33. Elizabeth
Elizabeth
Ihad cried enough for one lifetime as of about fourteen hours ago, so I did my mascara last, on the theory that if I put it on early it would simply be evaporated tears by the time anyone saw me.
I sat at my mother’s vanity, in a slip and bare feet, watching myself in a mirror that had watched three generations of Starling women decide whether tonight was going to be one they survived or one they actually enjoyed.
Outside, past the curtain, I could already hear cars crunching up the gravel toward the barn, doors slamming, somebody’s kid shrieking with delight about something.
The whole farm was getting ready to have the best night of its life, and I had spent the last few hours getting ready to have possibly the worst one of mine, which felt like poor scheduling on somebody’s part.
I wasn’t emceeing tonight. I’d handed the microphone off to June this morning, staring at my reflection over coffee and thinking, with great clarity, that a woman who had cried into a bathroom sink until sunrise had no business standing on a stage telling everyone to have fun.
June had taken the job the way June takes everything, which is to say immediately and with visible glee, and now I sat there wondering whether Matt Hartford would even bother showing up to the party I wasn’t running, after everything I’d said to him in the barn the night before.
And that was where it got complicated, sitting at that mirror, because I had tried very hard to keep this simple.
Furious was simple. A man who went behind my back, who made a decision about my family without me, who let me believe we were real and he was honest while he wasn’t—that man was easy to be done with.
I’d built the whole case against him in the dark, and it was airtight, and every word of it was true.
The trouble was that I no longer entirely believed my own closing argument.
Because I’d spent the morning sitting with my grandmother, who had hidden a loan from all of us out of nothing but love, who’d staked her favorite field to protect a family she couldn’t stand to watch drown.
And I’d spent it with my mother, who had forgiven me for hiding the very same secret the moment she understood I’d only done it to spare her.
My whole family runs on this—the instinct to take the burden alone, so the people you love don’t have to feel its weight.
It is practically the Starling religion.
And Matt had done the exact same thing. You had no right to decide that for me, said the furious part, and it was right.
No, said a smaller, quieter part I’d been trying not to hear all day, but he was trying to save you.
He did it the way they all do it. He did it because he cares about you.
That was the crack. Small, unwelcome, impossible to seal back up now that I’d seen it.
It is so much easier to be angry with someone when you can tell yourself they didn’t care.
I couldn’t tell myself that about Matt. I knew better.
I’d always known better. And knowing it didn’t fix a single thing he’d broken—but it made the anger heavier and more honest, shot through now with something that ached instead of burned.
Gwen let herself in without knocking, the way she’d let herself into every room in this house since we were girls, hair half-curled and a dress bag over one arm.
“You’re not dressed,” she said, which was not a question.
“I’m aware. I’m doing a bit called ‘staring blankly into the middle distance.’ Very avant-garde. Reviews have been mixed.”
“You’re not even doing your hair.”
“I’m doing my mascara. It’s a whole process. Some of us require several coats before we’re fit for public consumption.”
She set the dress bag on the bed and sat down on the edge of it, and for a second the brightness dropped off her face, the way it did sometimes lately when she thought nobody was looking.
“The kids are with their dad this weekend,” she said, to the mirror rather than to me.
“I asked if he’d let them come to the Ball with me, just for tonight.
He knows exactly what this weekend is—he’s been to enough of these to know precisely what he’s saying no to—and he said no anyway.
” She said it lightly, the way she says everything hard, but I caught the flicker underneath it, the same one I’d been catching for two years now every time his name came up.
“It’s not that he didn’t know. That’s the part I can’t get past. He knew, and he still said no, because it’s his weekend with the kids.
” She shook her head as she could physically dislodge the thought.
“Anyway. I’m here instead. You’re stuck with me. ”
“I’m sorry, Gwen.”
“Don’t be. I’m trying to find a silver lining.
Tonight I get to be off duty from motherhood and at the ball instead of stuck home missing them, and frankly the wardrobe is better.
” She stood back up before I could push on it, because that’s how Gwen operates: grief in one door and out the other before you can follow her through it, and unzipped the dress bag with the brisk, overcompensating energy of a woman fleeing her feelings at a dead sprint.
“Which brings us to the actual problem. You. Wearing that.”
“I’m wearing a slip. It’s basically a dress if you squint.”
“You are wearing defeat,” June announced, arriving through the door with a battery-powered curling iron ready to create a miracle on my head, because June travels prepared for exactly this kind of emergency.
She took one look at me in the mirror and set her jaw the way she does right before she goes live to her social media accounts.
“Absolutely not. Up. We have fifty minutes and a great deal of ground to cover, and I refuse to let you walk out there looking like she lost a fight with a raccoon.”
“I did lose a fight with a raccoon once. Down by the compost. It was humiliating for both of us.”
“Up,” June said again, and I got up, because you do not argue with June when she’s used her going-live voice on you.
What followed was less a getting-ready montage and more a coordinated operation with me as the unwilling subject.
Gwen unzipped the bag to reveal a dress in a deep, dark blue, the color of the last hour of daylight in the pines behind the house—fabric that moved like water when Gwen shook it out, cut close through the bodice with a neckline that would have made my grandmother clutch actual pearls if she’d been in the room, a slit up one side that stopped exactly at the point where modesty gives way to mischief.
A pair of sky-high heels, strappy and entirely impractical for a barn, came out of the bag right behind it, and Gwen dropped them at my feet like there was no version of tonight where I got a vote.
It was the kind of outfit I would never have picked for myself in a hundred years, because it did not leave a single square inch of room to hide behind a joke.
“Absolutely not,” I said, on principle.
“Absolutely yes,” Gwen said, already unzipping the back of it. “In.”
I went in. It fit like it had been made for me, which it more or less had been, because Gwen had apparently been holding onto my measurements since my birthday and waiting for an occasion exactly this dramatic.
While she worked the zipper, June attacked my hair with the ruthless efficiency of a woman who does this for a living between festival announcements, twisting it back off my face and leaving the rest of it down in loose waves that had never once occurred naturally on my head in my entire life.
Neither of them asked me if Matt was coming.
Which I noticed the way you notice someone carefully not stepping on a floorboard they know creaks.
“There,” June said finally, spinning me toward the mirror by both shoulders. “Now you look like a woman who’s about to make a man very sorry he ever let this get complicated.”
“Bold prediction, coming from a woman holding a curling iron like a weapon.”
She met my eyes in the mirror, and under the joke there was something steadier. “He’s going to be there tonight. And when he sees you in that dress, he is going to lose the ability to speak in full sentences, which, frankly, is the very least he owes you after everything.”
“And if he doesn’t show.”
“Then you’ll be the best-dressed woman at a party who didn’t need him there to have a good night,” Gwen said, simply, adjusting one earring I hadn’t noticed she’d already put in my ear.
“But he’ll show. He doesn’t know how to do anything halfway once he’s finally decided to do it right.
You know it. We all know it. It’s just the way he is. ”
I didn’t believe her, not entirely, but I let her zip the last few inches of my resolve up along with the dress, and the three of us walked down together through the dark toward the lights, me doing a low, running commentary the whole way about the outfit—am I attending a harvest festival or auditioning for a much sultrier holiday film, truly unclear, and I will almost certainly trip in this slit and give the whole town a look at my underwear before the night’s out—because if I stopped talking for even a second I was fairly sure I’d start crying again, and I had already used up my whole allotment of tears for the week.
The barn had stopped looking like a barn sometime in the last few hours and started looking like something out of a story somebody tells a child at bedtime.
Strings of amber lights ran in long loops from the roofline out to the fence posts and back, catching every gourd and mum and hay bale in a warm, low gold, so the whole yard seemed lit from underneath instead of above.