Chapter 4 – June
JUNE
The yoga studio smells of eucalyptus and money, and I'm on a borrowed mat between two women I haven't seen in four years, and for the first time since the move I feel my shoulders come down from around my ears.
Priya taught English down the hall from me for nine years.
Diane taught history and kept a flask of whiskey in her desk drawer for parent-teacher conferences, which she swears she only opened twice.
We fell out of touch the way people do—Christmas cards, then Facebook likes, then nothing—and when I got back to the city I emailed them on a whim, half expecting nothing.
They both answered within the hour. Diane's reply was three words: Took you long enough.
"Okay, so catch us up," Priya says, stretching into a forward fold that makes my hamstrings ache in sympathy. "The penthouse. The billionaire. The whole fairy tale. You've been holding out."
"I haven't been holding out. I've been moving."
"Uh-huh. And how is Prince Charming?"
"Busy. The spring line is eating him alive."
Diane snorts from her mat. "Men and their spring lines. My ex had a fishing boat he loved more than me, and at least a boat doesn't answer its own phone during sex."
"Diane."
"What? I'm just saying. Priorities."
I laugh, and it comes out real, and I realize how long it's been since I laughed with someone who isn't Matt or a mover.
And then—because I've had exactly one glass of studio cucumber water and apparently that's enough to lower my guard—I tell them.
About Tanya. About the wedding where she cried, and the sink emergencies, and the dancing at the restaurant, and the baby store ambush, and how she reports our afternoons back to my husband before I've made it to my car.
They don't interrupt. That's the thing about old friends. They let you finish.
"She's at the house constantly now," I say. "She and Rob are fighting again—I don't even know what about this time, he works late, she feels invisible, the usual—and when they fight she appears at our place. Twice this week I've come home and she's on my couch, and Matt's making her tea."
Priya sits up slowly. "Making her tea. In your house."
"He makes it the way she likes it. He's known her since they were seven, he knows everything about her." I roll my mat corner flat with my thumb. "If you didn't know better, you'd honestly think Matt was the father."
"Speak of the devil," Diane murmurs.
She's looking past me at the studio door, and I don't even have to turn around.
I know. My spine knows before my eyes do.
But I turn anyway, and there she is—Tanya, in matching sage-green leggings and a cropped top over a stomach that remains, at twelve weeks, completely flat, waving at me with both arms across a room full of strangers.
"June! I knew it—I said to the girl at the desk, I bet that's my June."
My June. She crosses the studio barefoot, hugs me before I can get fully upright, and stands back with her hands on my shoulders, beaming.
"What are you doing here?" I ask, and I keep it warm. I keep it so warm.
"Matty told me about this place! He said you'd found a studio you loved, with the Tuesday class, and he said you could use company." She says it proudly, the way you'd report a successful errand. "So I signed up for the package. All twelve weeks. We're going to be yoga buddies!"
Matt told her about my class. Matt told her where I am on Tuesday mornings and suggested she come keep me company, and it never once occurred to him to mention it to me, because in his head he's done something sweet for both of us.
He's set his two favorite people up to be friends, and now he'll expect gratitude from each of us separately.
"Great," I say. "That's exactly what I need."
"Right?"
She doesn't hear it. She never hears it. They have that in common.
I introduce her to Priya and Diane, and they shake her hand and smile, and Tanya immediately tells them she's pregnant—within ninety seconds, unprompted, hand on the flat stomach—and they congratulate her politely.
We take our mats. Tanya sets hers directly in front of mine, between me and the mirror, and unrolls a mat I recognize from the boutique next door, the one with the crystals embedded in the towel.
"She's exactly what you described," Priya whispers as the instructor dims the lights.
"Worse," Diane whispers back.
"Let's just get through the class," I sigh.
We do not just get through the class.
Tanya narrates the class. The instructor cues downward dog and Tanya says, not quietly, "Oh, we did this in Nepal, but real Ashtanga, not the Western version.
" The instructor cues child's pose and Tanya announces that in Nepal her guru told her she had the most open hips he'd ever seen, which is a sentence that makes Diane fake-cough into her towel.
During the balance series, Tanya flows through every pose with theatrical grace, checking the room to see who's watching, and twice she reaches back and corrects my form, pressing my hip down, murmuring breathe into it, June loud enough for the instructor to hear, which earns her a pleased smile from the front of the room and earns me an eye twitch that doesn't stop for an hour.
The worst part—the genuinely worst part—is that she's good.
Her practice is beautiful. She moves with total unselfconscious confidence, and everyone in the room admires her, and I hate her a little and admire her a little and I cannot reconcile the two, which is the entire story of me and Tanya Curtis compressed into a hot room with eucalyptus in the air.
At the end, in savasana, she reaches sideways off her mat and holds my hand in the dark.
I let her. God help me, I let her.
"I am starving," Tanya announces in the lobby, which is the announcement she was always going to make. "The baby is starving. Smoothies? There's a juice place next door, June, my treat, we have to celebrate our first class."
"Oh, I'd love to," Priya says, in the tone of a woman who would not love to, "but I've got a department meeting at noon."
"It's ten-forty-five."
"It's a whole thing," Priya says solemnly, and grabs her bag.
"And I have to—" Diane looks at her wrist. She is not wearing a watch. "Thing. With my—thing. I'll call you, June."
They both hug me goodbye, and Diane's hug lasts a second too long, and into my ear she breathes, "God be with you," and then they're gone, and I'm standing in the lobby alone with Tanya, who loops her arm through mine and tows me toward the juice bar, chattering about a woman in class whose form was criminal.
The juice bar has wheatgrass in the window and chairs that hurt. Tanya orders something green and enormous and then does what she always does: she waits until the exact moment I've taken my first sip, and then she deploys it.
"So. I need your help with something."
"Mm."
"The baby shower."
I lower my cup. "Tanya, you're twelve weeks. The shower is months away.”
"I know, I know, but I plan early, it's just who I am, and honestly with the wedding too I have to get ahead of everything or I'll drown.
" She says drown while sitting in a juice bar at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday with nothing on her calendar.
"Rob's mom wants to do it at her house, in the beige living room, and I cannot have my daughter's first party be beige, June, I cannot. "
"Your daughter."
"I just feel it." She waves that off and reaches into her tote bag, and what comes out of the tote bag is not a request. It's a handoff.
A folder. A color-printed folder with tabs.
She sets it in front of me and starts laying things out on the table between our cups—three venue brochures, a page of Pinterest printouts, a handwritten guest list already forty names deep with little annotations, a fabric swatch, an actual fabric swatch, in something she calls "dusty rose, but the good dusty rose. "
"So these are the venues, but honestly I'm set on the first one, you just have to call them because the woman there is impossible and you're so good at being firm without being rude—it's the teacher thing?—"
"Tanya—"
"—and the guest list, the ones with stars are non-negotiable, the question marks you can decide, I trust you completely, and the theme is all in the folder but basically I want it to feel elevated, not cutesy, no ducks, I saw how you looked at the ducks?—"
She saw how I looked at the ducks. She catalogued my face in that store, filed it, and has now redeployed it as proof of our intimacy.
"—and Matty said he'd cover the venue deposit, isn't that sweet, he just said put it on the card, so budget isn't even an issue, we just need it to be perfect."
Matt said he'd cover the deposit. Matt, who has not once remembered our own anniversary without his assistant's calendar reminder, has offered to fund a party for a baby that isn't his, in a conversation I was not part of, and the first I'm hearing of it is secondhand over a twelve-dollar smoothie.
I look at the folder. I look at the swatch.
I look at Tanya's face, open and sunny and utterly certain, because that is the engine of her: the certainty.
She has never once doubted that the people around her will absorb the weight of her life, because they always have.
Her parents did. Her first husband did. Matt does.
Rob's trying not to, which is why he's a jackass and why she's on my couch twice a week.
And me. I'm about to do it. We both know I'm about to do it, because I don't have a fight to pick that wouldn't make me the villain of a story she's already writing.
"I'll look at the venues," I say.
"I knew it." She claps once, delighted, and presses both hands to her stomach. "See? She's kicking. She's excited."
"She's the size of a lime, Tanya."
"She's excited in spirit." She drains her green monstrosity, stands, and hugs me from the side, her hair in my face, her voice gone suddenly soft and small against my ear.
"Thank you, June. Really. You're the only person I actually trust with this.
Rob doesn't care, my mom doesn't get it, and Matty means well but he's a man. It's you. It's always been you."
It's always been you. She says it with total sincerity, and here's the thing that will keep me up tonight: I think she means it.
I think underneath the scorekeeping and the barbs and the performances, Tanya has decided I am hers—her person, her safety net, her June—and she has never once asked whether I agreed.
She gathers her bag and her crystals and floats out, leaving the folder on the table. Leaving me the folder. Of course she leaves me the folder.
I sit there with my smoothie going warm and open it. Forty names. Three venues. A theme document with headers. At the bottom of the guest list, in her looping hand, she's written: Aunt June, obviously.
This is going to be a nightmare, I think.
And then I take out my phone and start calling venues, because I am, apparently, exactly who she thinks I am.