The me she was with us, Greta thought. Wasn’t that what she expected? Wasn’t it always what she guessed? “I’m sorry we weren’t good enough.”
“I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t enough for any of you,” Martha said. “That’s my apology. I am sorry. I am sorry that I lost control. I know it’s not logical. I know. It’s not about logic, just like gambling wasn’t about cards. That’s what you learn in Gamblers Anonymous. For me, it was about power. I felt the wins. But at home, it was all losing, and the costs were so much higher …”
“How long?” Greta asked, and she didn’t need to specify what because it was almost like Martha was waiting for the question.
“Two years with the gambling. Just a few nights a week at first, and then …” Martha turned to a drawer of instruments and began to sort. “Kurt might have been a bookie, but he gambled too. When we left, we drove all the way to Tucson—one straight shot. For a year we made it work with a trip to Vegas every few weeks. Paid the bills, but the economy went downhill and some investments went belly-up.”
“And you’re back?”
Martha closed the drawer and turned to Greta. Her hazel eyes were soft. “Back for three years, haven’t gambled for five.”
Greta stared at her mother, not sure if she was trying to read her face for the truth or for shame. It wasn’t like she could ever smell casino on her breath or test for cards in her blood. “So you ran away from Kurt too?”
Martha smiled sadly at that. “Kurt met someone else. Funny how attraction faded once the line of credit disappeared. I didn’t run back. Even if I had, problems don’t go away when you leave, because other people aren’t the problem.”
“I happen to disagree,” Greta said.
“No, Gret. Here I’ll pull seniority on you. I’ll pull out my research, documented. Twelve steps of it. Fifteen years’ worth of regret of it. Want to see the photo albums we never got to make together? Me too.”
Greta saw the lights in the hallway outside the examination room flick off and stood from her stool. “I should go.”
Martha took Greta full on. “Greta, I don’t expect you to love me, but I do hope you’ll let me love you. It won’t cost you anything, I promise. And don’t worry about the plane ticket.”
Something like pity, like empathy, roiled inside Greta. She forced herself to reach out and pat Martha’s arm. Once. Twice.
Greta frowned as her mother slipped her arms around her shoulders and pulled her in for a hug. “God, you really smell awful, though,” Martha laughed, her voice thick.
“It’s a long story.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
An e-mail pinged Greta’s inbox, and Greta laughed at the irony of it all. A recommendation request for Brandon’s job application at Florida State. The sender’s name seemed familiar, and all at once she pictured a jovial man in a hotel restaurant. Of course. She hadn’t heard from Brandon since the conference, and now this?
She chewed her lip as she read through empty form. It had places for “evaluate the scholarly work” and “evaluate the leadership skills,” but it didn’t have a spot for “evaluate whether or not you were actually led on by this person or it was all in your head.”
Brandon obviously chose her to write a recommendation for him despite the drama of the last few months. He trusted her to be fair, but she didn’t know if she wanted to be. She flagged the e-mail and set it aside. She had enough damage control to do today as it was.
Danny made it through the day, but she couldn’t call it “unscathed.” Fridays were hard enough. In the month or so with school in session, Danny on a Friday looked like his battery had completely run down. His face was drawn by the time she picked him up from school. Nothing over the counter touched his headaches, and he usually went to bed by seven. But this Friday was worse than the others combined, because this Friday was October 5.
October 5, the day that had marked the save-the-dates cards ordered too many months in advance. October 5, the day that Greta had had to repeat thirty times while making phone calls to cancel vendors and locations, only to find out that Meg had already done so. October 5, the anti-anniversary.
Greta had planned a horror-movie marathon when Danny got home, complete with pizza and sour gummy worms, but Danny shut off the TV before the first murder and shoved away his plate. “I just want to go to bed,” he said.
“It’s five thirty,” Greta responded.
He pulled his head into his knees. “God, Greta. She was right there today. Two rows away at an assembly. And you know what I said? Nothing. Nothing at all.”
The light in the living room shifted as she watched him, head down. Outside, the sunset bruised purple and red and sent shadows across the floor. “What did you want to say?”
Half a face turned toward her, the other half still buried in denim. “I wish we’d gotten married tonight.”
If love were a game, the moves here would be simple. Greta had told him weeks ago about Max, even if she hadn’t been able to meet his eyes when she confessed. She broke the Prime Directive to let slip that piece of information that Max and Meg really were just friends, but he didn’t seem interested. She didn’t get it. No other players on the board, so why no checkmate?
If it is love, no one’s leading and no one’s running, Danny had said. Well, neither Danny nor Meg was running away, but they weren’t exactly being drawn together either. They were frozen somehow, caught between the halves of a microscope slide.
After Danny went to bed, Greta sat in the living room, alone except for the stuffed goose looming above her. No harm, no foul. They used to purposely mix up the phrase after Uncle Ritz arrived in their house as kids. No fowl would be harmed. No farm, no howl.
No harm, no foul. She could do something, or try. If it didn’t work, she never had to tell Danny, and she wouldn’t. Ever.
After putting an ear to Danny’s bedroom door and hearing the reassuring sound of snoring, Greta felt between the futon and the frame until she hit upon the Calvin and Hobbes books. Four of them, four books that she had admittedly read through when she had trouble sleeping. She did her best to ignore the romantic back and forths in the margins, but occasionally one had caught her eye. Usually it was a sentence that started with “I can’t wait to …” in Meg’s curly handwriting, or a blocky “I remember when …” in Danny’s. The alternating past and future alongside the strips had made even Greta miss Meg. Almost.
It was October 5, though, and she could try to help her brother. Some of the most interesting episodes in Star Trek happened once the Prime Directive had been broken. Once, Picard accidentally convinced a civilization that he was a god, and he only undid the whole thing by almost dying in front of them. Well, if Picard could take an arrow, Greta could take a drive. The setting sun made Greta miss the turn into Meg’s apartment lot, so she doubled back past Brandon’s. His car was parked in its usual spot, and the recommendation request threatened to derail her thoughts, but she mentally shoved it aside. It was October 5, dammit. If she stopped to think about something else, or to think at all, she wouldn’t do what she was going to do. Meg’s car was missing, but Greta had a suspicion she knew where Meg might be.
Max’s neighborhood tucked itself in at dusk. Greta’s was the only car moving on the street, like she had driven onto a movie set. The houses blurred into a sameness of late-eighties construction. Meg had parked in front of one of the same-looking houses. The houseplants on the porch were just empty pots now. As she knocked, she realized with a shock that she was about to talk to Max’s parents for the first time. She carried the comic books in one hand and jingled her keys nervously with the other.
Max’s father answered the door. He eyed Greta up and down and gave a gruff, “What do you want?”
Greta had two inches on the man, but his tone insisted she was shorter. “Meg. Is she here?”
“Not a good time,” the man said.
“Remember me? I’m Max’s …” She paused and chewed over options. Classmate? Office
mate? “Friend Greta.” She hoped it was true.
Max’s father turned back into the house, and she heard movement. Max appeared a minute later, alone.
“Greta, leave her alone.” Max’s arms crossed in front of his chest.
“I need to talk to her.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tonight,” Greta said, as if this were coming to terms of an agreement. “She and Danny were supposed to get married today.”
“You think she doesn’t know that? You’re letting in flies.” Max grimaced but took a step backward to allow Greta into the front hallway. It was narrow and hung with cedar-framed pictures. “It’s not a good time. She’s with my mom.”
Greta nodded and looked down at her shoes. Noticing that Max had bare feet, she slipped her tennis shoes off. A scent wafted down the hall to her, something like lilies. “Right. How is she?”
She could hear the clench in his jaw. “Not good. Any day now.”
“Are you okay?”
His face softened. “I feel like we’ve been mourning for months. Preparing. Loving her so hard. I don’t think there’s anything else we can do.”
Greta wouldn’t get to see Meg. That was clear now. It was a mistake to come and barge into this peaceful house. “Just tell Meg I came, okay? And give her these.” She thrust the stack toward him without looking up. She slipped her feet over the back of her shoes, flattening them. One of her shoelaces was untied, and the white threads had crinkled leaf particles sticking to it. “And Max?”
He grunted, and Greta watched his bare toes shift side to side. She didn’t know how to speak this language, the language of comforting, but she tried. “I’m here if you need anything. Not here, but at my house. Or here, if you need me to be.”
Max didn’t say anything, and if his face said something in return, she wouldn’t see it with her eyes cast toward her dirty shoes. A few seconds later, she opened the screen door and stepped onto the front porch. She stood dazed for a few seconds, like she’d been temporarily abducted and brainwashed. Max’s back disappeared from the hallway, too late to say anything else now. What would she have said? What could she have offered? She stood there, trying to get her bearings, trying to understand how she got from the apartment to here. How she got from January to here.
She had just stepped off the front porch when the door opened again. Meg stepped outside. Her feet were bare, and Greta saw her toes turn up at the concrete. It must feel like ice, a sure sign she wasn’t here for long. Now that she saw her, Greta didn’t know what to say.
“I came to say I’m sorry, Meg.”
“For what.” Her voice was a lake: flat, wet, and murky.
“That you didn’t get married today.”
Meg took a ragged breath. “I don’t want to get into this right now, Greta. I just can’t.”
“Why did you come out here, then?” Greta’s cheeks burned. “He’s still in love with you, Meg. He’s miserable. He’s coming up for air after the worst months of his life and looking around to find you gone. He needs you.”
“I was there, Greta.” She sounded tired, as tired as Danny had, his face peeking at her from his jeans. “I was there. I was there to help, and he pushed me away. You pushed me away.”
“And now you’re pushing me away,” Greta pointed out.
“Can you blame me?” Meg said, her voice suddenly sharp. “Can you?”
Greta wanted to scream yes at her, or to tell her no and go to hell, but Meg was already inside. The fight curled into her veins and pumped through Greta’s skull like a back beat as she drove home.
Back home, her blood settled into an even rhythm, but she had trouble going to sleep that night. She opened her laptop and stared at her inbox. Finally, under the watchful eye of Uncle Ritz, Greta opened the recommendation form and filled it out for Brandon. Her assessment was honest and complementary and professional. As it should be. As she should be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Three days later, the department sent around an e-mail. Max’s mother had died. In the mail room sat a card scrawled with condolences. With Max gone the whole week, Greta offered to cover his sections. It was literally the least she could do after his help with the Florida debacle. The students in his classes were like her students. They wore red and yellow sweatshirts, the freshmen distinguishing themselves with lanyards around their necks and too much makeup. She reminded herself that they weren’t her students despite their similarities. Different sample size, different constants. They were used to looking at Max in the front of the lab, listening to his jokes, reading his neat handwriting. While the students examined specimens, she read through his syllabus. A Far Side comic graced the front page, and inside the thick language of the course policies, Max had a single line: “If you’ve read this sentence, e-mail me a picture of a kitten, and I will give you ten bonus points.”
Greta watched the heads bowed over their microscopes, the pairs and trios whispering and looking at their cell phones without trying to make it seem like they were. Greta took out her own phone, sneaking it under the desk. She e-mailed Max a picture of a kitten peeking out of a box of cereal. She didn’t know what to put in the message, so she didn’t write one. In the subject line of the e-mail, she typed, “No catastrophes yet.”
Twenty minutes later, as the students cleaned off their lab spaces, her phone buzzed. A picture of a kitten stuck inside a Kleenex box, the tissues poking around its too-large-for-its-body head. The title of the e-mail was “Catharsis.” Below the picture of the cat was the funeral time and location.
If there was a limit on the number of times that she could draft her brother into service as a stand-in for a friend or date, she hoped she hadn’t hit her quota. She especially hoped that five-AM deportation-related calls didn’t count in that tally. Danny wasn’t pleased about the funeral invitation—that much was clear. He rubbed a palm across his closed eyes and moaned about getting a sub, about only having so many sick days. In the end, Greta promised a family dinner with Martha.
“This gives me the right to insist on a public dinner out.”
Without him mentioning the name, she knew this meant Hickory Park, the sprawling home-style family restaurant, whose placemat featured twenty types of sundaes and brought up memories of every family birthday when she was young. Sundaes were free on your birthday. “You’re going to make me eat barbecue with Martha, aren’t you?”
“I’d be missing my opportunity if I said no. November sixth.”
“Martha’s birthday?”
“I’m providing you accompaniment to a funeral and reminding you of the woman who ensured we were born. Two-for-one deal.”
She grudgingly agreed. Nothing would have made her feel more alone than going to a funeral by herself.
On the morning of the funeral, Greta tugged on her skirt and found her least-ripped pair of pantyhose. If men had named pantyhose, they would have thought of something badass like “future socks.” Maybe that was also lame, but nothing sounded as granny-ish as pantyhose, which was one of the things that barred Greta from purchasing a new pair. The other thing was that she didn’t own many clothes that required future socks.
Luckily for the occasion, she had a funeral skirt, which could double as a concert skirt when needed. Five years ago, she’d gone into Yonkers with the single mission of buying clothes for her father’s funeral. She told the bewildered salesclerk she needed something sturdy and black. The fact that she couldn’t specify whether she wanted a skirt or a dress was the woman’s first clue that Greta wasn’t used to shopping. Actually, Greta’s green sweatpants and Homestar Runner T-shirt probably tipped the woman off first. The woman found a skirt that only deserved two adjectives: black and straight. It wasn’t long or short. It wasn’t flashy or lined with tulle. It was just a skirt. “Perfect,” Greta had said, and bought it without trying it on.
She pulled on the skirt, adjusting the zipper first to the side, then the back. Who had come to her father’s funeral? She tried to remember, but a
mental fog remained that allowed her to study her own hands and see them shaking, but she could not see past herself, not even in memory. Other people must have lived through that year too, but it was hard to imagine. She’d resided on an island of grief, staring back at the mainland.
It was a beautiful day, at least. As if that counted for anything. The leaves in front of the Methodist church were a trapped sunrise—all pinks and oranges. A line of people snaked down the church steps, waiting to find a seat, chattering. Greta and Danny shifted, not talking and not admitting to listening. Max’s mother had worked at a bank in downtown Ames for twenty years. She had volunteered at the church during the evenings, made bags of supplies for women saved from sex trafficking. More than the story of the woman, the tone of the voice of the mourners told Greta what she needed to know.
The woman on the front of the program smiled up at Greta, like she had always smiled. Even though she was dressed in severe black and white, her eyes were warm. How odd that Greta and Max grew up thirty miles apart but in such different worlds. In some other universe, they would have gone to the same high school. Maybe they would have found each other in some AP bio class. Maybe Greta would have grown up going to Max’s house for dinner, adopting his parents as secondary to her own. After Greta’s mother left, maybe Max’s mother would have gone prom dress shopping with her, insisted that Max and Greta go together. As friends.
Or as something else, if she were being honest. If she had ever been honest enough to deserve him.
Inside the door of the church, seats were hard to come by. An usher waved her and Danny over to a side stairway, and they went up to the choir loft. “Box seats,” Greta said. Joking was armor. Joking was a reaction, not a solution.
From the first row of the balcony, Greta saw the wall of flower arrangements in the front of the church and a set of empty metal brackets, stage center. Behind her, an organ thrummed with a dirge, bone-shakingly loud in its closeness. Danny’s whole body tensed beside her. “We can leave if you need to.”
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