Truly (New York Trilogy #1)

by Ruthie Knox

  Allie must have had the same thought. “I hope he’s at least with the dogs. Throwing sticks or something.”

  “He’ll be okay.”

  “You think?”

  “I know. He’s the most emotionally resilient person I’ve ever met.”

  “He’s coming to the party.”

  “What? No. How can he? Nobody is that resilient.”

  “He cried.”

  “That must have been awful.”

  “It was. It still is. But afterward, we were both kind of sitting on the couch, all snotty, and Matt was like, ‘So how do you see what happens next?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know, I can barely think. May told everybody we’re still going to have the party.’ And he didn’t say anything for like a whole minute, and then he said, yeah, we should have the party, because all these family and friends had come to celebrate with us, and he didn’t want to spend what was supposed to have been the best night of his life sitting around feeling sorry for himself. So I said maybe it was healthy to feel sorry for himself, and he said he didn’t give a shit what was healthy, if getting drunk and dancing and not thinking about anything too hard was an option.”

  “I can respect that position.”

  “Yeah, I think we’re pretty firmly in the same camp. So it’s going to be the weirdest, most awkward not-wedding reception there ever was. We’ll probably go way over budget on the open bar. But it’s not like we’re going to be short on time to mope later. I mean, fuck, I’m going to have to move. We’ll have to figure out dog custody, and—” Her voice broke. May reached for her sister and pulled her into an awkward, sloppy hug.

  “The point is,” Allie continued after she’d recovered, “we can be miserable tomorrow. Tonight, Matt’s bringing his party playlists. And he’s going to wear his shirt.”

  “The yellow polyester?”

  “With his tight blue disco pants.”

  May smiled. Matt loved KC and the Sunshine Band. He was hella fun at a party.

  “What are you going to wear?” May asked.

  Allie eyed the dress hanging on the shower curtain. “I had this crazy idea.”

  “What?” she asked cautiously. Because Allie had that doom sparkle in her eye.

  “Wait here a sec.”

  Allie bounced out of the room and returned moments later with a plastic bag from the grocery store swinging from her hand. “You remember Gwen Stefani’s wedding dress? With the pink?”

  “No.”

  “Sure you do. It was dip-dyed pink at the hem, and then it faded all the way up the skirt to white at the top.”

  “That sounds … interesting.”

  Allie shook her head. “Not interesting. Gorgeous. We can do it in the bathtub.” She pulled a hot-pink box of Rit Dye from the bag.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m totally serious.”

  “We have never had a single successful experiment with Rit,” she reminded her sister. “You have to know this. Every time you buy Rit, we end up with some horrible, unwearable—”

  “May, it’s my wedding dress. It’s not like I’m going to need it again.”

  “You can’t take it back?”

  Allie shook her head. “I wouldn’t anyway. It’s a great dress. And now we’re going to make it pink, and I’m going to wear it and get fabulously drunk.”

  “We don’t even have time to dry it.”

  “If it won’t dry on that shelf thingy in the dryer, we can use towels and the hair dryer. It’ll be fine.”

  “It’ll be damp and chemical-smelling.”

  “So what? I’m the bride. No one will be able to say a thing.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Allie gripped her shoulders and leaned in to lock eyes with May. “Please. Big sister. I’m having a personal crisis here. Help me dye my cry for help.”

  Allie grinned, and May had to grin back.

  “Okay.” She pushed the shower curtain aside, flipped the drain closed, and started running water into the tub.

  “Get the hair guard out, or it’ll turn pink.” Allie leaned past her to grab it, then straightened and went round-eyed staring at May’s chest. “Where did you get that shirt?”

  “I had it at the back of my closet.”

  “For how long?”

  May sucked in her cheeks as she considered the question. The wine she’d swallowed was already humming its way into her bloodstream, making the very act of sucking in her cheeks more interesting than it ought to have been.

  Had she eaten lunch? Possibly not.

  She should correct that mistake.

  “We need to order a pizza,” she said.

  “You order it. I’m going to dump Rit in your tub.”

  “This is such a bad idea.”

  May finished her wine before she left the room. She ordered her and Allie’s favorite pizza on the kitchen phone and came back just as Allie was dumping the dye granules directly into the water.

  “Five years ago,” she said.

  “Five years ago what?”

  “I bought this top five years ago.”

  “I’ve never seen you wear it.”

  “That’s because I’ve never worn it. You know you’re supposed to dissolve those in a measuring cup first?”

  Allie shrugged away this concern and started swirling dye powder with her fingers. “It looks good on you.”

  May didn’t glance at the mirror this time. “I know.”

  In five years, she’d tried it on three or four times, but every time, she’d talked herself out of wearing it. Too skimpy. Too trashy. Too brazen for a girl like her.

  She knew better now. She’d had her heart trounced, but her confidence remained, stubbornly refusing to be crushed. It was a relief to find she could keep on bending under the weight of so much difficulty, so much pain, and still not break.

  A relief, but not a surprise.

  The part that surprised her was that she wasn’t more devastated about Ben. As the afternoon flew by, her anger had faded, but sorrow hadn’t taken its place. She’d been right when she told Allie she wasn’t done with him yet.

  It was the opposite of how she’d felt about Dan. She’d broken up with him badly—ineptly, shamefully—and it hadn’t felt good. But it had felt correct, because it had been the right thing to do.

  Nothing about Ben’s leaving felt correct, so May simply refused to accept that it was over. “I’m going back to New York,” she said.

  Allie turned off the faucet, and the sudden silence echoed in the tiny bathroom.

  After a few beats, Allie said, “Give me the dress.”

  May removed it from the hanger. She ran one finger over the plain strapless bodice, its horizontal pleats the only decoration that the elegant, heavy satin required.

  She placed the dress on Allie’s lap. Allie flipped it over, took a deep breath, and plunged the hem into the tub with her eyes squeezed shut.

  “What if he won’t see you?” she asked.

  “That’s not why.”

  “Please.”

  “That’s not all of it. I need to find out … who I can be there, I guess. Who I am, when I’m not trying so hard to be who everybody expects me to be.”

  Allie swished the dress around in the water. “You think it’s been in here long enough?”

  “No. Are you kidding? You just put it in.”

  “I think it’s long enough.” Allie lifted the dress out. It wasn’t pink. It was sort of … liver-colored. “Whugh,” she said. “That is not good.”

  “I told you.”

  “You always tell me. How am I going to avoid turning into a human disaster if you leave me here alone? No Matt, no May. I’ll be a train wreck.”

  “So come with me.”

  “Do you think this will turn more pink if I put it back in?”

  “No.”

  Allie plunged the dress back into the tub, deeper this time. “Maybe I should.”

  May put a hand on her shoulder and peered into the tub. There
were still unmixed granules of dye on the bottom, and Allie was making no apparent effort to immerse the dress in stages for a dip-dyed effect. This was almost certainly the worst idea she’d ever had.

  “Maybe you should. But you can’t do it for me. You can only do it for you.”

  “Can we go tomorrow?”

  May searched the countertop for her wineglass. Both glasses sat side by side, empty. She refilled them and passed one to her sister.

  “I think it’s pretty likely that tomorrow we’ll be too busy wishing we were dead to drive to New York.”

  “In an ideal world, we’d have a convertible for the drive. We could wear silk scarves on our heads and big, fabulous sunglasses with rhinestones.”

  “And eat aspirin straight out of the bottle.”

  “Yeah, we’ll crunch it up like candy because we’re just that hardcore.”

  “Remember when Mom used to smash aspirin and mix it with sugar on a spoon?”

  Allie smiled. “She got the idea from Mary Poppins.”

  “It didn’t work.”

  “At all.”

  They drank their wine. Allie set her glass down on the floor and swished the dress back and forth in the tub. “I’m so going to regret this tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the wine. And the party. And probably everything about every decision I’ve made in the past … oh, three years.”

  “I’m a week ahead of you there.”

  Allie tilted her head. “How’s life looking from the future?”

  May drained her glass and smiled down at the dregs. “The sex is great. I can’t recommend much else about it.”

  Allie opened the drain and lifted her sodden, hideous, purple-brown half-dyed wedding dress out of the water. “Because I’m only two glasses of wine down, and I’m clearly taking your place as the tactful sister, I’m going to refrain from saying anything about my sex life right now.”

  May inclined her glass appreciatively in Allie’s direction.

  “But I will say this.” She raised the dress high in the air. Pinkish water dripped over the lip of the tub and onto May’s white bath rug. “I am certainly not going to get any action while wearing this dress.”

  “No, I don’t think there’s any risk of that. But there probably wasn’t anyway. It’s not tactful to score with a bride who’s just jilted her fiancé. Not when he’s at the party.”

  “Yeah, I hear you there. And it’s important to be tactful above all things.”

  “We don’t want to get a reputation. Those Fredericks girls.”

  “They might be man-eaters, but they have excellent manners.”

  May snorted, and that set Allie giggling. She slumped off the lip of the tub and dropped to the floor, still straight-armed, holding her bridal gown in the air. The longer she looked at it, the harder she laughed, and the sight made May laugh, too, until her face hurt and her knees went weak. She slid down the wall, eyes streaming, and pressed her cheek against Allie’s back.

  They stayed like that. Collapsed in a heap, dizzy and tipsy and light-headed with laughter and life.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  It was only a four-mile drive to the farm. He parked on the shoulder of the road and walked the quarter mile of gravel, holding his breath as he rounded the corner and the house came into view.

  It was only a house. Two stories of dingy white clapboard with green shutters.

  A cedar-shake planter full of chrysanthemums stood beside the back steps, dark red and bright orange. His father’s boots occupied the right side of the landing, same as they always had.

  Two pairs of kid-size boots listed over on the step below them.

  He found no other evidence of his father’s second family. No tire swing, no play structure, no Big Wheels in the front yard.

  Ben wondered if these kids paged through the Sears catalogs, dreaming about toys they were never going to get. If they had an endless list of chores to do but no money, nothing of their own. If their father frowned and muttered if they even dared to suggest the possibility of an allowance.

  The old barn appeared as likely to collapse at any moment as it had when Ben last saw it. The new barn had a fresh coat of paint. Set at an angle beyond it was the familiar long, low shape of the chicken house, a gleam of sunlight reflecting off its tin roof.

  A silhouette appeared behind the screen door. When it opened, Dean Hausman stood there.

  Smaller than Ben remembered, like everything else.

  Ben hadn’t been up here since he and Sandy were about to get married. The visit started out awkward and went downhill fast.

  Ben hadn’t spoken to his father since. “Hi, Dad.”

  “We’re having breakfast.”

  There were no clues in the way he said it. It could have been an invitation to eat with them or a request that Ben depart, and he’d never be able to guess.

  He’d expended so much energy once, picking apart his father’s sentences to find the meanings underneath. Trying to locate messages that might not have even been there.

  “I can go,” he offered.

  “Marnie says to invite you in.”

  Hard to believe that Marnie was calling the shots, but Ben nodded his assent. The door closed behind his father with a creak and a slam that pushed Ben’s head under, a violent submersion into the past.

  His mother, screaming, “You heartless bastard!” as she shoved the door open. The beige strap of her bra where her bright red blouse slipped off her shoulder.

  The slam of the screen door, the car door. Spinning wheels on the gravel driveway.

  Another slam that heralded the arrival of ice-blue eyes and a faded denim shirt. His father’s smell. “Come with me. I need to show you something.”

  Some chore he’d done wrong. Some punishment to be borne.

  Ben held the door open, his gaze caught on his fingers gripping the unpainted metal handle.

  The screen sagged. It would need to be replaced, but not this year. Not when it was about time to put the storm windows on.

  In the kitchen, the three boys sat along one side of the table with cereal bowls in front of them. They wore white shirts, stiff shoes, and dark blue slacks. Sunday morning, he realized. They would be off to church soon to hear parables and color in pictures of Jesus.

  One of them was Aiden, another Ashton. The little one was Atticus. Ben figured the names had to be Marnie’s doing.

  He wondered which one would be in charge of carrying the storm windows from the basement. Which would wash the panes with Windex and soft rags from the top of the extension ladder and which would have the job of cleaning from the inside and pointing out the streaks.

  None of them looked up to it. They were all so small, even the oldest. Ashton would be ten by now, surely.

  Ben had done harder work at ten.

  Marnie broke the spell with a greeting, and he let go of the door and greeted her back.

  His father settled in his chair at the end of the table while she brushed crumbs off what had to be her own seat and filled the space with empty chatter. When she offered it, he took the chair next to the boys.

  They had their father’s blue eyes and light hair, their mother’s fair skin and freckles. They slurped Rice Krispies in silence, kept their elbows off the table and their eyes on their bowls when they weren’t sneaking glances at him from behind their bangs.

  His brothers. Afraid of him. How surreal.

  They didn’t know him. But what if they did? Would they still be afraid?

  He shouldn’t have come back. Too many things were the same. The clock over the kitchen sink was a bright, painful splash of orange and yellow that hurt him to look at. He remembered his mother buying it on Madeline Island the time they’d taken the ferry over for the day. A smiling sunburst, its rays pointing toward the numbers.

  “What brings you up here?” Marnie asked.

  She’d been fresh and pretty when his father met her, but she wasn’t anymore.

  “I was in Mani
towoc,” he said. “Thought I’d drive up.”

  She nodded as though that made sense.

  Ben’s father ate bent over his plate with one arm curved around it. He’d always done that, as though someone might try to take it away if he didn’t defend it. His hair was thinner and entirely gray now, his body less impressive under his heavy cotton work shirt, but his mannerisms remained deeply familiar.

  Ben knew how his father’s soap would smell, but he didn’t know what the old man was thinking. He’d never been able to get inside his head.

  Atticus reached for the sugar and knocked over a glass of orange juice—an impertinent advance of vivid color across the white Formica tabletop. The boy’s eyes shot to his father’s face. “I’m sorry! It was an accident.”

  “Clean it up,” Dean said.

  Marnie wet a cloth under the tap, her movements slow because time had become stiff, starched with tension.

  This was the same, then. His father wielded his expectations, his disappointments, like a mallet, and everyone around him cringed, waiting for the blow.

  There was no love in this room. No affection. Just a cold man who’d found his first wife and kid so disappointing, he’d given up on them and started over again.

  He didn’t seem any more pleased this time.

  Atticus mopped at the orange juice, but he didn’t seem to know that he had to change to another part of the rag when the first part got saturated, so he spread the sticky dampness around. He knocked the cloth into a new part of the puddle, and juice spilled over the edge onto the floor.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Dean said.

  Ben stood and held his hand out for the rag, forcing a smile that he hoped would reassure. “It’s all right,” he said. “I want to help.”

  Atticus gave it to him, but if anything he looked more frightened than before.

  Ben ran the rag over the edge of the table to stop the spill and then maneuvered around Marnie to the sink, where he rinsed it, wrung it out. “It’s only orange juice,” he said as he finished mopping it up.

  His father’s eyes lifted from his plate, and the hard gleam in them woke an old, buried terror in Ben.

  Don’t make him mad.

  But his father had already stolen his childhood. He’d taken the farm away, kicked him out of his life. There was nothing left he could take.