The Shaadi Set-Up

by Lillie Vale

  “Is it because you still wish you had a second chance with Amar?”

  Her lips part. I’ve shocked her, I can tell. It’s the first time I’ve used his name in front of her. The second time I’ve said it out loud ever. Since I was a teen, I’ve always sensed that this one word would shell-shock a room more than an f-bomb.

  Finally, Mom swallows. “Sweetheart, no, is that what you think?” Her eyes grow glassy. “Oh, baby, yes, I champion you and Milan. But not because I want a second chance.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because I had my second chance already with your dad. Amar might have been my first love, but your dad is my last.”

  For the first time, the silence between us doesn’t have a single ghost.

  “Rita,” says Mom, opening her arms. It’s only then that I realize I’m crying.

  * * *

  —

  On day six, after finalizing the plans for Paula’s remodel and working my way through the last complimentary deluxe skincare samples she sent me home with, I make up my mind.

  I’m going to engage my best friend in crime.

  * * *

  —

  “Rita, would you please hurry up? Please don’t tell me you’re chickening out when we’re already here.” Raj shivers in her striped sweater minidress and black-cat tights when the Rosalie Island wind picks up. “It doesn’t look like any of the lights are on inside. It’s a quick in and out, you said. You still want to get your table back, right?”

  It’s the first week of September and the listing has been live for a while, so if I’m really doing this, I need to do it now. I swallow hard.

  I still have the key, so sneaking back inside Bluebill Cottage isn’t technically a break-in. Although it certainly seemed like a much better idea before we were standing outside of it. I’d expected to feel a sense of rightness once we were finally here, but the second mini rental van I notice parked in the driveway is all kinds of wrong.

  The house was just listed. How could he have sold it already?

  Even worse, without even telling me?

  “Oh my god, it’s cold out here,” Raj whines, stamping her feet. “Can you have your quarter-life crisis after we get inside?”

  Leave it to her to make me face my demons head-on. Grimly, I set my shoulders.

  We’ve already spent a ridiculous amount of time pro-and-conning this: last night during Girl’s Night (a misnomer, really, what with Harrie and Freddie cuddled up with us through tipsy-on-tequila-and-making-fun-of-hot-rom-com-leads-for-not-realizing-what-they-had-when-they-had-it and then despondent-on-tequila-and-wishing-the-rom-com-leads-would-just-kiss-already); the whole drive and ferry ride over to Rosalie Island; the last ten minutes in my moving van; plus, the last five minutes we’ve been hovering on the porch.

  In any case, I trusted Raj to keep track of the pros and cons on her notes app, and her typing devolved from full, coherent sentences to drunken keyboard smashing. Since multiple variations of “jahsdfhjan” doesn’t count as a con, the pros have it.

  Time to steal my table back.

  The second I take the plunge and turn the key in the lock, everything comes rushing back.

  Along with every reason this is a bad idea.

  But Raj pushes in before I can chicken out, making a big show of rubbing her arms and chattering her teeth. “Finally. I thought we were going to leave without the criminal activity you promised me and I was not looking forward to that.”

  I hide my wince. I regret enticing her with crime so, so much. “It’s not criminal,” I protest. “It’s . . . liberating the dining table that Milan only paid cost of materials for, so as long as I replace it with the identical table from Second Chance Shores tomorrow when the store opens, all I’m really taking back is my labor. Plus, I have”—I dangle the key between us—“this. So it’s not a break in.”

  “In other words, we’re here to be gay and do crimes,” says Raj. “I wish I’d worn more black. We’re like the younger, sexier cast of Ocean’s 8.” She pauses. “Wait, no, I take it back. No one is sexier than Cate Blanchett.”

  I groan because I’m definitely an Anne Hathaway girl, but we can argue about who does slick heists better when we aren’t currently trespassing. Regardless of my justifications, I really don’t want to get caught out here by Milan or anyone else.

  “Come on, let’s grab my table,” I say.

  I’d called earlier today to ask the store owner to reserve the matching table for Bluebill Cottage and that I’d pay cash—the last of my cash, thoroughly blowing this month’s budget—when I picked it up tonight on the way to the house. But just like the changing of the ferry times, the store had also reduced their open hours for the low season.

  The owner had forgotten to mention that, but because she had customers waiting in line, she also forgot her usual nosing around in what I and “my handsome young man” were up to these days in “our” new house. She’s seen us together so many times and seems to ship us, so telling her there is no Rita-and-Milan anymore is a conversation I don’t want to have.

  But if my plan works . . . we won’t be apart for long. Hopefully, anyway. Fingers crossed.

  Raj is right, though. There’s not a single sign of anyone living in the house. That moving truck outside could be here for any number of reasons. It doesn’t have to mean someone bought Bluebill.

  So the plan is still the same. Spend the night here and say my last goodbye, swap the tables tomorrow when the store opens, and then mosey back to Goldsboro with the only souvenir of the last two months on Rosalie Island that would, with any luck, get Milan to chase after me.

  I’m not letting him go without a fight. I’m making the first move, showing him I won’t pretend the last three months never happened. I won’t make the mistake of waiting, waiting, waiting like he accused me of doing.

  But if he wants me, he has to prove it, too.

  While I stand in the living room, taking it all in for the last time—the blue fireplace tiles we’d argued about, the couch where we’d kissed (and more), the bookshelves where we’d had an almost—Raj pipes, “Gotta pee!” and jets.

  And by that, I mean she goes upstairs to pee even though there’s a downstairs bathroom right there, probably as a ruse to test out each bed like she’s looking for a pea. She rejoins me at least ten minutes and five Milan memories later, as though she’d been right behind me all along.

  Honestly, she could have just said she wanted to snoop.

  “Did you know,” she says conversationally, flinging herself onto the couch, “that when it comes to toilet paper, Milan is an under?”

  “What? I put them over so you could see the pretty pattern.” When he cleaned the bathroom he must have put it the way he wanted it. Typical. “Did you fix it?”

  She makes a rude snorting noise. “Of course. Who do you take me for?”

  Thank god for Raj. I take back every mean thought I had about her tipsy-typing skills.

  Without skipping a beat she hauls a bag of Little Shop donuts from her vegan-leather purse. “Dinner first? I need sustenance before I do any manual labor.” She holds out a chocolate icing donut with a gummy worm on it to entice me. “You know, I could have cashed in a girlfriend favor for this and asked Luke to come over and help us.”

  At least one of us is getting somewhere with a significant other.

  I gesture for her to move her legs so I can sit. I pluck off the gummy worm to eat first. “So we’re officially at the calling-each-other-for-big-favors phase of the relationship?”

  She gets a glint in her eye. “Let’s just say he owes me.”

  “Ew, Rajvee!” I mimic in an Alexis Rose voice that sends her into peals of giggles.

  “It’s not a sexy thing!” she insists. “He crowned that awful rooster on our mantelpiece and Mom adored it. It’s an official part of the family. I tried to move
it somewhere less conspicuous and Mom moved it back, but not before I freaked out that it was some kind of haunted doll I couldn’t get rid of like in that Goosebumps movie we watched at my house when we were kids? Luke even threatened to ‘find’ its matching mate for her.”

  “Must be serious if there are threats involved,” I tease.

  Raj cheerfully takes a big chomp of her donut and throws her legs over my lap to stretch out. “I was kidding. I wouldn’t make him come all the way over here just to help steal.”

  “We aren’t—”

  “Oh, sorry. Liberating,” Raj says with an exaggerated drawl.

  The second we finish eating, I get her off the couch. “So you grab the far end and we’ll get her out of here,” I say as we enter the dining room. “Milan and I did it with no problem.”

  It’s hard saying his name, but it’s nothing compared to the shock waves that hit me when we reach the dining room.

  “Oh, fuck,” whispers Raj.

  I move too quickly on jellied legs, almost weaving. The table, or what remains of it, is bare. Back to its natural wood. No hint of the mural I’d painted. Not a fleck of blue water or a strip of sand. I run my hands over the smooth, almost soft, legs, disbelieving.

  I taught him too well.

  “I don’t understand,” I say, staring at the table like I’m deciphering a clue.

  I can feel my heartbeat in my ears. My head pounds.

  He sanded it down.

  He SANDED it down.

  He sanded it DOWN.

  What happens next is a blur. Raj’s arms are around my shoulders, pulling me up. She’s trying to get me to walk, to leave the room. She’s repeating my name, insistently at first, then crooning. Somehow she coaxes me back to the living room. Sits me down on the couch.

  “That rat bastard!” seethes Raj.

  I don’t want to be here. Not on the couch, not in this room.

  Not in this house.

  I ache to demolish every single memory associated with this place that healed my heart before it broke it again.

  If only I could take a sledgehammer to the day I showed him how to use the sander.

  I wish I’d taken Paula up on the offer she made at the beginning of summer so Rosalie Island and Milan never happened at all.

  I need to get out of here.

  Chapter 28

  There’s no way to access the back porch without passing through the dining room first. I realize my mistake when I see the erased table, but I don’t falter. I stride past it, finally able to breathe when I push the glass door open and take in my first gulp of cool, salt-filled air.

  God, I was such a fool. I’d been looking for signs in all the wrong places, when the universe had already given me the biggest one of them all.

  Broken things can’t be fixed.

  “I’m going for a walk,” I say over my shoulder to Raj, who’s followed me. “Alone.” The word punctuates the fog in my mind. “By myself,” I amend. Same meaning, but it makes me want to claw my heart out of my chest a little less.

  I thought nothing would be worse than losing the opportunity to know Milan again. But no, this is worse. Because this makes it so everything new and tender between us this summer never happened at all. And now it won’t ever happen again.

  I wait for the coil of anxiety and upset deep in my belly to loosen, dissipate. Surely now that my head’s made peace with saying farewell to even the tiniest wisp of a happy ending for us, my heart and the rest of me will fall in line?

  But if anything, the coil squeezes even tighter.

  My feet slip in and out of the sand as I walk. Frustrated, I hop along on one foot, ripping off my shoes without breaking stride. This side of Rosalie Island is ablaze with poppy-red color and marigold-bright rays. I almost make it to the nearest neighbor’s house before the urge to vomit passes and the horizon starts to swallow the sun along with my last shred of hope.

  God, I’m a literal walking-into-the-sunset cliché.

  I whip around. It’s time to go ho—go back and face things.

  The plan to take my table back failed. No romantic candlelight dinners and playing footsie under the table. No dimpled children eating waffles and Milan’s perfect scrambled eggs. No birthday cakes and Christmas roasts. No families squeezed around my table, bickering over the crackling and the last dinner roll. No Milan. No life together. Everything I dreamed . . . gone.

  I’d believed in him—in us, in what we shared. So much that I hadn’t let myself doubt for a moment that he would come chasing after me. That he wanted everything I wanted. It feels unreal how wrong I was. How disconnected my dream was from our reality.

  Maybe I should have trusted in historical precedents instead of fresh starts.

  I pad through the sand, heart sinking faster than the sun at my back. A hermit crab races to keep up with me, then scuttles across my path to join a second, smaller crab waiting near the water. My eyes sting, then blur, as I watch them together. It’s hard to believe that this is the same beach Milan and I jogged on with the pups not so long ago.

  “Rita?”

  I stop short. Milan’s walking up the beach, holding his flip-flops in his hands.

  Face full of confusion and no trace of guilt, he asks, “What are you doing here?”

  He’s asking me that? He has the gall to ask me that?

  “You sanded my table,” I say, voice quivering. “You could have given it back to me or you could have— Anything but that. How could you? You had to get rid of everything that reminded you of us?”

  He stops in his tracks, mouth falling open. “What are you talking about?”

  “The trestle table in the dining room. The one I painted. For weeks.”

  “It’s still here.”

  “No,” I say vehemently. “It’s not.”

  “Rita,” he says, voice rough with frustration, “I promise you that it is.”

  “ ‘Promise’? Ha!”

  His jaw clenches. “Why do you think I’m here? With a moving van? Do you really think I would let you—or your table—go?”

  I stare at him.

  He sighs. “Your table’s out front. Do you want proof?”

  I give him a jerky nod.

  This time we don’t go through the house, but around it, navigating through the tall beach grass. My van is in full view. There’s no way Milan can miss it, but with single-minded determination, he goes right to his own to unlatch the roll-up door at the back and shines his phone’s flashlight inside.

  I can’t hold back my gasp.

  The mural table is inside. My gaze zeroes in on the couple walking together in the sand the way we’d just done and on the green scrunchie in her hair.

  The knot in my heart unravels, and hidden in its center is a terrifyingly small bud of hope.

  But it’s growing larger by the second.

  “Believe me, now?” His voice holds a trace of annoyance. “Why are you here with your own van?”

  Before I can answer him, apologizing for my rant, Raj shouts from inside the house, “If you’re here to steal anything, you should know I called the police!”

  “What the fuck?” Milan takes off for the front door, me on his heels.

  He uses his key to get in, to his credit not blinking at Raj wielding a fireplace poker and a cranky expression. He sucks in his cheeks and looks from her to me before asking, “Does someone want to tell me what the two of you are doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?” Raj counters.

  He plays the trump card. Folding his arms across his chest, he says, “It’s my house.”

  I swallow. Right. It’s his house. He has every right to be here, unlike us.

  Raj lets the poker clatter back into the stand and huffs back to her seat.

  He’s still waiting for an answer. I cast around for somethi
ng that would explain why I, my best friend, and a second moving van are in front of his house.

  “I, ah, forgot something here,” I say finally.

  He half smiles, then remembers to steel his face again. “Another scrunchie?”

  “Uh, not exactly.”

  Milan lifts a brow. “Is it bigger than a bread box?”

  He’s teasing me. I gnaw my lower lip, replying in kind. “Considerably.”

  “Fine! You don’t have to interrogate us!” Raj bursts out. “We came for the table and that’s it. Rita was even planning on a replacement we were going to swap out for it, and maybe it’s wrong, maybe the word ‘stealing’ was thrown around, but this is important to her, okay?”

  Wow. Miss Cat Burglar didn’t even hold up to three questions without folding like that.

  I pass a hand over my eyes. “You are the worst criminal ever.”

  “At least now I know why you’re here,” says Milan.

  Anxiously, I ask, “You didn’t really call the police, did you, Raj?”

  The blush rises on her cheeks. “No. It seemed like the smart thing to say to scare off an intruder.”

  The tension in the room evaporates.

  “Well, then,” says Raj. “I’m gonna give you two some space. And fair warning, I’m not coming out until someone gives me the all clear.”

  Well, that’s one way to avoid awkwardness.

  And oh god, awkward it is. Now that the fright and anger has faded, I’m left with the awful memory of the way we ended and that stony ferry ride home when we’d locked Bluebill Cottage up for the last time. And now, arguing again only thirty seconds after laying eyes on each other. It’s embarrassing. We should be better than this.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t exactly break in. I still had my key. Which, um, I should probably give back to you.” I pull it from my pocket, the metal warm to the touch, and hold it out.

  I’m sure I don’t imagine that moment of hesitation before he takes it.

  It’s a small key. It would be so easy for our fingers to brush, but he seems as tentative with his acceptance as I do in my offering.