In Twenty Years: A Novel (9 page)

No, she was not the woman her mom was. She’d vowed not to be since the sixth grade. Even if it meant recreating carrots. She’d recreated herself, after all. Carrots weren’t the most challenging things in the world.

At the booth just behind them, three kids with backward baseball hats and skin that still shone with the glory of youth start pounding on their table.

In metered time, they shout, “Stuff it, stuff it, stuff it!”

Lindy, who’s been distracted with her phone, swivels her gaze upward, delight spreading across her face in the form of a lopsided grin. She cackles and joins in with the three of them. “Stuff it, stuff it, stuff it!” Her fists shake their own table. Owen mistakes them as chants for him, as if they’re a cheerleading squad there to buoy his bingeing. He swallows the remaining half of his second cheesesteak without so much as taking a breath.

“Stuffed it!”
he shouts, like he just scored a touchdown.

Lindy breaks out in furious applause and gives him a standing ovation. Owen tries to bow but just sort of tilts over, his reflection shining in the metal table, until his forehead falls all the way down in near slow motion, thumping down on its surface.

Colin pats him on the back. “It might be time to get you home, man.”

“I think it
is
time to get him home,” Catherine says, not particularly warmly. To Annie she says, “He’s on Lipitor. So this is really wonderful. Really smart. Gorging on cheesesteaks.”

“It’s just one night. He’ll be OK! I mean, there are worse things.”

Like ridiculous raw-food diets. Like texts that end in
xo
.

Catherine shakes her head like she’s not an idiot, that it’s not like he’s going to have a heart attack
right then
,
right there
on the linoleum floor that’s pocked with melted cheese and meat residue.

“It’s the principle.”

“You only live once,” Lindy says, overhearing. “So screw principles!”

“You would know,” Annie snaps, before she can censor herself. Her forehead furrows as if chasing the surprising sentiment. What compelled her to say that? (Other than the obvious fact that Lindy does often screw principles, not to mention the love of Annie’s life.)

Owen finds this to be the most hilarious thing he’s ever heard and flattens himself against Colin, who nearly has him upright now and is attempting to ease him out of the booth and safely out into the night, away from these murderous cheesesteaks, out of the immediate withering gaze of his wife.

“So we’re still being pissy from before?” Lindy says to Annie.

Annie has no idea if she means from a decade ago or from their earlier dustup in the living room of Bruiser, so she simply says, “I didn’t mean it!”

“Oh, you
did
mean it!”

“I think
you
were the one who was pissy before,” Colin says, over his shoulder to Lindy, and Annie relaxes just a bit because they’re not all referencing that disastrous night of Catherine and Owen’s wedding when Lindy and Colin screwed each other (and subsequently, Annie).

“Fine,” Lindy concedes. “I’m
sorry.
To everyone. OK?” She doesn’t sound particularly sorry, but Annie is too caught up stumbling around her own thoughts to push it. Not that she’d push it anyway. She can’t believe she pushed it just a second ago by firing back at her.

“Hey, Catherine, I’m sorry! OK?”

Annie sees Catherine debate it, wrestle with her grudge and the complications of the past. Then, because she
is
kind, and Annie knew it, Catherine nods. “OK.”

“But you.” Lindy pokes Annie’s arm. “Don’t take that back, don’t say you didn’t mean it.
Screw principles.
Fair enough. You got your jab in. We’re even. Can we move on now?”

Her eyes meet Annie’s, and this time it’s clear she does mean from a decade ago.

Can we move on now?

Lindy glides past her like that’s that, they’re square, even-Steven, as Annie would say to Gus.

Annie loses her breath for a moment and sinks back into the booth.

Can we move on now?

That’s it? Is she just supposed to
let go
because Lindy has?

Is forgiveness that easy? Is it easier with old friends because you’ve known them forever? Or is it harder for those same reasons? What about yourself? What about the fucking world? What about Bea? Would she forgive them for not keeping their promises to her—that they’d always be family, always be a six-point star?

Annie inhales and exhales in the revolting, filthy booth at Pat’s, watching her old friends shuffle out the door single file. She wants to get a grip, she needs to get a grip, and let the bruises of the past fade into nothingness like everyone else seems to. She breathes deeply once again, then pulls her phone from her purse and angles her arm and then her cheek just so, and captures the moment with a quick snap of a button.

It’s not the best selfie she’s ever pulled off, but she looks pretty decent for 2:45 in the morning, and with the Amaro filter, she can pass for thirty. Twenty-eight, maybe.

2:45 a.m. and back in the old haunt! Can’t remember the last time we had this much fun. #penn #lovinglife #oldfriends #thebest

She debates adding an emoji of a wineglass or maybe a martini, but she doesn’t want to overdo it. She’s not an undergrad, after all.

It does the trick. Annie gets a grip. And yet, by the time she posts the picture and scampers toward the street, the four others are halfway down the empty, litter-clogged block, darkened shadows underneath the streetlights heading toward home. She has to squint to eke them out.

Finally, she sees them, and rushes to catch up, cursing herself for always being one step behind.

10

CATHERINE

Owen is pawing at Catherine, his kisses sloppy, his breath pungent with beer and mustard. She wants to be enthusiastic, she tells herself to be enthusiastic, but he feels like a tranquilized bear on top of her, and she was never good at faking it. She turns her head to the side, and he moves to her neck. The bed groans unhappily beneath them, and Catherine thinks,
That makes two of us.

“You’re not into this,” Owen mumbles.

Catherine’s surprised he notices.

“You’re just too drunk.”

“Jesus!” He barks and rolls off her. “Is it too much to just want to have sex with my wife without her criticizing me?”

“Shhhhhhh! Be quiet!” Catherine sits up quickly. Owen has flung both arms over his face, and she’s unclear whether or not he’s lapsed into an immediate inebriated sleep. “I’m not criticizing you! You’re just really drunk,” she whispers.

“Ugh,” he says. “Nothing I do is good enough for you.”

“I don’t know
what
you’re talking about,” she says, but actually thinks,
Well, half the stuff you do
isn’t
good enough!

“We agreed that I could quit, and now you resent me.”

“I don’t want to talk about this right now. It’s three in the morning.”

“You resent me,” he whines.

“I don’t resent you. And can we talk about this when you’re sober? At home?” She sighs like a parent does during an epic toddler temper tantrum.

He’s right, she
does
resent him—even if they did agree on it. It’s thornier than that now. It’s not just that she’s the sole breadwinner; it’s how he stopped asking about her day, about the complications of running her empire; it’s how his own complaints seem trivial—
Ugh, I had to drive two different carpools today!
—compared to hers.
Try managing an inept designer who steals ideas from last year’s ideas! Try competing with a twenty-six-year-old decoupaging protégé who was just offered a book deal—on decoupaging!

“When we were here, we were so happy,” Owen mumbles. “Then it went to hell. Why did it go to hell, Cathy? Why did it go to hell?” He flops an arm out toward her.

“Stop it. It didn’t go to hell! Please, Owen, just go to sleep.”

“I shouldn’t have quit,” he says. “I should never have quit. That’s where we started to go wrong.”

“Oh, please, come on. Just . . . sleep.”

His chest rises and falls, and then, as if because Catherine is the boss, he heeds her plea and within seconds, tumbles toward dreamland.

Now Catherine can’t sleep because Owen is snoring so loudly.
Honestly, he needs to see someone about this,
she thinks.
Like, a surgeon, because it’s fucking ridiculous. How can he possibly sleep through this?
It’s like a goddamn volcano erupting next to her.

She shifts and pulls the duvet up to her neck.

How did they ever share this tiny bed? When they first met, before they moved into this house with the others junior year, they squeezed into a twin bed in her sorority room. Catherine doesn’t remember complaining, doesn’t remember being so uncomfortable she felt like she was breathing the same air as a stranger. Why does his leg keep twitching? How can he sleep so solidly, without worry, while her brain runs haywire, armed like a fuse to a grenade fueled with anxiety? She answers her own question:
he sleeps without worry because he has none
. Nothing to
worry
about, no shoulders on which a company rests, no creative well from which he must squeeze drops from arid ground.

Owen emits a particularly annoying crescendo that culminates with the bed literally quivering, akin to the earthquake Catherine had the misfortune of experiencing when she was in Los Angeles two years ago shooting some spots for
E!
She pushes herself up on her elbows, and then onto her feet, grabbing a blanket and pillow off the bed. She finds the light in the closet, its glow casting shadows, half illuminating the room, and for a moment she worries this will rouse Owen. Until she realizes that nothing could rouse Owen. Then she steps inside and nudges the door a little bit closed.

She stares at the ceiling in the closet, leaning back, buttressing the wall, then resting her head against it. Maybe it’s for the best that he’s snoring; at least it’s something to fill the quiet space. The house was never quiet back then: someone was always tromping down the steps, late for a lecture; or sneaking up the steps, with someone drunk in tow; or blasting Pearl Jam (Bea) out her third-story window, loud enough that it reverberated all the way down to the alley.

But Bea was dead now, something that all these years later Catherine still doesn’t quite comprehend. Like, she’d remember the way Bea shimmied to “Let’s Go Crazy” at Smoke’s, or the way that she—with her slightly too-wide eyes and off-skew crooked smile that hung lower on the left side, and her billowy mahogany hair that mesmerized those Wharton boys—would disappear for a day unannounced, returning when the rest of them were winding their way home from the library (or Annie from her work-study job at the bookstore), with shopping bags sagging her arms, presents from Manhattan for all of them. She couldn’t have been shopping for the entirety of those trips, but they didn’t always ask where and how she’d whiled away the rest of those hours—inevitably, Bea was off restoring her adrenaline high. Or she’d remember the way she always devoured Catherine’s improvised recipes even when they were wretched—the types of recipes that The Crafty Lady’s readers would rate with one star and complain gave them diarrhea. (Users on The Crafty Lady message boards could be particularly eviscerating. Catherine chalked this up to the fact that many domestic goddesses were actually closet bitches. She’d met Martha Stewart, you know. Not an easy nut to crack.)

Catherine would remember all these tiny moments with Bea—the moments of humanity, the slivers that made her
her
,
indelible, unforgettable, invincible—and it was as if, for that brief bubble within the memory, Bea wasn’t dead, because dying at twenty-seven felt impossible, too strange to consider. Stranger still that it has been thirteen years now.

Catherine stands suddenly and peers upward. She wonders if it’s still possibly there. She’d forgotten about it until a second ago. Their junior year, on the very last day, just before the airport shuttle pulled up to their front door to whisk Catherine home to Wisconsin and usher Owen off to an internship in Boston, they’d carved their names in the back corner. It had been Catherine’s idea. When you’re twenty and in love and about to be pulled apart for three months, this is the sort of thing you do. They’d already had sex twice that morning, and she’d double-checked that she had the right phone number for his apartment up there, and they’d both cried and wondered how they could accelerate time. How they could leap over the divide of those ninety days and reunite so their hearts (and loins) could be full again.

Now, at nearly forty, Catherine wouldn’t mind three months apart—she’d sleep better for one, and for two, well, three months isn’t that long in the span of a lifetime, now is it? She almost laughs at their juvenile angst, almost laughs at the memory of the ache in the pit of her stomach when they parted like a wishbone at the airport.

She cocks her head and cranes her neck and squints to make it out among the shadows.

Owen had put a Toad the Wet Sprocket disk into his portable CD player, and they woefully listened to “I Will Not Take These Things For Granted,”
and Catherine pulled out an X-ACTO knife she’d used to create rubber stamps. (She also used to write Owen love letters on homemade stationery. She’d slip them into his backpack on his way to a poli-sci class or leave one under his pillow if she couldn’t stay the night.) Catherine had etched her name, then Owen his, and then together, they each carved a half of a heart until the halves became whole.

Oh my God. That was another life. Different people. A different sort of love.

She rises on her tiptoes, checking the other corner of the closet. Maybe it was the right side, not the left. She hates that she’s so irritable these days, hates that she misses out on Mason’s hockey practices and Penelope’s gymnastics. Sure, she wishes something could give, but what?

Owen told her last weekend that she should cut herself “a little slack,” which was so typical Owen. She still hasn’t told him about the downward projections, the faltering blog traffic, the speculation that advertising rates will have to be lowered, that once the board catches wind of this next week, the IPO might be delayed. Or that now she’s desperate for the HGTV pilot and to lock in the Target deal and reinfuse the nearly red bottom line with cash.

And then there’s the fact that part of Catherine always wonders if this all wasn’t a spectacular mistake. She’s good at crafting, sure. She’s decent enough at it, but is she really something special? In college, she needed recipes to master her French toast. In her early years starting out, she had to rely on patterns to shape her clothing designs, craft magazines to inspire her holiday décor, online tips for all of those endless candles and potpourri jars and homemade scented soap. Bea used to tell her that no one made a better brunch than she did—that so what if she glanced at a recipe; that didn’t take anything away from the love she put in—but Catherine never quite believed that. A true creative revolutionary would spin something from nothing, and Catherine suspected, deep down, in a place she was too ashamed to share with Owen, that maybe she wasn’t the crafting visionary her fans hailed her to be, or worse, that she’s passed herself off to be for all these years.

What would Owen say about that?

She presses up a tiny bit higher on her toes, hoping something will make its way out to her in the dimness of the solitary bulb in the closet. She cranes her neck again and again and again. Then Owen’s snoring rattles the closet door, and Catherine’s toes give way, and just like that, she’s back on sturdy ground, back on her solid two feet.

It was a stupid idea,
she thinks.
To try to find it. I’m sure it’s long gone by now. Sanded down by a carpenter. Painted over one summer when they spruced the place up.
She shouldn’t pretend that old notions can be so easily resurrected.