The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay (32 page)

Now I'm wondering if there's a good fresh X-Acto knife in the art studio. I could make snowflakes on the luminaria. Or mehendi designs, inspired by henna tattoos … or I could do the same designs on tissue paper, decoupage them around mason jars, drop candles inside, and hang them from the big willow tree that hangs over half the pond …

I have always loved paper cutting—I find it enormously relaxing compared to the hunched-over eyeball-straining work of my paintings. When Renee was expecting her first daughter, she told me the nursery theme was going to be “prima ballerinas,” which I felt was maybe a
hair
oppressive for someone we hadn't even met yet, but even so, I wanted to get on board. So I cut out from heavy pastel card stock these soft and round jungle animals—hippos, rhinos, okapi, and elephants—in various states of arabesque and plié, and hung them from the finest fishing line until they were dancing a
Swan Lake
of their own. And, since the baby was a winter baby, I made them snowy tutus—layer upon layer of precision-cut paper snowflakes with the creases gingerly steamed out and then the paper positioned around the animals' waists. For their crowns, tiny dried lavender and baby's breath woven into miniature circles befitting their grand wearers' status.

It was a prissy, painstaking labor of love and I enjoyed every second of it. Renee dotingly hung it above the changing table and for months baby Natalie goggled at it as she had her diaper changed or during her little after-bath massage. I remember standing aside uselessly, goggling myself at Renee's strange competence with the baby—where did she learn to be such a wonderful mother?—and at the same time trying not to wonder what kind of mother I would have been to Nic's babies.

I know now, years upon years later, that I would have been no kind of mother then, and Nic is not what I wanted in a husband anyway, and the fairy tale that Renee had, that I tried so desperately not to envy her for, was not a fairy tale at all. At least not my kind of fairy tale.

Twinkling park lights, red, windburned cheeks, listening to an old Gillian Welch album and dreaming up frivolous art projects in a warm truck, as a man you are falling for competently clears a pond so everyone in town can enjoy one magical night of ice skating …

That is my fairy tale.

My mouth goes dry.
This
is my fairy tale.

I pick up my phone. I am
never
going back to Chicago. My fairy tale is right here.

I have to tell Renee. And Mitchell. And my brother.

It's time, I think, to say good-bye to that old life forever.

And that is when everything starts to go to hell.

 

Twenty

 

The phone rings only once before Renee picks up. “Hello?”

“Renee? It's me. I'm calling because—”

“Where the fuck are you?” she screams into the phone.

I spend a second being taken aback. “What? Are you okay?”

“Just answer the question.” Her voice sounds raspy. Thick. Mad.

“I'm in Minnow Bay,” I tell her, a little scared.

“You cannot be serious. How hard can it be to get a freaking divorce from a man you barely know? God, Lily, what is
wrong
with you? Why won't you just come home?”

I am rendered speechless. Rather than answer, I just stare out the window at Ben driving the tractor.

“Lily? Are you even listening?”

“Hm?”

And then she bursts into tears.

There are three times in my fifteen-year friendship with Renee that I have heard her cry. The first time was a month after we met, late at night after we drank too much cheap vodka mixed with Hawaiian Punch at a frosh party and she cried after throwing up on her new bought-just-for-art-school extra-long twin comforter. Once she cried from stress the night before she took the bar. And the last time was when she told me she was pregnant again when baby Natalie was only fourteen months old. Three of her grandparents have died in the time I have known her and there were no tears for any of them. She failed the bar on the first attempt and had to take it a second time—no tears over that. And one time in college a horrible professor told her she would never amount to anything and should give up art, in front of the entire seminar, and that didn't make her cry. It made me weep like a baby, and then drop the class in protest and write a mean instructor review, but it didn't make Renee cry.

Now she is crying. “Nic left me,” she says, her voice full of pain and mucus. “He called me a cold, unfeeling bitch.”

“What?” I say, suddenly violently mad. “Are you kidding me?” I will go down there and I will show Nic just how “unfeeling” a woman can be.

“Well, he did say I was cold. He said I wasn't invested in him or the girls. He told me I wasn't the woman he married.” There's a little more wailing.

My rage flickers out as quickly as it came. “Oh. Oh, Renee. I'm so sorry. But just to be clear, he didn't call you a bitch?”

“Of course not,” she says, her voice becoming more clear. “He doesn't have the balls. He said he loves me but I've changed. He wants to go to marriage counseling. Marriage counseling! Like we're some ugly middle-aged couple who never have sex anymore.”

I recall a few times hearing about how Renee and Nic never have sex anymore. “Maybe it would be kind of a good idea? Just to get back on the same page and reconnect a bit?”

Renee snorts through her tears. “I don't want to reconnect. This whole tantrum of his has made me realize I never loved him. It's all been one huge disappointment.”

This stops me cold. “What? No, honey, you don't mean that.”

“Don't I? Think about it, Lily. I was about to graduate from college, I was scared of being alone, and he was just so convenient, you know? I was looking for someone secure, who would stand by me as I went through law school. Someone I could count on to never outshine me. I knew he wasn't a cheater or a letch. And he was right
there.
”

A hurt rises up in my chest that feels almost unbearable. I try to put it elsewhere—after all, this is not about me. It is about Nic and Renee.

Even still, as I go looking for the right words to say in response, only pointed questions appear in my mind.
He was convenient because he had been my boyfriend for the three years previous?
I want to ask.
He was “right there” because he had just broken up with me? You “knew he wasn't a cheater” because he had been faithful even to
me
?
Everything I want to say is hysterical and self-centered.

“I…” I say, because I've been silent for far too long, and I am praying something reasonable will come out. “I didn't know that you felt that way?” I attempt.

“Of course you didn't,” says Renee, and then there are some more weeping sounds. “You've always been such an amazing friend to me, Lily, and you've always been on my side, and now that I need you, you're a million miles away on some kind of weird spirit quest, and my whole life is falling apart.”

“I'm not a million miles away,” I try. “I'm in Wisconsin.”

“So you can come home, then?” she asks weepily. “I have to figure out what to do. I need you.”

I swallow hard. All the times—there have been so many of them—Renee has been there for me are playing in my head. I'm usually the one having drama, needing guidance, not knowing how to negotiate some new self-created catastrophe, and she's the one who talks me out of doing stupid things and taking unnecessary risks and letting important things slip through my fingers. Right up to ten minutes before I left for Minnow Bay this was the case. She was the one who found Ben, who told me how to handle the situation, got me out of my panic and paralysis. Without her, I probably wouldn't even be up here. I wouldn't have met Jenny and Simone and Colleen and Ben. I wouldn't be sitting in this truck looking at my fairy tale through the windshield, thinking of how fast I'll have to abandon it.

“Of course I can come home. The weather looks clear. I'll get some coffee and leave as soon as I can.”

“Oh, thank you,” says Renee. “Thank you thank you thank you, Lily. You're my best friend in the world, you know that? We fight, but still, we'll always be there for each other. No matter what happens, just like we promised each other freshman year.”

Freshman year. When, after six months of clinging to each other as we navigated homesickness and aimlessness and artistic terror, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and instead of packing up and going to her, I lay down in my lofted bed and stayed there for three days. And on that third day, Renee came home from class, climbed up the loft ladder, grabbed my ankles, and actually tipped me out of the bed so that I had to hang on to the edge to soften my fall.

“You're all packed up,” she said, when my dismount was complete. “The registrar is calling your professors now. You will be able to come back whenever, but probably next semester is most realistic.”

I lay there on the floor for a few more minutes. I was crying in such an empty way, it wasn't even a good cry, it was just a half-assed attempt based in self-pity. It was crying for lack of a better plan.

As though I were a child, Renee washed my face with a warm washcloth and changed me out of stale pajama pants into a clean pair of jeans—jeans she must have washed for me, because God knew I hadn't done laundry in weeks. “Get up,” she said when she was done. “Stop wasting time.”

“My life is here,” I said then, stupidly, selfishly, because I was eighteen and I thought my life was in any particular place at all, and that I had a life to geolocate in the first place. “I can't just leave.”

“Fine,” she said. She crossed her arms over her chest and nodded. “Then we'll just go out to dinner. You've got to get out of this room. Get your purse.”

But of course when she got me into the car—a car she had somehow obtained, though freshmen weren't allowed cars on campus—she pointed it west and didn't stop driving until we were in my home suburb. I sat, catatonically, knowing what was happening, knowing it was the right thing, and hating it all the while.

In the parking lot of a nearby grocery store, she flicked my face right on the temple, hard, as I remember, and said, “I need directions to your mom's house.”

Instead of giving them to her I begged her to turn around. “I can't face her. She'll see I'm too weak to help her. I'll only make her feel worse.”

“Worse than having terminal cancer?”

I burst into tears instead of answering.

After a moment, Renee said, “You're right. You're useless. Which ends now. Time to nut up and go show her you'll be okay.”

I sniveled and shook my head. “But I won't be okay. I'm going to be all alone when she's gone.”

And Renee, in her way, turned off the radio and said to me, “Don't be a stupid fucking idiot. You won't be alone. You'll always have me, moron. And I'll always have you, whether I like it or not. We're family now. And family is yours for life. Now, give me your address.”

“Just like freshman year,” I say now, a million miles away from that terrible day. But not with any kind of enthusiasm.

*   *   *

As soon as Renee hangs up, I look over at Ben and see that he is parking the snowplow back in the shed. I dash a note off and put it on the dashboard and then race back the couple of blocks to the inn on foot. I thunder up the stairs noisily enough that Colleen appears at my door, Jenny trailing behind her.

“We were looking for you,” says Colleen. “Everywhere. Where have you been?”

“I was—” I'm about to tell them about Ben and the lake when I realize, Colleen will still get her surprise even though I won't be here to have it with her. It makes me feel a little better about leaving. “I can't tell you, actually. You'll find out tomorrow.”

“What are you doing?” asks Jenny.

“I'm packing,” I tell her. “I'm sorry to do this, but I have to go back to Chicago right now.”

“Now?” Jenny says, horrified. “Not now! Tonight?”

“Tonight. It's an emergency.”

“Oh my goodness, what's wrong?” asks Colleen, crossing to my bed and grabbing clothes from the closet to fold for me.

“It's Renee,” I tell them, “I think she's leaving Nic. Or he's leaving her? I'm not a hundred percent sure. I only know that she needs me.”

“Renee, the lawyer who wouldn't lend you two hundred bucks?” asks Colleen, her folding speed slowing tremendously.

“Renee, the lawyer who has been my best friend since freshman year,” I say.

“And Nic is the guy who left you for your best friend?” says Jenny.

“Yes,” I say, because there's no shine to put on that particular nugget.

“And this constitutes an emergency how?”

“Does a divorce not constitute an emergency?”

Jenny shrugs in her Jenny way. “Mine didn't. Well, it was hard to get enough Champagne on such short notice.…”

Colleen waves her off. “Are you really the only one she can go to with this?”

I drop the pile of bathroom ephemera I'm scooping up back to the counter with a clatter. When I turn around I see Jenny and Colleen, who are both standing in my room with hands on hips now, looking formidable, looking like they mean to keep me here by force. “Ladies,” I tell them. “I appreciate your kindness and friendship, and the zeal with which you have encouraged me to extend my visit to Minnow Bay. However, and I say this with love, this is none of your business.”

Jenny doesn't bat an eye. “Lily, and I also say this with love, it is entirely my business.”

“We care about you,” says Colleen. “And it doesn't seem like Renee has treated you very nicely in the past.”

“And furthermore,” says Jenny, “I've invested in you. I went into the studio today, when I was looking for you, and I saw what you are working on.
The August Drought,
” she says, and immediately I realize that that will be the name of this painting, if I ever get it done. “It's going to be your most important work. It's so full of anticipation. Of the agony of waiting. It's painful and beautiful at once.”