Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (33 page)

He couldn’t make out what the expression on May’s face meant. Dreamy, abstracted, but in a good way.

“What’d I say?” he asked her.

“It’s not honey.”

“Of course it’s honey.”

“I mean it’s not
only
honey. It’s food. It’s … you’re cooking. With bees.”

He laughed. “The bees do all the work. I just harvest it and make money on it.”

May ducked her head and looked away right as he noticed the color coming up in her cheeks. He didn’t know what she was so all-fired excited about, but he recognized the flush on her skin from their time in bed.

He shot a guilty look at Nancy. She didn’t seem to have noticed. “You want to taste it?” he asked.

Allie perked up. “You brought some?”

“Of course.” He stood. “Stay put, I’ll get it.”

He felt three pairs of eyes boring into his back as he left the room. Out at the van, he found the box in the back where he’d packed up a dozen jars of honey. When he emerged, cradling it in his arms, a car drove past, and the driver—an older man in Packers green and gold—waved at him. Ben grinned and kicked the van’s panel door closed with his foot. The sun cast the driveway in bright light, a cool fall breeze rustling the leaves of a small maple tree in the front yard. Somewhere nearby, a leaf blower buzzed away.

He did a three-sixty in the driveway, taking in May’s little kingdom. The house sat on its own square of lush green in a flat suburban subdivision, the yard barely shaded by half a dozen young trees. It was a nothing kind of neighborhood in a place he never would have thought worth visiting.

But it was May’s place. May’s house. May’s mother and sister inside, waiting for him to come back so they could decide what they thought about him.

He’d planned to be gone already.

Here he was, jogging back toward the door.

A few hours later, with grocery bags under each arm, Ben followed the women into the spacious, bright kitchen of the house May grew up in. It was a comfortable two-story, part of a hilly subdivision overlooking Lake Michigan.

The three women unpacked, and Ben tried to stay out of the way.

“What’s next?” May asked when they were done.

“You two girls go work on the table decorations. Allie’s got everything ready on the back porch; carry the boxes inside and get to work. She’s been avoiding finishing those things for I don’t know how long. I’ll work on lunch. Ben, you can sit and read the paper, if you like. Or check in with your boss if you need to. I bet they’re missing you.”

“I doubt it,” he said. “I can help.”

“Are you any use in the kitchen?”

“I know my way around.”

“All right. I’ll let you wash and chop a little if you promise not to wear yourself out. Do you want some more coffee? I have to drink coffee all day long, or I collapse in a heap. After my hernia surgery they told me to stay off the coffee for forty-eight hours, and I was a wreck. You remember, don’t you, May?”

“You wouldn’t get up off the couch. You kept saying, ‘Don’t look at me,’ like a soap opera character.”

“I wasn’t that bad.”

“Yes you were,” Allie said.

“Out of here, the both of you.” She made a shooing gesture with her hands. “I don’t want to see you again until all the centerpieces are done.”

May widened her eyes as she walked past him, and he widened his back.

This is crazy
, hers said.

I know
, his confirmed.

She was smiling a little as she disappeared from sight.

Nancy handed him a plastic-wrapped bundle of celery hearts. “You can start by washing these.”

Once Nancy had him working, she forgot to be a polite hostess and began issuing a steady stream of orders. She had him wash all the vegetables that would become part of lunch, then gave him a cutting board and a knife and put him to work chopping.

Her knives were awful, but he didn’t mind the work. May and Allie bustled through the kitchen five or six times as they carried craft supplies from the back porch to the living room. He caught stray bits of their conversation, mostly jokey insults. Nancy fielded three phone calls, reaching past him every time to snag the phone from the wall on the far side of the countertop. The third time she did it, he noticed the framed watercolor hanging to the right of the phone.

White space divided the paper into four small scenes, like a comic book page. A tiny dumpling-looking girl with a red cap sat at a toadstool table, sipping tea. In the next frame, she was getting into bed, but there was a lump beneath the covers. The third frame showed her discovering a mischievous kitten in her bed, and finally they sat together at the toadstool, each with her own tiny cup of tea.

It was whimsical and light, the colors bright. It didn’t match the rest of the decor, which could have come from an upscale home-decorating store at the mall—earth tones, carefully matched accent colors, collections of photographs with words like
love
and
family
and
inspiration
marching across the frames.

The next time May passed him, he asked, “Did you do this?”

She had her arms full of fake flowers, and she dropped a bunch of them on the floor when she turned to see what he meant. “What? Oh. Yeah. In high school.”

She bent over to gather the daisies.

“It’s great.”

“Thanks.”

She and Allie crossed paths on her way out of the room. “There’s just a few more daisies,” she said.

“Okay.” Allie disappeared onto the porch, then reappeared, daisy-laden. “These are going to be the ugliest centerpieces in the history of time,” she muttered.

Ben angled his chin at the picture. “She’s really good.”

“Yeah,” Allie agreed. “But she never believed it mattered.”

Nancy reached past him to hang up the phone. “Sorry! You don’t mind, do you?”

“It’s not a problem.”

“You need to get a cell, Mom,” Allie said as she left.

“Who needs one more phone bill?” Nancy returned to the stovetop, where a big stockpot had come to a boil. She dumped in two boxes of macaroni.

“Does she still draw?” he asked.

“Who, May?”

“Yeah.”

“She doodles. Mostly on the corners of things. Receipts, napkins. Always doodling, that girl. I used to find her drawings in the strangest places. One year, I took the pan for the Thanksgiving turkey out of storage, and there was a little drawing of a turkey inside it. He was trussed up with his head still on and a little ‘gobble gobble’ coming out of his mouth. It was the cutest thing. I still chuckle every year when I get the pan.”

The phone rang, and Ben lifted the receiver and handed it to her. Nancy smiled, answered a few questions from the other end, and hung up, shaking her head.

“Bill’s at the rental place collecting the tablecloths,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like it’s going well.”

Bill had to be May’s missing father. “Is he artistic?”

“He couldn’t draw a stick figure to save his life. I think May gets that from my side of the family. I wanted to be a sculptor. Thought I would be famous, if you can imagine that. Who’s ever heard of a famous sculptor?”

“There’s Michelangelo,” he offered. “Rodin.”

“Sure, but in the last hundred years? And a woman?” Nancy shook her head. “No, May needed to do something more practical. Something where she could have a steady income and options, you know? Not like when I was younger. My mother was always after me to focus on finding the right person to marry. That was the culture back then: get a good education, wear the right clothes, have good manners, and you’ll get the perfect man to marry you. Not that anyone said it quite that baldly, but all those jokes about going to college to get your m-r-s degree weren’t really so far off. Girls have so many more options now.”

Ben made a noncommittal sound and chopped red peppers.

“Look at that!” Nancy said a minute later, her eyes locked on the cutting board. “They’re all exactly the same size! Where did you learn to do that?”

“I’ve worked in some kitchens,” he said. “Prep cook, that kind of thing.”

“That’s such good experience. And a man who cooks—any girl would be excited by that. Do you have a girlfriend, Ben?”

He hesitated, and Nancy said quickly, “Or a boyfriend? I suppose it could be. You know, I’m never quite sure what to say these days. Ignore me if I’m being offensive.”

“No offense taken,” he said. “I’m not, ah, with anyone at the moment. Not exclusively. Anymore.” Not beyond the next few hours anyway. “I had a recent … thing that I’m still kind of hung up on.”

“Oh. That sounds rough. Was this person … was it a mutual breakup, or—”

“Long-distance,” he said. “She lived really far away.”

“That’s hard.”

“It is.”

“I know it was torture for May and Dan when he was in New Jersey and she was still here,” Nancy said. “Even with the Skyping and all that, it puts a real strain on the relationship.”

Ben peeled a carrot with vicious strokes.

Nancy cleared her throat and said in a quieter voice, “Can I ask you something personal? It’s about May.”

“Sure.”

Please, let this not be a sex question
.

“Did she seem happy to you? Before … you know. Before last week?”

Uncertain what Nancy wanted to hear, Ben settled on, “There were some signs.”

Let her read into that what she wanted.

“I was afraid of that.”

She cocked her head, listening. Allie and May were engaged in a heated discussion about how many daisies each centerpiece had to have.

Satisfied, Nancy continued, “I thought she might have a hard time adjusting to the pace of life in New Jersey. Because May—how can I put this? You know, going back to the art for a second, my friend Andrea, her daughter does marketing for the Art Institute in Chicago. She says the most successful artists? Their whole lives are part of the art. Their clothes, the way they talk, who they hang around with. And when May was in school and she thought she wanted to be an artist, I always worried, What would May have to say to people like that? She’s so … well, we’re just not like that around here. You know what I mean?”

He knew what she meant. She meant that she loved her daughter, but she didn’t
see
her.

She meant that she thought May wasn’t special enough, wasn’t
interesting
enough, to do anything but settle for what life brought her.

“That’s why we were all so surprised at first about Dan,” Nancy said. “I mean, can you imagine? This NFL quarterback, and he wants to go out with May? But after a while, I came to see that they work together
because
of how May is. What he loves about her is everything that was missing in his life—her peacefulness, and that he can count on her to always be there, to always listen. And he brings her that larger-than-life quality that she might never have found otherwise. He tells her stories from his road trips, and for May, it’s as good as having traveled with him.”

Ben watched the peeler travel down the length of the carrot, stripping off its skin. He felt as though Nancy were stripping off his own.

Slice
, and all his good intentions dropped into a wet, twisted pile.

Slice
, and his ability to pretend he was here for May’s good and no other reason dropped into a heap on the countertop.

Slice
, and his hope that he’d moved past anger—that he was learning something, getting somewhere—fell away.

He was angry with Nancy for being so clueless about May.

He was angry with May for being so quiet all morning, for letting her sister lie about him, for pretending they were nothing to each other. He wanted her to climb on top of the dining room table, phone in hand and her entire family as witnesses, and call Dan to publicly end this fucking charade.

He was angry with himself for being here, and for being stupid enough to think he could bring May into his life for a few days and then release his grip on her.

His fingers ached from how badly he wanted to grip her.

This craving he felt for May—this painful, bitter empathy that swamped him when he saw how her family was, how her sister outshone her, how her mom underestimated her—it hurt in his joints. In his heart. It hurt him all over, and that made him
angry
.

“And he takes care of her, too,” Nancy was saying. “He paid off her mortgage so she could visit us anytime and always have her own place to stay. When they have children—”

She stopped suddenly, and Ben looked up from the carrots, certain that the game was up.
That she’d seen it all on his face. He knew it was there—in his eyes, his mouth—because he couldn’t remember ever feeling quite this exposed.

Not since the last time he’d been home.

Fucking Wisconsin
.

The thought twisted his mouth into a sardonic smile, and Nancy smiled back, though he could see her heart wasn’t in it. “I’d meant for you to dice those.” She gestured at the pile in front of him. He’d shaved the carrot down to a pencil. “But that’s pretty, too.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I got distracted.”

The stove timer started to beep, and Nancy turned the power off under the pasta. She carried the stockpot to the sink and dumped all the water into a colander. “Well, I was taking a while to get to the point, because I’m a little nervous asking you.” She glanced toward him, then back at the sink. She gave the colander a shake. “They’re so good for each other, those two. I’m sure you’ve seen it.”

He didn’t respond, but she kept going anyway.

“So I was thinking, since you’re friends with both of them, maybe you can stick around a few days? You said your job is mobile, and I just thought … when Dan comes for the wedding, they’ll need someone impartial who can help them see what they’re throwing away. And May seems to trust you, or she wouldn’t have hidden out at your place. I know Allie and Matt want to help, but with the wedding coming up, I’d hate for them to be focusing on anything but their big day, and I’m not sure May will listen to me. She seems to like you.”

Ben put the peeler down on the cutting board and, for lack of a better response, stuck the carrot pencil in his mouth. He crunched it between his molars. It tasted like soap. All mass-produced grocery store carrots these days seemed to taste like soap. He couldn’t imagine why anyone stood for it.