The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay (35 page)

My mouth falls open.

“And you drove all night long just to be here for me, even though you knew all those things.”

I shake my head at her wildly. “I did
not
know all those things, Renee.” Fifty thousand dollars in debt? The vast number knocks my brain out of my ear.

Renee laughs. She laughs! “What did you think, Lily? Did you think I like working ninety-hour weeks and dressing exclusively in my aunt's hand-me-down Ann Taylor Loft?” She pauses for a second but obviously not so I can respond, which is good, because I'm stunned speechless. “I just don't know what else to do. And neither does Nic. And there you are, no student loans, no kids, no tuition, no responsibility, just fucking up any old way you want to with no repercussions, and
making your art
all the time, and then not making it because apparently even that was too hard, and taking extended sabbaticals to nowhere-freaking-Wisconsin with all your possessions tossed into a fifteen-year-old car you own free and clear.”

I stare at her wide-eyed.

“And Nic really
loved
you, you know that? He told me you were better in bed than me. And to then have you ask to move in? Can you imagine that, you living your carefree life, floating like a helium balloon around this house while we stagger under all this
stuff
?”

I still stand there. I feel groggy, from driving, from sleep, from not understanding anything I thought I so clearly understood just a few minutes ago.

“It's just been hard to love you,” Renee tells me, and now she is crying. “And I do. I do love you. And Nic does. Not like that. Though, I don't know that for sure. The girls love you. You're Natalie's hero. But it's just been so freaking hard to be your friend. That's why I was trying to hurt you, Lily. That's why I've said so many awful things.” And then she sobs for the second time in ten years, and two days.

“I didn't know,” I say dumbly. “I had no idea. How was I supposed to know?” But of course now I start to think of the things I've misunderstood. The clothes. The permanent state of hurry. The dark circles under her eyes.

“Nic and I have been in separate bedrooms for the last year. That's why I never have you over anymore. And he said to me, last night, before you called, he said I wasn't the woman he married, and he asked me why I couldn't be more like you.”

I stand completely still, completely quiet, completely and utterly stunned.

“And that's why,” she says. “You see, don't you? I'm not the woman he married. I'm not the friend you lived with freshman year. I can't afford to be, not anymore. I had to give that all up.”

I start to see it all now. The last ten years, completely rewritten in an instant. All the drinks dates laughing about my stupid boyfriends and my incompetence with money and my dead-end jobs. All the times I showed up with lattes at her office at 4:00
P.M.
and she dropped whatever she was doing to talk for an hour. The real reason the invitations to come over for wine-fueled sleepovers stopped coming, why she stopped attending my art openings, why she stopped taking my phone calls, why she didn't want to lend me two hundred bucks at the blink of an eye.

I see it all.

“I had no idea,” I say again.

She shakes her head at me. “I love you, Lily, and you're my best friend, but you can't see things right in front of your own face. And when that inn lady called me last night, and told me what had happened—”

“Wait, what?” I say.

“Colleen O'Donnell? She called me at like, nine
P.M.
last night just to yell at me. She just wanted to tell me basically how incredible a friend you are and how I am squandering your love and treating you like shit and—”

“You've got to be kidding me.” I think, suspiciously, of the envelope, but then remember: 9:00
P.M.
I was still sitting on Ben Hutchinson's roof. “Colleen called you? She yelled at you?” That sounds more like Jenny, I think with a sad smile.

“Well, she didn't actually yell. She told me that she had hurt you and you were out of her life and she didn't want me to make the same mistake. She told me you deserved better. And that's when I realized, you had no idea why I was acting like this. You didn't know all the ways you were making things worse. All this time I thought … I thought it was because you were too selfish to care.”

“I was.” I think about all this. “No. Just too stupid to see,” I tell her.

Renee takes my hand. She takes it hard, and I feel now it's cold, it's January in Chicago, and we've been standing outside all this time, and she's in her pajamas, and her face is puffy from tears.

“Can we start over?” she asks me now. “With each other the way things actually are, not the way they used to be? Can you be a friend to someone with a drowning marriage and a hopeless fiscal situation and barely enough hours in the day to eat, much less meet up for coffee and boy talk at a moment's notice?”

My throat fills; my voice is thick. “Can you be friends with someone who is living out of her car and cheated on her boyfriend and is in love with a man she slept with once ten years ago?”

Renee actually thinks for a moment before she answers. “Yes. Yes. Of course I can.”

“Me too,” I say, and now the tears are back and we are both crying. “But before we start over completely, I need to ask one more thing of you.”

*   *   *

One after the other, Renee and I clean off the heartbreak and grime of the last twenty-four hours. She pulls out a suit—suddenly her wardrobe of ill-fitting poly-blend business separates make so much more sense—and I pull on a sweater from the top of my suitcase, the very same suitcase Colleen packed for me the entire time I was raging at her for misleading me. It's the men's woolen sweater that appeared, unbidden, in my room at the inn a week or so ago. Was it Mason's? Ben's? It feels all the warmer for its kind intentions.

Both of us hold hot washcloths over our eyes until the red swollen look turns more into a light puff. I look around her master suite bathroom in a new way, seeing now that there is only one toothbrush in the Venetian glass holder, only one Egyptian cotton bath sheet on the heated towel rod.

“We can be like a two-woman support group,” I tell her as I take it all in, the loneliness combined with the overspending. “Work together to get our money right.”

Renee puts her face in her hands. “I'm going to have to give up so much.”

Looking at her in the mirror, I add, “Or, you could just give up worrying about what other people think about you, sell this anchor of a house, and get the girls into public school stat.”

She looks back at me. “It might be easier to just file for bankruptcy.”

“Might be,” I tell her. “But we never were the kind of people who took it easy.”

She rolls her eyes but I can see that she's not ruling it out. “Do you have a contract with Mitchell?” she asks me. “I feel like you're going to say you don't, and I'm going to yell at you for being irresponsible, and you're going to mumble something about being an artist and letting the details take care of themselves.”

“Consider that entire conversation to have happened already. And then come with me to my car, because I have a box in there labeled ‘Papers and Shit' that probably contains everything you need.”

It does. She locates the contract, scans it in her leather-appointed home office, and then starts marking up a copy. “Okay,” she says. “Here's the passage you need.” She circles something in red and makes some more notes. “Now, go get the girls out of bed and ready for school. I'll draft the paperwork.”

That one simple instruction Renee gives me is so intensely challenging that I start to understand a little better what her life is really like. Natalie, seven, opens her eyes when I enter her room, shouts, “AUNT LILY!” excitedly, and then turns around and goes back to sleep like a narcoleptic. The five-year-old, Natasha, is already up, dressed in a satin princess gown, and has emptied an entire bowl of expensive organic cereal into a big baking bowl, filled it with milk, and is now trying to pick out only the raisins with her spoon. I rush upstairs and ask Renee what to do about this situation and she doesn't even turn away from the screen, waving one hand and saying, “She only eats raisins now. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, raisins.”

Oh my god. Renee, I remember vividly, fed her kids organic quinoa and coconut milk smoothies for their first foods. She breastfed them until they were, like, thirty. If she says Natasha only eats raisins now, I am not going to be able to contradict that.

Instead I go back into Natalie's room, pull the covers off her body, get scolded in a stern seven-year-old voice, and open the blinds and turn on the lights. Nothing happens beyond some grousing and moaning until I tell her I will give her ten dollars if she gets dressed and gets ready for school. She opens her eyes but doesn't move. I can't bid more—I don't have it—so instead I bribe her with a trip to the American Girl Salon for their infamous St. Patty's Day tea. I remember Renee telling me that store is the seventh circle of hell, and me being incredibly curious about it. Now I wonder why on earth I never offered to take her before.

In the kitchen, I eat a bowl of soggy de-raisined cereal and make some coffee. I pour a cup intended for Renee and then have a second thought, and head back up the stairs and in the opposite direction of the home office.

My hands are too full to knock. So I just open the door with a thwack. “NICOLAS LARSEN,” I announce as I walk in, like he's a guest on a talk show I'm hosting in his bedroom.

Nic is in a queen-size bed with one pillow, clearly unconscious. He jumps about a mile when he wakes up and realizes I'm standing there. It's very satisfying.

“Good morning, Nic. I brought you coffee and a message.”

“What are you doing here?” he asks. He is clearly scared.

“Coffee. Message.” I set the coffee on the nightstand. It is black with Splenda, the way Renee takes hers. I remember from our years together he takes his with cream. Too bad.

“Oh, save it,” I say as he tries to shuffle his body around, attempting privacy. “We dated for three years. Your morning wood doesn't shock me.”

He turns bright red. “I thought you were in Wisconsin.”

“I am clearly not in Wisconsin,” I tell him. “I am in your bedroom, where you also are, which is odd because your daughters need to get off to school and your wife needs to get off to work and what the hell is wrong with you?”

I have been wanting to yell at someone for the last month straight. Trying to, actually, regardless of the situation. And now, here, at long last, is a person who should actually get yelled at. I am pretty excited. “Damn it, Nic, you stupid jerk! Get out of bed! Look at you! Why are you treating my friend like this?”

“Hang on there, Lily! There are two sides to every story,” he says.

“Of course there are, you stupid jerk. That's why you have your own best friends to talk to. As for me, it is only Renee's side that I'm concerned with. And, from where I sit, it's time for you to get your head on straight. Renee is apparently the world's most discreet wife, but now that I know some of what's going on, I'm pissed.”

“You don't understand,” he says. “She's changed!”

I make a hate-face at him. “Yes, she has changed, but look at you!” At this I lean over and give him a Pillsbury Doughboy–style poke in the tummy. “Your lives have changed because it's been ten years since you got married. And you've gotten in over your heads and you're tempted to give up and, based on the smell in this room, maybe you already have given up. But that is over now. Here is what is going to happen. Are you listening?”

Nic nods, frozen and afraid.

I put a finger up and wag it in his direction. “You are going to stop being lord of the manor, and she is going to go to therapy with you. You two are going to start having sex again, and you are never going to compare her to me again or I will cut off your business.” Nic turns green most satisfactorily. “And, most importantly, you are going to start buying raisins without the cereal mixed in because JESUS CHRIST!”

Nic stares at me, confused. He is just a deer in the headlights now. I know the look because I'm pretty sure it's what I had when Renee told me everything this morning.

“Drink the coffee,” I prompt. “Get out of bed. Drive the girls to school. Renee and I have something to do.”

Dumbly, Nic gets out of bed. He takes a swig of coffee. He puts on a pair of pants from the floor and stumbles out of the room with the T-shirt he was sleeping in still on. “Natalie?!” I hear him call down the stairs. “Natalie! Natasha! Car. Now!”

I stand at the top of the stairs like an Italian housewife wielding a wooden spoon. When I'm sure he's done what needs doing, I go back for more coffee and take two mugs to Renee's office. “Holy shit, Renee,” I say. “Husbands and kids are hard work.”

Renee just laughs. It is the laugh of a person who just heard someone discover the world is round a few hundred years too late. “I think I've got this Mitchell thing solved,” she says to the computer screen. “The relationship stuff is on you, but here, in section four, there's language that allows you to submit for independent appraisal and auditing of past sales going back two years, and if it's found that he misrepresented his earnings or your fair value, even just by a small percentage, he has to pay for the audits and pay you the money owing with interest as well. If you're not sure about this, and it turns out he hasn't been cheating you, you're going to be out for the auditor and the appraiser. It could be a couple thousand dollars. Not cheap … So you want to be sure.”

I think of what Jenny told me. And what Mitchell told me. They've both lied a lot, and yet I know in my heart who I can trust.