“I have to tell you something,” I began. This was the reason I’d finally let Marissa talk me into coming. Bethie was the one person I’d hoped to see. But before I could start, she shook her head.
“It’s okay,” she said quietly.
“I feel so terrible.” My eyes were welling. “The way I behaved.”
Bethie looked down, one finger tracing lines on the tablecloth. “At least you never went out of your way, you know? There were people, it was like I was part of their checklist. Drop off their books, sign in at homeroom, make fun of Bethie.” I turned my head and wiped my eyes. That was another delightful part of being pregnant—in addition to everything hurting, everything made me cry, from the evening news to novels with plots about babies in peril and commercials for dog food for senior dogs. Now that I was closing in on thirty, it looked like the warnings were right, and I was finally going to turn into my mother.
“Maybe I didn’t do that much,” I said, even as I remembered the things that I had done or said, the way I’d rolled my eyes and laughed behind her back. Sometimes—more often than I liked—I remembered the scene in the dorm room, Marissa ripping Bethie’s bags open, shaking her and calling her names, and the way I’d flicked the eye out of her stuffed elephant. I remembered everything—her unicorn T-shirt, the way her face had looked, the noise the disc of glass had made falling to the floor. “But I didn’t try to stop it. Isn’t that the saying, about how all it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing?”
“It was high school. Evil is kind of the name of the game.” She patted my hand. “And I really enjoyed your Walkman.” I exhaled and smiled back at her, feeling like I’d been granted a forgiveness that I didn’t deserve.
“Are you in touch with Andy? Dale—my husband—we were watching the Olympics, and I saw his name, and I said, ‘I knew that guy!’ ”
“I knew him, too.”
“So what happened?” she finally asked. “Did you see that Sports Illustrated story, about how he thought his father was dead for his whole life, and then it turned out his dad was in prison? I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”
“Awful,” I said. “It must have been awful.” If tormenting Bethie was the great regret of my adolescence, then not being able to be there for Andy when he’d learned about his father was surely the great regret of my adulthood.
Maybe I couldn’t have been his girlfriend, but I could have been a friend. Someone who’d known him a long time, who knew who he was and how he’d gotten that way.
The day that the SI story had come out, I’d been unpacking boxes at the brownstone that Jay and I had closed on the week before. Nana was in the kitchen, hand-washing the dishes that I’d already run through the machine, and my mom was upstairs, having a breakdown on the phone with the owner of the boutique that had sold me my gown, who was now saying that the alterations might not be finished in time for the blessed event. In the midst of all that, I got a call from the fact-checker for the Times, who needed to confirm details of our wedding announcement—where we’d gone to school, whether I was “a daughter” or “the daughter” of Bernard and Helen Blum of Clearview, Florida.
With the phone tucked under my chin, telling the guy that indeed, I had graduated cum laude from Beaumont, I had run down to the mailbox to see if any last-minute RSVPs had arrived, wondering what my mother would do if we needed to change the seating arrangement again. The mailman had left us three bills and Jay’s copy of Sports Illustrated, with Andy Landis on the cover. It wasn’t an action shot or a picture from the Olympics, but a portrait, a tight shot of just his face, his expressive brown eyes and thick, dark brows, the full lips that I’d kissed a thousand times, his teeth just peeking out in a hint of a smile. He looked tentative and guarded and tender underneath, the way he’d look when we’d been talking in bed and he’d finally loosened up enough to use his hands or smile when he got to the funny parts. I wondered who’d taken the picture, and what the photographer had said to Andy to get him to look like that.
“Ma’am?” The fact-checker wanted to know how I spelled my middle name. “Sorry,” I said, and spelled out Nicole, and gave him Amy’s phone number so he could confirm her role in our how-we’d-met tale. I still needed to check in with the florist and ask if the caterer had vegan meals for my soon-to-be sister-in-law, Robin, and pick up my birth control pills from the pharmacy, but I decided that all of it could wait. I carried the magazine to the park at the end of our block, sat down on a bench in the sun, and started reading.