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• Chapter 12 •
A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.
— Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), German poet
Luke stares at me. “You think we need to what?” he says, his grip on my shoulders loosening.
“Oh!”
I let out the sound in a whoosh. At least I think it was me. I realize I can’t even be sure what sounds are coming out of my mouth anymore. That’s how little control I have.
I sink down onto the top step of the stoop and hug my knees to my chest. The man with the dog, I notice, has hurried away. Apparently, he is no longer enjoying the show—the show of a girl in vintage Shaheen going crazy right in front of him.
“Lizzie.” Luke sits down on the step beside me. “What do you mean, you think we need to take a break?”
“I don’t know,” I groan into my knees. God, what is happening to me? “I just… I mean, you’re going to France for three months anyway… so we’re kind of taking a break, whether we want one or not.”
What am I saying? What is coming out of my mouth? I do not want a break from Luke. I do not. I love Luke.
Don’t I?
“It’s just,” I hear myself saying, though at no point did I formulate the words in my head beforehand, “I know that you love me, Luke. But I don’t always feel like you respect me. Or at least… not my job. It’s like you think it’s just this hobby I have that I’m doing for fun until something more serious comes along. But that’s not what it is. This is really what I do. What I want to do for the rest of my life.”
Luke blinks down at me with his gorgeous, sleepy eyes. “Lizzie, I know that. And of course I respect what you do. I don’t know what would ever have given you the impression that I don’t. All I meant, when I said that about Ava, was that I’ve worked in the business world for a lot of years, and we just never let our clients take advantage of us the way I think you sometimes do.”
“It’s not what you said about Ava,” I explain. “It’s the way you just thought I could leave with you to go to Paris for the summer. You know. When you brought it up.”
Luke stares at me. “Last January? You’re bringing up something I said in January? Now?”
I nod. “And maybe I do business a different way than you do,” I point out. “But I’m not you. Different doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
“Point taken,” Luke says. “Listen, Lizzie—”
“And,” my mouth goes on. Why, oh, why, won’t it just shut up? “I don’t think you respect my family very much, either. I know they aren’t as sophisticated as your family is. But you’ve never even met them. So how do you even know? And that’s another thing. You’ve been going out with me for a year. For six months of that year we’ve been engaged. And you’ve never met anyone in my family. And yet you make remarks like the one you did tonight—”
“I apologized for that already,” Luke says, moving to put his arm around me. “I know what your grandmother means to you. And if I hadn’t—well, let me tell you, Chaz really let me know, back at the restaurant. But, Lizzie, you have to admit, you complain about your sisters a lot. And your grandmother… well, everyone talks about her drinking problem. And you know the only reason I haven’t met your family is because I’ve been busy with school—”
“You could have come home with me at Christmas,” I interrupt, “instead of going to France with your family. Or at spring break. But instead, you went to Houston to see your mother. And my family isn’t rich like yours. It’s not like they can go jetting off to New York to meet you like yours can.”
I glance at him to see how he reacts to this. He isn’t looking at me, however. He’s looking at the Honda Accord parked across the sidewalk in front of us.
“Yes,” he says in a quiet voice. “You’re right. I probably should have.”
“Because meeting my family isn’t important to you,” I say. I don’t want to say it. It’s like the words are being wrenched out of me. Like Gran, that time she got completely wasted on cooking sherry and decided to finally go after that balky kitchen pipe with Dad’s giant wrench. The sherry had given her superhuman strength, and she’d managed to loosen the joint and remove all this gunk that had been trapped inside for six months. It just started spilling out.
Just like all this gunk is pouring out of me. Gunk that probably should have come out of me last January. It’s all spilling out now. Even though I don’t want it to. I really don’t. Not on my nice clean relationship.
But I guess that’s what gunk is. Stuff that sort of has to come out eventually.
“That’s not true,” Luke begins to protest, but I cut him off.
“Don’t say you didn’t have time,” I say. “If it had been important to you, you could have made the time. It was important to me,” I go on. “And it’s important to them. They keep asking me when they’re going to meet you. It would be nice if they could meet you before the wedding.”
Luke opens his mouth to say something, but I barrel on.
“But it’s too late now. Because you’re leaving for France the day after tomorrow. And so,” my voice adds ruthlessly, without my consent, “whether you want to call it that or not, we’re taking a break. Because I need to think, Luke. I need to think about what’s going on here. What we’re doing. What I’m doing.”
“Right,” he says.
And he removes his arm from around my shoulders.
We sit for a moment in silence. But the city isn’t silent, of course. Taxis rumble by, and a siren sounds over on Third Avenue. I’m not sure, but I think I hear a window open above our heads. Ava is eavesdropping.
That’s all I hope she’s dropping, anyway.
There’s another thing I think I hear in the silence that’s fallen between us as well: the sound of my heart breaking.
When I get back upstairs to the apartment, Ava is on the couch again, i
“So?” she asks. “How’d it go?”
“Like you weren’t listening,” I say, dropping my keys in the fruit bowl I keep for this purpose on the bookshelf by the door.
“I was not,” Ava says with a sniff. Then, seeing my expression, she says, “Well, okay, I totally was. But I couldn’t hear. I was all ready to pour orange juice on his head if you started crying, though. Did you? I didn’t think you did.”
“I didn’t,” I say, and flop down onto the couch beside her. Snow White leaps up onto my lap, and I pat her distractedly. “We’re taking a break.”
“Really?” Ava stares at me, bug-eyed. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “I just heard the words coming out of my mouth, and I went with them. That happens to me sometimes.” Try all the time.
It hadn’t made any sense, either. I mean, that I had said what I had to Luke. What had I been thinking, asking for a break? I love Luke. At least… I’m pretty sure I love Luke. I know I love waking up in the morning before he has and just staring at him and his incredible eyelashes, resting so dark and sooty against his cheekbones. I love how, when he’s awake, those dark eyes still look so sleepy, like they hold the promise of a thousand secret dreams.
Most of all, I love that I’m one of those dreams, me, Lizzie Nichols, who no boy in my high school ever even asked out, because I just wasn’t the kind of girl you asked out in high school… unless you were a gay boy and you didn’t want anyone to know that, of course.
Oh yeah. I forgot. Gay boys asked me out. A lot. I was always the fat girl gay boys asked out to make their mothers happy.
So what was I doing? What was I doing telling this guy—this guy that I love so much, and who, more important, loves me back—that I wanted to take a break? Am I crazy?
Why couldn’t I, for once in my life, have kept my mouth shut?