So that was what I smelled. Crawford, wicked smart and socially awkward, was always a step ahead of the rest of us. Without comment, Jilly took Bean from me, plopped her on the floor, handed her one of her bracelets to gum on, and continued.
“Enough with the excuses, okay?” she said to me. “It’s been almost a year. Time to get back out there. You can’t hide behind work forever.”
“And ‘out there’ is a dirty, sticky club?”
“In this particular case, yes.”
“Germs cause viruses,” Crawford opined. “And viruses make you sick.”
“Just come, listen to some music, we’ll hit a party or two,” Jilly said to me, as Bean began crawling under my bed. “It’ll be fun. I promise.”
“Wait a second. You didn’t say anything about a party. Or parties, plural.”
She exhaled loudly, this time without the benefit of a breath beforehand. “Louna,” she said, reaching out and taking me by my arms, “I’m your best friend. I know what you’ve been through, and I know you’re scared. But we are still young. Life is ahead of us. What a privilege, right? Don’t squander it.”
This was the thing about Jilly. In so many ways, she was over the top, a big, loud, spirited girl who cared not one bit what anyone thought about her. She always had at least two of her siblings in tow, co-opted my clothes, and was hell-bent on finding me another boyfriend, even if—and especially when—I didn’t want one. And yet for all these frustrations, and our absolute polar opposite personalities, every once in a while she could say something like this, heartfelt and direct and, damn it, true. Her heart, as misguided as it could be on other levels, always managed to zero out everything else. What a privilege, indeed.
“I’ll try to get there,” I told her.
“That’s all I ask.” She leaned forward, giving me a sloppy kiss on my cheek just as her phone beeped. Pulling it from her bodice—her preferred storage space—she glanced at the screen. “Twinnies need to go to gymnastics. I totally forgot.”
“I hate gymnastics,” Crawford said. “The whole place smells like mats and feet.”
“He’s not wrong,” Jilly told me, checking herself in the mirror again. Then she looked into my closet, raising her eyebrows. “Wait, are those new sandals I see back there? Hold the phone! I just got a pedicure.”
With this, she ducked around me, past the rows of my everyday shoes and into a back corner of the closet, reaching out to grab a pair of thin black sandals with a gold ring closure I’d worn only once. Just seeing them dangling from her hand, straps hooked over her thumb, made my heart sink. “No,” I said, my voice sounding harsher, more abrupt than I meant. “Not those.”
She looked down at them, then at the place they’d been, away from the others. A beat, and she got it. Quietly, she set them back down on the floor. “Oh, right,” she said. “Sorry.”
I didn’t say anything, just tried to collect myself—why was this still so hard?—as she bent down to retrieve Bean. When she lifted her up, I felt Crawford watching me, his face somber as usual, and even though I knew he was just a kid and knew nothing, I had to turn away.
They left a few minutes later with the usual noise involved in any scene change, Bean shrieking while Jilly and Crawford bickered down the stairs. Once out in the backyard, she looked up at my window, waggling her fingers, and I waved back, then watched as they made their way across the grass. Jilly jumped the creek, light on her feet even with the baby in tow, but Crawford stopped, bending down to closely examine something by the water’s edge. A moment later, she yelled at him to hurry up, and he moved on.
In my room, things were quiet in that special way they only were when the Bakers left the building. As a family they were a lot to handle, for sure, but I couldn’t imagine what my life would have been like had they never moved in. My own house was so clean and still, just my mom and me, everything in order. Knowing their brand of dependable chaos was always nearby was a comfort from day one. We all need to lose ourselves in a crowd once in a while.
But I was alone now as I went back into the closet. There in that small, dark space, I picked up one black sandal, then another, and placed them back where they’d been, in the corner under a black dress, also worn only one time. They no longer felt like mine, as much as another girl’s from another time. And yet, I still couldn’t get rid of them. Not yet.
“I love a third wedding,” William said happily, as we stood by the country club pool, watching guests take their seats. “Everyone is so relaxed. I feel like we should just specialize in them, corner that niche market.”
“Not enough business in it,” my mother, always the realist, told him. “Plus you’d miss the neuroses of young brides. It would be a waste of your gift.”
“True,” he agreed, as his eyes followed an older man in a tight-fitting suit who was about to sit in one of the front rows of chairs reserved for family. William was the most hyper-aware person I knew, like a cat always ready to pounce. I realized I was holding my own breath until the man’s wife took his elbow, pulling him back to a farther row. “Speaking of young brides, I spoke to Bee and she’s confirmed for first thing Monday morning for her preliminary.”
My mother sighed. “You know I hate a rush job, William.”
“The wedding is in August. It’s April.”
“Late April,” my mother countered. “Which would be fine, if it was a third wedding. But it’s not. It’s high society, and high maintenance, which means we should have started planning a year ago.”
“You’re leaving out high budget,” William pointed out.
“Money isn’t everything.” I waited a beat for what I knew was coming next. Sure enough: “You can’t put on a price on your sanity.”
“But if you could, they’d pay it.”
They both fell silent as another guest started for the front row. It would be only a matter of minutes before William pulled out the pre-printed RESERVED cards (in his almost calligraphy-like handwriting, aka the official font of a Natalie Barrett Wedding) and put them on the seats. He usually tried to resist, eschewing any extra clutter in a venue, even nicely printed cards. But you could never underestimate the Moron Factor. That was another one of my mother’s mantras.
“Twenty minutes,” she said now, flicking her wrist to check her watch. “Put down a few cards, just so we don’t have to police. Louna, can you take BRR?”