CHAPTER TWENTY
WHEN SASHA RETURNED HOME after her haircut/boozy brunch with Hannah and Bridget, her sister’s belongings were strewn all over the living room and several suitcases were precariously perched on pieces of furniture. She hoped this meant that her sister was either going back East or moving into her own place.
Although she’d appreciated her help with work in the past few weeks, it wasn’t an ideal situation to teach her sister how to be an adult and have a real job. And now that Hannah was back in fighting form, they didn’t really need help anymore.
Before Sasha could ask her myriad questions, Madison had her own. “What happened to your hair?” Madison asked as soon as Sasha walked through the door.
“I cut it.” The night before, she’d hidden the chunk of hair that she’d cut off with a ponytail. Although she and her sister had grown closer over the past few weeks, Sasha wasn’t ready to spill the beans on the fact that she’d been hooking up—in a manner—with a frocked priest. “Going somewhere?”
Madison’s wide smile in response was alarming. For that matter, the way she was dressed, not in sweatpants but her former housewife uniform of jeans and high boots and a cashmere sweater, set off alarms as well. “I’m getting my own place.”
“So, you’re really going to leave Tucker?”
Madison nodded, and her grin got wider.
“And you feel good about that?”
Her sister just shrugged and kept folding clothes. “He called me last night and we had a long talk. It turns out that he was so bored with me that he could have died, too.”
“Have you told Mom and Dad?” She wouldn’t put it past her parents to threaten, cajole, or bribe any one of them into falling in line. Sasha just happened to have turned that around on them enough that they didn’t bother to try very hard with her anymore.
“Not yet.” Madison stopped folding and sat down. “Seeing Mother completely lose her shit made me scared of her. I feel like I understand you a lot better now.”
“I think the point is that you understand yourself a lot better now,” Sasha said. They’d made so much progress, and Sasha was filled with hope that her sister was actually turning a corner and about to make her life into what she wanted. Sasha thought Madison might stop caring about what other people thought a little bit more.
“I’m afraid. I just don’t want to end up with nothing.” Madison motioned around the room.
Then Sasha got angry. Her sister really thought she had nothing because she hadn’t followed their mother’s very precise playbook for success? Her sister didn’t have any room to talk. “You think I have nothing?”
“Well—”
Sasha had her own business and was on her way to buying her home from their parents. She would never deny that she’d been given a leg up in many ways by not having student loans to pay back and not having to worry about rent the first few years out of college, but her life was not frivolous, even though she planned parties.
She had friends who were more like family than her own family and a full life. Sasha didn’t feel the need to run away because she felt empty—like Madison had. “The only thing I don’t have that you do is a high-fiving, pleated-pant-wearing, soon-to-be-ex-husband who is only truly happy when he’s playing golf with his boys.”
“Tucker is not that bad. At least he wasn’t. And I will definitely get married again.” Madison crossed her arms. “You won’t give anyone a chance. You have no one to come home to. You are truly alone.”
Sasha only felt alone when she was with her family of origin. Hearing her sister denigrate the life she’d made on her own flipped a switch in her. She’d always thought she’d been bad or wrong because she didn’t fit her family’s mold. All of the tiny mental rebellions she’d tallied like a burn book against herself and castigated herself for—from her fantasies about Professor McDermott to her very real transgressions with Father Patrick—were just evidence that she’d never come up to snuff.
But maybe the fact that she could never quite fit the mold didn’t mean that she was bad or wrong. Maybe it meant that the mold was wrong.
“I don’t understand why you’re so upset.” Of course empathy would escape her sister. “I’m just telling you the truth.”
Maybe it was the truth as Madison saw it. And perhaps they might have reached the limit of their common ground.
“I just want to see you happy,” Madison said. Instead of telling her sister off, Sasha picked up one of Madison’s blouses and started to help fold. She realized then that she was never going to see the world in the same way her sister did. And she might not see the world in the same way as Bridget or Hannah, but at least they saw her. Her family only cared about the version of her that fit with how they saw the world.
“I’m happy,” Madison continued. And then she bit her bottom lip as though she was thinking about the next thing she was going to say. She hadn’t done that before, so this must be a doozy. “It just took me seeing how miserable you are to realize it.”
Miserable? Sasha knew she’d been mildly dissatisfied with life before, but she didn’t think she was miserable. “I’m not miserable.”
“You never seem satisfied with anything that you have.”
Madison had a point there. She had started therapy for a reason. She’d been missing something that she couldn’t pinpoint.
“So, me not being satisfied made you decide to be satisfied?”
“I guess.”
She couldn’t fault Madison for that. But she was going to have a lot to discuss with Pam next session.
* * *
—
PATRICK WAS NERVOUS ABOUT seeing Sasha again, but still he was disappointed when Hannah came into his office for a final meeting about the carnival.
It must have shown because Hannah smirked at him. “You were expecting to see someone else?”
He wondered what Sasha had told her best friend. He knew they were very close, but he’d also learned that Sasha was a bit of a vault even when it came to her friends. They were alike that way, smoothly gliding on the surface and not letting their friends in on how hard their feet were churning underneath the placid water. They were birds of a feather and kindred spirits.
Instead of probing deeper, he decided to take in the message sent by cutting off a strand of her hair—which Patrick wouldn’t think about, even though it was still in his desk drawer—and sending her business partner in her stead.
“You’re feeling better?”
Hannah certainly looked hale. “Yes. I’m very lucky that the bad morning sickness only lasted for the first trimester. It was like the fetus stopped trying to make me feel like shit once it knew we were in it for the long haul.”