Cleo inhaled, exhaled, looked to Gaby, who was all business with her camera phone. She wanted to get this over with now, rip off the Band-Aid and be done with it. Convince Gaby that filming four more of her regrets would only end in disaster.
“Well, I flew all the way here today to apologize.” She said it stiffly, not like something emotive she’d rehearsed to argue on the Senate floor. She knew she could do better. She inhaled again, tried to soften. “Teenage girls can be pretty tough, MaryAnne, and I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
MaryAnne’s face pinched for just a moment, and Cleo, aware of her old friend’s mannerisms, was sure that this could all be over. That she’d be forgiven, and they could pour themselves a glass of . . . she didn’t know what they were drinking but something fancy . . . and move on. Cleo didn’t really want to befriend MaryAnne again—she was firmly not into looking backward—but a shared drink felt like a peace offering that would be a nice gesture, a neat bow tied around this now-closed chapter.
Instead, MaryAnne composed herself, rose to stand, and said simply, “No.”
Maureen and Susan, in the back, gasped and looked a little delighted. Like a real live fight was going to break out right there at the Seattle Country Club among the blue bloods. Well, one blue blood and one just regular blood. (But senatorial blood!) Cleo did think that she could take her, thanks to her early-morning boxing classes, and God knows that with her marathon training, Gaby could deliver one cold knockout punch, but she also knew that physical violence on camera (because Gaby would surely keep filming while punching) would not be the ticket to her reputational rehabilitation.
MaryAnne herself, in her sleeveless pink and green floral dress that highlighted her arms, was looking significantly fitter than in high school, even with her stellar track times. Probably spin classes, Cleo supposed. Maybe a personal trainer.
“Mom,” Esme interjected. “Please sit down. This is ridiculous. She apologized.”
MaryAnne raised her chin an inch, refusing.
“Do you know what you did to my entire life?” she said.
Cleo shook her head. “Your entire life? No.”
“When you sabotaged that internship at the mayor’s office, you changed everything for me.”
“Mom,” Esme groaned. “Please. Stop.” Then, to Cleo (and probably Lucas): “She and my dad separated recently. He became a cliché and literally ran off with a coworker.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, MaryAnne,” Cleo said, as if she bore responsibility. She did feel sorry for her, and God knew she understood the sting of being disposable.
“And she’s spent a lot of time reading blogs about reclaiming her personal power,” Esme continued. “Righting what went wrong.” She rolled her eyes and looked so very much like Lucas when he did the same, as if a plague infected teenagers with a universal disdain. “And I keep telling her—move forward, but she keeps looking back.”
“‘Only Forward’ would actually be my campaign slogan!” Cleo said, which, she immediately realized, was a stupid thing to say. “I mean, well, when I run for . . .” She flopped her own hand. “Never mind.”
“Ugh,” MaryAnne replied. “Me, me, me, me, me, me, me.” She reached for her (fancy) drink and swallowed the rest of it until the ice rattled in the highball.
“I shouldn’t have told you that writing about your dead dog was a great essay topic,” Cleo said. “OK? I shouldn’t have.” She quieted for a moment. “Really, MaryAnne, that was childish.”
“But she should have known that too!” Esme said. “Don’t apologize for her stupid choice.”
“I like you.” Cleo looked at Esme. “I like you very much.”
Esme grinned, opening up her face into something wide and beautiful, and then Lucas grinned, opening up his face into something Cleo hadn’t seen in a while at home, even on the soccer field: joy. For a flicker, Cleo saw a different life, one where she and MaryAnne hadn’t detonated their friendship, and their children grew up together side by side, barefoot in their backyards, biking to the 7-Eleven for Cokes, best friends just like their mothers had once been.
“I think you owe me a public apology, and not just for that,” MaryAnne said.
From behind her, Oliver interjected: “MaryAnne, at what point do you just let twenty years go?”
“Not at this point,” she snapped. “I could have been a senator; I could have done something with myself! That internship started something for Cleo, and the same thing could have happened for me.”
“Like I was saying.” Esme sighed.
“MaryAnne, you’re only thirty-seven,” Cleo started.
“Thirty-eight,” Esme corrected. “Last week.”
“MaryAnne, you’re only thirty-eight, and so many women reinvent themselves these days—”
“No.” She cut Cleo off. “I’m not interested in you showing up here and being my therapist or patronizing me. You were my best friend, and you took something from me, and I’m sorry that your parents died and all of that.” She paused. “I am. But I don’t believe that people change, and you showed me your true colors, and I’m not going to absolve you of that.”
That sliver of lament that Cleo had sewn up reopened. Barely, just detectable—not enough for Cleo to really try again with MaryAnne with a renewed openhearted apology—but there all the same. That on a few occasions, she had been small and petty and shitty to MaryAnne, who had sometimes been small and petty and shitty back, but not with the ferocity that Cleo had. Cleo wouldn’t really change anything—she loved her life, was proud of her life, and her straight line from Congress at twenty-five to a presidential run at thirty-seven required this linear thinking. But still. In this quiet moment, with her eyes locked with her old best friend, she could allow for the fact that things could have been done differently.
Behind MaryAnne, Maureen and Susan and Beth had gone statue still, and Oliver was shaking his head, like he couldn’t believe that he was part of this high school drama. But Cleo still knew MaryAnne well enough to know that she wasn’t going to relent.
“OK,” she said. “Fine. You can’t say I didn’t try.”
“But you didn’t really,” MaryAnne snapped. “And I can say whatever I damn want.”
So Cleo bounced her shoulders and looked to Gaby, who finally dropped her phone and stopped recording. And then, perhaps for the first time in her life, Cleo McDougal acknowledged her loss and retreated.
At the hotel, Gaby and Cleo lounged on the king mattress in Gaby’s room. Well, Gaby lounged, leaning up against the headboard, and Cleo got up and paced. They’d given Lucas his space; he was already half-mortified that he had to share a room with his mother, so Cleo suggested he treat himself to room service, and she’d be back in a bit. She didn’t know what he expected—they’d always been a unit, just the two of them, and simply because puberty held him in its grasp didn’t mean that she was booking him a separate hotel room. She’d avert her eyes; she’d never enter the bathroom while he was in there. She was doing her very best.
Gaby had ordered two burgers and two fries for them respectively, but Cleo didn’t have much of an appetite. She nibbled on a disproportionately long fry (she’d always been drawn to outliers) and considered what came next. She didn’t think that MaryAnne was going to stop, and in fact, Cleo was scared to check her Facebook page now. Surely her ex–best friend had teed off about their evening, saying God knows what to God knows who. Gaby stared at her phone while it buzzed and buzzed and buzzed, biting her burger thoughtfully, as if it held the key to their mess.