In other words, just a fight, but I think it’s their first one and Ava is distraught.
“Could you get a curling iron that turns off automatically after thirty minutes?” I ask.
“Probably,” Ava says.
“It sounds as if you both might be feeling under-appreciated and taken for granted right now,” Lainey says. “I think that’s not uncommon with recently married couples.”
Okay, she’s way better at this than me.
Ava’s nodding.
“And, I don’t know,” she says, looking down at the beer. “It also feels like we just got married and we’re already in this routine? And spaghetti night is part of that routine? And sometimes I don’t want that, I want him to be exciting and sexy again and surprise me —"
Her face goes bright red, and she glances at Wyatt. He pretends he heard nothing.
“Have you told Thad that?” I ask.
“No,” she admits. “I don’t want him to think… I don’t know. That I’m needy?”
“Sweetheart, you’re allowed to have emotional needs and express them,” Lainey says.
“Just tell him,” I say. “You’re married. He knows he has to take your feelings into account, but you have to tell him your feelings. And if you do that and he doesn’t, divorce his ass.”
Ava stares into the fire. She drinks her beer. She drinks some more beer, still staring.
“Is that what happened to you and Nolan?” she finally asks.
“Sort of,” I admit. “I mean, not really. It was…”
I drink the last of my beer.
“I fucked up,” I tell her. “Promise me you won’t tell your sisters or your mom.”
Ava leans forward, wide-eyed.
“I shouldn’t have gotten married,” I start. “I should have spent a year backpacking the world and finding myself or something, but instead I married someone eight years older than me because I wanted to be someone else and I thought I could force myself into some other mold.”
Wyatt’s also leaning forward, frowning. He doesn’t know this story, either. Lainey’s one of the few people who do.
“Anyway, he had this life plan all laid out, and part of the plan was that six months after we got married we started trying for a baby. And I agreed to this, for the record. I was not at all sure that I wanted to have a baby that soon with him, but instead of saying that out loud, I just went along with this plan.”
I grab another beer, pull one foot onto my chair, and point at Ava.
“Definitely don’t do that,” I tell her. “After the first month, when my period showed up, I was so relieved I cried. Then I felt so guilty for being relieved that I cried about that, and then I think I just cried for the hell of it, but I wanted so badly to be the right kind of person that I didn’t say anything and we kept trying.”
I pause, drink some more beer. Even though this story is years old and water long under the bridge, it still sparks deep guilt and the creeping, unsteady feeling that I’m not a good or brave person.
“Then next month, my period was a week late,” I go on. “I’ve had two panic attacks in my entire life, and they were both during that week. I didn’t tell Nolan.”
I take another drink.
“But I did go to my gynecologist and get an IUD,” I say. “Which I didn’t tell Nolan about until we’d been ‘trying’ for another four months and he was starting to think we had fertility issues.”
Ava is agog. She’s full-on staring at me, wide-eyed, open-mouthed. Wyatt’s giving the fire a dude, did you hear that? look.
In some fairness to me, we were a bad match and shouldn’t have gotten married. It wasn’t until a few years later that I finally recognized some of his manipulative, controlling tendencies, and I think he sometimes saw me as more of a prop than a person, but I was definitely still an asshole.
“And then, we got divorced, and then I ran off and fucked Seth in a hotel in Harrisonburg and we’ve been stuck in this stupid fuck-and-fight cycle ever since,” I say quickly.
I think Ava’s eyes might fall out of her head.
“I thought you hadn’t seen him since you broke up?” she gasps.
I grimace.
“You guys have been together this whole time?”
“Not together,” I say. “Extremely not together.”
We drink the rest of the beer while I slowly and excruciatingly tell Ava and Wyatt everything. I’m not sure I like it, and it’s sure not how I thought today would go when I woke up this morning, but they’re both cooler about it than I expected.
“Oh, yeah,” Ava scoffs when I get to the very end. More drinks have appeared, and she’s now had three. “We knew there wasn’t a brewery emergency. We’re not total idiots, we could hear you two screaming at each other like you’d found him in bed with a farmyard animal.”
“Damn, Ava,” says Wyatt.
“Sorry,” she says, but she’s grinning.
“Do you at least feel better about Thad?” I ask.
She sighs.
“Yes,” she says. “It’s just so hard! Why can’t things just always be great? I don’t want to have to ask him to appreciate that I always buy the pasta, you know? Can’t he just do that?”
“Ava,” I say. “My sweet baby angel. Listen. You like Thad more than you like being angry at him about spaghetti, right?”
Her face scrunches.
“Being angry is fun,” she says. “But, I guess.”
“Then talk it out and let it go,” I tell her. “It’s not rocket science.”
In my peripheral vision, I can see Lainey turn her head and give me a look. I ignore it.
“All right,” Ava says, standing. “I’m gonna — oh noo.”
She wobbles on her feet, arms out for balance.
“You’re more than welcome to stay in my guest bedroom,” Lainey says, then looks at me. “You too.”
“Thanks,” I say. I’ve only had two beers, but Lainey’s house is nice and warm and cozy and comfy, and mine is far away and feels like all the times Seth’s been in it.
“I should call him, though,” Ava says. “Do you think he’s worried? I hope he’s worried.”
“He’s worried,” I confirm.
Wyatt walks over to me and offers his hand, pulls me out of my chair.
“Do you need a place to crash?” Lainey asks him as Ava wanders away, on the phone.
Wyatt looks down at her, and I swear he almost says yes.
“Nah, I only had one,” he says, holding up the beer bottle. “But thanks for the offer.”
Lainey’s guest room has a bed and a couch. Ava insists that I take the bed, and she also insists that it’s not because I’m old and decrepit.
Even so, I have a hard time falling asleep. The new tattoo on my wrist itches under the bandages. I can’t believe I actually told my sweet baby sister — who, at twenty-two, is not all that sweet, nor all that baby — the whole sordid truth of my relationship with Seth, and I also kind of can’t believe she wasn’t fully scandalized.
And worst of all, I can’t stop thinking about the very good advice that I heard coming out of my mouth: do you like him more, or do you like being angry more?