Roxanne smirks, and I blush at the half-hidden meanness. Bernardo doesn’t react, which I love.
Arizona stands up so that she’s face-to-face with Karissa. We’ve been in this situation dozens of times, with me and Arizona always surviving and the stepmoms always falling away.
Except.
Karissa is different.
I care that she’s hurting and drowning herself in white wine in my basement. I care that her dress is askew and her eyes are wild. I care that none of her wine-and-pickles friends were at the engagement. I care that the ring is too loose on her finger, like my father confused her ring size with someone else’s.
“I wish your dad could have met my family. He would have totally, like, gotten it. You know? Gotten me. He would have understood what kind of party to throw me.” Karissa takes some of the stolen shrimp. Dips it in brie. Making something strange out of something normal, as always.
“Dad only does this type of party for these things,” Arizona says. I think she’s getting meaner, or else it’s that I love Karissa more than I’m used to loving the stepmoms. That I’m not solidly enough on the side of anger and hate, even though part of me should be.
“Anyway, no one up there will notice I’m gone,” Karissa says. She’s not crying anymore, but she’s spacey. Almost like she’s already past drunk and into that hazy post-drunkenness that comes if you stay awake for too long after drinking. “Your dad will, obviously, but he likes my mysterious side, so he’ll think it’s charming that I disappeared.” Karissa barely breathes when she gets on a riff. She talks right through. “I left my own birthday party, right after we started dating. He tell you that? I wanted pizza and met a cool drunk chick from Australia when I was grabbing a slice. I took her to Queens. She wanted to see the seediest club in the city. Thought Manhattan was too cleaned up. She wanted some, like, eighties experience.” Karissa laughs along with her own story, but I’m still stuck on my father going to her twenty-third birthday party, surrounded by recent college grads and wannabe actresses. The same friends I hung out with a few weeks ago. What would he have worn? Did he buy jeans? Did they think he was her father at first? Did they see the similarities in our faces and demeanors when they met me? Did he play Never Have I Ever with them and drink wine and eat pickles and smoke outside in some weird parallel version of what I did?
She’s changed him, at least a little. I noticed upstairs there were bottles of beer, which I know he hates, and chips and onion dip. He hates onions. And dip. And the greasy reality of chips. Maybe he loves Karissa.
Nope. Too gross. Too impossible. Letting someone eat chips at their own engagement party isn’t the same as loving them.
“He didn’t mind that you ditched him?” Bernardo says.
That’s when I realize I’m still enthralled by her. I sit on my hands like a little kid while she speaks. I look at her eyes, which haven’t changed at all and are grass-green and rimmed in purple eyeliner.
Except: she is going to be my stepmother.
And I feel, with an ill kind of certainty, that I don’t want a stepmother who gets drunk on white wine and knows where the best strips clubs are. I don’t want a stepmother who plays dirty charades and can’t stop crying over her family.
That last part is true, even if it’s cruel.
“Mind? No. Opposite. He called me an inspiration. Said I understand something . . . what was it . . . vital about life. Told me he loved me the next day. Do the honors, Bernardo?” she says, handing him the next bottle of wine. He pours it out in our little plastic cups better suited for rinsing with mouthwash than partying.
I have a feeling the wine is expensive. It tastes expensive. Like grass and lemon and it’s light as air. I could drink bottles of it, I think, without stopping.
There’s laughter and clinking glasses and elevator music drifting in from upstairs. I get a text from my dad asking if I’ve seen Karissa, but I don’t respond. We can keep her with us. We can save her, maybe. If she’s down here drinking and telling too-long stories, she’s not lost yet.
They’re not married yet.
I’m pathetic for even thinking that. For having some hope for normalcy even in the face of all this. For wanting things to go back even when they’re so clearly moving forward.
“So. You’re happy, then?” Roxanne asks when she has finished off her wine. Karissa is staring at the ceiling, which is tin and awesome and totally old-school New York. I wonder if she’s picturing her new life in this pretty home with ancient details and old-fashioned moldings and sleek silver kitchen appliances and picture windows that look out at other brick buildings.
“Blissful,” she says. I believe that she believes it, at least. “Like Montana. We’re just two girls in love, you know?”