And his mother. I can’t bring myself to tell her the truth. Even though she’s never liked me much—she made that clear years ago—she does not deserve to think about her son that way. To realize you can love a person and not know them at all. To start to question everyone and everything in your life. What else do you not know? Who else is keeping things from you?
Beth, for one. Turns out, she had an admission of her own. After she’d told me not to go to Maui with Nick, her left eye started twitching—the way it has since we were kids. It was her tell—that she’d done something I wasn’t going to like. The first time I noticed it, I was seven or eight. I couldn’t find my Malibu Barbie convertible. The twitching eye led me to her closet, where I not only located the bubblegum-pink plastic car, but Barbie and Ken in a compromising position in the backseat. So when her left eyelid started blinking uncontrollably in her living room yesterday, I pressed her for what she wasn’t saying. At first she denied there was anything. But I wouldn’t give up. You see, once you find out there are so many lies sitting right below the surface of your relationships, you want to know them all. Every single one. I used to think that some things were better left unsaid, like when my mom asked me if she was too old to wear that fedora at the pool a few months back. She was. But I told her she worked it because I knew she wanted to wear it. I had reasoned I was helping her feel confident. But now I realize that lies, even small, well-meaning ones, just pile up until they eventually topple over.
Beth finally admitted there was something but that my knowing wouldn’t change anything. But I was sure whatever had her eyelid in spasms was important. So I kept at it until she told me.
Apparently she’d once seen James and Dylan together.
It was about a month before they’d died. She’d spotted them having lunch at a little sushi place not far from where we lived. Beth had seen them through the window as she’d been getting into her minivan after leaving the boutique next door. She hadn’t told me because she figured it was a business lunch.
“Wouldn’t that be all the more reason to mention it? Like, ‘Hey, I saw James today at Sushi Time’?” I demanded, standing up and looking down at her, my hands pressed into my hips.
“I figured he’d tell you.” Her eyelid was going full throttle as she said it.
“What does that mean?”
“He saw me see him and nodded his head, then turned back to her. He didn’t even raise an eyebrow! And I’d just had dinner with you guys the night before; it’s not like I felt compelled to run in there and say hi.”
“Did she see you?”
“No, at least I don’t think so.”
“And you really didn’t think anything of it? You, who breaks into your husband’s email and texts every Sunday morning while he sleeps in?”
She shook her head but wouldn’t look at me.
“Bullshit, Beth. I know you. At this point, the salt is already in the wound, okay?”
“Fine. I thought something. But it wasn’t enough of a something to tell you about it. Because what if I was wrong?”
“Well you weren’t, now, were you?”
I’m not proud of what I did next. I lost it. I might have even accused her of indirectly causing his death. Because maybe if she’d mentioned his little luncheon liaison, I would’ve confronted him and he would’ve come clean and broken it off with her and never would have gone to Maui. Right?
It was twenty-four hours ago that I stormed out, and we haven’t spoken since. It’s the longest I can remember not talking to her, someone I usually call or see three or four times a day. Someone I’ve been accused of having a codependent relationship with by more than one boyfriend or friend.
So obviously I need answers now more than ever. I need every scrap of information, whether it will hurt me or not. I feel like an alcoholic who knows she will feel like hell the next morning but pours herself another drink anyway. Because she can’t not pour it.
I know now that I have to go find Nick. And then we have to go to Maui.
CHAPTER NINE
JACKS—BEFORE
“I like this one, don’t you?” James’s mother, Isabella, held up a brick-red tablecloth covered in metallic gold leaves, the tasseled corners dangling precariously close to the polished linoleum floor of Crate and Barrel.
The truth was, I hated it. If it were the last tablecloth on the planet, I wouldn’t buy it.
But I kept a smile plastered across my face and tried to imagine the gaudy fabric in my mother-in-law’s thin hands covering the nicked-up country table I loved so much. It might have seemed odd, but it was always the imperfections that made me like that table more—the gouge in the side of the leg where James had banged it against the doorframe when he’d moved it in; the paint I’d splattered on it when I was changing the wall color in the kitchen from ivory to taupe; and the deep and long scratches—from God only knows what—that covered it. Its wood had always been sensitive; even sliding a plate across the soft pine would make a mark. I worried I’d be betraying my table by covering its blemishes. Like I was agreeing with Isabella that they needed to be hidden. I often wondered if she was somehow trying to cover up my flaws as well.
As she waited for me to sign off, her piercing green eyes identical to James’s, I fantasized saying to her, The table and I are flawed, and that’s okay! But of course, I didn’t. Some things are just better left alone.
It was December. Two and a half years before James and his secret girlfriend would careen off a cliff together. We were planning to host James’s family for Christmas brunch for the first time, and Isabella was helping me prepare. Step one, she’d said, was sprucing up my unsophisticated dining room table. But in true Isabella style, which gave a whole new meaning to the term passive-aggressive, she hadn’t used the word unsophisticated. She’d said rustic. But I knew what she meant.
It was a miracle I’d finally been awarded this brunch, a ritual in the Morales family. Isabella usually hosted everyone in the sprawling home she owned with James’s father, Carlos, on the coveted Balboa Peninsula. Carlos was the salt-and-pepper version of his son, and could be just as smooth. But for as sweet and accommodating as he always seemed, I’d always felt like he was hard to know. Like there was an invisible barrier between the words he spoke aloud and the ones that danced inside his head.
But I’d seen others given the opportunity to host. Her sister once. James’s cousin another time. I’d been asking for my turn to play hostess for several years, wanting to prove that I could fit into their tight Costa Rican clan, and my mother-in-law had finally acquiesced. I’d received an email from her informing me it was finally my turn, but quickly clarifying that she wanted to stay involved. I asked James if he had been the one responsible for her decision, and he’d denied it. But there was something in the way his lip curved a little bit higher on the right as he’d said he didn’t know anything about it that had made me wonder if he was lying. I’d seen that look before, and would again. I ignored it, as I always did.
James’s parents, plus a few of his aunts, uncles, and cousins and their children, were all set to attend with their large broods and had graciously agreed to sit at my unacceptable kitchen table while I attempted to make gallo pinto, a traditional Costa Rican breakfast.