“And sometimes they aren’t.”
Charles went quiet, picking at a loose thread on the seat. Joanna breathed in. Her stomach jumped into her heart for just a moment before she spat it out. “Why don’t you tell me anything, Charles? Why don’t you share anything with me?”
“Huh?”
“Sometimes I feel like I don’t know a thing about you. Your friends know much more about you than I do. Your mother knows way more. Is it because I didn’t go to Swithin?”
“Joanna …” He blew out through his nose. “You’re being ridiculous.”
But now that she’d started she couldn’t stop. “Tonight, for example. With your friends. They didn’t ask me a thing about myself. They asked about you, they asked about your mom, but they didn’t ask about me. And you didn’t bring me into the conversation.”
“They asked about you!”
Pressure rose up in her chest, higher and higher. “They didn’t. And you ignored me around them. I got the impression that you would have preferred it if I hadn’t been there at all. It would have been easier that way. Just like old times.”
He squeezed the empty water bottle so hard that it crinkled. “If you didn’t want to have dinner with them, you should have said something.”
“And what, look like an asshole? How did you not realize I didn’t want to have dinner with them? It must have been written all over my face. I thought it was just going to be you and me! I was waiting for you to step in!”
He raised his palms in surrender. “How was I supposed to know that? I’m not a mind reader!” He rolled his neck around, cracking a joint. “So, what, you’re pissed off at me for not knowing what you wanted and you bring up the hazing thing in revenge?”
“Is that why you brought up Bronwyn?” she shot back. “Maybe the revenge goes both ways.”
He let air seep from his nose. The bottle slipped from between his hands to the floor of the car. “I was just curious if Nadine talked to her. I wasn’t trying to hurt you. Not like you deliberately tried to hurt me.”
“I did no such thing.”
He turned away from her, pressing his head against the window. “Sometimes I think you want to hurt me.”
She gaped at him. “How could you say that?”
But he didn’t retract it. She bit down on her lip. Was that what she was doing? But she couldn’t; that would mean she was a heartless, sinister person. A saboteur.
She faced front again, put on her turn signal, and got off at the rest stop. Her tires squealed as she pulled into the parking lot.
“What are you doing?” Charles asked.
She didn’t answer. The mini-mart attached to the gas station gleamed fluorescently; a clerk lingered behind the counter, surrounded by shelves of cigarettes. Joanna pulled into a space and shoved the gearshift into PARK.
“You do hurt me, Charles,” she said. “You leave me out of things. And it feels deliberate. And then you ask about Bronwyn in this voice, this completely wistful, longing voice, like she’s the one who’s important. Like it’s always been her. What am I supposed to do? How does that make me look, just sitting there?”
“I didn’t use a voice,” he said. “And Bronwyn …” He trailed off.
She stiffened, on alert. “Bronwyn … what?”
Charles shook his head. “Forget it.”
“What were you going to say?”
“Nothing.”
Joanna’s mouth trembled. It was clearly not nothing. She glared out at the green highway sign in the distance. A Honda drove into the parking lot. Another Honda was parked next to them. This whole place was full of Hondas, completely unoriginal. This conversation was unoriginal, too; it was probably a conversation every couple had at one point or another, probably even verbatim. A conversation not special in the least.
Joanna gazed at Charles imploringly. Charles winced. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“You …” He waved his hands in front of his face. “It’s like you’re so disappointed.”
“Disappointed in what?”
“How am I supposed to know? I never know what you want.”
There was a thin line of spittle between his top and bottom lips. The turn signal was still on, making an irksome, repetitive tick-tuh-tick-tuh-tick-tuh. She was disappointed. Of course she was. She’d felt it about their wedding in Roderick’s garden, which had been organized long before Joanna came into the picture. She felt it touring old, creaky, dusty Roderick, not nearly as grandiose as in her dreams. She felt it when Sylvie and Charles left Joanna out of family matters, when Charles’s Swithin friends ignored her, even when Charles didn’t cry at his father’s funeral, not one tear, and not even when they went back to their apartment in Philly, instead suggesting that they check out the Jennifer Convertibles store—they were having a sale on sectionals.