“Okay, Mamá? I just went through a horrible divorce and we’ve only been dating for five seconds.”
“And he’s already giving your brother an organ. Dios mío, what more do you want? I like him. Good job, good-looking. He’s very polite.”
“He is polite.” And generous, and kind. “But just so you know, I probably won’t ever remarry.”
She pivoted to look at me like I was speaking in tongues. “Why?”
“Because it didn’t end well for me?”
She waved me off again. “You just be smart about it. You make him give you an expensive ring. You put your name on everything, all his property. Then if he leaves you, you take his house.”
“Mamá!”
“What? That’s what I did with Gil. It’s how I know he’s not going to leave me. He can’t afford it.”
“Gil is obsessed with you and couldn’t live without you,” I said.
“And if he did, he’d do it without his house.” She shrugged.
I laughed. Then I looked in the rearview. “So what’d you think of Jacob’s family?” I gave my brother a twisted-lip smile. “BEN.”
“Shut up,” he muttered.
“Jane’s pretty, huh?” I said, looking back at the road. “She’s single,” I sang.
“I know. She told me.”
I gasped. “You asked her?”
“No. She asked me. And then she said, ‘Me too.’”
“So? What are you gonna do about it?” I asked, looking at him through the mirror.
“Nothing. Not like this,” he mumbled, gesturing to the catheter under his shirt.
My face went soft. “One more month, Benny.”
“I liked his family,” Mom said. “Good people.”
“Speaking of good families,” I said. “Levi Olsen came in today.”
“Levi? Little Levi?”
“Yeah, he moved back. He wants to have drinks.”
Mom eyed me. “Jacob’s letting you go?”
“Okay, first of all, no man tells me what I am allowed to do.”
She crossed her arms. “Why not? You don’t tell him what to do?”
“Uh, no. I don’t.”
“You should not be going there when you have a boyfriend,” she said.
“Levi is not trying to make a move on me. He’s dating Cindy Baker. She will be there.”
“Take Jacob with you,” Mom said.
“Why?”
“So he won’t get jealous.”
I rolled my eyes. “Mamá, he is not going to be jealous. And Jacob is not a let’s-go-have-drinks-with-my-random-friends kind of guy. He doesn’t like stuff like that.”
She tsked. “Men get jealous, mija. At least tell him to go so he knows he can. It’s like you’ve never met a man before.”
I couldn’t explain to Mom that this man wasn’t going to get jealous. That he wasn’t going to care one bit who I had drinks with.
Because this man wasn’t really mine.
Chapter 38
Jacob
When Briana got home from dropping off her family, I came down the hallway to meet her.
“Hey,” she said, letting herself in. “It’s late. I thought you’d be asleep.”
“I wanted to make sure you got home okay,” I said, leaning in the doorway.
She smiled. “I think my brother likes your sister,” she said, taking off her shoes by the door.
“I think my sister likes your brother.”
She set her purse down on the credenza and padded up to me in her bare feet. “Do you want to watch TV in your bed?”
“Yes,” I said, too quickly.
With the armchairs gone and the sofa not getting delivered for a few more days, the only place to watch TV was on my bed. I liked this so much I was hoping the universe would intervene on my behalf and my new sofa would fall off the back of a truck.
The last time we watched TV in there, she’d fallen asleep. When I woke up in the morning, she’d already gone back to her air mattress, but still.
We brushed our teeth next to each other in my bathroom. Then she shut the door to change into an old T-shirt and some shorts I liked, and came out and climbed under my comforter.
It was moments like these that made my heart ache more than usual, because it was so easy to picture us together. Just another night in the casual life of a happy relationship. We were a couple in love, getting ready for bed, watching TV.
Only we weren’t.
We were friends. Maybe even less than friends, since I didn’t have any way to know if she’d even be here if it wasn’t for what I was doing for Benny.
“You look tired,” she said. “You okay?”
No, I spent the whole day concocting scenarios about you and Levi in my head?
“It’s just been a long day.”
She turned onto her side and propped herself up on her elbow. “Are you going to be okay for tomorrow? That’s a lot of socializing two days in a row.”
Tomorrow was the bachelor party. The guys were all going bar hopping in a limo, and Amy was having a girls’ thing at my parents’ house.
“I’ll be okay.”
“You sure? A limo? Bars? Extroverts spawn at night, it could be really bad.”
I snorted.
“The Evite Amy sent me said we’re making candles,” Briana said, grimacing. “She didn’t want to go ride a mechanical bull in a wedding veil? Do something fun?”
“I guess not,” I said. “Maybe she really wants to make candles?”
Briana nodded at me. “I’ll make you one. What essential oil do you want?”
I rubbed my forehead. “Something for stress.”
It was nice that Amy invited her. She was trying to include Briana, and I appreciated it.
I, on the other hand, wished I hadn’t been invited to the bachelor party. Spending a night in a limo going to loud bars with a group of my brother’s drunk friends made me preemptively exhausted. I almost didn’t RSVP. But then Briana made a good point, that if I didn’t, it would look like I wasn’t okay. I was Jeremiah’s only brother. I had to be there. And I especially had to be there if I was attempting to look supportive.
And also, if I didn’t go, Briana wouldn’t go to Amy’s party.
My sisters and mom would be there. It mattered to me that Briana was a part of the things that my family did. That they embraced her.
Even though none of that would matter in two months—not that we’d talked about the ending or when exactly it would take place. But two months from now the wedding would be over and I’d be over a month post-op. The agreement would be fulfilled.
How much longer could I expect her to stay?
I went quiet at this and stared at the show on the TV, looking right at it and not seeing a thing.
Her cell phone pinged in the silence. She picked it up and laughed.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s just Levi.” She bit her lip while she typed in her reply.
Levi.
“You’ve been talking to him a lot today,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Yeah. It’s been nice catching up.”
I cleared my throat. “Did you two ever date?” I asked.
“Me and Levi? Nah.” Then she smiled. “My mom used to always joke that I’d marry him one day.”
“Why?”
“She thought he had a crush on me. I don’t know.”
My mouth went dry. “You never wanted to date him?”
She looked over at me. “This is going to sound a little eighteen-hundreds Victorian England, but his family wouldn’t have really approved of that.”
“Why not?”