One of these days, she’d get used to it. But the trouble with truly moving past things was that certain resentments had a stubborn way of sticking around. For instance, she couldn’t help being mildly irritated that Penny had suddenly decided to miss her now, when Izzy had been lying low ever since the wedding back in June. Of course, the impulsive purchase of her house and move to Yellow Springs offered convenient excuses for all involved. Izzy knew she had to do a better job of pretending. Penny and Josh certainly were. But she may have put too much stock in assuming it would be easier to pretend from a distance.
In all those months of furtive wedding preparation, led by her mother as if she’d discovered her missed calling in life as an event coordinator, Izzy told herself that if she could just get through her maid of honor duties—the sickeningly sweet cake tastings, and the who-cares hubbub over the centerpieces, and the uncomfortable dress fittings, and the too-old-for-this bachelorette night—that once the big day had come and gone, things would be better. That would be that, till death do them part, and something in Izzy’s brain would send her a signal of closure, of it being time to find a way to move on.
Instead, it got worse. The whole week following the ceremony, she dragged herself miserably through her workaday routine nauseated by the thought of Penny and Josh lying on a Bahamian beach, toasting their good fortune in finding each other. She’d reasoned that she just needed a vacation herself, but she had neither the gumption nor the funds to go it alone, and all her other friends seemed too attached to get away.
Then there was the whole business of her parents downsizing to a condo, turning Izzy’s childhood home over to Penny and Josh for a steal—a token price, really, which irked Izzy, as no one had asked her if she, their older child, might also be interested (she wasn’t, but still, must everything be determined by a race to the altar?)—and her mother filling the void the wedding planning had left in her days by dropping hints about grandbabies.
That much, at least, was futile. Neither Penny nor Josh had ever wanted kids—it was the only thing about Josh that did make him more perfect for Penny than for Izzy, really. Sometimes, Izzy would be watching Thomas and Maddie playing outside with Abby and Aaron and catch herself caught up in a certain wistfulness. “You’re out of order,” she’d chastise her biological clock, chagrined that it was evidently real. “You need to pair up before you can procreate.”
She didn’t know when Penny planned to break it to their mother that she was in for a disappointment, but she hoped it was soon, before she started preemptively knitting booties. In the meantime, Izzy was starting to find her parents as insufferable as she found Penny and Josh. She wrestled with instant regret every time she dodged one of their check-in calls or cut a conversation short, but she needed a little more time to regroup.
In her restlessness now, she turned on the TV and landed on a prime-time special spotlighting victims of Saturday’s shooting and the killer’s troubled past. She forced herself not to look away from the blood-spattered band members, the sobbing cheerleaders, the shaking spectators. These were people who couldn’t have done anything to prevent their misfortune, aside from arbitrarily choosing to be somewhere else that night. These were people who were allowed to be sad.
Not her.
The most twisted thing about the comparison was that it could be a comfort. See, what you’re dealing with is nothing. Witness real tragedy and be properly ashamed.
You didn’t even have to look far to find it. Now it was right across the street.
She poked a finger between slats in the blinds and peered out again at the dark form of Paul’s car, silent in Kristin’s driveway. She’d been waiting for other cars to join his there—family, friends, colleagues. It puzzled her that there were none. Nothing about this made sense. She desperately wished she had a clearer memory of Kristin’s role in the conversation around the fire Saturday night. She didn’t know that anything important had been said, but she didn’t know that it hadn’t been, either.
A flash of movement caught her attention, and here came Clara, hugging an oversized hooded sweatshirt to her body, down the wide front porch steps of her old farmhouse, past the massive oak tree shading her front yard, its solitary swing moving gently in the breeze, and—with a furtive look over her shoulder at Kristin’s—across the street toward Izzy’s.
She’d only started getting to know the other neighbors, but she had really come to like Clara, who was often outside with her kids when Izzy got home from her bizarrely early workdays. They’d taken to chatting in those hours when it seemed as if they had the neighborhood to themselves. Unlike her friends back in Springfield, Clara didn’t ask what had possessed Izzy to buy a house by herself, or make her feel like a special case. And unlike other moms Izzy knew, Clara didn’t reassure her not to worry, that one day she’d find a man or have kids of her own. Nor did she apologize for her own happiness, falling all over herself to tell Izzy how annoying husbands and children can be.
When Izzy mentioned that her banana bread always stuck to the bottom of the pan, Clara didn’t remark woefully that she remembered the days she had time to bake things from scratch, before kids. Instead, she lent her these amazing nonstick loaf pans that make everything turn out perfectly. When Izzy told her about her “new,” last-to-the-party infatuation with Cary Grant, Clara didn’t comment that it must be nice to have time to sit around and watch old movies. Instead, she disappeared into her house and came out with a special edition DVD of The Talk of the Town, which became Izzy’s favorite. When Izzy admitted one night that she was feeling lonely, Clara didn’t suggest that she set up an online dating profile. Instead, she asked Benny to handle the kids’ bedtime and came over with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a bottle of vodka. Clara was one of those rare people who didn’t make Izzy feel like she was in the wrong place in her life.
Even though she probably was.
Izzy rose to meet her friend at the door, slipping her feet into the hand-knit alpaca moccasins she’d bought last week at Randi and Rhoda’s boutique. She’d only been trying to be nice—the price tag seemed a bit steep for slippers—but they were wonderfully soft and warm, a surprisingly worthwhile splurge, and it was nice to have some small luxury to revel in.
She whisked open the door just as Clara had raised her hand to knock, and Izzy laughed at the startled look on her face. “Sorry! I’m a bit of a nosy neighbor tonight,” Izzy said, glancing again at Kristin’s. “Come in and save me from my stalkerish tendencies.”
“Not a chance. I’m here to join you. I can’t see anything from my own living room. Guess you didn’t get my texts?”
Izzy felt her face color at the memory of how she’d silenced her sister’s ringtone and shoved the phone deep into her purse, out of sight. The problem with dodging someone was that sometimes you ended up dodging everyone. “I must not have heard it,” she said quickly. “I’m glad you’re here, though. I’ve been dying to know what you make of this Kristin thing.”
Clara caught sight of the TV as she shut the door behind her. “Oh, no. You can’t watch this stuff. It’s what these shooters want. Attention.”
“I know you’re right,” Izzy said. “But, in my defense, this channel has the earliest local news, at ten. And it’s suddenly gotten really local.”
Clara crossed to the remote lying on the coffee table and pressed it with a purposeful index finger, muting the television. “‘They will always be more beautiful than you / the people you are killing,’” she recited.
Izzy stared at her, momentarily stunned by both her conviction and her words.
“Alice Walker,” Clara said. “She blogs poetry now. In a world where political tweets have taken over the Internet, there’s still hope.”