The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

“So you and Max are friends?” I asked, speaking confidentially after looking around to make sure no one was paying any attention to us.

“I can’t be his friend because Ricky says we can’t. But I think we are anyhow. He came to our house and Mommy and Ricky yelled.” I nodded and kept quiet, waiting for more. She rooted around in the folds of her dress and came up with a tiny boat. “Grandma says no toys allowed because weddings are serious,” she whispered. “But I brought my boat.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Max gave it to me.” She craned her neck again to get a view of my mother and reassure herself that she couldn’t be seen, and then she sailed the boat across her lap. “While they were yelling in the kitchen. Max and me ate cake in the living room.”

“Annie.”

My tone was serious enough to make the little girl alert, mildly apprehensive. She set the boat at rest on a fold of skirt and looked up at me.

“Annie, are you happy that your mom is getting married?”

She shrugged, more evasive than noncommittal. She said, “I like my boat.”

“I do too. Do you like your mom getting married?”

Annie craned her neck around to catch Max’s eye. He lifted a finger and crooked it at her; she crooked a corresponding finger back at him. She settled back in the seat and sailed the boat across a fold of skirt. “Mommy says I can’t be alone with Max.”

“Why not, Annie?”

Annie heard the alert uptick in my tone and she tipped her face away so she didn’t have to look at me when she answered. “Can we make a pie when I stay with you?”

Yes. We would make pie. I repeated my question. Annie shrugged.

Back at the reception at our house I climbed the stairs to our old room to help Lilly change from her wedding gown into the next of her day’s outfits. I started in on the thirty-eight pearl buttons running down her back, one by one. “So Ricky has a brother,” I said to her. “And he has go-searches.”

“Max. But Ricky hates him.” Lilly’s third glass of Champagne had pinked her cheeks and compromised her skills at self-editing. “And it’s research. He does ocean-current tracking or something. He and Ricky aren’t exactly part of each other’s lives, so you won’t be seeing much of him, believe me. I insisted that Ricky introduce him to Annie and me before we got married because I had this stupid idea that family was family and hating each other was no reason not to introduce a brother to a fiancée and ask him to your wedding. I set up this one little dinner with him and Ricky acted like I’d asked him to eat a live grenade.”

“Why don’t they like each other?”

“Sometimes people just don’t like each other, Neave.”

“People don’t like each other for reasons.”

“It isn’t worth digging some things up and poking them.”

“Lilly, why would you tell Annie to never be alone with Max?”

“I don’t remember saying that.”

She’d twisted away from me with the same half drop of the shoulder that her daughter had used earlier. “Liar, liar,” I said. “Pants on fire.”

“The truth is, I don’t know. Ricky just said that he wouldn’t trust his brother with anything precious to him. I don’t know what he meant. But the way he said it … I got nervous for a minute, and I might have said that to Annie.”

“Why wouldn’t Ricky trust his brother?”

“I didn’t ask him,” my sister said, and I knew she was actually, amazingly, telling me the truth. Lilly didn’t ask questions that could have bad answers. “It looked like we were never going to see Max again. No reason to know details. Right?”

“Lilly…”

“Not today, Neave. Not now.” My sister lifted her glass and drained it. She smiled at me. “Right now the world is a wonderful place, and I’ve got nothing to worry about except how long I’ve got to wait for you to get me another glass of this stuff.”

She handed me the empty glass. She smiled a wide and authentic and mildly drunken smile. Lilly Terhune felt perfectly safe in the world, and this little matter of a brotherly rift was irrelevant to her present and future happiness. This is another way Lilly and I differed. The only place and time on Earth I had ever felt entirely safe was in front of Mrs. Daniels’s fire with a book in one hand and a cookie in the other: a child’s place and time. And now we weren’t children.

“Trade you.” I made my tone playful, light, and I held up her empty glass. “Another glass for more info on this brother.”

She shook her head like an animal that’s had something it dislikes pushed in its nose. “What do you care about his brother?” she demanded. “You’ve got this habit of caring about everything. I don’t know how you drag yourself from day to day lugging it around with you.” She swished her skirt. “All I know is there was a little sister who died when she was really small. Some kind of accident, and that seemed to be the start of all the bad feeling. Ricky doesn’t like to talk about it, because it was bad and it was somehow Max’s doing, whatever it was. She had some flower name. Daffodil. Daisy. But I figured Ricky said what he did about keeping Annie away from him because of whatever happened to the little sister. So. How about that drink?”

“I’ve changed my mind. You’ve had enough to drink.” I set her glass down and moved to help her slip off the shimmering wedding dress.

“You don’t know about people from looking at them,” she continued. “The guy looks like such a solid citizen, but Ricky says when they were kids, Max was a terror with the girls.”

“What does ‘terror’ mean?”

“Look, I only know what Ricky was willing to say. He said once that Max got a girl’s dress slammed in a car door and dragged her—” She stopped. “Who knows what really happened.” She made a quick turn to make the skirt blossom out again and raised her chin, dismissing all dark considerations. “Come on. What do you think this skirt’s got in it? Fifteen yards? I’m gonna knock ’em dead.” She smiled as she headed for the stairs. “There is nothing in this world like a dramatic entrance.” She looked at my face and sighed, irritated. “Come on, Neave—you’ve got to keep what’s long ago and far away right where it is—far away. The past is over.”

“The past isn’t over. It isn’t even the past.”

She stopped right smack in front of me, and pulled me into her arms. “I love you, Neavie. Always have. Always will.”

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