My Best Friend Put My Ex-Husband’s Wife In The Room Next To Mine—Then We Realized We’d Been Told Opposite Stories
PART 5
The town near the lake had one bookstore, two antique shops, a bakery, and enough decorative signs about wine to supply every aunt in America.
Kara and I spent an hour walking without trying to become friends.
It helped to expect only an hour of ordinary company, not a new friendship.
She liked terrible ceramic birds. I disliked scented candles. We both judged a store that sold a forty-eight-dollar wooden spoon.
At the bakery, we shared a table near the window.
“I owe you an apology,” she said.
“For what?”
“For believing some things because they were easier than asking.”
I broke a blueberry muffin in half.
“Then I owe the same one.”
She nodded.
There was no dramatic release. Nobody cried. We simply removed one false thing from the space between us.
Then my phone rang.
Lydia.
I let it ring once, then answered.
“Hey.”
“Where are you guys?”
“At the bakery.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“I just wanted to make sure nobody felt cornered.”
I looked across at Kara.
“No one is cornered.”
“Mel, I know you. You can be polite long after you’re comfortable.”
“That’s true.”
“So if this is too much—”
“Lydia, if it becomes too much, I’ll tell Kara.”
Silence.
Then she said, “Okay.”
I ended the call.
Kara raised her eyebrows.
“She was checking the weather?”
“Apparently I am the weather.”
When we returned to the house, something else had shifted.
Two of the women, Renee and Joyce, were arguing softly on the porch about Sunday departure times.
Lydia stepped between them almost automatically.
“Joyce, Renee didn’t mean she won’t ride with you. She’s just worried about traffic.”
Renee stared at her.
“I did mean I won’t ride with her. I’m leaving at six, and she wants to leave at ten.”
Joyce blinked. “You told me Lydia said you didn’t care.”
Lydia laughed too loudly. “See? This is why group travel is impossible.”
Renee looked at Joyce. “I never said I didn’t care.”
Joyce turned toward Lydia. “You said she was flexible.”
“I thought she was.”
No one said anything for a beat.
The scene was small enough that, a day earlier, I would have ignored it.
Now I watched Lydia’s hands. She rubbed her thumb against the side of her index finger, a nervous habit I had seen whenever she was trying to smooth over a problem before it acquired witnesses.
Renee solved the ride issue in thirty seconds by saying, “I’m leaving at six. If you want ten, take your car.”
Joyce said, “Fine.”
That was it.
No mediation required.
Lydia went inside.
I followed ten minutes later to refill my water.
She was alone at the sink.
“You’re angry with me,” she said.
“I’m not sure what I am yet.”
“That sounds worse.”
I leaned against the counter.
“Why did you tell Kara I asked for separate gatherings?”
Lydia kept washing a glass that was already clean.
“Because after the divorce you were fragile.”
“I was hurt. That’s not the same thing.”
“I watched you leave a restaurant because Greg walked in with her.”
“That was eight years ago.”
“And you called me afterward and cried for an hour.”
“I did.”
“So I protected you.”
“For seven years?”
Her shoulders sagged.
“It became habit.”
“Did Kara ask you to protect her from me?”
“No.”
“Did I ever ask you to keep her away?”
“Not in those words.”
“That answer is doing a lot of work.”
She turned off the faucet.
“You think I enjoyed being in the middle?”
“I don’t know.”
Her face sharpened. “I hated it.”
“Then why didn’t you stop?”
“Because every time I tried to put people together, someone got uncomfortable, someone complained afterward, someone said I should have known better. You all think invitations just happen. They don’t.”
There was truth in that. I had complained to Lydia after awkward dinners. I had asked who was coming before accepting invitations. I had made her social labor invisible because she did it well.
But truth was not the same as permission.
“I’m sorry we made you the traffic controller,” I said. “I’m not sorry I want you to stop directing cars.”
She stared at me.
“That’s cute.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
For the first time all weekend, Lydia looked angry rather than anxious.
“Fine. Handle it yourselves.”
She walked out.
I stood alone in her birthday kitchen feeling the strange relief of having finally disappointed the person who had spent years preventing everyone else from disappointing one another directly.
That afternoon, while Kara and I were in town, I got a text from Evan.
Aunt Lydia says you’re having a weird weekend. Everything okay?
I stopped walking on the sidewalk.
Kara saw my face. “What?”
I showed her the message.
She read it and handed the phone back.
“That was fast.”
My first impulse was to call Lydia. My second was to reassure Evan before he worried that his mother and stepmother had been locked in a lake-house death match.
Instead I called my son.
“Hi,” he said cautiously.
“Hi. I’m fine.”
“Lydia made it sound like there was tension.”
“There is some tension between Lydia and me.”
“Oh.”
“Did she say why?”
“Not exactly. She said she hoped you and Kara talking would clear up old misunderstandings.”
Kara was pretending not to listen while studying a window display full of bird feeders.
I said, “Kara and I are okay. If you ever want to know whether I’m okay with Kara at something, ask me.”
There was a pause.
“I do ask you.”
“Sometimes you ask Lydia.”
Another pause.
“Fair.”
“I’m not angry.”
“Also suspicious.”
“Correct.”
He laughed.
After the call, I texted Lydia: Please don’t update Evan about me and Kara. If he needs to know something, I’ll tell him.
Three dots appeared immediately.
Then disappeared.
Then returned.
Finally: I was trying to reassure him.
I wrote: I know. Please stop.
She replied with a single OK.
I stared at it longer than necessary.
Kara said, “That looked painful.”
“It was four characters.”
“Some of the worst messages are efficient.”
We kept walking.
At the next store, Kara found a ceramic loon so ugly it looked personally offended. She held it up.
“Peace offering?”
“If you buy that for me, we go back to separate invitations.”
She put it down.
“Boundary respected.”
We laughed, and I realized that for the first time I was making a joke with Kara that Lydia had not prepared, interpreted, or witnessed.
