Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,103
been proud and relieved all these years that he couldn’t lord it over her anymore, when, really, he could. He did.
She was mortified to be having this conversation in front of George and Faye. They stared down at their food as if they couldn’t hear over it. Elisabeth appreciated the gesture so much.
She kept trying to meet Andrew’s eye, but he wouldn’t look at her. She was furious with herself for not telling him sooner. It was a secret she had managed to keep for two years, and then, in the presence of her family, she had undone it with one offhand remark.
“Honey,” she said. “Say something. Please.”
Andrew still looked confused. “So, all this time you thought Charlotte wasn’t taking his money, you’ve been supporting her?”
“I wouldn’t say supporting, exactly,” Elisabeth said. “I’ve helped her for the last couple years while she waited for this sponsorship deal to happen. It was a loan.”
“Not that diet pill thing,” Davey said. “I talked her out of that months ago.”
Everyone was silent for a long while.
Davey’s words sank in. Months ago. Charlotte had known for that long that she wasn’t going to pay Elisabeth back.
She felt sick. She would never see that money again.
Faye dipped her napkin into her water glass and started wiping Gil’s face, as if she did this all the time.
“Don’t these two make gorgeous babies?” she said, clearly hoping they could change the subject. “I keep asking when they’re going to have another.”
“Let’s not rush it,” Elisabeth’s mother said.
“Why not?” Elisabeth said, offended, even though she had no intention of having another.
“Motherhood is making you tense,” her mother said.
“It is,” Charlotte agreed.
“Unbelievable,” Elisabeth said. “Of course you’d find a way to turn this back on me.”
She wanted to scream at all the members of her immediate family, each for a different reason. She wanted them out of her house.
“You know, I wondered earlier why we don’t do holidays together more often,” she said, in a manner that would sound calm, happy, if you didn’t understand the words, just in case Gil was storing the memory. “But now I remember.”
Andrew’s chair scraped against the floor.
“I’m going out for a while,” he said.
She followed him to the front door.
“I’ll come with you,” she said. “We should talk.”
He just looked at her and shook his head.
Elisabeth returned to the dining room. She said, “It’s time for all of you to go.”
* * *
—
Andrew came home after an hour, but did not address her.
He took the baby and went upstairs.
Elisabeth started cleaning.
Andrew’s pies sat uneaten on the counter. He had spent the night before layering a lattice crust onto the pecan pie. He made leaves out of dough and lined them up like a wreath around the edge. It looked perfect, like a picture from a magazine. The sight of it filled her with regret, despair.
After Gil was in bed, Andrew found her in the kitchen and said, “So.”
Elisabeth was grateful for that single syllable, for the broken silence.
“Wasn’t there three hundred thousand dollars in that account?” he said.
“Yes.”
“You gave it all to her?”
“Almost.”
“That money was from your book,” Andrew said. “You worked hard for that.”
She was amazed that he was thinking of her in this moment. She started to say so.
But Andrew wasn’t finished.
“Do you know how difficult it was for me to ask you about taking some of that money for my parents?”
“You never asked me,” she said quietly.
Immediately, she thought of her mother saying she hadn’t come sooner because she wasn’t invited. There were questions that shouldn’t require asking.
“Bullshit,” he said. “Sorry I never wrote up a formal request, but you knew I wanted it. You made me feel like an asshole for that.”
“Andrew, no.”
“Yes, you did. Now I understand why. I didn’t think we kept things from each other.”
“We don’t,” she said, even though she had.
Andrew inhaled, ran a hand through his hair. He looked like he was trying not to cry.
He had been wronged and she wanted so badly to comfort him.
“I wanted to tell you,” she said. “I didn’t know how. Sometimes it’s just so hard to say certain things to each other, do you know what I mean?”
“Sure,” he said. “Like how ever since we’ve moved here, you’ve been acting like a terrible snob, like you’re better than the whole goddamn world because you lived in Brooklyn?”
“Jesus,” she said. “That was kind of mean.”
“We’re not your parents,” he said. “Learn to trust me, will you? Otherwise, what’s the point of any of this?”