room would bring back three years of my life, but that was many lives ago.
‘I would give anything to be there in that beautiful place watching you marry the man of your dreams.’ Brian, an oaf with the energy of a hibernating bear. ‘But I don’t have eighteen hundred and fifty dollars. I don’t even have a hundred and fifty dollars.’
‘Well, I can’t pay your way. We’re already giving a free ride to my sisters.’
‘That’s not what I was angling for. I would never accept that.’
‘You have a job. We played phone tag for two weeks because of all the shifts you’re working. What else are you going to spend this money on? This is one of those selfish decisions you are going regret the rest of your life. We need to be there for each other. You need to make this happen against all odds and obstacles. You put it on a credit card, and you come to my wedding.’
‘I’ve maxed everything out. I can’t accrue more debt. I can barely meet the minimums.’
‘Jeez, Casey. At some point, don’t you think you have to grow up? You can’t expect to be given a pass forever. It’s time to be an adult. You can’t live in your made-up worlds all your life. People get real jobs that make real money so that they can be a real friend at their best friend’s wedding. I flew from my vacation in Bermuda to Arizona for your mother’s funeral. And it wasn’t cheap, buying it three days before.’
The underside of my arms begin to burn.
‘Did your mother have any idea how much trouble you were in?’
If she hadn’t said this, it might have been okay.
‘Did you pay for that ticket, Tara?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did you, yourself, pay for the ticket from Bermuda to Phoenix?’
Silence.
‘And if we took away Brian’s salary at Schwab and your dad’s little allowance, how much money would you have working part-time at that nonprofit? Would you be able to afford Bermuda or your two-bedroom in SoHo? Are you more of an adult because two men are giving you the illusion of self-sufficiency?’
She hangs up on me.
I am hemorrhaging friends with these weddings. Muriel and Harry are nearly all I have left.
On the last day of August I go to work in the morning and the waiters are all gathered around the bar. I think I’ve missed a meeting but it’s just Mia reading something out loud: ‘The Mercedes limo slammed into a wall in the Alma tunnel, on the right bank of the Seine under the Place de l’Alma, the police said.’ I wedge my way in-between Mary Hand and Victor Silva to see what she’s reading from. ‘Shocked eyewitnesses reported that the car was full of blood.’
The front page of the Boston Globe is spread out on the counter with an enormous photo of a mangled black car. The headline above: DIANA IS DEAD.
The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane. The second-hardest thing is getting out. Sometimes I sink down too deep and come up too fast. Afterward I feel wide open and skinless. The whole world feels moist and pliable. When I get up from the desk I straighten the edges of everything. The rug needs to be perfectly aligned with the floorboards. My toothbrush needs to be perpendicular to the edge of the shelf. Clothing cannot be left inside out. My mother’s sapphire needs to be centered on my finger.
When I was fifteen, my father’s girlfriend, Ann, had my sweaters dry-cleaned. My mother used to wash them in Woolite and lay them on a towel to dry, but she was in Phoenix with Javi by then, and my father and I were living at Ann’s and she would gather up my sweaters while I was at school. They’d come back a few days later on hangers covered in paper, sheathed in long plastic bags, which she hung on my closet door. I didn’t like the shape of these bags, the swollen tops with the sweaters beneath and then the empty length of sheer plastic, dangling like the lower region of a jellyfish. I was scared of those bags. I’d get the sweaters out of them and tie tight knots along the length of each one and shove them to the bottom of my wastebasket. I was scared I’d try to suffocate myself in my sleep.
I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t happy, living in Ann’s big house without Caleb,