Page 48 of Bloom

“Can’t we do that over the phone? Or in the city?”

“You don’t sound like you really want this,” he says, a threatening edge to his voice.

“Of course I do,” I argue, and then I resort to a lie. “But I think my boyfriend would be really bothered by that.”

“What boyfriend?” he asks with sudden irritation. “That singer? I thought you broke up.” I’ve never told him anything about Ryan. How does he know? Come to think of it, how did he even know my address to send the flowers? I’ve gone from feeling awkward and unsettled to totally creeped out.

“Edward,” I say firmly. “I can’t come up there.”

“You’re making a bad decision,” he warns. Except it feels like more than a warning. It feels like a threat. That’s when I hang up.

I walk back toward the house slowly, wishing I had one person I could tell about this call. Ginny was that person once and she’s not anymore. And the person I want most to tell, oddly enough, is the one who’d go ballistic: James.

He looks at me curiously when I get inside, as if he knows I’m hiding something. He hasn’t shaved today. It’s so good on him that my eyes catch on it, on him, as if I’d actually run my palm over his jaw.

I look at him and I’m glad Edward didn’t get me a job. I’m glad I’m stuck here to pine for him fruitlessly. And this is perhaps the greatest evidence of all that I really need to leave.

Chapter 28

My mother is so happy when she calls me that I don’t have the heart to answer her honestly when she asks how I am. I tell her things are great, managing not to mention that James rejected me and that my best friend inexplicably acts like I’ve stabbed her in the back. That I suck at my crappy new job, and that Edward Ferris is leaving me such creepy messages that I can no longer bring myself to listen to them.

She’d probably barely hear me anyway. Today, for instance, she’s too busy talking about how “rad” Tommy’s new album is (I somehow manage not to mention that no one has used that word since the last time he was famous.) I passively watch Max and James through the glass door as they get ready to golf, part of some grand scheme Max has concocted to pull James out of his funk. Why he’s even in a funk is beyond me. If I’d been to the one to ditch a shrew like Allison I’d be levitating with joy.

“So I have something to tell you,” she says. “I wanted you to hear it from me and not the papers.”

Yes, that would be a novel way to learn bad news, Mom.

“Tommy and I are engaged.”

I feel curiously removed, unsurprised, as if I’ve been waiting for this moment. It’s always been as if I’m the parent and she’s the headstrong teenager, making one bad, impulsive decision after the next. I guess I should just be relieved it’s not cocaine addiction or pregnancy. James shoots me a questioning glance on his way to the shed.

“You’ve only dated him for two months, Mom,” I argue.

“When you know, you just know,” she sighs happily.

“You mean the way you just knew with Dad?”

“I was young when I met your father,” she insists. “I didn’t know who I was then.”

“It took you nine months to choose what color BMW you wanted, but you can pick a husband in two?”

“I thought you’d be happy for me,” she says. “Or are you only happy when there’s a wedding in Grand Cayman you get to attend?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh,” she says uncomfortably. “Nothing.”

“No, it’s not nothing, Mom,” I reply. “Who’s getting married in Grand Cayman?”

But I already know. I ask because I want her to tell me I’m wrong, something she does not do.

I sit there holding the phone in front of me when our call ends. There’s a sharp pain in my chest. I wish I could cry to blunt its edge, but nothing comes. What the hell is happening to my life? It’s as if the world has spun too hard, hard enough that I’ve been cut loose from every single thing I was tethered to. Some of those cords were thinner than others. Ryan, I’d known less than a year. But Ginny? My parents? I’ve known them the longest. And it seems as they’ve all decided, simultaneously, to set me free.

James climbs back up the steps with his golf bag.

“Everything okay?” he asks.

“Yep,” I nod, but the word is vacant, a shell for all the things I really feel.