Madly (New York 2)

May dropped the metal pan onto the countertop with a bang. “Why are you here?”

“I can’t do this.” Allie crossed to the door. She’d left her shoes there. Now she sat on the stool by the door and started buckling them back on. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“You’re not leaving.”

“I’m in New York for the next few days. You can call me, just right now I can’t.” She buckled her second shoe, glanced up at her sister, and wished she hadn’t. “Please, May.”

May crossed her arms. She was as angry as she ever got, and it cut into Allie like it always did, being the one who let her sister down and made her look like that.

She’d torn off May’s Barbies’ heads, ruined her first homecoming gown, totaled the car she bought by saving up her Taco Bell paychecks for a year.

Always, it was Allie who did this to May.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to.”

May flapped one hand. “Oh, do what you have to. Definitely.”

“Listen, I want to move Mom and Dad’s party back to September. If it’s this coming Sunday like we planned, you can only come for the weekend, but if we move it, you guys will be able to visit longer right after, up at the cabin, and I just think it’s better.”

“Ben already planned on taking off this Friday to Monday.”

“But he could change it, right?”

“If you can’t get the party ready in time, even after I checked and you told me it was all under control, sure. Move the party to September, months after our parents’ actual anniversary. Don’t worry about how they might feel about it, or how inconvenient it might be for Ben, who’s never left the restaurant unmanned before. Don’t worry about anyone but yourself, Al. You never do.”

Allie scanned the floor and furniture for her purse. Her chest hurt too much. “Where’s my—”

“It’s by the fishbowl.”

She looked to her left. To her right.

“On the left. On the table. For fuck’s sake.” May stalked to her, past her, and plucked her bag off a table right in front of her.

“I’ll be in the city,” Allie said. “I’m not going.”

But May pushed her bag at her, and she went.

The apartment was on the second floor, the second building on the second block from the street where the subway had disgorged her, and everything looked the same here, and there was nowhere to sit down in Queens. There was nowhere to be alone with yourself in New York, nowhere you could get a grip, and anyway she didn’t have a car, or darkness, or Wisconsin where you could loop for miles around farms, drive in a patchwork quilt of interlocking squares on dairy roads until your throat felt like it might start bleeding and your voice sounded like nobody you’d ever known.

It was good that she didn’t plan on crying.

She walked until her shoes were giving her blisters, and then she found a park with a bench where she sat down beside an anemic tree in the full sunlight.

Angry. Furiously angry. With herself, and May, but mostly herself.

She should have asked. She should have tried to talk, and to listen, because if she had, May might have told her she was scared and short on money, and those were problems Allie could actually solve. Money she had. If all she had to do in her family was write checks, this would be a fucking relief.

But that wasn’t all she had to do. She had to do this—this project she couldn’t seem to get a good hold on, this mission to fix things, make her family whole again, before May and their parents figured out exactly how far they’d traveled down the road to broken.

She didn’t want to be the one who broke them anymore. She wanted to be a fixer. She just kept fucking it up, and it made her want to go home.

Instead, she called her dad. She couldn’t think of anyone else to call, and she needed to feel tethered to a real human being who loved her and who she hadn’t disappointed lately.

He picked up on the first ring. “How’s my girl?”

“Good, thanks. How’re you?”

She could see him, just what he’d look like, what he’d be doing on a Monday—puttering in his garage with his shop clothes on, his hair wispy and flyaway, a rag in his pocket. Lately he’d been clearing out one of the bays to take donations for Syrian refugees for the church.