Madly (New York 2)

Ben sighed. Looked at his watch. “That’s family. I’ve got twenty-seven minutes.”

“She doesn’t want to be my family anymore.”

“If you keep being this dense, I’m not going to be able to stop myself from cracking you over the head with a plate.”

He looked like he might mean it, too. Allie wiped her face and tried to sit up straighter. “I’m not trying to be dense.”

“You are, though. She wants the same thing you want. I’m sitting here on the fucking floor, two hours late to be in the kitchen of my restaurant where everything’s probably completely gone to shit in my absence, giving you this pep talk because it’s important.”

“This is not a pep talk.”

“This is the best I can do at pep talk.”

“You’re supposed to say something nice.”

Ben rolled his eyes and huffed out a breath. “Fine. Give me a second…all right, look, you know what? We do this thing before bed.”

“I don’t want to know what you do before bed.”

“Shut up. We do this thing, if I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep, I ask her to talk to me. Tell me stuff. I don’t care what she tells me, it’s not the point, the point is to hear her voice, okay, and keep me distracted, but what she talks about most of the time is you.”

Allie started to cry again. Epically stupid.

“You’re her best friend. Not me. You are. Everything good, just about, that’s ever happened to her, you were right there. It’s always me and Allie this, and Allie and me that, and you know that fucking children’s book she’s trying to sell to her agent is about you, don’t you?”

“What book?”

“Her book that’s in its twelfth or thirteenth draft, what she does all day long, her book. You ask her to show it to you, see if you don’t recognize that skinny big-haired knobbly little kid in the tiara and dress-up outfits trailing some dog around.”

Allie’s throat hurt too much. The hurt extended up to the roof of her mouth. Her stomach ached. “You know what I’m really afraid of? It’s like…I know she loves me. She’s my sister, so she kind of has to. But that doesn’t mean my family’s going to be a family anymore. There’s no reason for us to, exactly. She lives here, and my mom’s on her way out, maybe, and my dad’s back home doing…whatever it is he does when Mom leaves, and May doesn’t want to talk to me, and the thing is, she doesn’t have to. I could see you guys once a year at Christmas, maybe every other Thanksgiving, hug her hello and goodbye, send a birthday present, and that could be what we are now. Lots of people go on like that. And I can’t—”

She couldn’t figure out the words for it. There weren’t words for the way she’d always just wanted May, wanted her and wanted her, her attention and her love and her company, her clothes and her friends, the greedy details of her life.

There wasn’t a way to explain that when she found out about Justin—when she snooped through her mom’s life and figured out where she was going and who she had to be meeting—that it had ripped out something enormous and important from the middle of her life, and part of what it ripped out was her right to May, her right to her sister.

There was no way to tell Ben how incredibly heavy it was to worry about everything, all the time, her family being her family, her sister being her sister, Matt being okay and not hating her, her parents being happy even though her dad wasn’t really her dad and her mom was somebody she didn’t really know, not truly. How heavy, and how impossible, because she didn’t have the keys to unlock the solutions she needed to make any of it better.

“I don’t feel like I can make demands anymore. Like I can be the one to try to keep our family from turning into this other kind of family.”

Ben stood up. He took her plate, then held out his hand. “Come with me.”

He took her to the kitchen, where he handed her the other half of the apple she’d devoured. “Eat it.”

Allie took a bite with Ben glaring at her. Still delicious.

He crossed his arms and sighed. “I don’t know why you think it’s your job.”

“Why I think what’s my job?”

“Fixing shit. Rescuing everyone. It’s not a job anybody ever gave you, it’s a job you assigned yourself, and it’s bullshit.” He opened a cabinet and pulled out a jar of honey. Showed it to her. “This came from a hive in the wall of a bank.”

“Like a display?” She imagined glass walls, bees buzzing behind them, how cool it would be to wait in line to deposit the day’s cash receipts if you could watch bees.

“No, like a bank with rotten sills on the windows and a wall completely infested, where the morons blocked the hive entrance so they had bees coming out the ducts, stinging customers all to fuck. Don’t interrupt me, this is important.” Ben brandished the jar at her. “These bees didn’t belong where they were at. They messed up, made a hive where they shouldn’t, and none of them were happy. The bees weren’t so happy, either. I get the phone call, come in and find the queen, and the bees swarm. You ever seen a swarm?”

She shook her head.

“It’s like a ball of angry bees. Fucking tornado. It’s kind of cool. So my point is, I moved the queen somewhere else, the bees came with her. Everything fell apart. Then it came back together. That’s how it works.”