Truly (New York 1)

It had been a fantasy to have him tell her, Close your eyes, and to put an upside-down spoon in her mouth. To run her tongue across the thick, sticky surface and taste something dark and herbal, a rich sweetness, a peppery kick.

The very worst kind of fantasy, really, because he was lying for her. He was pretending to be Andy’s PA, and May was letting him.

She knew she ought to feel guilty, but the camaraderie at the table had suffused her with sticky, golden sweetness instead. She felt too good. Too pleased.

She still hadn’t called Dan.

“What are you thinking about, Zombie McStare-a-lot?” Allie asked.

“Nothing I ought to be.” May grabbed two orange daisies, two pink daisies, and a length of brown raffia ribbon. The playful argument in the kitchen simmered down to the occasional jibe drifting over cooking noises—the faucet running, water bubbling on the stove, wooden spoons clicking against the sides of bowls.

Ben passed through the room and went out to his van. He returned with his toolbox of knives.

“Ooh, this is getting serious.”

He winked at her and went back in the kitchen. After a few minutes, the sounds of chopping resumed. She pictured his hands, all scarred and nicked, guiding the knife.

Her father came through the room with a coffee cup and a newspaper, mumbling some vague excuse as he disappeared into the basement. May guessed he wouldn’t come back until someone else had been found to judge the macaroni salad war. He knew how to avoid making waves.

Allie pulled together raffia from five different-colored bundles and cut off an arm’s length, which she tied around a miniature galvanized bucket in a bow. The dog nosed her thigh, looking up at her with yearning in its liquid black eyes, but she ignored it.

Something was off with her. Even her frizzy hair was flat today, ceramic-ironed into submission.

“Are you excited for Saturday?”

“Sure.” Allie looked down at the bucket she’d been holding, her expression missing. May realized that her sister had jeans on—that, uncharacteristically, Allie’s clothes could actually be called boring.

Allie’s clothes were never boring.

May plucked another daisy from a pile and tied her bundle together. Her fingers were already aching, and the number of finished buckets beside her was far smaller than the number still waiting to be beribboned and filled with green florist foam and fake flowers.

“Is Ben staying for the game?” Allie asked.

May wanted him to, even though it would be weird. Games were always a little off these days. It felt strange to watch them in the basement, on the screen, instead of at Lambeau in the box Dan had shared with a few other players. Stranger to see Dan play in a Jets uniform. Deeply strange to sit behind the wrong team while the Jets played the Packers in the Super Bowl. But watching the Packers and the Jets play in New Jersey on TV with Ben here pretending to be an employee of Dan’s agent? It was like a whole new category of strange.

And still, she wanted it. She wanted Ben around, however she could get him.

“I don’t know.”

Another long silence, and then Allie inhaled suddenly and said, “He looks at you, May. And the way you look at him … I just keep wondering, what happened to my sister this week, you know? What are you doing? Because I thought I understood what you were up to, but now I’m not so sure.”

May reached for another daisy as her stomach did a pitch-and-roll. She didn’t know what to say. She had no explanation to offer. No story to tell that would make her sister say, Ahh, I see. How very May.

All she had was this restlessness inside her. This feeling of wrongness, this cast-up hopelessness. All she had was this need, even now, to be with him, instead of stuck on the living room floor stuffing daisies into buckets.

Because he knew. Ben understood what had happened to her in New York. If she could simply be with him, talk to him, maybe she could understand it, too.

“Are you okay?” Allie asked.

May choked back a laugh. “Yeah. I mean, yeah, I’m okay. Or I will be.”

“Are you moving back home?”

“I guess so. New York wasn’t really …”

Wasn’t really for her? Was that true?

“It wasn’t permanent.”