Ren finally cracks a smile, but at the same time, I feel the sting of it, that we haven’t been around for each other’s birthdays. That there was the usual hoopla in the family group chat, as there is for everyone’s birthday, but rather than be an adult and send a perfunctory happy birthday message, like he has on my last three birthdays, I just liked the first celebratory text someone else sent.It was a jerk move, I knew even then, but something about acknowledging the years passing between us in any real way hurt too much.
“A bachelor?” Ren says.
I lean my head back, an exasperated sound rattling out of me. “Why do men get something that they turn into a whole reality franchise, and we get Charlotte Lucas?”
“If I recall correctly, thereisa bachelorette version of the franchise, and you once told me that you might be okay marrying someone like Mr. Collins if you never had to talk to him.”
“You remember that?”
“You made us watchPride and Prejudice, like, a hundred times when you had mono.”
“Joni,” Ren had said after what I’m sure was our tenth viewing on his computer, angled from his dorm room desk so we could both see it. It was all I really had the energy to do: consume comforting classics in between naps. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about the Elizabeth and Darcy of it all, but what if we watched something set in a time period where someone wouldn’t waste away from what’s currently ailing you?”
“What’s currently ailing you,”I repeated. “Are you trying tosoundlike Darcy?”
On his bed, Ren pressed his hands to his face, groaning. “We’ve just watched it so many times. Keira Knightley was in my dream last night.”
“Okay, that’s not because of the movie.”
He threw a pillow across the room at me, and I pretended to flail, tossing a hand over my forehead and crying out that I was on my deathbed.
“That must have been the fever talking,” I say now, banishing the memory of the month I spent sleeping across the room from him, doing a fair amount of my own NyQuil-induced sleep talking and begrudgingly letting him bring me soup and tea. His roommate was dating my roommate—the source of the mono—and had moved in to take care of her.Because Ren and I weren’t the type of friends who made out on occasion, I’d lugged a suitcase over to his dorm and spent my recovery there. “AndBacheloretteis something entirely different than spinster. It brings to mind visions of feather boas, bride sashes, bedazzled penises.”
Ren laughs. I don’t fight the warmth that spreads through me.
“I am sorry,” I say. “About Amanda.”
He lifts a hand as if to brush this away, lets it drop back to the arm of his chair. “Don’t be. It was time for us to go our separate ways.”
I tilt my glass toward him. “Aren’t you well-adjusted.”
“To be fair, I did still come up here a day early to mentally prepare for a week with my deeply disappointed mother.” He pauses, considers me like he’s mulling something over. “Did you really come up early to help get things ready?”
I shake my head, shrug to stall. Lying to Ren has never been easy, but we’re not in a place where I can tell him the whole truth. I opt for the most basic answer. “No.”
Ren doesn’t press. I can feel the words there against the back of my teeth, aching to get out. It strikes me that if there’s one person I would want to talk to about this with, it would be Ren. Even after everything.
For a moment, I let myself study him as if the last two and a half years didn’t happen, imagine I was here to see the smiles that crinkled his eyes, led to the hint of crow’s-feet, to hear how he got that faint scar running up his left thumb that I know wasn’t there before. When my eyes latch on to Ren’s, there’s something vaguely wistful in them, and I wonder if he’s observing the same changes in me.
“You must be the unhappy couple!” a voice says cheerfully.
We both lurch back and look up at the short, gray-haired man standing next to our table,his arms raised over his head like he’s cheering for us.
“Tony,” he says. “Let’s get you that wine.”
chapter eight
We each wheel a dolly stacked with cases of wine to Ren’s car, where he puts the seats down and loads them into the trunk. We’re quiet again on the drive back to the house, but the air feels warmer between us.
After hauling the wine onto the far end of the screen porch (because it’s not only our sleeping quarters, but the place to store every spare thing that has ever come through the door of this house, including a lot of the boxes from the back of Stevie and Leo’s car), we join the others down at the beach. We kick our shoes off at the bottom of the path to the sand, and Ren shrugs on the black hoodie he grabbed from the hook. It’s cooler here.
A ways down the beach, Thad is helping their dad, Greg, as tall as the rest of the Websters, set up a badminton net. “You and me against Sash and Dad?” he shouts to Ren.
“I’m in!” Ren can never pass up competition, a holdover from his days of playing soccer and running track. He heads off in that direction, his feet leaving imprints in the sand, and I try hard to shake off the feeling that he wants to get away from me, that I misread our conversation at the winery and it was just for the sake of keeping up appearances. But halfway to the net,he turns around, walking backward, his eyes catching mine: something inviting and familiar there. He smiles at me, until Thad tells him to hurry up and he jogs the rest of the way forward.
To one side of the net, my mom and Ren’s mom, Hannah, are sitting in beach chairs, laughing with Stevie and Leo, who are on a blanket next to them. But I’m not ready to drive myself into another pothole-riddled discussion, so I join my dad at the water’s edge, where he wanders, pant legs rolled up.
“Hey, kiddo,” he says, slinging an arm around my shoulders. “Wine crisis averted?”
