“Hmm?” Ren mumbles. He’s crouched down, focused on where one of the legs is stuck.
I stare at the top of his head. “Marriage, settling down, all of it.” He bumps the heel of his palm against the hinge. “You weren’t lying about your mom being bummed about Amanda.”
The hinge gives. Ren pulls the leg open and locks it into place before he straightens and meets my eyes. “You know. It’s nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Isn’t it?” I ask. I know Hannah, like my own mother, can ask a lot of questions, but I don’t remember her fussing over Ren’s romantic life this much.
“She’s just not dealing all that well with the breakup,” Ren says, rubbing a hand at the back of his neck.
“Your mom isn’t dealing well withyourbreakup?” I ask.
“I think she’s worried I won’t ever get married,” he says, then hastens to add, like he’s revealed too much, “or, she’s just worried about me settling down. Thad and Sasha are so happy and I’m—”He breaks off, studies the table between us. “She was just really excited when Amanda and I got back together. I think she thought it was a pretty sure thing. And I hate being a disappointment.”
The words are hanging right there.You’re not a disappointment.But before I can say them, he’s tipping the table up to standing and nodding at me to take the other side. We may not have spoken in years, but I still know what Ren’s face looks like when he doesn’t want to talk about something. Flat, drawn-in, inaccessible.
Ren keeps his eyes on the table as we carry it over to the others. But when we set it down, he looks at me across it, considers his next words. “Amanda’s amazing.”
I nod, trying to keep my expression neutral.
He tilts his head, squinting.
“What?” I say. “Amanda’s amazing.”
“You never liked Amanda.”
“I didn’t reallyknowAmanda,” I point out, which is mostly true. I only met her once, when she and Ren first dated, and then, through vague family updates, witnessed the rekindling of their relationship. It was six months after things between us blew up, and it felt like such an inevitability that I could only feel numb at the news. What I did know about her was enough to tell me that she and I probably wouldn’t get along, because she was, in a lot of ways, the opposite of me. Interested in different things, one of those people who might tell a deeply anxious person to juststop worrying about it!In a well-meaning, if perhaps somewhat ill-informed way, of course. Ren would never date an unkind person, and I understood what he saw in her. She was self-assured, successful, put-together. “But she made you happy, so I liked her. Fair enough?”
“Sure,” Ren says. He shakes his head, reaches under the table to check the legs a last time. “Anyway, she’s great. But I just… I couldn’t marry her.”
He makes his way back across the room, but halfway there, he turns back to me. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“We’re the only two unmarried kids left, Joni,” he says with mock seriousness before walking back for the next table. “What are we going to do about it?”
“Know anyone up for a marriage of convenience?” I ask, following him. “I bring a never-ending sense of doom and a total lack of direction to the table.”
It’s out before the words are even fully formed in my head. It was once safe to say anything to Ren, so much so that my thoughts mostly spilled out unedited. Now, talking to him this way feels precarious.
He pauses, his hand on the table, shoots me a curious look. “Something you want to share?”
“No,” I say, waving it off as blood rushes to my ears, and I focus on pulling the legs down. I can’t tell Ren what I really mean—that my life is currently the equivalent of a raft floating in the middle of the Pacific, no compass in sight.
Ren is still looking at me, a familiar expression on his face. “Joni,” he says. “If you want to talk about anything—”
“I know,” I cut in quickly. Then, softening my tone, “Thank you.” I’ve had enoughalmosttalking about work today. I try to pivot. “Being back here with everybody has been pretty great.”
Ren smiles skeptically. “Even when our mothers won’t stop badgering us?”
“Okay, maybe not that part,” I admit. The interrogation Ren and I underwent in the kitchen is a great example of why neither of us has told our families, especially our moms, that we’re no longer friends. If we told them, they’d force us to sit down in some kind of intervention that would have made it all worse.
“Well,” Ren says, picking at the edge of the table with a thumbnail. “That worry is always here for you.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe I stayed away too long.” It’s a thought that’s plagued me over the years.Everyone was moving on with their lives, after all. There was only so long I could stay away before I would be left behind for good.
I reach down to turn the table over, but Ren stops me, steadying it with his hand so I have to look him in the eye.
“I hope you know you didn’t need to do that,” he says, a hint of worry lining his forehead. “I could have stayed away, if that would have meant you’d come. I didn’t think—”
