I nodded at the woman across the table. Avonlea, Max’s girlfriend, had seemed nice enough so far. It had been a total surprise to get her text inviting me for coffee. I had said yes because I was so curious about her and why she might have wanted to meet, but I’d figured that she was as flakey as my brother. I’d expected to be stood up. Instead, she had gotten here before I did and then had offered to pay for my drink.
It was very strange.
“You’re welcome,” I answered. “I couldn’t imagine what you wanted to talk to me about.” That was a hint for her to tell me but she didn’t immediately rise to the bait.
“You’re Max’s sister,” she said, smiling.
True, but so what? I nodded and waited.
“I kind of remember you from when I was in high school with him,” she said. “You used to be…around. A lot.”
Yes, correct. I had followed my brother whenever I could, sticking to him like he had his own gravitational pull, until he’d finally blown up and told me to fuck the hell off. I had.
“You were so cute,” she said next.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you were little and you had those pretty blue eyes. They’re so light,” she pointed out. “It’s kind of freaky. In a good way!”
“Oh. Thanks,” I said. “I guess.”
“In a good way,” she reiterated. “You and Max look a lot alike but you and your sister are practically twins. How is Morgan doing?”
It was a question for which I didn’t have a good response. My sister and I hadn’t talked in a while, not since she and my mom had realized that I’d moved out.
“When were you going to tell us?” she had texted. “What’s wrong with you?”
Neither of them seemed to have noticed that I’d gone ahead and also graduated on the day I’d left. “You don’t really care. Don’t pretend,” I’d written back, and that had been the sum total of our final communication. I was better off without her and without my turncoat mom, who seemed to have forgotten which daughter had been there on those late nights figuring out the mess of the books or keeping track of inventory, which daughter had always come in to work when the other siblings got “busy” or just “couldn’t.” Which daughter had taken an extra year toget her college degree because of neglecting classes, dropping requirements, and struggling with scheduling because she had to be at the restaurant?
“Um, I asked how Morgan is doing,” Avonlea reminded me.
“Fine,” I told her. “How’s Max?”
He was what she really wanted to talk about. First of all, she let me know that she’d always liked him, ever since they’d been in high school together. “We had the same history class and he used to help me when I didn’t understand,” she said.
My brother helped someone else? “Maxdid that?” I clarified.
“Yes, he’s so sweet!” She went on to give me more examples of this purported trait. When they had run into each other again last fall, he had bought her a drink and walked her to her car. When they had started dating, he texted her every night before he went to sleep and he always gave her a little compliment, too.
“I never thought I had cute toes before,” she told me, blushing and smiling. “He likes so many things about me.”
Well, ok. That did sound pretty nice, but I waited to hear more before developing a firm opinion.
She continued. Now that they were living together, he did practically all the cooking and cleaning so when she came home from work, there was always a delicious dinner. Well, it was mostly delicious, she amended, because he was still learning his way around the kitchen. But it was the thought that counted, she reminded me.
“Does he have a job?” I asked her. “Does he pay any bills or buy any of the food for those semi-delicious dinners?”
She immediately sprang to his defense. “He has so many great ideas for new businesses! I’m very impressed by his ingenuity.”
“Do you seriously believe that any of those ideas would work?” I asked her and now she didn’t have an answer. Apparently, Avonlea wasn’t a liar so she didn’t immediately say yes. Instead, she blushed again in an angry way and pressed her lips together.
“Are his ideas what you wanted to talk about?” I wondered. “Is that the real reason you wanted to meet me, to get me to invest in one of his crazy plans? I don’t have any money.” I had gotten a job as a server (so I was back in another restaurant), but the pay wasn’t great and I certainly wasn’t going to waste any of it on another dumb scheme.
“No, I don’t want your money!” Her nose went right up in the air as she told me about her mother, who was rich beyond anything I could ever think of. “I work for her and if Max needs something, I can provide it!”
“Lucky guy,” I commented. He was smarter than I’d given him credit for. He had apparently tricked his wealthy, employed girlfriend into liking him by pretending to be nice. I wondered if it had physically pained him to give her those compliments about her toes, since he’d never had a good thing to say about anyone in our family.
“There’s one thing that I can’t provide, an intangible that could come from you. Oh, ‘intangible’ means something you can’t touch,” she explained.
