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A relief, but not a surprise.
The part that surprised her was that she wasn’t more devastated about Ben. As the afternoon flew by, her anger had faded, but sorrow hadn’t taken its place. She’d been right when she told Allie she wasn’t done with him yet.
It was the opposite of how she’d felt about Dan. She’d broken up with him badly—ineptly, shamefully—and it hadn’t felt good. But it had felt correct, because it had been the right thing to do.
Nothing about Ben’s leaving felt correct, so May simply refused to accept that it was over. “I’m going back to New York,” she said.
Allie turned off the faucet, and the sudden silence echoed in the tiny bathroom.
After a few beats, Allie said, “Give me the dress.”
May removed it from the hanger. She ran one finger over the plain strapless bodice, its horizontal pleats the only decoration that the elegant, heavy satin required.
She placed the dress on Allie’s lap. Allie flipped it over, took a deep breath, and plunged the hem into the tub with her eyes squeezed shut.
“What if he won’t see you?” she asked.
“That’s not why.”
“Please.”
“That’s not all of it. I need to find out … who I can be there, I guess. Who I am, when I’m not trying so hard to be who everybody expects me to be.”
Allie swished the dress around in the water. “You think it’s been in here long enough?”
“No. Are you kidding? You just put it in.”
“I think it’s long enough.” Allie lifted the dress out. It wasn’t pink. It was sort of … liver-colored. “Whugh,” she said. “That is not good.”
“I told you.”
“You always tell me. How am I going to avoid turning into a human disaster if you leave me here alone? No Matt, no May. I’ll be a train wreck.”
“So come with me.”
“Do you think this will turn more pink if I put it back in?”
“No.”
Allie plunged the dress back into the tub, deeper this time. “Maybe I should.”
May put a hand on her shoulder and peered into the tub. There
were still unmixed granules of dye on the bottom, and Allie was making no apparent effort to immerse the dress in stages for a dip-dyed effect. This was almost certainly the worst idea she’d ever had.
“Maybe you should. But you can’t do it for me. You can only do it for you.”
“Can we go tomorrow?”
May searched the countertop for her wineglass. Both glasses sat side by side, empty. She refilled them and passed one to her sister.
“I think it’s pretty likely that tomorrow we’ll be too busy wishing we were dead to drive to New York.”
“In an ideal world, we’d have a convertible for the drive. We could wear silk scarves on our heads and big, fabulous sunglasses with rhinestones.”
“And eat aspirin straight out of the bottle.”
“Yeah, we’ll crunch it up like candy because we’re just that hardcore.”
