For the Love of Friends(85)

I stopped again. Did I think anyone would ever want to marry me? Well, not today, obviously, but I always assumed it would happen someday. Kids too, even though my mother might be right that at thirty-two, perhaps I was cutting it close on that one. I joked that I would be a crazy cat lady who hated cats, but I never for a moment thought I was truly destined to be alone.

I was quiet and humbled when I replied. “I’m sorry, Sharon.”

She was still crying, but the tone had changed. “I don’t think that’s enough.”

I started to ask what I could do, but Amy’s words rang in my ears. “I know. And I’ll do whatever I need to do to make this right.”

“I don’t know if you can. How am I supposed to make my mother look at you in all of my wedding pictures, knowing what you said about her?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t either.”

There was a long pause. “Do you want me to not be in your wedding anymore?”

Another pause. “I have to think about it.”

“Okay,” I said quietly. “I’ll do whatever you want. And I really am sorry.”

I wasn’t crying when I hung up the phone—I honestly didn’t know if my eyes were capable of producing more tears. But I was shaken to the core. What kind of friend was I? What kind of person?

It had never once occurred to me to stop and look at Sharon’s behavior through any lens other than my own. I thought, after knowing her for so many years, that Sharon was like me. Which, saying that now, sounded like an insult. But I thought all of my friends were like me. I couldn’t fathom why Caryn cared what Caroline thought, even after she told me about the circumstances of her dad’s death, because I didn’t care about money or social status. I thought Megan was being unreasonable about Alex, but I hadn’t once let her know how I felt about him. She wasn’t a mind reader any more than I was.

Buzzfeed was wrong. I wasn’t the snarkiest person in the world. I was just one of the least self-aware. I thought everyone else was the problem, but it had been me all along. Okay, not entirely me. Caryn’s physical demands had gotten ridiculous, and Megan was probably the most like me in that she wasn’t exactly examining my motives either.

But one thing was certain. In making the blog about me, I had proven I didn’t deserve the position any of my friends or siblings had elevated me to by asking me to be in their weddings.

No wonder I’m alone, I thought.

I shook my head. I wasn’t going to be able to fix everything. That much was obvious. Sharon and Caryn would probably never speak to me again, and they’d be entirely right not to. But my family would have to get over it eventually.

At least I hoped they would.

Phone calls in which my brother conveyed information from me to Madison had historically not worked in my favor. Jake and Madison were leaving the following day to go back to Chicago until Amy’s wedding, so I decided to kill several birds with one stone and just show up at my parents’ house to beg forgiveness from everyone at once.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX


My apartment was only about twenty minutes away from my childhood home, which, on the drive that day, felt metaphorical for how far I hadn’t come from childhood. When you’re a kid, you think you’ll know how to do everything once you’re an adult. But I must have screwed up somewhere along the way because Amy was the only one actually speaking to me, and I was driving to my parents’ house to apologize for being the biggest jerk on the planet. Not to mention the distinct possibility that I would need Amy’s recently vacated room, depending on how things played out at work.

I parked in the driveway next to Jake’s rental car and took a moment to steel myself. I reached for the doorknob to let myself in—I had never knocked at my parents’ house unless I had forgotten my key—but this wasn’t a normal visit. So I removed my hand and pushed the doorbell, then waited.

My father opened the door, his glasses absentmindedly far down his nose. “Lily?” he asked, pushing the glasses up. “What are you doing here? And why did you ring the bell?”

“I didn’t think I should just walk into the arena unannounced. The lions should know I’m coming.”

He patted my shoulder and gestured for me to come in. “It’s not as bad as all that. Your mother—well—you know how she gets. Everything is the end of the world. Until the next big crisis, at which point that’s the end of the world. Hopefully the florist screws up something for Amy’s wedding and she’ll forget all about this.”

My eyes welled up in gratitude. He patted me again awkwardly. “I’m sorry you had to see all that though,” I said. “I never would have said as much if I thought people would know it was me—it wasn’t all true, you know.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t read a word. I’m just going off what your mother told me.”

“But she said you read it all.”

“Good God, no. Sweetheart, I didn’t survive having two teenage daughters by going snooping through your private thoughts. If I found a diary, and I did from time to time, I kept it closed.”

I looked at him in wonder. I didn’t understand how two such polar opposites as he and my mom could be so content after thirty-five years of marriage, yet here they were. Somehow they worked.