For the Love of Friends(88)

“Didn’t I raise you better than that? To have some self-respect?”

“Mom, I’m thirty-two, not sixteen. I made a decision—albeit a terrible one—but I’m not the first thirty-something to have sex. You had two of your three kids by my age.”

“I was married!”

“You used to love Sex and the City, so please spare me your outrage about sleeping with someone without a ring. I made a really bad decision, and I’m paying the price for it in spades.”

“Thank God you didn’t sleep with the other groomsman too. At least there’s that.”

I felt my face screwing up as I fought to keep from crying, but there was no stopping it. “Mom, you have to stop. You have to. You’re all over me all the time and it’s too much. I can’t be you. I can’t be Amy. All I can be is me. And I’m sorry me isn’t enough for you, but it’s all I am.”

She was stunned into silence and I hung my head. I don’t know what I expected her to say. It wasn’t like she was going to change. I didn’t think she was capable of it at that point. She was who she was, just like I had said about myself.

But the silence was more than I could bear and the truth started pouring out of me. “I wish I could be the person you want me to be and be married with kids already, but I don’t wish it for me at all. I wish it for you. Because even though I like who I am, I wish I could make you happy.”

She still hadn’t spoken, and I went back to the last thing she had said. “And no, I didn’t sleep with Alex. I—I love him. He’s—he’s my best friend. And he said I’m his. And I ruined it all. So please, Mom, please, please, please, don’t make this about what I did to you.”

I got up to try to leave, but she put a hand on my arm, stopping me, her face stricken. “You—love—him?”

My shoulders dropped and I nodded. I hadn’t even let myself think that word. But it came out on its own, and there was no way to shove it back into Pandora’s box.

Her entire countenance changed—this was right in her wheelhouse, after all. And I, unlike Amy, never allowed her to share in my romantic mishaps. She rose and wrapped her arms around me. “Oh, Lily.”

It was the comfort that I wanted, but a heavy price to pay to get it. My aunt, siblings, and grandmother would all know the details of the Alex situation, probably heavily embellished with additional details that had never happened, by the time I was halfway down the street on my way home, no matter how she might swear never to tell a soul. But it wasn’t like Alex would be my date to Amy’s wedding anymore—if that had been the case, this would have been its own new disaster.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, when I was able to stop my eyes from overflowing. “It’s over now.”

“Who is this person talking to me? Not my daughter, who never gives up until she gets her way. No, he’ll come around.”

It was the first time in my memory that my mother had offered praise of my tenacity instead of bemoaning my stubbornness. If Jake and Amy were to be believed, she talked me up constantly when I wasn’t around. To my face, however, an interaction with her always left me feeling like I had been pecked at by a small but ferocious bird, who knew exactly where my weakest spots were. With love, of course, and the desire to make me better. But it still left me with the sensation that if I drank a glass of water after seeing her, it would come pouring out of the holes she had left like a sieve. So this—this was new territory. And a tiny ray of hope bolstered me.

But I shook my head. That was a pipe dream. Squaring your shoulders and vowing that you would get the guy back might work for Scarlett O’Hara, but real life didn’t work that way. “No. I messed up too much.”

“Nonsense. Even if he said that, he didn’t mean it.”

“He made it pretty clear he’s done with me.”

The corners of her mouth rose into a frighteningly determined grin, her eyes lighting at the challenge. “Isn’t he a groomsman in Megan’s wedding?” I nodded. “And aren’t you giving a speech at that wedding?”

I looked away. “I don’t know anymore.”

“What did Megan say?”

“I haven’t talked to her yet.”

“Lily! She’s been your friend for how many years?”

I looked back up, bemused. “And you wanted your apology before Madison’s?”

She waved a hand in the air. “You have to talk to Megan.”

“I’m going to.” It was too complicated to explain why I wasn’t ready yet.

“Good. Then you can use your speech to win him back.” She kept talking, pacing as she formulated her plan of how I would convince Alex to love me back, and I watched her. This strange, indomitable woman whose body I came from. She would never understand defeat—I didn’t think it was even in her vocabulary—any more than she would understand why using my maid of honor speech (if I was still giving one) to win Alex back would only prove to everyone, including Alex, that I had learned nothing.

Instead of arguing, I nodded, thanked her, and kissed her on the cheek when I rose to leave. She grabbed me in a tight hug and whispered in my ear, “They conquer who believe they can.” My mother was a paradox to the last—make a Shakespeare reference and she told you to speak English, yet here she was, whispering a quote from a two-thousand-years-dead philosopher. And if I mentioned Virgil, she would respond, “Who? I saw that on a pillow at Home Goods.”