This Summer Will Be Different(37)

He shook Zach’s hand and gave Joy a kiss on the cheek. “Hey, Colin,” she said.

“We all went to school together,” Zach explained as Colin said hello to Bridget.

Colin gestured at Joy with his beer can. “I’d heard you and Wolf were back together. Is he here?”

Scarlet spread across Joy’s cheeks. She shook her head. “We aren’t together.”

Colin scratched his beard, and I thought he looked relieved. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I heard yous were talking again, and my brother said he ran into you together at Upstreet Brewing.”

“We’re just friends,” Joy said. She turned to me. “I follow In Bloom on Instagram. I love that wedding bouquet you posted last week. The one with the cabbages?”

I stared at her open-mouthed. The bride wanted something “unique” and “not girly,” and I responded with purple and green kale, sedum, amaranthus, sage, and rosemary. Even Farah was impressed.

“It was kale,” I said to Joy.

“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “And the herbs? Genius. You’re so talented. And your shop looks so amazing. I want to stop in the next time I’m in Toronto.”

I was stunned. After everything Bridget told me, Joy was not what I expected.

Felix was twenty-two when he proposed. He and Joy had been together for seven years, but she broke off the engagement a week after saying yes. Bridget and I were newly minted roommates back then, and she was shocked by the sudden way Joy dropped her brother, but she thought their friendship would endure. It had made it through Joy quitting hockey to get her grades up. It had weathered Bridget moving to Toronto and Joy to Nova Scotia for school. But it didn’t survive Felix, and Bridget was devastated.

The twin breakups—Joy’s with Felix and Joy’s with Bridget—brought us closer together. A good friendship origin story involves a villain. Ours was Joy.

“I need to find myself” and “I don’t know who I am”—two things Joy told Felix when she gave him back the ring—soon became part of our lexicon. As in:

“Can you take out the recycling?”

“I wish I could, but I need to find myself.”

I glanced at Bridget now, bewildered. Joy was lovely.

“Thanks,” I said. “I have a lot of help, especially from this one.” I bumped Bridget with my hip. “She’s the reason my accountant loves me.”

“Lucky. There’s no one who loves a spreadsheet more than you, right, Bridge?” Joy looked at Bridget with a shy smile.

Bridget didn’t reply. She blinked at Joy with a pained expression, like she was fighting back tears. She grabbed my arm and squeaked, “We have to go.” She yanked me to the other side of the room to get ciders from an ice-filled cooler on the mahogany dining table.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said, though obviously she wasn’t. “I can’t believe she and Wolf are friends again. We were friends first, and she abandoned me like I meant nothing. Obviously he always mattered more to her.”

“I’m sure that’s not true. I’m sure she misses you. You’re the best. But it’s been a long time. Maybe she thinks you wouldn’t be interested in a relationship.”

“I’m not.”

“Really? She seems nice.”

Bridget peered around me, taking a long sip of her cider. “I can’t go there again.”

I followed her line of sight. Zach and Joy were deep in conversation.

“Traitor,” she grumbled.

I finished my drink almost as fast as Bridget did hers, but I cut myself off on the next round because Bridget was throwing back ciders with slaphappy enthusiasm. I’d never seen her this thrown off by another person.

“Joy broke both our hearts.” That’s what she told me back then. But I hadn’t realized until now that there was only one ex in Bridget’s life who really mattered, and that ex was Joy. The person who held her childhood memories. The woman who saw her through braces and first boyfriends, who witnessed her break an arm on the ice, who helped skate her off, who came with her parents to the hospital. Her oldest friend.

An hour and two more ciders later, Bridget rejected my suggestion she switch to water. Another hour and one more cider after that, she was asleep on the pile of coats on Zach’s bed.

When the rest of the party had cleared out, Zach, Joy, and I sat Bridget up, got her to take a drink of water, and helped her into the passenger seat of her parents’ car.

“Do you want me to follow you home?” Joy asked. “I can help you get her up to her room.”

Blah. What an angel. “Yeah. That would be great.”





18





Thanksgiving, Three Years Ago





The Clarks’ Thanksgiving Day dinner preparations began shortly after breakfast. Bridget and I were on mashed potato casserole duty, still dressed in our jammies. She in a hockey jersey and hole-ridden leggings, I in a long-sleeve flannelette nightgown covered in tiny flowers that the firefighter I’d been sleeping with referred to as a boner killer.

Bridget peeled and I sliced the potatoes into large hunks with the oversize chef’s knife Christine forced into my hands.

“I don’t see what’s wrong with a paring knife,” I said to Bridget when her mom was busy making the stuffing.