“No, I’m upset because you’re always the one who leaves and I’m always the one whose fault it is. You can’t even just say you’re leaving because you want to. ‘I choose something else.’ You act like you’re being driven off by some set of expectations that presumably I have? And I don’t think I have them. I never said it was here or nothing, never. If you’re not even up for a conversation about meeting halfway, that’s fine, but don’t put the whole thing on me.”
“Halfway?” she said. “So, what, Minneapolis? Is that halfway? There’s no halfway here. You go off with somebody, and they want one thing and you want a different thing and it’s not halfway, you just end up trying to win and lose an equal number of times. Especially with big things, and especially when you’re older like we are, what’s the play? I’m not going to give up everything. I have spent too much time on my life to decide I don’t need it anymore because of however I feel about you.”
“However you feel,” he repeated.
She set her jaw. “Nick, I knew it was going to get harder for me, I knew I was going to make a complete mess out of it, and I’m sorry if I made it harder for you too. It sounds crazy, but how I feel about you is absolutely not the point. It’s not you. It’s that I wake up at two in the morning when I sleep with other people, no matter who it is. I want to sleep through the night. I don’t want to fight over waffle makers. I don’t want to negotiate vacations every single time, I want to go where I want to go, like Dot did.”
He nodded. “You want the pictures and the spoons and the books, but really you don’t want anything.”
Laurie stood up and walked into the bedroom. She had been sorting Polaroids for weeks now, and she had a big box that was labeled PEOPLE. It was sitting beside the box that was labeled FAMILY. Laurie stacked one on top of the other, and when she carried them back out to the living room, they were heavy, heavy with the years and years of click-flash, click-flash. She went over to the chair where Nick was and put both boxes on his lap with a hard thump. She pulled the lid off the PEOPLE box on top and pulled out a handful of Polaroids. She took Nick’s hand with one of hers, turned it palm up, and pushed the pictures into his grip. “It’s not about not wanting anything,” Laurie said. “It’s about what I know how to have. Do you get it?”
“Not really,” he said. “But I know you mean it.”
She sat beside him and put her hand on his knee. “I’m incredibly glad we did this,” she said. “Incredibly glad. You will never, never know how much I appreciate the fact that we got to spend time together again.”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah. Me too.”
He left not long after that, kissing her at the door, but quickly. Just as she shut the door, Laurie had a text from June. Hey, Charlie’s at a bachelor party and I have to feed my kids and I could really use an extra hand. Any chance you’d like to come over for dinner?
Laurie tapped back right away: I would love to.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Over at the Devons’， June was part of the way through making spaghetti sauce, and Bethie had just finished a complete meltdown over Tommy breaking one of her headbands. She was now up in her room reading while Tommy watched videos in the living room. June’s face had the slight puff of someone who might have recently been in tears, and she kept peering down at the pot of water on the stove. “It won’t boil,” she said. “I swear, it has been on there for fifteen minutes and it won’t even simmer.”
Laurie came up next to her and put her arm around June’s shoulders. “Hey. Heat works, I promise. Boiling still works. You can see the tiny bubbles on the bottom. It’s going to happen.”
June smiled weakly. “Right before I texted you, I was sitting at my dining room table with my head down, and I was chanting, I love my kids, I love my kids.”
Laurie gave her a squeeze. “Of course you do, but they can also be pains in the butt, Junie.” She picked up a wooden spoon and stirred the sauce in the skillet. “This looks good. Smells good, too.”
“I hope it is good,” June said. “I really thought we were going to have this nice mom-and-kids dinner while their dad is out at this stupid thing he didn’t even want to go to, and then I burned my hand, and Bethie started screaming about the headband, and she told her brother she hates him, and he said he hates her too, and they’re probably both going to be fine in fifteen minutes and I’ll still be standing here with my head exploding.”