Laurie bit her lip. “I don’t know exactly what I want.”
June sighed. “I’m just going to tell you one thing, and I hope that you understand that I’m saying this out of love. Like, decades and decades of love. Okay?” She came over and put her hand on Laurie’s arm. “I find the way you approach this exhausting.”
To her own surprise, Laurie laughed. “That’s direct.”
“Well, my kids have worn me out.” She sighed. “You talk like you’re choosing between having this relationship and preserving your identity, you know? Like down one road, you’re in a church with a ring and you’re fusing yourself with somebody else for the rest of your life, and down the other road, you’re this lone wolf hiking around the world and only stopping to make satellite phone calls to your parents so they know you’re alive. I keep wanting to reassure you—you know, I am still myself, even though I got married and even though I had kids and even though I let somebody else make some of the decisions about what color to paint the living room. And I really think no matter what you do, you are going to be on your own sometimes, and you are going to be dependent on other people sometimes. As I was today when I started this spaghetti sauce by myself and then texted you because I needed an assist. And you came.”
“I did,” Laurie agreed, looking down at her wineglass.
“Laur,” June said, “you don’t have to be single to be independent. And you don’t have to be married to be loved. That’s not the choice. And I think you owe it to yourself to at least figure out what options you have before you assume that what you really want is impossible.” June took a big slug from her wineglass, and then she went back to the stove. “Oh, look. Water’s boiling,” she said. “You were right.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Laurie startled awake the next morning when there was a sharp knock on the door. She dragged herself out of bed, pulled her hair back, and called out that she would be just a minute, then she pulled on soft pants and her Springsteen shirt. She opened the front door and found Matt Pell on her doorstep, shifting back and forth on his feet. “Matt,” she said.
“I need to talk to you.” His smile was gone, he was wearing a plain gray shirt, and suddenly, she believed that she was actually seeing who he was.
“That’s great,” she said. “Because I need to talk to you, too.” She stepped aside, and he followed her in. She shut the door behind him and said, “I’m going to go first. I want you to look at something.” She went to her bag and found the fake appraisal. She pushed it into his hand. “This is fake. It’s fake, and it’s not even a good fake.”
She half expected that he would defend it, that he would start to tell her that this was a completely legit document, and that the auction house was lying or denying their work, or maybe that there was some big misunderstanding, and couldn’t they listen to some Natalie Merchant and talk about it? So she was surprised when he frowned at the paper. “I’m sorry, tell me what this is again?”
She laughed. “This is the ‘appraisal’ you gave me, and I know it’s fake. I talked to Wesson & Truitt. I called them on their real phone line. I know this number—this number you put here—rings that insufferable hipster phone in your store that you don’t answer. They told me this isn’t from them. It’s not their document number, because they start their document numbers with a letter. It’s also got dummy text on it, and they never looked at a duck that was supposedly a Kittery. They didn’t make this.” She grabbed it back from him and flapped it in the air an inch from his face.
“This what?” He took it from her and turned it over and over in his hands. “I don’t know what this is.”
Her ears started to ring. “This is the paper you brought me. This is the…the thing you gave me. This is the thing you gave me that was the entire reason I sold you the duck. This was your proof that it wasn’t worth anything. This was the appraisal you promised me.”
He held it in his hands. He looked at it. He looked, for whatever reason, at the back of the sheet, as if he barely understood what paper was to begin with. “I don’t recognize this,” he said.
Laurie felt something in her chest start to expand like a balloon full of lava. “You gave this to me in this living room,” she said. “You gave it to me over there.” She pointed. “We were right there, and you came in, and—”