“It wasn’t you, right?” she said by way of a greeting.
I paused. “No. It was me.”
There was a sharp intake of breath past her teeth. “I see,” she said, echoing her mother’s censure of choice. A tiny piece of my heart that hadn’t yet shattered fell apart. Despite it all, Sharon still wanted to please her mother, even if doing so meant becoming her.
“I’m so, so sorry.” She was silent. “I never wanted to hurt you—please know that. The whole thing started because of Caryn’s friends, but without the context of the five weddings, it didn’t make sense why I was so—God, I don’t even know—jaded? Cynical?”
“Mean?” she supplied.
“Yes. Mean too.” The Buzzfeed post said I might just be the snarkiest person in the world, which I hoped was hyperbolic. “But I tried to focus on the people who were making my life difficult, and you never once did that.”
“Lily, you called my mother a Japanese horror monster and said her skin was pulled so tight from plastic surgery that you were worried it would split open during the wedding and all of the demons inside her would come spilling out.”
Crap. I did say that, didn’t I?
But Sharon wasn’t done. “Not to mention you called me spineless when it came to her and said I would throw myself off a bridge if she told me to.”
“I didn’t say ‘spineless,’ but—I mean, you didn’t even want this wedding.”
The next thing she said was so quiet that I almost couldn’t hear it. “I did, actually.”
“You told me you wanted to elope and your mother was forcing you to have a wedding.”
I heard her start to cry. Which didn’t mean she was upset; Sharon cried when she was angry instead of yelling. “She ‘forced’ me because I wasn’t brave enough to do it if she didn’t push me. I’ve been in therapy for eight years to deal with my social anxiety issues, and I said I wanted to elope because I didn’t think anyone would actually come if I had a real wedding.”
“I—didn’t know any of that.”
“Of course you didn’t. I hide it. Not that you ever asked if I was okay when I didn’t go out to things. You just stopped inviting me.”
I stopped inviting her because she always said no. She was busy, or tired, or had other plans. But wasn’t that the hallmark of social anxiety? Struggling to say yes to social outings?
Sharon and I had lived together for two years. She usually went out when I did in college, but she almost always had a drink or two at home first. But after college, she moved home to save money for a couple years, and I moved to Bethesda, first with Megan, then with Becca, when Megan switched jobs and wanted to move farther north. When Sharon stopped coming out, I just assumed her mother was exerting her domineering force over Sharon’s social life and that I had been cut out.
If that wasn’t the case—what had I just done to my friend?
“So you—wanted the big wedding with the white dress and the whole nine yards?”
“Yes. I want to get to do everything that everyone else does too.”
“But you always said—”
“I didn’t think anyone would want to marry me, so I pretended I didn’t want any of it.”
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?