Chapter Twenty-Four

ETHAN

Lara and I are out to dinner. Nathan has Riley for the night, as part of my parents’ and his insistence that Lara and I both get an occasional break from minding Riley. The party is still two weeks away, but it’s more or less prepared. As prepared as it’s going to get, anyway, until the day of.

“I’ve gotten just about all the RSVPs,” Lara says, taking a sip of her sangria. We’ve both, maybe without thinking about it, avoided drinking alcohol since the time we had sex. Neither of us was drunk that night, but there’s something about drinking that sort of lowers inhibitions, and I don’t think either one of us is anxious to repeat that.

“All the stuff is booked. I think I’ve got the final order for the cake to send,” I say.

Lara wanted to do the cake herself, but I talked her out of it, saying that I’d foot the bill for the whole thing if I had to. Alexis had insisted on making the cake for Riley’s first birthday. I can still remember, all too clearly, how stressed out it made her when she couldn’t get it perfect, and how many tears she cried over it until she got it as right as it could be. That’s not an experience I want to repeat, even if I have my doubts that Lara would get that stressed, or that upset.

“What flavor did you end up choosing?”

I grin. The cake is a little nod to Alexis, not much of one, but enough that people who know her well will appreciate it.

“Strawberry-vanilla,” I say.

Lara’s eyes widen, and I know she’s caught it, but I hope she’s okay with it.

“I think that’s great,” she says.

I’d tasted the sample cake at the bakery, a simple vanilla cake with buttercream and strawberry preserves, and it reminded me of the wedding cake that Alexis and I had had. It was simple, and it was delicious, and it had given me one of the first really pleasant reminders that I’d had of Alexis since the terrible night she’d passed.

“It’ll be good to have a little… not a tribute, but at least something,” I say. I feel awkward about it. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything at all. Lara sets aside her sangria and the waiter comes with our appetizer before she can say anything. We both thank the guy serving us, and Lara grabs a fried mushroom out of the basket.

“That makes sense,” she says quietly.

“If it bothers you, I can have them change it,” I say.

Lara shakes her head.

“No, I just wasn’t even thinking about it. People will think it’s weird if we don’t have any kind of reference to Alexis at the party,” Lara says.

“Yeah,” I agree. I hadn’t even thought about that in the moment that I’d told the bakery what I wanted. I’d just wanted it, for my own reasons. I’d wanted something that I could have as a reminder of the mother to my daughter.

“It should be a nice party,” Lara points out.

I nod my agreement and pluck a fried pickle out of the appetizer basket, dip it in some horseradish ranch, and pop it in my mouth.

“I don’t think Alexis could have planned anything better,” I suggest.

Lara winces, it lasts less than a second, just long enough to make me wonder if I’ve imagined it, and then she smiles.

“I’m glad that I’ll be around for it, that I won’t miss it the way I did her first birthday,” Lara says.

“You know… Alexis was sure, when she had Riley, that you’d come around eventually,” I tell her cautiously.

“She was?” Lara looks up and takes another quick sip of her sangria, following it with a longer sip of her water.

“She was really…” I press my lips together. We’re getting into dangerous territory. No matter how things have changed, I can’t quite fight the lingering sense that all along, so much of the pain my wife, and I, went through could have been avoided.

“If we’re going to talk about it, we might as well actually talk about it,” Lara says with a sigh.

“She never stopped wanting to mend the breach,” I tell Lara.

“She shouldn’t have caused one in the first place,” Lara says tartly. She sighs. “I know, I know.”

“She didn’t intend to hurt your feelings, and neither did I,” I point out.

“We’ve been over this,” Lara says, looking at me levelly.

“The important thing is this, from pretty much the moment you cut her off, she wanted to be… she wanted to get close to you again. She said it was wrong for you to never be around the family.”

Lara shrugs. “I didn’t want to be the cause of a bunch of drama,” she says.

“You created drama by insisting on never coming to any family events,” I counter, and I can hear the bitterness in my own voice. How many nights did I have to deal with Alexis crying because her mother informed her over the phone that yet again, Lara wasn’t going to be there? Or that she’d called Lara and gotten no answer, not even voice mail?

“I would have created much more drama if I’d made myself go,” Lara insists.

“How?” I pop a fried mushroom into my mouth and ignore the stinging burn of it as the hot liquid squirts out.

“Every time I would have seen the two of you together it would have ended up in a fight. Do you really think it would have been good for anyone, especially Riley, for that to happen?”

I roll my eyes at that argument.

“You managed not to start a fight with us at Thanksgiving or Christmas last year,” I point out.

“Only because I was trying really hard, and only because I didn’t pay any attention to either of you,” Lara counters. She takes a deep breath and exhales on a sigh.

“You could have done it before,” I say.

Lara shakes her head.

“I couldn’t have. It was because Mom was dead, and Dad was desperate, and all that,” she says. She sighs again and snags a deep-fried pickle.

“So, you didn’t want to cause level-ten drama, and instead just caused constant level-seven drama,” I say bitterly.

Lara scowls at me. “Do you have any idea how badly the two of you hurt me? Really and truly. You’re going on about how much Alexis was in pain, but do you even realize how bad it was for me?”

“We went over this. You broke up with me. What I do after that isn’t anything to do with you,” I say firmly. “And it definitely doesn’t have to do with Alexis.”

Lara sighs and shakes her head. “It was like being stabbed. It really felt that way. When I left the house that day… it felt as if I had two knives in my back. I wasn’t even sure I could breathe. Do you really think I should have been forced to go through that every time I went to a family gathering?”

I try to imagine it. As much as Alexis’ pain over losing her sister got to me, I have to admit that neither of us, really, ever thought that Lara had really, truly been hurt. Or at least, I didn’t. I’d thought that Lara was just being petty, that she was bitter and resentful. That she was trying to make Alexis pay.

Even now I can’t quite believe that it could have possibly hurt Lara that much to see her ex-boyfriend with her sister. I can’t imagine it, really. But obviously she believes it.

“We wanted to reconnect with you all along. Alexis especially,” I say.

“Well, want in one hand, spit in the other. I think you wanted the impossible…” Lara smiles wryly, and we both lapse into silence.

“Let’s talk about something else for a while,” I suggest.

Lara agrees, and we start talking about Riley’s new words, about the traffic on the expressway, about anything — anything, except the complicated mess that our relationships have become.