Lucas sighed and clicked off the television. Startled, I turned to look at him.
“Did it ever occur to you,” he asked, each word so slow and deliberate I got the feeling they’d been boiling in there, “that your sister Raine is jealous of you?”
I think my mouth actually fell open.
“And I have a radical idea,” he said, temper kicking in his voice. “How about you tell her to fuck off instead of letting her play passive-aggressive games with your head?”
Chapter Nineteen
What are you talking about?” I demanded, staring at Lucas as if he’d lost his mind.
“I’m talking about your sister,” Lucas said in a very controlled, but still notably tense tone. “I heard her in here, making all her insinuations and talking about your career like having a chair on a major symphony orchestra is something you should be embarrassed about.” He rolled his eyes. “Yet taking pictures of her own crotch and plastering them across a bar in San Francisco? That’s art.”
“There’s something about Raine that’s just free,” I argued, feeling compelled to leap to the defense of those pictures for the second time. She was my sister, after all. He didn’t understand the context. “She doesn’t have to practice every day, she isn’t compelled to do what anybody tells her, and she gets to live her life on her own terms.”
Unlike Lucas and me, who worked all the time, and were forever answering to other people: Lucas to his clients, me to my fellow cellists, the orchestra, the conductor, the audiences—the list went on and on.
“And what does she do with all this glorious freedom?” Lucas asked. The sarcasm in his voice was scathing. “Oh, right, she tends bar. Not very well, as I remember. And she sticks a camera in her crotch and then is pretentious about it.”
“Stop saying crotch!” I snapped at him. “Just because you and I might not understand Raine’s art doesn’t mean it’s bad.”
“In some places, they have a name for sticking cameras into your privates and sharing it with the world.” His eyebrows rose. “And that word is ‘porn.’”
“Those pictures were not porn.”
“That’s a good point,” he retorted. “After all, porn is generally titillating.”
I ran a hand over my face.
“You really want to have a debate about the artistic merit of Raine’s photographs?” I asked after a moment. “Really, Lucas?”
He crossed his arms over his chest, probably because I’d invoked The Name in the middle of a fight. We’d discovered that we could always tell that it was a big deal when one of us called the other by Our Name, rather than an endearment.
“I can’t understand why you let her talk to you like that,” he said, and I could see the temper in his eyes. I saw it so rarely that I was a little taken back. “I don’t understand anything that’s happening in your family right now, if you want to know the truth.”
“What’s happening in my family is that we’re all together for the first time in six years,” I said, annoyed that I had to remind him, “and I thought you knew how important this is to me.”
Lucas sighed as if he thought I was being unreasonable, and leaned forward.
“Courtney,” he said. Using The Name right back. “Of course I know how important this is to you. But why isn’t it important to anyone else? Doesn’t that bother you? Even a little bit?”
“Raine flew all the way across the country.” I glared at him. “What else is she supposed to do?”
“Our engagement party is in ten days,” Lucas said, as if that might have escaped my notice, with my mother calling daily about hors d’oeuvres. “You and your mother talk about it on the phone, but it never even comes up in conversation with your sisters. Don’t you think that’s weird?”
What I thought was that I felt entirely too emotional to be having this upsetting and hostile conversation about my family. And I also thought that I felt sucker punched. He had obviously been waiting around, dying to say these things to me.
Of all the things we should have been talking about, the Cassel family dynamics were not high on the list.
“I don’t need all that fairy princess, it’s-your-special-day, Bridezilla crap,” I told him, because it was easier to concentrate on that part of it. “That’s not who I am. I’m not the sort of person who needs to be the center of attention for the entire span of her engagement.”
As he should know already, I thought.
“That’s a good thing,” Lucas bit out. “Because as far as I can see, you’re never going to be the center of attention at all. Raine supposedly flew all the way out here to see you and celebrate you, and so far the only thing anyone’s talked about is ancient history.”
“Again,” I grated at him, “she’s been away for years. Of course history is going to come up! It would be much weirder if we all ignored it, wouldn’t it?”
“It’s not just Raine,” Lucas said, never looking away from me. “Even the day we got engaged couldn’t be about us. Not even one meal. There were about fifteen minutes between congratulations and yet another big drama about Norah’s wedding and her hurt feelings.”
“Okay,” I said impatiently, “I think there were some extenuating circumstances—”
“You know, I was sitting there the other night, listening to Norah and Raine throw down over who’s the artist in the family,” Lucas kept on, ignoring my protest.
“And now you want to have the argument, too?” I asked, completely confused. Why was he doing this? Did he know, somehow, about the almost-kiss? Was he using this roundabout approach to fight about it?
“I knew you wouldn’t say anything,” Lucas said. I found I couldn’t look away from him. “Because you never do.”
“What was I supposed to say?” I shrugged. “They’ve been having that same fight for the past twenty-eight years. It’s always better to just let them have it and try to contain the damage.”
“You’re missing the point,” Lucas said. He looked almost sad, and frustrated, too. “There’s exactly one artist in the Cassel family, Courtney. And it’s you.”
“I’m not that kind of artist,” I demurred at once, shaking my head.
“No,” Lucas agreed with an edge to his voice. “You’re the professional, working kind. You actually make your living playing music. You don’t wait tables on the side while making a whole lot of noise about how you have a vision. You just do your job, and you do it well. And yet, not one of your family members even mentioned that. They never do.”
It began to dawn on me that he wasn’t angry because he had found me out. He was genuinely angry on my behalf. He was trying to protect me.
I hadn’t thought I was capable of feeling worse.
“I don’t think they think of what I do as art,” I said slowly.
“Of course they don’t,” Lucas replied, in a withering tone. “Because to do that, they would have to think about you in the first place.”
“How can you say that?” I demanded, aware that tears were making tracks down my cheeks.
“I’m not trying to be cruel. I love you, and I hate this.” He let out a frustrated noise.
“They’re my family!” I told him, crying openly. I couldn’t have said what, exactly, I was crying about.
“That doesn’t mean they should get a free pass to treat you like you don’t exist,” Lucas threw back. He raked a hand through his thick auburn hair, making it spike up. Normally I found that adorable. “Your sister stood right in this living room and hit on me,” he said, outraged. “Directly in front of you. What the hell was that? Who does something like that?”
“That’s just Raine . . . ” I started to say.
But I couldn’t really defend that particular moment. Everybody loves a working man had been playing on a loop in my head all day. Until now I had been trying to pretend it hadn’t happened.
“It’s fucked up,” Lucas said in a low, angry voice. “Your mom apparently checked out and has been leading a secret life for decades. Norah talks to
you like you’re a particularly dim-witted seven-year-old, incapable of making your own decisions. And Raine has made it perfectly clear that she doesn’t care about you at all. I stood in the kitchen today and listened to her make you feel like shit about a career you’ve worked your ass off for every single day since you were a kid. It’s obvious to me that they’re all pathologically jealous of you, but I don’t think that’s ever even occurred to you.”
“It hasn’t occurred to me because it’s ridiculous,” I told him. “I had no idea how much you hated my family.”
“Don’t make this about me,” Lucas said in a tight voice. “I love you. I care about your family, but I don’t like how they treat you.” He shook his head and looked around as if looking for inspiration, or evidence. “My mom keeps asking me how you’re enjoying having both your sisters around, because she assumes that means they’re out looking for wedding dresses with you, or helping you plan things. I haven’t had the heart to tell her that they’re far more interested in having the next round of their endless battle with each other.”
“I’m sorry that your family is so much better than mine!” I yelled at him then, something cracking inside my chest. “Maybe if your father had run off while your mother was pregnant with you, you’d be a little more understanding now!”
There was a choked sort of silence then. If I could have, I would have reached out and plucked those words out of the air and shoved them back down inside where they belonged. But I could only breathe, and realize as I did so that each breath was ragged. And my lungs didn’t seem to be doing their job at all.
“Is that was this is about?” Lucas asked softly, his eyes suddenly kind. Which was so much worse than what had come before.
I couldn’t answer that. I wiped the tears from my cheeks.
“They might be dysfunctional, but they’re all I have,” I whispered toward the floor.
“Hey,” Lucas said. I looked up.
“They are not all you have,” he said. “You have me.” He held out his hands as if he contained us both within his palms. “This is our family. Right here. This is what matters.”
And to honor that, I had nearly kissed Matt Cheney. That was the kind of woman I was.
I felt my face crumple in, and then, without meaning to, I found myself sobbing. Lucas put his arms around me and held me tight against the heat of his hard chest.
“I’m sorry,” I got out at some point, between sobs, and he just shushed me.
He held me like that for a long time, and when I woke up I was in our bed, and it was morning.
If I was very still, I could hear Lucas’s voice through the wall. He was probably on the phone with a client, but all I could hear was the abstract music of his tenor voice. Faint and far, but it made me feel slightly better just to hear him nearby.
I was glad he was already up, because the truth was, I felt embarrassed. I stretched out on my stomach and felt a cat body tight in the V of my legs, making it impossible to roll over onto my back. So instead, I opened my eyes—noting they felt swollen and huge—and saw the other cat sitting on the very edge of the bed with her back to me. She was sitting very rigidly and staring with apparent rapt attention elsewhere, but her tail gave her away. It twitched and pointed accusingly at me, indicating in cat speak that while she couldn’t be bothered to look at me, she was pissed about something. And it could be anything: it might be too hot, her food bowl might be at an unacceptable level, she might feel the litter box was not adequately maintained, she might just have a mood on.
She would have to get in line, I thought, and let my mind return to the night before.
I had poured everything I had into my cello. Everything I was, and became. All my love, hope, and dreams. Because the truth was, I’d had three parents and I’d had none, all at the same time. Lucas wasn’t wrong about the level of interest my family had shown in my activities. I’d learned early on how to lug my cello on and off the train, even back when it was much taller than I was, because I was responsible for getting myself to my various tutors and schools on my own. I might have thought from time to time that my sisters and my mother could have shown a little more interest in what was going on with me, and I might have hated having to be the fatherless girl on those excruciating Dad Days at school, but none of that mattered when I was playing. I could fall into the music and let it take me somewhere far better, and more magical, than my forever sad, endlessly grief-stricken family.
We had been like soldiers in the same trench, I thought. That was how I’d described it once to Verena. We were all overwhelmed by the loss of Dad. Mom mourned, and taught us all how to mourn with her. We grew up with a ghost, and the difference between my sisters and me was that I was to blame for it.
Of course I knew that I, as a fetus, had nothing personally to do with a grown man’s decision to leave his family. I knew this intellectually. But the truth was, Dad hadn’t wanted a third child. He hadn’t been happy working in pharmaceuticals at SmithKline. I had been the last straw. There was just no getting around the truth of that—and I knew that better than anyone; I’d been trying to get around the truth of it for twenty-eight years.
Somewhere inside, I knew that Lucas was right. I shouldn’t accept how my family treated me when it upset me so much. But I also knew that he couldn’t imagine how much that old guilt still motivated me. I was sure it was bound up in everything my sisters did or didn’t do. I was convinced that sometimes they looked at me and wondered what might have happened if Mom had never gotten pregnant with me when she had.
Would Dad have stayed? Was he always going to leave us or was I the straw that broke the camel’s back? I couldn’t be the only one who’d wondered about these things. I couldn’t be the only one who’d figured that if looked at in a certain way, the Cassel family might have been better off if I’d never been born.
And when I looked at it that way, it seemed, the way it always had, not to matter so much that my family didn’t treat me the way the Cleavers treated one another.
When I looked at it that way, I felt almost pathetically grateful any of them talked to me at all.
Chapter Twenty
I was confident I could have brooded about that for days, having already brooded about it on some level my whole life, but there was one part of what Lucas had said that I couldn’t entirely push out of my mind: the dress.
Not the wedding dress. God.
My mind balked at the very idea of a wedding dress. I figured I would get to that eventually, after I dealt with choosing a wedding date, picking a wedding venue, and whatever else those terrifying magazines demanded brides do, tear-out sheets in hand, while becoming deeply serious about ring pillows and cake toppers. Items I currently could not have identified if my life depended upon it.
First things first. I needed something suitable to wear to our engagement party.
“You will not wear something suitable to your engagement party!” Verena gasped at me when I called her. I sensed that even mouthing the word suitable caused her physical harm. “You will wear something stunning!” She actually moaned. “How can we be friends? I don’t understand.”
“Fine,” I replied, too exhausted to argue. “Want to go shopping this weekend?”
There was a small silence.
Then, “Yes,” Verena breathed reverently. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting to hear you utter those words.”
It got out of control quickly. Verena wasn’t satisfied with half-measures, so my vision of a quick circuit through Center City was promptly vetoed. Verena demanded the King of Prussia Mall, complete with some four hundred stores at our disposal.
“Why do we need four hundred stores?” I asked, because I was foolish. I had once lived with Verena, after all. I knew that “need” had nothing to do with it.
“We don’t,” she replied at once, with a derisive sniff. “We need only four: Macy’s, Nordstrom’s, Neiman Marcus, and Bloomingdale’s.” She considered. “And maybe Lord & Taylor, or, as I lik
e to call it, Loud & Tacky. That would be our final, desperate attempt should all else fail, it goes without saying.”
It snowballed from there, because the fact was, I was embarrassed that Lucas’s mother had visions of my family life that he didn’t have the heart to dispel. So I called both of my sisters and invited them to come shopping with Verena and me. I expected them both to decline the invitation, of course. I couldn’t recall ever shopping with my sisters, and certainly not with both of them at the same time.
“I was going to head out there anyway this weekend,” Norah told me when we spoke, sounding as surprised as I felt. “There wasn’t anything festive in my closet, either.”
So she was in. Which made me sure that Raine would find any possible reason under the sun to avoid the little outing. But I felt I had to offer anyway.
“Oh, I’d love to go,” she drawled, sounding delighted at the very idea. “Sisterly bonding is actually a really critical part of a woman’s development. I don’t know if you know that, but it’s super important, Courtney.”
And that was how I found myself at the King of Prussia Mall, in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, on a busy summer afternoon with both of my sisters.
“So far, so good,” Verena muttered into my ear. Her eyebrows appeared to be permanently lodged up near her hairline, as she and I literally walked in between my two sisters—both of whom appeared to be on a mission to kill the other with a politeness so crisp it bordered on cold. Which, all things considered, I chose to take as a positive sign.
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” I muttered back, my eyes darting from one sister to the other. “This is obviously all going to go horribly wrong.”
“Yes,” Verena agreed. “But it hasn’t yet.” She sighed. “And that’s really all we have to cling to here.”
As a group, we headed for Macy’s first, which Verena claimed was her favorite.