Page 126 of Our Last Resort

I loved Annie. And also: I’d gotten to know her as an actual person. Not just a whimsical young woman dropped into my life in a flurry of wedding planning, beach vacations, and s’mores.

She was a whole human being. She was fun, spontaneous, smart.

And she was flawed.

Maybe Annie felt judged for getting married so young. Maybe she was insecure in her own choices, and so she felt the need to justify them constantly. But her behavior shifted after she and Gabriel got married. She started making harsh, sweeping statements about her friends: “I look at my people who aren’t married, and I’m like, What do you get from this? Jumping from one person to the next? Don’t you want to build something?” Or: “I’m so glad to be done with the whole dating circus, sleeping with strangers, lying to myself that it’s okay, that I’m not selling myself short. I like to be on solid ground, you know?”

Oh, I knew. But as someone who was very busyjumping from one person to the next,who had never touched anything resemblingsolid ground,I couldn’t very well relate.

I never confronted her about her insensitivity. Because she was family. Because we needed to get along. Because I loved her.

Still, she irritated the hell out of me.

Fine—it was more than that. Her little asides hurt me. I felt judged. I didn’t want to defend my life, my choices.

Every outing with her became a challenge. I’d come home with all my bitten-back quips lodged in my throat like so many fish bones.

In most situations, none of this would have been a big deal. Couples fight. People change.

But sometimes things get complicated.

Once Annie realized that Gabriel crashed at my place that one time, she started venting to me about their fights. I think she figured that if I was getting his side, then I should hear hers,too.

“Did he tell you,” she said on the phone one day, “that he didn’t do anything for my birthday?”

“Yeah. That sounded bad.”

“He said he would cook and then he said it was ajoke.”

“Honestly, he fucked up.”

There were texts, too:Your brother is late againorCan you tell your brother to stop LYINGorI know you guys didn’t grow up with much[Gee, Annie, you think?]but he is BAD at sharing and needs to do better.

Again, I agreed. I’d doubted Gabriel was ready to be any kind of long-termboyfriend,let alone a husband.

He and Annie went into counseling—a fact I was informed of separately, by each party.

If it helped, I didn’t see it.

Your brother is AWOL again,Annie texted me one evening.Any idea where he went?

Probably the library,I wrote back.

Your brother came home drunk last night.

In his defense, Annie, we didn’t have a drop of alcohol until we were twenty. And it’s not like we ever had a partying phase. Our tolerance is abysmal.

Your brother needs to get a grip.

I’m sure he does.

Etc., etc., etc. In Annie’s pissed-off texts, he was always “your brother,” never “Gabriel.”

My brother did not get a grip.

In fact, he fucked up majorly, one night.

He didn’t even realize.

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