Page 44 of The Bride
“You know what?” I said, grabbing my laptop. “I can’t have this conversation with you right now. You’re on your own for dinner.”
I left and felt particularly justified in my fury.
Then once I was in my room, I suddenly felt like shit. I didn’t want to bang every guy in town. I didn’t want to be some slutty girl. I wanted to…
Be normal.
But I wasn’t. I was Weird Married Ellie.
Some days it sucked.
* * *
Jake
A few days before Thanksgiving
“Hey, we have to decide what we’re going to do for Thanksgiving,” Ellie told me.
She was sitting across the kitchen table, cutting her steak, and I thought—I hoped—that things were starting to get back to normal between us. It had been a few chilly days after the whole porn incident.
“What are our options?” I asked.
“The Pettys invited us over.”
“Perfect. Mrs. Petty means good food.”
I looked up. She was pushing peas around on her plate, biting her lower lip.
“You don’t want to go to Mrs. Petty?”
“Well, Chrissy also sort of asked if…Iwanted to go to her place. You know, hang out and stuff.”
It was odd, but something sank in my gut. “You don’t want to spend Thanksgiving together,” I realized.
It was our first major holiday. Or family holiday. The first real holiday where she would be missing Sam hard. We’d had great Thanksgiving open houses here at Long Valley for years. There was no way this day wasn’t going to back up on her. I needed to be there for her.
Unless she didn’t want me. Unless she wanted Chrissy.
“No. I mean... I do. Want to. It’s … I didn’t know if you thought that was important or not. Like maybe you wanted to do something else. With someone else.”
“Who the hell else would I want to spend Thanksgiving with?”
I hated this. She had an agenda. I knew she did, but instead of coming right out and saying it she had to girl that shit up.
That’s right. I said it. Girl that shit up. If that made me a sexist I had to own it.
“I don’t know. A girlfriend I don’t know about. Maybe that girl you met in Missoula.”
We were will still talking about Missoula. This was a problem. A potentially big one, but I wasn’t going to let it get that far. Simple and basic. That’s how I liked pretty much everything. Including my Thanksgiving.
“I don’t have a girlfriend. I want to spend Thanksgiving with you because you’re my family. I want to go to the Pettys because neither of us can put together a decent Thanksgiving meal and we both know it.”
She beamed at me and I knew I had said the thing she wanted to hear, but I wasn’t sure which part.
“Okay. I’ll let Mrs. Petty know we’re coming.”
* * *
