The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [37]
“You just didn’t want to sign a prenup,” Liz said.
“Liz! That’s not fair, not fair at all.”
Tess, who had watched far more daytime television in the past month than she had seen in her previous thirty-five years, began to feel as if she were in the middle of her own bizarre talk show.
“We’re not here to talk about our relationship,” Beth said.
“Why not?” May asked. “You’ve been telling me what I can do. Why can’t I have an opinion about what you do?”
“Do you?” Crow asked. “What do you want, May?”
The question seemed to catch her off-guard. Had no one ever asked her this? Her two mothers waited, as if May were an oracle, as if she had the power to control their future. She did, Tess realized, and not just in the matter of marriage. She was their child, their lives were in thrall to her.
“I want you to be happy,” she said. “But you’re both so determined to win that it’s become impossible. It’s the same with Lloyd and me, only you agree on that. You’re so fixated on winning the argument that you’ve never bothered to think about why I took the ring, why I might want to marry Lloyd.”
“You’re too young,” Beth began again.
May rolled her eyes and sighed exaggeratedly, which didn’t exactly refute Beth’s point.
“Your brain isn’t even fully formed,” Liz put in. “Teenagers don’t have the same brain chemistry as adults. You’re not using your frontal lobe to make decisions. I heard it on NPR!”
Crow caught Tess’s eye at that moment, which was disastrous. She began to laugh, then cough, then laugh and cough. It was the combination of “frontal lobe” with the PC battle cry, “I heard it on NPR!” She laughed so hard that Dempsey began barking, almost as if joining in. It was infectious, catching May, then Lloyd and Crow, Beth, and finally, reluctantly, Liz.
“Okay, okay,” Beth said at last. “Why do you want to marry Lloyd?”
“I’m not sure I do,” May said, and the look on Lloyd’s face almost shattered Tess’s heart. “But that’s part of being engaged, right? You make a commitment to get married, but you have time to think about it.”
“May?” Crow said. “At the risk of piling on more advice, I have to say that engagement isn’t something you do as a trial. You get engaged when you’re sure of what you want.” Tess’s heart lurched on her own behalf. Was this why Crow no longer spoke of marrying her? “I believe you love Lloyd and he loves you. But he proposed precisely because he knows you’re not one hundred percent sure of him. He was trying to bind you to him prematurely. Just be in love, don’t worry about putting names to it.”
“That’s part of it,” May admitted. “But the thing I can’t forget is that Beth and Liz met when they weren’t much older than we are now, back in college. They let ten years go by before they were together.”
“In part,” Beth said dryly, “because Liz married a man first.”
“I didn’t get a wedding then, either. Is it so wrong to want one wedding in a lifetime?”
“But don’t you wish you had those ten years?” May asked. “Don’t you regret doubting yourselves, being skeptical of what you felt?”
The two women exchanged a glance.
“I do,” Liz said.
“I do, too,” Beth said.
“Well,” Lloyd said. “That’s a kind of wedding right there, ain’t it?”
Beth and Liz had no problem laughing at themselves this time. They weren’t humorless, as Tess had first thought. Just worried about their daughter.
Beth plucked a carrot curl from the salad and placed it on Liz’s finger.
“Marriage in Massachusetts, not California,” she said. “Party here. Friends and family, nothing too crazy.”
Tess looked at the carrot curl and thought about the Art Deco behemoth that Epstein had used for two wives. Where was it now? What if Carole had found it in his effects? What would that signify? The ring mattered, she was sure of it. No, not that ring. Carole had found something else in Don Epstein’s house, the importance of which only she understood.