Matchmaking for Beginners
Page 66

“I’m sorry!” I yell. “I’m really, really so very sorry!”
He doesn’t turn around for that either.
FORTY-ONE
MARNIE
“I have never heard so much yelling associated with Thanksgiving,” Patrick tells me. He’s walking from the kitchen to the living room with a cup of tea, which he hands me, and a teapot. “Well, maybe the very first Thanksgiving had that level of tension. Possibly Myles Standish caused this much trouble with the Native Americans—he was a bit of a brute, from what I’ve heard. But I’m not even sure about that.”
He looks over at me, sitting on his couch with my foot propped up and ice that’s supposedly going to help with the bump on my head. He may have forgotten that he’s mad at me for the crime of trying to kiss him. At least he let me come here. Even came upstairs and got me. Fixed the ice pack. Gave me drinks of water. And now herbal tea. Put aside his deadline about colon cancer, he said.
“Doesn’t matter in the least,” he told me. “People are digesting their turkey dinner, and they should be giving thanks and not rushing to read about colon cancer. Any symptoms they’re having tonight are just that they ate too much.”
“Yet another thing I’m responsible for today.”
“Oh, you, stop with the self-pity. It’s all going to be fine. For the rest of your life, you’re going to have the most exciting Thanksgiving dinner story anyone’s ever heard.”
Yes. After the madness died down—after I’d gone back inside and screamed at Noah, and pulled Bedford away from the turkey drippings, then cleaned up the puke when he didn’t stop licking up the drippings; after I’d cried with Lola, who told me I was a traitor, and after I’d tried to persuade Jessica not to break up with Andrew once again; after I’d packed Harry off with his bag of wiggling lobsters that never did get cooked, and sent the waitress limping off with her new boyfriend—well, Patrick came upstairs and retrieved me and gave me a place to hide. He checked out the bump on my head, peered in my eyes, asked me some arithmetic questions, and declared that I don’t have a concussion.
Things may not be fine fine—there was way too much crying for that—but maybe it’s livable. That’s the best I can do right now. Patrick walked Lola home. I think he comforted Sammy. I think he may even have cleaned up most of the mess while I was dealing with all the fallout. He tied a piece of gauzy cotton around my head where it might have been bleeding a bit.
I feel bad about so many things. Maybe one of the worst things is Lola, who told me in no uncertain terms that she was furious that I’d been conspiring, as she put it, behind her back to get her married off to William Sullivan. Aiding and abetting the enemy behind the front lines! How dare I! Helping him write that letter! Encouraging him! Giving him hope, even though I knew—I knew—her position!
Which I did know. She’s absolutely right.
“How could you not have told me you were talking to him!” she said. “Is there nothing that you matchmakers won’t do?”
But the magic, I wanted to tell her. The sparkles.
And then there was Jessica—well, she was just devastated, plain and simple. Not so mad at me, thank goodness, because how could I have known that the Yolk waitress happened to be the woman who Andrew had cheated with? Jessica says it’s simply humiliating (her word) that all this time, she and I had been friendly with that waitress, and in fact we’d exchanged little tidbits of our lives with her—not even knowing who she was! (And excuse me, not for nothing, but who knew that Brooklyn was such a small town after all? That’s what amazed me—that with all the millions of people milling around this place, how our waitress at Yolk could possibly be the woman who had enticed Andrew away from his marriage vows!)
This might as well be Smalltown, America, I tell Patrick.
He smiles.
“Don’t,” I say and hold up one finger. “Too soon for smiling.”
“You look sort of jaunty with that bandage on your head,” he says. “Rather like a drunken sailor.”
“Did I tell you that after Bedford had dragged the turkey carcass into the living room, and I went by there on my way to talk to Jeremy, Noah was taking the opportunity to remove things from the walls and put them in a box—presumably to send to his parents?”
“Classy Noah move.”
“Probably just to make me mad.”
He is sitting at the other end of his couch, as far away from me as he can get, I notice. And he’s grinning happily.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’ll tell you. But first, in exchange for all the excellent care and rescue, I need you to tell me every single detail. One by one. And start with what happened with Jeremy,” he says. “That poor guy.”
“Yes. God, I’m the worst. And of all the things that happened today, the fact that Jeremy came here without telling me, and got my whole family to keep it a secret as well—I still can’t believe it.”
“You had no clue?” Patrick says. “None?”
“Well, he’d vaguely said a time or two that it was too bad we couldn’t be together, and he’d offered to come and help me sell the place . . .”
“But nothing like, ‘See you at Thanksgiving, my plane gets in at eleven’?”
“Nothing. In fact, I hadn’t even talked to him for a week or so, because I was so busy worrying about Noah and the Blix stuff.” I put my head in my hands. “I can’t believe I’ve done this to him. That look on his face.”
“So . . . did he yell and scream? How did you guys leave it?”
“He was monumentally disappointed and sad. And yes, he yelled. Quite out of character for him. I believe we left it that I suck. Which I do.”
Patrick now actually laughs. “Stop it. Who do you think you’re talking to? You weren’t ever going to end up with him. The first thing you told me about him is that he is the most god-awful boring man you’d ever met. I believe those were your exact words.”
“But boring is not a crime. And anyway I led him on. And betrayed him.”
“First of all, you weren’t leading him on. You were deciding about him. And I happen to believe that your betrayal, as you call it, was part of the deciding. Also, for the record, I think Blix considered being boring a crime,” he says. “Which it is. I agree.”
“You’re right. She did. She was married to that boring legal aid person, or was it the boring bug guy? And I told her she couldn’t just leave somebody because he was boring, and she said of course she could! She had to, she said. So she did.”
He reaches over and pours me some more tea from the teapot. “So anyway, we’re all agreed that you weren’t going to end up with him. And even though this was a shock for him, we have to acknowledge that he bears some responsibility for finding out the way he did. When you set up a surprise, you have to figure that you’re the one that might get surprised. Right?”
I stare at him. “Patrick, I am dumbfounded at this side of your personality.”
He shrugs. “What? I’m just stating the facts. The way I see it, there are no victims here. And also—look at it this way—you’ve now freed him up to find the true love of his life. And he’ll always have a great story to tell about Thanksgiving in Brooklyn. How many people get such a good breakup story?”
“I hope he’ll be all right. It’s like he’s a person who has his emotions in a safety-deposit box somewhere, and he forgot where he put the key.” I realize with some surprise that this really is what makes him boring. He’s protected himself with layers of emotional padding, tamping down every single true feeling that might cross his mind. Maybe it’s because of losing his father at an early age and having that anxious mother he had to take care of. Emotion was a luxury item on the menu, and he couldn’t afford it.
“Even when he asked me to marry him, he wasn’t overjoyed,” I say slowly. “When I said yes, he looked absolutely shocked. Happy, maybe, but mostly shocked. And even when we had sex, it was—”
“Okay. I’m willing to listen to most things, but I draw the line here. Your sex life. I used to have to put on headphones when you and—oh, never mind.”