That was the problem. She had no solution to offer, no magic wand to wave, and another part of her just wanted to punch something, hard. To bang her head against a wall until she stopped feeling pulled in so many different directions.
Her allegiances were divided, and she was a coward. She was afraid.
Allie tied raffia ribbon around buckets.
May stuck daisies in them.
The phone rang, and Nancy answered it.
Ben came out, asked where the bathroom was, left, returned, disappeared.
It was all very ordinary and very strange, and no one said any of the things that needed to be said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Even before the kickoff, Ben knew there was going to be trouble.
Everyone had assembled downstairs, where Bill had both a workshop and, paneled off on the finished side of a full basement, a bar, complete with the obligatory elk heads tossed up on the wall alongside some Packers paraphernalia. The TV screen was huge, the couches comfortable.
It was the crowd that worried Ben.
There had to be fifteen people in the basement, if not more. Neighbors, relatives. He couldn’t keep them straight, but they sure all knew who he was. Or who he was supposed to be. Nancy pointed him out to everyone who came in the room.
That’s Ben. He’s a friend of May and Dan’s. May was hiding with him in New York to keep away from all the reporters after that unpleasantness last week. And May’s home now, too. May? Get over here, hon! You need to see Andrea’s new haircut!
After that, the inquisition would begin. May seemed to disappear a little more with every introduction, every awkward pause or lame joke about keeping her away from the utensils, and he began to wonder if the woman he’d met and spent time with in New York—if the woman he’d taken to bed last night and the night before—was a mirage. A vacation version of May who couldn’t exist outside of New York.
The version of May who lived in Manitowoc wore that goddamn Packers jersey with Thor’s number on it, and she agreed with everything everybody said, even when he knew she didn’t really.
He didn’t like her like this.
And he hated that so much, he channeled his aggression into the production of a lot of flamboyantly cheerful bullshit. When Nancy introduced them, he answered all the questions, inventing the sort of stories he thought Dan’s agent’s PA would tell without worrying whether they made any sense in the context of everything else he’d said. He wouldn’t be around long enough to have to care if people compared notes and found he didn’t add up.
No one seemed to notice the hostility underlying every dumbass story he told. No one but May.
Her mother came down the stairs with two bags of chips and a casserole dish and shouted, “Football dip!”
Allie and Matt dug in. Other than the macaroni salad contest—from which Nancy had emerged victorious when Matt showed up to break the tie—there hadn’t been any lunch. All that food had been for the game, and Nancy was bringing it downstairs one dish at a time, laying it out on a table beside green paper plates and gold napkins.
Everybody seemed far more interested in the food and the company than in the pregame analysis on TV.
“You guys do actually watch the game, right?” he asked May under his breath.
“Sure.” But her eyes flicked to the TV, which was on mute, and then to her mother.
“What?”
“Well, sometimes I have to go watch it upstairs.”
“Because …”
May leaned closer and lowered her voice. “My mom doesn’t like it if anybody gets too … intense about the football.”
Her hair looked shiny under the basement’s can lights. He hadn’t been alone with her all day. There were way too many people around.
“And you get intense?”
“I’ve been known to take it a little more seriously than I probably should.”
He resisted the urge to tuck a strand of her hair more securely behind her ear. Not something a friend would do.
He didn’t want to be her friend. Not if it meant acting like this. Feeling like this.
“Remember that Seahawks game with the replacement refs? I had to leave the room. Allie thought I was going to have a heart attack.”
“I got kicked out of Pulvermacher’s,” he admitted.
“What’d you do?”
“You probably don’t want to know.”
“Did you hit somebody?” Her breath was coming faster now, and she was leaning into him, her hand on his thigh.
“You look like you hope I did.”
“I was so mad about that game. I couldn’t sleep that night. I just lay awake, being furious. Maybe if I’d hit somebody, I could have slept.”
“I didn’t hit anybody. I got into an argument with some hippie who told me, ‘Chill out, man. It’s a game.’ ”