“Girl, if I eat another cheese straw, I am going to “die.”
Emily takes another cheese straw as she passes me the plate, so I’m not sure her death is all that imminent, but I give her a sympathetic smile. “Same,” I say before tacking on a “girl,” about a beat too late.
Luckily, Emily doesn’t seem to notice. We’re sitting on the floor in her living room: me, her, Campbell, Anna-Grace, and Landry. I still don’t know their last names or even what streets they live on, but both Anna-Grace and Landry look a lot like the women I already know here in Thornfield Estates. Pretty, thin, good teeth, good jewelry, and a casual way of wearing clothes that I will never be able to mimic. The only thing that sets them apart is that they are both pregnant, Landry slightly further along, her belly rounded underneath her light blue top, Anna-Grace looking like she maybe just ate an extra piece of pizza at lunch. Earlier, I’d heard her tell Emily that they’d already decided to call the baby “Hilliard,” whether it was a girl or a boy, so I shoot her bump a sympathetic glance as I sit on the floor.
At the last meeting, my first one, I’d worn a Lilly Pulitzer dress and ended up having to perch awkwardly on the couch while the rest of them sprawled gracefully on the hardwood in leggings and drapey tops, their feet bare. I’d expected something a little more formal and fancy, hence the dress, but once again, I’d somehow gotten it wrong.
Today, however, I am dressed nearly identically to Emily. Both of us are in neutral shades, Emily a sort of sand color, me in an eggshell cream that I know makes me look sallow, but Anna-Grace and Landry aren’t looking at me like I’m a gate-crasher this time, so I guess that’s an improvement.
Or maybe I somehow proved my worth by buying all those solar lights and not being so gauche as to turn in a receipt.
In any case, I’m on the floor, too, now, sitting next to Emily on one side of the giant upholstered ottoman she uses as a coffee table. There’s a big wooden tray on it today holding a bucket of ice where our white wine currently sweats, and I think all of it—the ottoman, the tray, the wine bucket, the painted glasses we’re all drinking out of—came from Southern Manors.
I almost ask, but the last thing I want to do is raise the specter of Bea here and now. No one had said anything at that first meeting, thank god, and I wasn’t about to give them an opportunity to do a little compare and contrast where the two of us were involved.
“So,” Campbell says, pulling out the monogrammed binder she’d brought last week. “Sweet Jane here got us the new solar lights like a rock star, thank you, Jaaaaaane.”
I raise my wineglass, smiling at all of them. “No problem!” No problem at all except my ex-roommate threatening me in a Home Depot parking lot, and over a thousand dollars racked up on Eddie’s credit card for something as stupid as lights.
“And,” Campbell goes on, sliding her finger down the page, “Anna-Grace said her father-in-law’s landscaping company can donate sod for the front entrance.”
She presses a hand over her heart, tilting her head down with an exaggerated sad face. “You are an actual angel.”
Anna-Grace made a fucking phone call and got some free shit, which doesn’t really seem to qualify her for angel status, but what do I know?
I take another cheese straw off the plate. I’m just jumpy because of everything with John, which is making me bitchier than usual. I’m supposed to be proving to these women that I’m one of them, not thinking of them as the competition, and I need to remember that.
Campbell turns back to her binder, sitting back on her heels. “Okay, so that ticks off most of our summer goals. We should probably go ahead and start looking at fall.”
“Girl, if you say the word mums, I am leaving,” Landry says, rolling her eyes, and they all laugh.
I laugh, too, but once again, I’m about a beat too late again. As far as I can tell, they’re speaking some foreign language.
“No, no mums, don’t be basic, Landry,” Campbell assures her with a smile. Then she clasps her hands underneath her chin, her rings sparkling. “I was thinking we could do something fun with football,” she says. “You know, half the front flower bed in red and white, half in orange and blue.”
The other ladies all ooh at that, and I look around, smiling, but once again, having no clue what’s actually going on here.
Landry must notice my face because she grins a little, leaning forward. “The Iron Bowl,” she says, like that explains anything, and I raise my eyebrows, still smiling, still lost as fuck.
“Are you a Bammer or a Barner?” Anna-Grace says as she pulls the bottle of wine out of the bucket. It’s nearly empty, though, so with a tutting sound, Emily gets up and heads to the kitchen.
“Jane isn’t from the South,” Campbell says as she ticks something off of her list. Then she glances up at me. “Auburn and Alabama,” she explains. “Big colleges here, big football rivalry. Most everybody declares for one or the other since birth.”
“Landry and I both graduated from Alabama,” Anna-Grace says. “So, ‘Roll Tide’ and all that.”
“And I’m an Auburn girl,” Emily adds, coming in from the kitchen, open bottle of wine in hand. “So, War Eagle!”
I accept her offer of more wine, my head spinning, wondering how college football is now a thing I need to care about.
“Where did you go to school, Jane?” Anna-Grace asks.
She’s not quite as pretty as Campbell and Emily, her features a little too sharp, her hair a little too blond for her fair skin. As she crosses her arms, bangles jingle on her wrist, and I have to fight down the urge to want one. Not just one I can buy, but one of hers.
I think about lying to them. Making up some obscure college they’ve never heard of. But I’ve already got too many lies going at this point, and there’s something about the way Anna-Grace is looking at me that makes me think she’d go home and Google, or invent a friend who went there, too. Something to throw me off.
So I tell … okay, not the truth, but something that at least feels closer to it. “I did community college, then online courses. I was working a lot, so that fit my schedule the best.”
“Yeah, Campbell and Emily were telling me you were their dog-walker?”
She says it like a question, but it’s not.
I smile. “Yup, sure was.”
“And that’s how you met Eddie?”
“Mmm-hmm.” I take another cheese straw even though I don’t want it. The crumbs leave greasy little dark spots on my new beige leggings, and whoever made them used too much cayenne. It stings my nose, making my eyes almost water.
“God, if I’d known you could meet hot, rich widowers walking dogs, I wouldn’t have bothered with those stupid dating apps,” Landry offers, and now I remember that her name was familiar because Emily and Campbell were gossiping about her doctor husband having an affair with a drug rep a few months ago.
“Guess I’m just lucky,” I say, making myself smile. I can’t quite manage the faux-humble thing I did with the others, though. Maybe because of how she’s looking at me, maybe just because I’m tired of doing that shit. I’m here, aren’t I? Isn’t that enough?
“So where were you before Birmingham?” Landry asks as she sits up a little, fluffing the couch cushion she’s propped up against.
I’d been expecting this, and had already decided that vague was the way to go here. “Oh, gosh, lots of places,” I say, shrugging. “My family moved around a lot.”
It was actually me who did the moving, sliding into different families. A cousin here. Another cousin there. Eventually foster homes. Then the last home, in Phoenix.
The memory makes the wine go sour in my mouth, my stomach suddenly roiling, and I sit my glass back on the tray, almost catching the lip and dumping pinot grigio everywhere.
“Obviously, I never lived in the South before now,” I say, grinning again and trying to cover the awkwardness of the moment. “Or I’d know my Roll Tide from my War Eagle.”
That makes them laugh, like I’d hoped, and I’m hoping we can move back into talking about flowers or flags or whatever other dumb shit they want. I’ll spend another grand on fucking light-up lawn ornaments if we can stop talking about me.
“But I sure hope you’re planning on staying in the South,” Landry says, all saccharine now. “Now that you and Eddie are…”
She trails off, waving one hand.
There’s nothing pointed about it, and her gaze is nowhere near as searching as Anna-Grace’s was, but I feel a question hanging in the air.
Campbell finishes her train of thought. “I do not know why he doesn’t just go ahead and wife you up, girl.”
“Seriously,” Emily says, nodding and pouring herself more wine. “If he’s going to have you living with him, the least he can do is put a ring on it.”
“Caleb wanted us to live together before we got married,” Anna-Grace says, shaking her head so that her ponytail brushes her back. “And I was like, ‘I don’t think so!’ If a man wants a woman to basically be a wife, he needs to make her a wife.”
The others all hum in agreement, and I look around, at these ladies drinking in the middle of the afternoon on a random Thursday, all of whom seem to have decided that “getting married” is a woman’s chief accomplishment.
And I finally get it.
I can join all the committees, wear all the right clothes, learn about fucking football, say all the right things, and none of it will matter.
I’m never going to be one of them until Eddie proposes.