Page 4 of Thank you, Next
“I hear you, Grams. He is very hot.” That wasn’t a lie. To make matters worse, she’d finally felt like she had a real partnership on her terms with Jason. They were both focused on their careers and didn’t feel like they needed to get married to be secure. They’d had an understanding, or so she thought. “I thought that I’d finally met my match.”
“I don’t know why you’re so afraid of getting married,” Lexi said, as she moved to mix another drink. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It’s just not something I feel like I need.” What Alex left out was that she felt like needing it was somehow wrong. Her parents’ marriage had been more like a business partnership, and their split hadn’t been particularly acrimonious.
Both of them were professors and found dramatic displays of emotions gauche. Alex and her sister had come home from school one January afternoon to find that their father no longer lived with them. He’d moved out of their Minneapolis craftsman, and their mother had announced that he had taken a teaching job at USC.
He was so far away that they didn’t spend nights and weekends with him. They didn’t see him again until the summer, when their mother had a monthlong research trip and dropped Alex and her sister off at Lexi’s house.
And even then, they hadn’t seen their father much. He didn’t really have any interest in entertaining little girls when there were papers to publish and panels to speak on. Alex and her sister were only trotted out when he needed to put forth a family-friendly image. Alex’s sister thought she was being uncharitable and that she should give their father more credit. But the man had pawned them off on Lexi every chance he could.
And it wasn’t all bad. Lexi was the coolest grandmother on the planet and always made time to hang out with her granddaughters—even taking them with her to tour in Japan once. True, she didn’t bake cookies and make tea that didn’t contain booze or drugs, but she called over her personal tarot card reader and mixed a mean martini when Alex was in a crisis.
Lexi handed Alex a martini with a flourish and sat back down, carefully arranging the folds of her caftan. “Take a sip and try to clear your mind.”
Alex tried not to laugh because one martini after her huge wine and the bourbon tea, and her mind would be nothing but muddy. She took a sip and thought that maybe it was strong enough that she’d fall through the floor and into a wonderland.
“My mind is clear, Grams.” And that was true. She knew because of one stupid television show and some Internet sleuthing turned doomscrolling that she was the last stop before matrimony or serious commitment for almost every person she’d kissed since starting college. It couldn’t be any clearer. There was something about her that made people never want to date a new person again.
Honestly, she should put out a shingle for people wanting to lock down their person—break up with them, let them date her for a few weeks, and then swoop back in. They’d be ready to lock it down then.
Lost in her own thoughts, she flinched when Star Sign said, “I need you to touch the cards with intention.” Alex’s eyes were closed so the woman couldn’t see her rolling them before doing as instructed.
Alex tried to keep a straight face as she listened to the cards shuffling and being placed on the giant mahogany coffee table between the three women.
“Open your eyes,” Star Sign said. She’d placed six cards in two rows of three. “The top row represents your mind, body, and spirit. And the bottom represents your past, present, and future.”
Then Star Sign went through the top three. Her mind, body, and spirit were apparently all fucked up and she needed to tend to all three like a garden and be willing to call in others for help.
Fat chance of that happening. She’d never been able to rely on anyone for anything concrete and practical, because—until her sister had become a grown-up—she was the only practical person in her family. Growing up, she’d been the one making grocery lists and cleaning up the house on Saturday mornings because her sister was too little and her mom was too busy building her academic career.
And Lexi wouldn’t know practical if it died in her bed after hours of lovemaking. Alex had had to explain—more than once—why chocolate cake was not an appropriate breakfast for children. As a child.
It was no wonder their father had turned out to be such a self-indulgent narcissist. No one had ever told him no. She never talked about that with Lexi because her father had died before he’d taken the time to grow up. A fifty-year-old man who didn’t have the common sense to not sleep with his grad students also unfortunately did not have the common sense to make regular doctor’s appointments and manage his health well enough to live longer than fifty.
Alex’s thoughts had turned bitter, and she’d tuned Star Sign out until she flipped the Prince of Wands as the past card. And when she’d described this figure—essentially a self-centered egotistical flash in the pan—only one person came to mind.
Will Harkness. Her teenage dream and nightmare all in one package. If Orlando Bloom hadn’t gotten there first, Will Harkness would have been the agent of her sexual awakening. When they were both seventeen, he’d given her a swerve so hard that she’d gotten whiplash, and Alex wondered whether some of her problems with romantic relationships were born the night he’d rejected her.
Over the past few years, she’d done her best to forget all about the time she’d had a crush on Will Harkness, because he’d been married. And now that he was divorced, she’d kept up her efforts to think of him as a brother. Or a Ken doll.
Lexi looked at her knowingly when Star Sign flipped that card. Lexi knew Will quite well. When they’d met, she’d been dating his father.
“He’s in the past section, Grams.” Alex knew that she and Lexi had cut Star Sign out of her own reading. But she and Lexi had discussed the whole “Alex and Will thing” ad nauseum. “And he’s a fuckboy without staying power. According to the cards. That doesn’t sound like Will.”
“It really could be anyone who ignites the passions. It doesn’t mean that he ignites passions all over town,” Lexi said, unable to let it go.
Star Sign flipped over the card supposedly representing the present—the Tower. Lexi gasped, and this time Alex failed to keep her eye roll under wraps. “They are pieces of paper.”
“This card represents a great unraveling of everything you thought you’d ever known, Alex. Please take it seriously.” Alex looked into Star Sign’s earnest face and didn’t start laughing uncontrollably, the way she wanted to. Because she saw the other woman’s point.
Even though seeing her ex on a stupid show, looking happy with a woman who looked a lot like Alex but with bigger boobs and more time to spend with a curling iron, wasn’t great for her ego, it wasn’t a great unraveling of everything she’d thought she’d ever known.
“I think what Star Sign is saying is that your whole loner schtick isn’t working for you anymore, and you need to unravel and let people in.”
They’d had this conversation before, too. Many times. More than the Will Harkness conversation. More than the conversation about how Alex was too hard on her dad and that it would do her good to forgive him even though he was dead. According to Lexi, Alex’s real problem was that she didn’t want to truly let anyone in, that she kept her feelings bottled up and never allowed anyone to take care of her.
“I let you in tonight, Lexi.” Alex gestured with her half-consumed drink. “I told you something deeply embarrassing that happened, and I came over so you could comfort me.” Not that a tarot card reader and copious amounts of varied booze were really constructive, but Alex was not going to say that.