Page 46 of Thank you, Next
In addition to being great with his hands, he was handy to have around. She tried to resist getting used to it, but she was starting to rely on him to be there not just in times of crisis, but when she wanted to send him a funny TikTok that would make him mad based on his fervent belief that lettuce wasn’t a good substitute for bread in sandwiches. He was also weirded out by her liberal use of mayonnaise on both sides.
But she didn’t know precisely where they stood with each other, and she didn’t know if she was going to tell Jane and Lana when she sat down to brunch with them and Lexi the following Sunday. She wasn’t sure how they would react, and she wasn’t sure how she wanted them to react.
They were already at the restaurant and had probably already ordered her whole wheat pancakes, bacon, and a bottomless mimosa.
Alex had the choice about whether to tell her grandmother and her friends that she was seeing Will taken away from her when Lexi looked her up and down and said, “You finally did it.” Lexi’s voice was so loud that other diners looked at them. Although she didn’t want to be a spectacle, she wasn’t going to admonish her grandmother in public. And Lexi knew that, so she didn’t modulate her tone or volume.
Instead, she went with pure denial. It wasn’t as though she was wearing a sign that said she’d slept with Will. There was absolutely no way that Lexi could know that for sure. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She took her seat. Jane and Lana stared at her, wide-eyed. Lexi was undeterred. “Young lady.” Lexi never did the “young lady” move, so this had to be serious. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. You finally put poor Will out of his misery.”
“Poor Will?” Alex was dumbfounded. Lexi was prone to revisionist history when it made her ex-husbands look bad or herself more glamorous, but any suggestion that Will was some sort of victim in their decades-long animosity was strictly out-of-bounds. “Now neither of us knows what you’re talking about.”
“Your problem is that you’re not a romantic like he is,” Lexi said. She took a bread roll from the basket at the center of the table and started smearing it with butter rather aggressively. Given that Lexi had come of age before body positivity was even a glimmer of a thing in Hollywood, the fact that she was eating carbs in public was a sign that Alex had upset her.
But Lexi was right. Alex was not a romantic. “How could you expect me to be a romantic given what I do for work and where I came from?”
She literally spent her whole life steeped in unhappy couples. Most of them had started out with a romantic idea of what their lives would be together, and just like fifty percent of other couples, they failed. There was no way she would come out of that unscathed.
Jane and Lana both looked around as though they deeply regretted accepting the invitation for brunch. “And look at these two: Jane’s divorce was messy and expensive. And I give Lana and Greg five years tops before they start going to key parties.”
“Key parties” distracted Lexi. Her “Oh, how fun!” was at her original volume. She might be aging, but she could still project her voice, God love her.
Through gritted teeth, Lana said, “We’re never going to key parties, Alex. That was in the vows.” She smiled at the diners at the tables around them, who were suddenly interested in eating their food again.
“And I’m happy that I’m divorced, but I don’t regret getting married,” Jane said, draining her mimosa and motioning the server over for a refill. “I learned a lot from my ex, and we have nothing but love for each other now that we’re not living in the same house. Sometimes you have to try something out before you decide that it’s not for you.”
“You’re still paying for the woman’s yoga classes and bikini waxes, and you have nothing but love for her?” Alex always thought that Jane was more sensible about these things. She felt as though she was being ganged up on, and she didn’t like it.
“Lexi, whether or not I’m a romantic is beside the point. I don’t know what Will I are even doing together. Not yet.”
“So you admit that you are seeing each other?” Lexi looked over her readers at her. When the server had come over to refill Jane’s mimosa, Lexi had apparently decided to change her order.
“Yes. Although it really freaks me out that you could tell by looking at me.” It was that kind of witchy shit that prevented Alex from completely discounting Lexi’s reliance on tarot card readers and other mystics, even though it didn’t fit with Alex’s generally nonspiritual vibe. Most of the time, it felt like one of Lexi’s many quirks, but every so often...
“We don’t have to talk about the details, but I think you should be careful,” Lexi said. She never warned people to be careful. When people left her house, she told them to “drive fast and take chances.” It was ironic, but barely. Alex had never been able to figure out why Lexi was so willing to take risks and chances, especially in love, after so many losses.
But the fact that she was telling Alex to be careful now must mean that she thought Alex was doing something foolhardy. That there was a high probability that her heart would end up broken.
“I know it probably won’t work out, Lexi,” Alex said. “But when we break up, you have to promise not to hold it against Will. This is probably just something that we’re both getting out of our systems.”
“I’m not worried about you. I’m worried about him,” Lexi said with a sniff. “You chew men up and spit them out. They’re sad and broken when you finish with them.”
“Hello, pot. Meet kettle.” For someone who’d been married more times than she’d had a colonoscopy, Lexi sure was being judgmental about Alex’s approach to her love life.
“I always leave them better than I found them.” When Alex gave her a look, Lexi added, “If not financially, at least spiritually.”
“I do not destroy men. If anything, I leave them in good enough condition that the very next person they date snaps them up to make a long-term commitment.”
“Or you wound them so severely that they vow never to date another person with an avoidant attachment style.” Lana threw that grenade on the center of the table.
“Avoidant attachment style?” Alex was really sick of people telling her that. “I don’t have an avoidant attachment style. If I did, I would never even get in relationships in the first place.”
“Oh, cut the shit, of course you do,” Jane said.
Okay, so they were definitely ganging up on her. The only thing that kept her from getting up and walking out of the restaurant was that it would be a very avoidant attachment style thing to do.
“It’s totally understandable, of course,” Lana said in her therapist voice. “Your mother supported you financially, but she could never give you what you needed emotionally. And your father was neither physically nor emotionally available to you. So, even though you had Lexi every summer, you got used to managing your own emotions. You essentially raised yourself. Because you couldn’t rely on either of your parents, you can’t allow yourself to rely on romantic partners. You rarely even rely on your friends.”