Silence.
Then, “Everything okay in there?” Darren called, sounding like he was about to get up and come galloping in to save one of us from the other.
“We’re fine!” Sherry shouted back.
“Everything is super okay!” I yelled.
“Super okay?” she whispered. “Because that sounds like you mean it.”
“Monkey orgies,” I growled at her.
“I don’t even know what that means!”
“You sure?” Darren asked. He didn’t sound any closer.
“She’s telling me more about your lovely wedding to a ninja turtle,” I said. “Summer wedding, Dare, really? You’re so precious.”
“Jesus Christ,” Darren said as laughter began to spill in from the living room. It was only another moment before the TV was unmuted and turned up louder than it had been before.
“Well played,” Sherry said.
“I am a drag queen,” I said, as if that explained everything.
“It was you,” she said, looking determined. “Only the second time I’d ever seen it happen with him.” I wondered if Darren would forgive me if I knocked his mother down and made a break for it out the back door. I thought maybe he’d even approve, given what she was saying to me. “He called me and told me that he’d met someone, someone unlike anyone he’d ever met before. He said this person was good and kind and seemed to walk on water, if Darren was to be believed.”
My skin felt hot, and my feet wouldn’t work. All I could do was stand there and listen.
“He told me he thought he’d messed things up, though,” she said. “Because if there’s one thing that Darren inherited from his father, one thing that can almost always be counted on, is that at some po
int, Darren Mayne will be an asshole. And he said that he hadn’t meant to be, but that he’d panicked.”
“Did he tell you what he said?” I asked, unable to keep my words from sounding harsh.
She shook her head. “I didn’t want to know. Because I couldn’t bear the thought of him finding someone that could make him happy, only to have him ruin it because he had to preen in front of his little idiot friends. Was it bad?”
I nodded.
She narrowed her eyes. “But you seem to have gotten over it.”
Right. Because she thought we were together. “I guess,” I said slowly.
“He didn’t mean it, you know. Whatever he said.”
I laughed bitterly. “It sure sounded like it at the time.”
“He was what, twenty-one? Twenty-two?”
I shrugged.
“Not to give him an out, but we all do stupid things when we’re that age.”
And apparently we do stupid things when we’re thirty-one too, but I didn’t think she needed to know that. “So forgive and forget?”
“Haven’t you done that already?” she asked. “Why would you be with someone who you couldn’t forgive?”
“Right,” I said. Because right.
“Look, Sandy,” she said as she stepped forward, taking my hands in hers. “I’ve seen it now. With my own eyes. The way he looks at you. I’ve never seen him look that way at anyone else. I don’t know why you agreed to be in a relationship with him if you can’t trust that, but it’s real, okay? I’ve heard the way he’s spoken about you for years. I don’t know the courage it must have taken for you to admit how you felt, or whatever Darren had to overcome to finally allow himself to have this, but it’s real. If you need him to tell you, ask him. He will tell you it’s real.”