She takes a breath, and I interrupt, gently.
“I’m at Lainey’s house,” I say, raising my eyebrows at Lainey. She nods. “Do you want to come over here?”
“Okay,” she says. “Thanks, Delilah.”
“Is she okay?” Wyatt asks, frowning, when I hang up.
“I think she and Thad got into their first fight,” I say, putting my phone away again. “And I guess now I’m the sister who’s good at fighting with partners? Fuck.”
“You’re the least likely to blow smoke up her ass and she knows it,” Lainey counsels.
“Agreed,” Wyatt says.
Fifteen minutes later, we hear someone shouting Hello? Around the front of the house, so the three of us call Ava back. She’s wearing jeans with knee-high boots over them and a black wool winter coat, somehow looking perfectly put together even though she’s obviously been crying.
I, on the other hand, am wearing jeans for the first time all week. I’ve worn leggings to work for the past three days, because the idea of putting on anything less comfortable than that just sounded like torture.
“Hey, y’all,” she says softly, then frowns. “Wyatt?”
“He’s making sure I’m not dead,” I say, pop the top off a beer, and hand it over as she sits. “What happened?”
Ava takes a deep breath. She stares into the fire. Then, she comes to some kind of decision, guzzles half her beer, and looks determinedly at the three of us.
“Tonight was supposed to be spaghetti night,” she begins.
The gist of the fight is more or less that Ava forgot to get pasta on the way home from work, Thad snapped at her about it, she snapped back that it’s always her job to get pasta, and things devolved from there until she was shouting about dirty socks and he was detailing all the times he’d turned her curling iron off for her before the whole house burned down, not that she ever bothered noticing.
In other words, just a fight, but I think it’s their first one and Ava is distraught.
“Could you get a curling iron that turns off automatically after thirty minutes?” I ask.
“Probably,” Ava says.
“It sounds as if you both might be feeling under-appreciated and taken for granted right now,” Lainey says. “I think that’s not uncommon with recently married couples.”
Okay, she’s way better at this than me.
Ava’s nodding.
“And, I don’t know,” she says, looking down at the beer. “It also feels like we just got married and we’re already in this routine? And spaghetti night is part of that routine? And sometimes I don’t want that, I want him to be exciting and sexy again and surprise me —"
Her face goes bright red, and she glances at Wyatt. He pretends he heard nothing.
“Have you told Thad that?” I ask.
“No,” she admits. “I don’t want him to think… I don’t know. That I’m needy?”
“Sweetheart, you’re allowed to have emotional needs and express them,” Lainey says.
“Just tell him,” I say. “You’re married. He knows he has to take your feelings into account, but you have to tell him your feelings. And if you do that and he doesn’t, divorce his ass.”
Ava stares into the fire. She drinks her beer. She drinks some more beer, still staring.
“Is that what happened to you and Nolan?” she finally asks.
“Sort of,” I admit. “I mean, not really. It was…”
I drink the last of my beer.
“I fucked up,” I tell her. “Promise me you won’t tell your sisters or your mom.”
Ava leans forward, wide-eyed.
“I shouldn’t have gotten married,” I start. “I should have spent a year backpacking the world and finding myself or something, but instead I married someone eight years older than me because I wanted to be someone else and I thought I could force myself into some other mold.”
Wyatt’s also leaning forward, frowning. He doesn’t know this story, either. Lainey’s one of the few people who do.
“Anyway, he had this life plan all laid out, and part of the plan was that six months after we got married we started trying for a baby. And I agreed to this, for the record. I was not at all sure that I wanted to have a baby that soon with him, but instead of saying that out loud, I just went along with this plan.”
I grab another beer, pull one foot onto my chair, and point at Ava.
“Definitely don’t do that,” I tell her. “After the first month, when my period showed up, I was so relieved I cried. Then I felt so guilty for being relieved that I cried about that, and then I think I just cried for the hell of it, but I wanted so badly to be the right kind of person that I didn’t say anything and we kept trying.”
I pause, drink some more beer. Even though this story is years old and water long under the bridge, it still sparks deep guilt and the creeping, unsteady feeling that I’m not a good or brave person.