Anyway, I guess they didn’t want to linger too long on that topic, because before we knew it, they were back to teasing Walker and me.
“I have never seen anything more chaotic than that living room,” Taffy said. “Did the bearget in? I thought maybe he’d eaten you.”
“What happened last night?” my mother asked, still scooping.
I, personally, took the Fifth.
But I guess Walker wanted to defend us. “I could barely see driving up here,” he tried to explain. “The rental car hydroplaned on the unpaved road. It’s a wonder I didn’t kill us both. There was no heat or power, I thought—and this one”—he gestured at me—“didn’t bring any clothes.”
“Anywarmclothes,” I corrected.
“And we wound up eating canned beans for dinner.”
Taffy nodded. “We saw the pan in the fireplace.”
“And on your birthday, sweetheart!” my mom said, all sympathy.
Taffy followed with “I hope you made a good wish.”
“Anyway,” my mom said, ready to brush it all off. “Maybe it was just the reunion you needed. You two used to get along so well.”
“All little kids get along,” I protested. “They don’t know any better.”
“Not like the two of you,” Taffy said. “You’d disappear into the bunk room and build forts. You’d spend full days following tracks and looking for arrowheads. You’d swim in the lake until sundown.”
My mom nodded. “You were genuinely compatible. It was very special.”
“I was also compatible with other kids,” Walker pointed out.
Taffy nodded at that and said, “Ryan.”
At the mention of Ryan, Walker did a funny thing and looked over at me.
His mom went on. “You and Ryan were definitely best friends.” Then she smiled at me. “But the two of you”—she gestured back and forth between us—“had something special. All four of us used to talk about it. You just seemed like ...”
The moms finished together: “Soulmates.”
Walker and I protested together. “Come on!”
But my mom stood her ground. “We all thought you’d wind up getting married.”
“And of course,” Taffy went on, looking at my mom like we weren’t even there, “sweet little Lily always had such a crush on Walker.”
My mother nodded.
Wow. We really hadn’t told themanything, had we?
I shook my head at them like,Let’s not get into this.
But it was too late. Maybe always had been. Any dignity I might have hoped to maintain around my tragic, unrequited, lifelong pining for Walker was already lost.
What the moms did next wasn’t as mean as it sounds—really. They had no idea what a still-fresh (and as of this weekend, even fresher) wound they were poking at. They thought I’d had a crush on Walker as a child, and like all normal crushes, it had faded. And now it was fine to joke about it, and reminisce fondly, and maybe even work to keep our focus as a group on something way less devastating than the actual reason we were gathered here.
Anyway, they reminisced. About me. About all the adorable-slash-pathetic things I did for Walker as a kid: “Remember how she always baked him cookies at the holidays?” “And how she went looking for his baseball capafter he lost it?” “And how she bought those stickers with the initialDon them and stuck them all over her mirror?”
In their defense, I really think they thought we were all fine now.
But I wasn’t exactly fine. And the more they went on, the more un-fine I felt. Before I knew it, I was overtaken by a swell of protectiveness toward my besotted, tenderhearted younger self.
