“Not if you do it to make the other person happy. It is if you do it to make yourself look good and in the process it makes the other person upset.”
Dalia pulled into an unofficial lookout over the lake. It was astoundingly pretty but Valerie didn’t care, thinking about Nico as they got out and waded through the tall grass and weeds to an abandoned picnic table near a tree and covered with carved graffiti. Dalia was quiet, giving Valerie the space to think.
She’d been in the wrong for not telling Nico, but he’d hit hard and mean. She hadn’t expected that.
She checked her phone again. Nothing. To distract herself, she went through her group chats. Blair and the others were talking about going to New York for a girls’ weekend. Her mother had texted to tell her Erica and her fiancé were getting a kitten, and made no mention of their fight. One of the twins was getting a new car.
Valerie sighed and put the phone down.
“Do you ever feel like everyone is an adult but you?” she asked, wanting to talk about anything to get her mind off Nico. “How can I be thirty and still feel like I don’t have it together?”
“Sometimes,” said Dalia. “I mean, look at me. I work a few shifts at a diner and rent a room. I do admin work for a bunch of strangers. I’ve got twenty bucks in my retirement fund so I’m stuck working until I die. My sisters both went the husband, kids, good jobs, nice housesroute. It’s hard to not feel like I’m failing somehow, although I don’t want any of that. I like my jobs, and I don’t feel trapped, but they’re always complaining.”
“I hate feeling trapped too.” Valerie tossed a rock at the water, and it landed in the grass.
“Then where are you failing on the adult front?”
“I can’t stick to things. I never could, according to my mom,” said Valerie. “Like Ad Astra. The second I had a problem, I quit. Or seriously considered it.”
“According to your mom? Not you?”
Valerie opened her mouth but paused. She’d always believed her mother’s interpretation but was it accurate? She thought back to the things she’d quit. Her job with Ruth, but it had been to start her own company. Jake, but that was to save her own mental well-being. Pilates. That was because she didn’t know how to refuse when Blair asked her to come, and she stopped when Blair did. A rum-tasting course she’d had to shelve when work got too busy. Becoming a certified gemologist… Okay, quitting that was on her. She’d realized she’d preferred admiring stones in ignorance.
“No,” she said slowly. “I never quit because I was flighty. I had reasons.”
“Even if you didn’t, that’s fine,” said Dalia. “It’s not a moral failing to decide something’s not for you and to stop. Have you always kept with the things you wanted?”
“I have,” said Valerie, in the slow realization of epiphany. “I love crafts and I do those. I love planning events and I stuck with that for a decade.”
“Very few choices are set in stone,” said Dalia. “I mean, some are for sure. But there are lots you can revisit or rethink once you’ve given yourself time.”
Valerie didn’t answer. They stayed for a while, tossing stones downtoward the water and picking flowers. The sun was kind on Valerie’s skin, warm rather than baking.
“Overall, people are too hard on themselves,” said Dalia eventually. “Let’s take you. You wanted to do something nice. In your mental imagery, was the focus on the reaction to the nice thing or the reaction to you doing the nice thing?”
Valerie thought about it. “The reaction to the nice thing. Mostly.”
“Then you wanted to do something kind but messed up the execution a bit. It’s not a crime. If you felt good for doing good things, that’s science, my friend.”
“What?”
“Yeah, it activates the reward centers in our brain.” Dalia made a face. “Apparently we had to be incentivized to be kind to people. I’m not sure what that says about humanity.”
“I don’t know if Nico’s going to take neuroscience as an excuse for keeping this from him,” she said.
Dalia tapped her on the knee. “Then maybe start with an apology,” she advised.
They drove back to the Badgertons and Valerie leaned her head back. “I feel like all we’ve done is emotionally rescue me this month,” she said. “It’s been the Valerie show.”
“Don’t sweat it,” said Dalia, turning into the driveway. “You’ll have plenty of future chances to be a stand-up friend. I’m a hot mess in my luteal phase, so next week you’ll be talking me down from shaving my head and moving to Bali because someone cut in front of me at the grocery store.”
“I look forward to it.”
“You’re the only one.”
When Valerie got out of the car, Dalia leaned out the window. “Call if you need me, okay? Or if you want a place to stay. We’ve got an extra room and I can come get you in minutes.”
Valerie felt her insides melt a bit with relief. Someone was in her corner. “Thanks.”
