Free The Almost Archer Sisters by Lisa Gabriele Page B

good, Peach, I’ll just stay right here, playing with myself.”
    “So tell me what happened, Beth.”
    “You wanna know what happened? You wanna know what he said? He said: ‘Well, Beth, I wasn’t sure I could fall in love with you before. But after that Page Six stupidity, it’s doubtful I ever will.’ He’s looking to join a private firm. Make partner, or whatever law people do. Seems I’m not law-partner-wife material. But dammit, Peachy, that bouncer was a fucking tool.”
    Marcus told her he thought that they should take a long break,as though Beth was an arduous hike and lucky him coming upon a bench. I understood that urge, but sometimes that’s all it took. A brief break, feet up, phone off for a spell, and then I’d muster up the business of missing Beth again.
    “I want to know what’s wrong with me, Peachy. Why I can’t get a guy to love me?”
    “I wish I knew too, lovey,” I said. “Maybe your picker’s broken and you should retract it for repairs. You know?”
    Beau was right, I did spend more time on the phone trying to fix Beth’s life than I did making sense of ours. I know now we had just begun the mysterious process of growing apart, something that used to baffle me about other couples. I used to wonder how, after seven, eight years together do you possibly “grow apart”? And please can you show me how to do it? I used to worry Beau and I had grown way too close, not in the cute way of finishing each other’s sentences, but in the bad way, like a pot holding too many plants, the roots eventually strangling each other. After almost a decade of marriage, my body, my life, was becoming indiscernible from my husband’s, a man who ate off my plate, used my toothbrush, and talked to me while sitting on the toilet, scouring his molars—worse, I understood every word he mumbled through the suds, standing there at the vanity wearing his tossed-off T-shirt and rubbing his medicinal hand cream into my heels. Even if I hadn’t had sex with him, hugged or touched him, by the end of the day, I would smell like Beau. Once, after my hernia operation, I was about to scold him for clipping his toenails in the living room. But when he was finished with his toenails, he started on mine as though my feet were simply an extension of his own, a backup set, perhaps, and I loved him so much in that moment.
    “Beth. Listen to me. Have you spoken to him?”
    “Marcus won’t talk to me. Won’t answer my emails. Won’t tell me why he can’t love me. Then he goes and posts that ad and he
makes sure
I know about it. It’s so cruel. I hate him, but I love himso much. Oh, Peachy, I’m going crazy. And now the Internet’s down at this fucking hellhole hotel, and I’m fucking here for another week of fucking stupid models and fat Germans trolling the beach for kids. I hate it here.”
    I let her cry while craning my neck to watch Beau stretch off the couch, channel-surf, then fall back down after finding something else to watch. Like bobby pins under a high beehive hairdo, or the spider web of arthritic knots tied behind a delicate piece of embroidery, men have no idea how relationships are held together, the girdles and duct tape, the emotional scaffolding that hold two people together.
    “Forget him, Beth,” I said. “You have to just forget him. And no more emails, okay? He’ll think you’re desperate.”
    “It’s just that I don’t want this to keep happening to me. You studied social work. What’s wrong with my social life?”
    “Well, I flunked out so I’m just an antisocial nonworker. Maybe you pushed things too soon, too far?”
    Beth had a knack for sending what I called “emotional canaries” into the hearts of the men she liked or loved. They took the form of anxious questions: Where do you see this going? When are you back in town? What should we do about dinner? How do you feel about meeting my people? My meeting yours? Where do you see yourself in five years, ten, twenty? When