It Had to Be You by Georgia Clark

Author:Georgia Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

38

Darlene accepted a warm hug from Imogene and a Don’t wrinkle my outfit air-hug from his mother, Catherine. She shook hands with Zach’s father, Mark, and was introduced to their house manager, Debra, a brisk, friendly woman in her forties, who looked Indian or Caribbean. They exchanged a smile and small nod of recognition. Darlene was relieved not to be the only nonwhite person in a fifty-mile radius, even though Debra, despite working on a laptop and not serving drinks, was still technically staff. It was hard not to think of Get Out. When Debra disappeared into a study to work from one of the comfortable leather chairs, Darlene stopped herself cracking a joke about the Sunken Place.

“I thought we’d start with a little tipple on the patio,” Catherine said, resplendent in a red silk wrap dress and fresh round of Botox. “Just something casual.”

It was neither little nor casual. The patio was the size of a ship, looking out over a spangled Olympic-size pool and acres of immaculately landscaped green. Catherine handed Darlene a rum-based cocktail she needed two hands to wrangle.

Zach requested a seltzer. His mother looked shocked. “Zach, you’re not drinking?” She said this in the same way one might exclaim, Zach, you can fly?!

Zach explained he was driving, laying a hand on Darlene’s knee. The sensation zipped up her spine with such hot, unexpected electricity, she twitched. Reading this as reproach, Zach removed his hand.

“Why didn’t you get a driver?” Mark asked. Casually, Zach’s dad was in a three-piece suit, and shoes a crocodile had casually sacrificed its life for. “Don’t you usually get a driver?”

“Don’t you get it?” Imogene sipped her cocktail, her blue eyes flashing. “They wanted to be alone.”

“Oh,” Zach’s parents said. They exchanged a slightly mystified look. Unclear whether it was because of Zach’s sobriety, or that Darlene would want to be alone with their son.

The conversation moved on to Imogene and Mina’s upcoming wedding, an event Darlene was expected to attend with the family. On one hand, she felt guilty. The Livingstones were investing in her emotionally, and she was lying to them. But another, less noble part of herself was looking forward to it. Not just because she’d be attending a wedding with Zach that they wouldn’t have to work at. Because she’d be attending a wedding with Zach.

It was odd witnessing Zach at home with his family. Darlene was used to him being the life of the party, which was sometimes fun and sometimes annoying, but here Zach was muted. Perhaps he saw entertaining people as work. He wasn’t working now. He and Imogene seemed like partners in surviving two dramatic narcissists, in a place where expectations were so impossibly high he wasn’t even bothering to please them with a performance. And the irony was Zach’s parents still treated him like a clown.

Zach-as-annoying-idiot was a role he’d written for himself and played with aplomb ever since Darlene met him. But it had become less circumstantial, based on fact, and more institutional, based on assumption.

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