The Hopefuls(53)

But my first year in St. Michaels, things changed. During a heated volleyball game, Will spiked the ball over the net and it hit me right on the nose. When I opened my eyes, he was watching me through the net with a scrunched-up face. “Everyone, take five,” he shouted to everyone who was playing, as if they didn’t see the blood that was spilling out of my nose. Will led me inside, sat me down in the kitchen, put a bunch of ice cubes in a baggie, and wrapped them in a towel for me to put on my nose. I’d met Will just a few times before this trip, and I was mortified to have him see me like this.

“It’s okay,” I kept saying to him. “Really, I don’t think it’s broken.” I had no idea if it was broken or not, but it felt like I needed to reassure him. He was looking at me nervously, like he was afraid I was going to start crying.

“Keep the ice on as long as you can,” Will said. Matt had taken his nephews out on a kayak, and Will kept looking at the door hoping that he would show up.

“You can go back out,” I said. “I’m okay, I promise.”

“Are you sure?” Will asked.

“Yes, I’m totally fine. I’ll just sit here with the ice.” I wanted desperately for him to leave then, and he finally did after patting me on the shoulder and telling me to “hang in there.” I listened to the volleyball game resume outside, and stayed in the kitchen until the bag of ice started to melt and drip down my face.

My nose wasn’t broken, but it did swell up and I had two light purple bruises underneath my eyes. There’s a group picture from that trip that Babs has hanging in the kitchen, of everyone standing on the dock. Someone must have taken it from a boat on the water, but I don’t remember who. (It seems like something they would have had me do, since we weren’t engaged yet and Babs didn’t like to have non–family members in family pictures.) I always look at the picture when we go to their house—the shot is far away, but you can still see that my nose is lumpy and miscolored.

On the last night of the trip, when Will knew it was okay to joke about my nose (and probably couldn’t help himself any longer, because the Kellys needed to make a joke out of everything), he stood up and toasted me. We were all eating crabs, as we always did for the first and last meals of the trip, and Babs had laid out newspapers on the table and put metal buckets in the middle for the shells. Everyone had mallets in their hands, and I was concentrating on my crab, trying to ignore the splashes of butter and pieces of shell that were flying everywhere. (After these dinners, the smell of Old Bay and crab lingered everywhere.)

Will stood up and wiped his hands, then hit his mallet lightly against his beer bottle. He cleared his throat. “I’d just like to take a minute to announce that the volleyball MVP award will be going to Beth, who was willing to use any body part to stop the ball. Well done, Beth!” He held up his bottle and chanted, “Hip, hip, hooray!” until everyone joined in.

The whole table clapped and cheered, even Nellie, who’d said, “Oh, Will,” in a halfhearted defense of me when he announced my name. I knew that I had to smile, so as not to seem like a bad sport, a killjoy who couldn’t take a joke, and so I did even though it made my nose throb. Matt put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close to him, but he was also laughing. That was the thing about the Kellys, they always thought they were so damn funny.

When everyone quieted down, Babs reached over and patted my arm. “Don’t worry about it, dear. Not everyone is an athlete. We all know that.”

And I swear to God, with those words I lost any athletic ability I had. It was like the Kellys cursed me. In the vacations that followed in St. Michaels, I fell while running bases, tipped over a canoe, and wiped out on a bike. The harder I tried, the more of a danger I was to myself.

This was never my favorite week of the year, but this time I was really dreading it. Normally in St. Michaels, Matt and I were a team. He watched out for me and brought me Band-Aids when I inevitably hurt myself and started to bleed. We’d go to our room at night and laugh about the things that Babs said to Rebecca, and how drunk Nellie got at dinner. But this year was different. Matt and I were on strange ground—I was at my limit with his career crisis and he was well aware of that. We’d had some snippy exchanges lately, each of us feeling that the other was the one being insensitive. There’d been a few times when I was in the middle of telling a story or talking about work and Matt cut me off to start talking about himself, as if he didn’t notice we’d been having a completely different conversation. When I tried to point this out to him, he’d become huffy and told me that it didn’t feel like I was supporting him. I was afraid he was losing his mind.

In the car on the way to St. Michaels, Matt said, “Maybe I should start looking in the private sector now, get some experience that way.”

“Maybe you should,” I said, although I knew he didn’t really want my opinion. I was only half paying attention—I’d found it was the best way to get through these long discussions.

“I wanted another year or two in government, but maybe that’s not going to happen. Jimmy said he loves Facebook. That it’s the perfect job.”

“Did you ever notice that Jimmy loves everything he does?” I asked him. “That he thinks everything is perfect and amazing. Don’t you just think that’s his approach to it? That he’s spinning it that way?”