The Wife Upstairs(66)

Bea laughs, nudging Blanche’s shoulder. “Um, Birmingham-Southern, obvi,” she says, and it actually takes her a moment to realize that Blanche’s smile has slipped.

“Oh, wow,” Blanche says, but it’s faint, and suddenly Bea knows she’s made a mistake, fucked this up somehow, but she’s not sure how.

“I thought you’d be excited,” she says. “I mean, it’s not like we have to room together there, too.”

Bea laughs to show how stupid that idea would be even though it’s exactly what she’d been thinking they’d do.

Blanche laughs, too, but just like her smile, it’s not real, and when she sits down on the edge of her bed, she says, “I guess I just thought you’d want to go to Randolph-Macon since you got in. And, like, hardly anyone here did. I didn’t.”

Which had been exactly why Bea didn’t want to go to Randolph-Macon. She’d applied because Blanche had, but she hadn’t thought she’d get in, and when she had and Blanche hadn’t, Bea had dismissed it altogether.

But now she stares at Blanche and says, “So … you want me to go to Randolph-Macon?”

Sighing, Blanche starts brushing her hair. It’s shorter now, just below her earlobes, and she’s lightened it. It doesn’t suit her as well as her dark hair did, but Bea had told her she loved it anyway.

“I just think maybe we should each have our own … things, you know?” Blanche says, and then she meets Bea’s eyes in the mirror. “We can’t be ‘the Bs’ forever.”

For the first time, Bea realizes that Blanche isn’t wearing her B necklace. Probably hasn’t worn it in weeks, and Bea just hasn’t noticed.

She feels her own pendant practically burning against her skin.

“Right,” she says with a little laugh. “You’re right. That would be stupid.”

Blanche is clearly relieved, her smile brightening into something genuine as she puts her brush down and turns around.

“I knew you’d get it,” she says.

So Blanche goes off to Birmingham-Southern, and Bea heads to Randolph-Macon, and they keep up on Facebook, through texts, but Bea doesn’t go back to Birmingham. She gets an internship with an interior design firm her junior year, and then she’s in Atlanta, and just two years after college, thanks to the contacts she’s made, she’s launching Southern Manors.

She doesn’t see Blanche again until they’re twenty-six, and finally, finally, Bea makes the trek back to Alabama, not even bothering to let her mother know she’s there.

There’s a mini-reunion in Five Points, some bar that’s too loud, the drinks too expensive, but it’s fun, being back in Birmingham, seeing the Ivy Ridge girls again. Seeing Blanche.

Whatever weirdness there’s been between the two of them vanishes the second they see each other, Blanche squealing and throwing her arms out to hug Bea.

Her hair is shorter, almost severe, but it’s pretty with her slightly elfin features, and Bea has a brief moment of wondering if she should try something similar. But no, what looks good on Blanche won’t always look good on Bea, and besides, Bea is looking pretty good herself these days as Blanche immediately points out with a shrieked, “You bitch, look at you!”

The other girls also want to know what Bea’s secret is, how she looks so great, who cuts her hair, all of that. The truth is so simple, though.

She’s rich now.

When they’d known her at Ivy, she was lacking their patina of wealth and class, so of course she seems different to them now, of course she now looks prettier and better.

But Blanche is the real star of the show because she’s getting married.

Blanche’s engagement ring is huge, an emerald-cut diamond on a platinum band, and Bea has seen pictures of Blanche’s fiancé on social media. He’s blond and tall, and reminds Bea of the boys she’d met going to parties at Hampden-Sydney, the boys’ college near Randolph-Macon. He looks older than twenty-eight and has probably looked like that since he was a teenager, earlier even. There’s a certain type of boy who seems to be born with a golf club in his hand, and that’s Tripp Ingraham.

“Richard Ingraham the Third,” Blanche tells them, and Bea hides a smile behind her drink because of course Blanche is marrying a “the third,” who’s called Tripp.

The wedding is in the spring, and they’re building a house, a big one, in a new neighborhood called Thornfield Estates.

Bea looks it up.

There’s nothing to it, really. It’s mostly a bunch of drawings of what it will look like one day, all manicured lawns and houses that are ostentatiously huge, but built like older, more modest houses. No white stucco here, just brick and tasteful navy shutters.

Houses start in the seven figures, but Bea is rich now, and why not settle in Birmingham again? Her business can be run from anywhere, and while she likes Atlanta, she hasn’t really made a life there.

But buying a house that big in a neighborhood clearly meant for families feels silly and … obvious.

So she gets a town house in Mountain Brook, then an office in Homewood, and Southern Manors keeps growing even as she helps Blanche with her wedding plans.

“It’s so good to have you back,” Blanche says one night as they sit in Blanche and Tripp’s living room, a bottle of white wine on the coffee table in front of them, their shoes off, bridal magazines all around them. “I’ve missed you.”