25. Growing Sideways – Stella
I wake up to banging.
A steady knock outside my house has my pulse pounding until I hear intermittent dog tags jingling.
Gracie.
Gracie is outside, which means Riggins is probably outside, too.
Sitting up, I take note of my body, the achy exhaustion in my limbs, and the quiet, foggy blanket covering my mind.
I left early in the morning before Riggins woke, driving home in silence, overthinking every moment that happened the previous night. Him singing my song, going to his place in a rage, the papers. The kiss. Everything that happened after the kiss.
The contentment I felt falling asleep in his arms.
I was surprised when I was able to fall back asleep when I got home, but I told myself the day prior had taken an emotional toll, draining me. But now I know to my bones that’s probably not it. I feel the rising tide of another episode coming on, the waters lapping up to my knees now, holding me down.
With a sigh, I roll out of bed and use the bathroom before sliding on a pair of sandals and moving toward the front door, where the banging is the loudest. I’m still in Riggins’ tee and a pair of my own shorts as I tiredly lean on the door frame, watching as he bangs a hammer into loose nails on the porch.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
His head lifts, followed by his body, and Gracie runs to me, dancing in front of where I stand until I pet her. “Funny, that’s what I said this morning when I woke up to an empty bed. No note, no text, nothing. Just an empty bed, your car out of my drive.”
I squint at him, still tired and confused, trying to understand. “Are you… are you mad at me?” I ask, bewildered.
“Considering everything that happened yesterday, I’m trying my fuckin’ hardest not to be, Stella, but I’m having a hard time doing so.” My head snaps back, and I stare at him.
“You’re not allowed to be mad at me,” I say, and Riggins stands to his full height, staring at me with false shock.
“I’m not? My wife spends the night in my bed, I don’t have nightmares for the first time in seven years, and then I wake up, and she’s gone?” For a moment, I stand there, stunned because I don’t have nightmares for the first time in seven years is running through my mind but then I snap out of it.
I can’t have him helping me slide into the easy we used to be before everything imploded. I mean, fuck, he’s only been in my life for a couple of weeks, and my life is already going back to the mess it was when he was in it.
“I’m not your wife, Riggins. Stop saying that.” I step out onto the porch.
“You’re not?” he asks, stepping closer and crossing his arms on his chest, the hammer still in his hands. “The papers we signed in Vegas state differently.” I groan and sigh, looking at the railing of my porch as if it will give me the energy and strength to deal with him.
It does not, in fact, give me anything.
“Then we’ll get a divorce! Sign the papers, and we can end this shit. It was a dumb decision we made as kids! This is crazy, Riggins.” The words twist something I refuse to acknowledge in my gut, while the practical, rational side knows it’s what makes the most sense. It’s been the same battle for seven years: cut the last tie holding us together or hold on tight to the last fraying thread of hope.
A loud clatter occurs, heavy metal on wood, as the hammer falls to the steps before he takes a few steps toward me, pinning me against the side of my house.
“You bring up those stupid papers again; I’ll do what I always used to do when you would say something that pissed me off.”
I feel my brow come together in confusion. “What?—”
“Fuck you until you see things my way.” My mouth drops open, his just inches from my face, and even though there are a million things I should be worrying about at this moment, all I can think about is the fact that I probably have morning breath.
“Excuse me?” I ask, my voice a stuttered whisper.
“You let your walls down for me last night. Let me in. You came barging in, ready to rip me apart. But instead, what happened was out of your careful little calculations.” My breath stops.
“What?” I ask again, my words barely audible now, but he hears it all the same.
“You think I don’t realize your new life is entirely weighing pros and cons and deciding a million outcomes before you even try anything? No impulse. No excitement. Nothing.” He looks…. disappointed as he speaks like he can’t believe this is the life I’m leading.
“I don’t—” I try to explain because he might not be wrong, but that doesn’t mean he has to be right.
“At my place, though, you didn’t take a moment to calculate. You went with your gut, and fuck, baby, I’m glad you did.” His head dips down then, shocking my system as his lips touch the skin beneath my ear.
“Riggins,” his breath is spreading warmth through me, his beard that needs a shave grazing against my skin. “Riggins, we can’t.”
“We can,” is all he says, his lips grazing skin.
“We aren’t that anymore.”
“We could be.”
I shake my head, but even I know it’s half-hearted. I’m barely even fighting anymore.
“We can’t. We don’t work; we proved that years ago,” I whisper, but I don’t push him away, and I don’t give any other indication I’d want him to back away from me.
“You’re punishing me, pushing me away because of who I used to be, but I don’t even know that man anymore, Stella. How is that fair, paying penance for a person I’m not?” he whispers, hitting a sore spot, a place I’ve contemplated more than a few times since he’s been back.
“I just need time, Riggins.”
“Time,” he whispers against my skin.
“Yes. I need time.” He nods, something I feel rather than see.
“If you can promise you’re not using it as an excuse, a chance to rebuild that wall I broke down yesterday, then yeah, I can give you time. I can give you all the time you need.”
Relief washes through me and I answer before I can second guess it, answering with my heart rather than my head.
“I promise.” His face goes liquid with pleasure, and the waters lower a bit, his sun warming my bones.
“Okay, Stell. Then I’ll give you time,” he whispers, then his head dips once more, pressing his lips to mine before backing away. “Gracie girl, come on,” he says, and I watch as Gracie follows him, trotting to his truck. Then, I watch him drive away.
On Thursday, Reed is leaning on his elbows against the table in the diner, loudly and exuberantly telling me a story of a time when they locked Wes outside of the bus with no clothes on.
“God, you should have seen it, Stella. He was frantic,” he says. I look over at Riggins, who is watching me. A small smile is on his lips, as he does. This is what it’s always like when he comes here; his eyes are always on me like he’s afraid to miss something.
It’s two days after my failed attempt at serving Riggins with divorce papers, and I’m learning his definition of space is a bit different from mine. He is still coming in at noon every day I’m at the diner, sitting in his booth and watching me until I’m done for the day. Then he follows me home and presses a kiss to my lips before he leaves and goes on with his day, doing I don’t know what.
It’s… easy.
It’s everything we used to be.
But it’s unnerving. I’ve come to learn that good things, sweet things, don’t last for me.
And it seems like today is the day the other shoe is going to drop.
“No.” I hear the words ring out in the diner, my mother’s firm, angry voice entering my psyche.
My head swivels in the direction of the door to see my mother standing at Amelia’s station, her jaw tight, her eyes filled with venom.
And the venom is directed right at Riggins.
Without my permission, my body moves toward the front of the entrance, ready to diffuse this situation.
“You are not welcome here,” she says, not paying me any mind.
“Mother,” I say, my voice low and trying to avoid a bigger drama than I already see rolling out. We have a handful of customers scattered at tables throughout the diner, but in a small town like this, juicy drama travels fast.
Her head turns to me quickly, and I don’t see the mother I know, the one who is cordial, if a bit cold. Instead, it is ice and brutal anger. A glance of someone who doesn’t like you in the least and barely tolerates your presence. “I’ll get to you next,” she says, stunning me.
“I told you I didn’t want him to be here. Riggins Greene, leave, or I’m calling the cops. I have the right to refuse service.” Her lips tip up in an ugly smile I’ve never seen before. “You were pretty well acquainted with the back of a cop car last time you were in town, weren’t you? And if I recall, Stella wasn’t too impressed by that either.” My brows furrow in confusion with her words and the way a hint of pain scrapes along Riggs’ face with the words, but Reed steps in before I can let it register.
“Hey, Mrs. Hart, maybe—” Reed tries to say.
“I don’t want to hear from you, Reed. You’re no better than that one. You leave my establishment before I call the authorities.”
It’s getting too out of hand, her words getting angry for no reason, and I wonder if she’s fully sober, remembering the days when she would come home from luncheons with her friends just a bit too tipsy—that’s always when she would be her most cruel. And with all the eyes in the diner on us now, I need to shut it down before it gets much, much worse.
“Mom, come on, let’s—” I don’t know what I’m going to say. Maybe let’s talk about this out of the eager eyes of the entire town or let’s not do this here, but I don’t get the chance to determine which version I’m going to argue because she looks at me, and snaps.
“I told you to get that divorce, or I was done with you, Stella. Did you? He’s bad news, just like that father of his. Even Jeanette enabled their shitty behavior.”
Now, I can put up with a lot of shit. I can put up with my mom talking shit to me, with my never being enough for her. I can even put up with her talking shit about Riggins because, at some point, I reinforced those thoughts she had about him. I cried in her house when he broke me, and she listened.
But Jeanette?
Absolutely not.
Jeanette Greene was the woman who took me in for six hours when I tried to run away from home after failing another one of my mother’s invisible, unwinnable tests when I was ten. The one who dried my tears and told me my mom was just confused. That I was beautiful and smart and enough, and when I was 12, and she died, a part of me died with her.
She was a good person, unlike the woman who actually raised me.
“Absolutely not,” I say, speaking the words out loud, my back straightening, my jaw tightening. The armor I’ve built around me to be her perfect child despite everything shatters, and I revert back to a version of me I hid long, long ago.
“Excuse me?” My mother says, seething.
“I said, absolutely not. You do not talk about Jeanette like that. One, she isn’t here to defend herself. You yourself taught me not to talk ill of the dead, but your obsession with talking shit about Mr. And Mrs. Greene is absolutely criminal. And two, that woman was more of a mother to me than you ever were. She was kind and comforting and never?—”
I don’t get to finish my sentence because searing pain strikes my cheek, my face turning as my mother slaps me across my face.
“How fucking dare you,” my mother says with pure fucking venom, with a voice I’ve never heard before. “How dare you? I am your mother. I raised you.”
“I…” I start stuttering. My cheek is throbbing, and I think, at this point, I’m in pure shock, unsure of what to do.
I’m twenty-seven, and my mother just slapped me in the entryway of my workplace.
“Get out. Get your shit, and get out of here. You’re fired. And this time, when he breaks you again, I hope he does it well and good, makes sure you don’t come back from that shit. I’m done with you, Stella. So is your father, and so is Everest.”
The words rocket around my brain, and I think people talk in the restaurant, but they could be whispering or screaming, and I wouldn’t know the difference. I can’t focus on anything, absolutely nothing.
“Come on, Stella,” a low voice says, a comforting one, a voice my body melts for, firm hands wrapping around my bicep, another tucking around my waist, pulling me until my face is pulled from looking at the pure rage that is my mother. “Come on, sweetheart. Amelia, right?” Another voice I can’t place says. My ears are ringing now.
“Can you grab Stella’s stuff? Bring it out?” I think someone agrees but I can’t function, my feet moving without my knowledge as I’m guided toward the exit, the bells tinkling overhead.
Suddenly, my mind registers somehow, somewhere, that might be the last time I hear that noise, those bells.
Fresh air hits my face and my lungs, the smell of impending rain hitting my nose, and suddenly, it’s like the world fast forwards, and I’m rushed back into my body.
Riggins is holding me, my body pressed to his as we stand on the sidewalk outside of the Ashford Diner.
“She hit me,” I whisper.
“Yeah, baby. She did,” he whispers into my hair.
“My mother slapped me.”
“Yeah, Stell.”
“She hit me in public. She hit me.” I’m starting to lose it. I can feel it. The emotion is leaking into my pores, the panic and disappointment and anger and sadness all mixing like chemicals in a nuclear reactor that is my chest, needing an outlet.
“She hit me, Riggs.” And then I break.
The tears come, and somehow, the way he always did, he knows it’s coming before I do. Somehow, he remembers how much I hate having people see me cry and is giving me that bit of decency, that bit of humanity. He turns me into his body, using one arm to wrap my waist and hold me up, the other to hold my head down and I break, as I cry into his shirt.
“Here, Riggins,” Amelia’s voice says. Riggins moves, jostling me a bit but not too much before grabbing what must be my bag. “I’m sorry, but she said if you guys don’t leave, she’s going to, uh,” she hesitates as I take a deep breath to force my tears to slow, my sobs turn into gasping breaths into Riggins’ shirt. “Call the police.”
That snaps me out of it, and I step back, looking at Amelia, then Riggins, then at the open door, my mother standing in it, her arms crossed on her chest.
And despite the fact that I know my face is swollen both from her hitting me and my tears, I move to stand in the doorway.
“You’re going to call the cops? I dare you. I dare you.” A maniacal laugh leaves my lips. “You do, I’m happy to tell them how you assaulted me, then fired me. Bet that would look great at your Sunday morning brunch, explaining the assault charges to your little friends.” Her face goes red.
“How fucking dare—” she starts, but I cut her off, feeling free for the first time in my life. Free of her expectations, of my unexplainable need to earn her approval.
I’m done.
“No, how dare you. How dare you treat me, your own daughter, like I’m shit on your shoes?
“That’s enough, little star,” Riggins says in my ear, his chest somehow plastered against my back, rumbling the low words right into my body.
“Enough? Enough? A lifetime of taking her shit, nothing will ever be enough, Riggins.”
“I know, baby. I know. Come on. Don’t let her win, yeah?”
Somewhere in the far reaches of my mind, I remember that. I remember him whispering that to me as I cried on a street corner, not unlike how I am now when I cried because she kicked me out at nineteen.
He was right then, too.
Riggins Greene might not be perfect, and he might be fucked in a million and seven ways, but he was right about that.
My standing here, arguing with her, is what she wants. It somehow confirms I am what she thinks I am, and not in a good way.
“You’re right, she’s not worth it,” I whisper, then turn away from my mother.