Chapter Twelve
Martha · Now
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The showcase had been on the calendar in red since October.
Theo plays cello. He came to it the way some kids come to a religion—completely, and without our help, which is its own small miracle in a house of people who can’t carry a tune.
The regional youth showcase was the thing he’d been pointed at for half a year, a solo, eight minutes of Saint-Sa?ns that I’d heard through his bedroom door so many times I dreamed in it.
He’d asked me twice whether his dad would be in the front.
Second row, I told him. Same as always. He’ll be the one crying first.
When Beau first mentioned the trip—some ride to a rally three hours out, the whole crew, the same weekend in red—I looked him in the face. I did not raise my voice. I have learned that the things that matter should be said the way you’d say a price.
“Theo’s showcase is that weekend,” I said. “He’s been working since fall.”
Beau blinked, and for one honest second the old him surfaced. “Oh—yeah,” he said. “Right. Of course.” Like it had genuinely slipped, like the calendar in his head and the calendar in mine were the same one.
I let myself believe it was settled.
A week later he brought it up again.
We were doing the dishes, which is to say I was doing the dishes and he was leaning on the counter telling me how Dex had a guy who could get them into the rally’s VIP paddock, and I felt the floor tilt a half-degree before he even said it.
“So I’m thinking I might do the rally weekend,” he said, easy as weather.
I turned the water off. The kitchen got very quiet, the way a room does when one person in it has stopped performing and the other hasn’t noticed yet.
“That’s Theo’s showcase,” I said.
“I know, I know—but it’s one show, Marty. There’ll be others. The guys only do this trip once a—“
“Beau.” I dried my hands on the towel, slow, because I needed something to do with them.
I looked at him the way you look at someone you’re trying to memorize.
“I’m going to say this once, and I want you to actually hear it, because I’m not going to say it twice and I’m not going to fight you about it after.
If you go on that trip—if you miss your son standing on a stage looking for your face—we are going to have a serious problem.
Not a fight. A problem. Do you understand the difference? ”
And here is the thing I will carry: he heard the words.
I watched them land. And then I watched him decide to file them somewhere he wouldn’t have to look at them, the way he filed Dex’s calls into the garage.
He smiled—that good, warm, infuriating smile that had gotten him a decade of the benefit of the doubt—and he said, “It’s not going to be a thing, babe. It’s two days.”
He went back to telling me about the paddock.
I picked up the next plate. I want to tell you I was furious, but it was further than that.
Somewhere under the soap and the running water, very quietly, a woman I’d been for twelve years sat down and didn’t get back up.
The good one. The one who financed her own replacement and called it generosity.
The one who said the price once and trusted you to pay it.
I’d been her a long time.
I was about to stop.