Chapter Sixteen
Beau · Now
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The rally was everything I’d been promised, and by Saturday night it tasted like ash, and the reason was a number I couldn’t stop doing the math on.
Seven-thirty. He goes on around seven-thirty.
We’d ridden out Friday—four hours of the kind of road that’s supposed to hollow your head clean, the switchbacks the crew called the Devil’s Staircase, two hundred miles of throttle and not one of them pointed home.
The Caldwell County fairgrounds had been handed over to a couple thousand bikes and the smell of fryer grease and hot two-stroke, and Dex knew every third man there, and for about a day I was exactly who I’d left Mercer to be.
Hartley, you mad bastard. A place in a shape.
A name that landed on men who needed nothing from me.
Then Saturday’s sun started down, and I caught myself checking my phone for the time I’d sworn I wouldn’t check.
Six-fifteen. They’d be parking now. Martha would have the kids in the good clothes. She’d have saved the seat.
I put the phone face-down on the picnic table like that would help, like a man can outrun a clock by refusing to look at it.
Sienna sat down across from me with two beers and slid one over and read my whole face in about a second and a half—which I’d thought, until that night, was a kind of intimacy.
“You’re somewhere else,” she said.
“Kid’s got a thing tonight,” I said, and hated how it came out—a thing, like I was already practicing how to make it small.
“So you’re here,” she said, easy, “and he’s there, and one night isn’t a referendum on your whole life, Beau. They don’t own you. You’re allowed to be a person.” She tipped her bottle at the fairgrounds, the noise, the lights. “This is yours too.”
It was the most generous-sounding thing anyone had said to me in months, and it was poison, and I drank it down because I was thirsty for exactly that and she’d known it before I sat down.
They don’t own you. God, I wanted that to be a true sentence.
I wanted it so badly I let it stand in for the actual question, which was: do you owe them?
Seven-thirty came and went. I felt it go.
I sat at a fire with men who liked me and a woman who looked at me like I was interesting and I felt my son walk out onto a stage three hours north and look for my face, and I drank, and I told myself the worst lie of the whole year—that there was nothing I could do about it now.
There’s always something you can do about it. You can stand up. I knew where the truck was. I could have ridden through the dark and walked in at the back of that auditorium and it would have meant something, even late, even just to me. I didn’t.
The crew peeled off to their tents one by one until it was the fire, and the dark, and Sienna, close, closer than the fire needed her to be.
She put her hand on my forearm—light, casual, a question with the punctuation left off—and she said, low, “You could just stay out here. With me. Put it down for one night. Stop carrying all of it.” And I felt it, I won’t pretend I didn’t.
I felt the whole shimmering exit she was holding open: a version of me with no recital to miss because he’d never made the promise, no wife doing dishes with her hands gone still, no kid hauling a cello bigger than he was.
A man with nobody waiting up. Everything I’d been telling myself I missed, sitting right there under her hand.
My phone buzzed against the wood. Face-down, but it buzzed, and then again, and the second buzz did what an hour of guilt hadn’t. I turned it over.
A missed call from Martha. A text under it, sent at 7:41: He’s about to go on. Second row. The seat’s here if you’re some kind of miracle.
And the lock screen behind the words—I’d forgotten what it was.
Theo at six, before any of this, before I owned a bike, holding a quarter-size cello he could barely get his arm around, grinning at me through the gap where his front teeth used to be.
And out of nowhere, clear as if he were sitting at the fire with me, I heard him the way he’d been at four, terrified of the dark, gripping my sleeve: Dad. Stay till I’m asleep.
Nine nights I’d slept on that boy’s floor. I’d done it without making it a story I got credit for. That was who I was. That was the whole architecture of me—and I was sitting two hundred miles away letting a stranger talk me out of it one reasonable sentence at a time.
I took my arm back. Not dramatic. I just—took it back, and stood up.
“I can’t,” I said. “I—no. I can’t.”
And I watched Sienna’s face do something I hadn’t seen it do before.
For half a second, before the warmth slid back over it, there was something underneath—flat, and quick, and adding a column—like a woman running a total she didn’t like.
“Suit yourself,” she said, and the ease was a costume now; I could see the seams in it. “I thought you were braver than that.”
“Brave’s got nothing to do with it,” I said, and I walked out past the fires to the dark edge of the fairgrounds where a fence ran along a field I couldn’t see, and I called home.
It rang. It rang. It went to the voicemail with Martha’s voice on it from two years ago, cheerful, recorded in a life I was busy setting on fire. I hung up. I texted: I’m sorry. Tell me how it went. Tell me he was okay. I watched it go through. Delivered. Nothing under it.
It was past eleven. The showcase had ended hours ago.
My son had stood on a stage and looked for my face and not found it, and I had been right here the whole time, free to go and choosing not to, and I sat down in the dirt with my back against a stranger’s fence in a town I’d never see again and understood the thing it would take me a year to climb back out of.
I hadn’t slept with anyone. I’d stayed faithful to my wife by about eight inches and a turned-over phone.
And it hadn’t saved a single thing. Because you don’t have to put your body in someone else’s bed to betray your family. You just have to not be in the second row. I’d avoided the larger thing and skipped the smaller one, and the smaller one was the only one my son was ever going to remember.
I stayed against that fence until the fires burned down. Nobody came looking. That, too, was a kind of answer.