Chapter 7 #2
He said, "Alma. Five minutes."
I went inside. I washed my face. I sat down for five minutes with a glass of water. Beckett sat with me. He did not talk. He just sat there, with his elbows on his knees and his hands loose between them, and he let the five minutes be what it needed to be.
When the five minutes were up, I stood. I said, "I'm finishing the Sportster."
He said, "I'll be in the back."
He kissed me on the temple. He went to the back of the shop and started, without being asked, on the small pile of mail that had accumulated on the counter over the previous three days, sorting it into bills, advertisements, and personal correspondence with the slow patient attention of a man who had nothing else he wanted to be doing.
I finished the Sportster.
I rang up the customer. I thanked him. I told him about the new battery warranty.
Then I closed the front bay. I locked the back. I turned off the work lamps. I walked to the front counter, where Beckett was waiting with his hat in his hand and his eyes on me, and I said, "Diner."
He said, "Diner."
We walked to the diner. We held hands. It was the first time we had held hands without an audience to perform for.
The hand-holding felt, weirdly, more conspicuous than any of our public performances had ever felt, because there was no longer a reason for it except the obvious one, and the obvious one was, somehow, the most exposing reason of all.
Sienna saw us coming through the window. She set down the coffee pot she was holding. She came out from behind the counter. She crossed the diner. She got to us before we had even reached the front step, and she said, "What happened. Tell me. Tell me."
I said, "We won."
She said, "Oh my God."
I said, "And we are staying married."
Sienna burst into tears. She was, by then, a woman who burst into tears the way other women checked the time.
She hugged me. She hugged Beckett. She hugged me again.
She hauled us into the diner. She sat us in the corner booth.
She brought us two milkshakes — chocolate, vanilla — and a basket of fries we had not ordered, and she stood at the table with her hands clasped under her chin and said, "I knew it.
I called it. I called it on day three. Ask Maverick. Ask Diesel. Ask anyone. I called it."
I said, "Sienna. Sit down."
She said, "I can't sit down. I am vibrating."
She sat down anyway. She slid into the booth next to me and put her arm through mine and asked us the kinds of questions that only Sienna asked, questions that other people would have considered nosy and which from Sienna felt like sunlight, and we answered them, and Beckett laughed, and I laughed, and somewhere around the second milkshake I realized that I had been laughing for an hour without stopping, and that this was a thing my body remembered how to do, and that I had simply not been letting it.
By the time we left the diner, half the town knew.
By the time we walked the three blocks home, the other half had been informed by Sienna's particular phone tree, which was less a tree and more a wildfire.
Diesel called Beckett on the walk. He said something short.
Beckett laughed and said, "Yeah. Thanks, Pops.
" He hung up. He did not tell me what Diesel had said.
I did not ask. There are some things between fathers and sons, even adopted ones, that you do not need translated.
We got home.
We climbed the stairs.
I sat on the couch. Beckett sat next to me. He pulled the Mary Oliver paperback off the side table and opened it to a page he had marked. He said, "Are you ready."
I said, "Twenty minutes. I am not interrupting."
He said, "I will hold you to that."
He read.
He read me the Wild Geese poem because of course he did.
He read me four poems after that — The Summer Day, the one about the grasshopper, and In Blackwater Woods, and a poem I did not know the name of, and the one about the dog.
He read them in the low quiet voice he had used at the courthouse to say I do.
I leaned against him. I closed my eyes. I let the words come over me the way I let the columns recede.
When he was done, he closed the book. He put it on the coffee table.
He said, "Alma."
I said, "Yes."
He said, "I made a list."
I opened my eyes.
I said, "You made a list."
He said, "I made a list. For you. Because I love you and you love lists."
He pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his back pocket.
He had carried it there, I would learn, for two weeks.
He unfolded it on his knee. The paper was creased and warm from his pocket.
The handwriting on it was his — careful, slightly slanted, the handwriting of a man who did not write often but who, when he wrote, meant every word.
Reasons, the list said, at the top. Permanent.
There were eleven items.
I read them.
I read them all.
When I was done, I did not cry, because I had cried enough that day.
I folded the list. I put it in the inside pocket of my flannel, against my chest. I leaned over and I kissed him on the corner of the mouth — the corner, where he had kissed me at the courthouse, the small geography that had started the whole thing — and I said, "Beckett. "
He said, "Yes."
I said, "Item twelve is because I love you back."
He said, "Noted."
He smiled.
I leaned my head on his shoulder.
The list, I will tell you, I still have.
It lives in a drawer in the kitchen now, next to the spice jars, where I can look at it when I need to.
The drawer is the only drawer in this apartment that is not organized, because the list is the one thing in my house that does not need a system. The list is a system unto itself.
The shop, downstairs, was silent. The town, outside, was settling into evening. Beckett's hand was warm on my shoulder.
I had won. I had won the case, and the shop, and the man, and the future, and somewhere in the slow accumulation of those wins I had also won myself back — the version of me that had not yet learned to file her feelings under manageable risk, the version that had hung off the back of Tomás's chair at twelve and laughed at his jokes, the version who knew, before the columns had taken over, that some things did not need to be managed.
They just needed to be lived.
I closed my eyes.
I lived this one.