6. Crash, Bang, Bang
CRASH, BANG, BANG
LUCY
Icry for what feels like three days straight in Dina’s apartment above the diner. She lets me.
I don’t tell my family because they’d be heartbroken for me. They know I love Fox. I also don’t tell them because Milo is very likely to go to Germantown and get into a physical altercation with Fox.
I put my things away in Dina’s second bedroom, but I stay on her couch, wrapped in a quilt her grandmother made thirty years ago, around the time her family was escaping from Iran.
I know this couch. It has held me before.
After my first real heartbreak at nineteen.
After my grandmother’s funeral.
After the baby.
It holds me for three days while I grieve.
“You are not a pretty crier,” Dina remarks as she watches me sob uncontrollably while the television is playing The Bridges of Madison County. It’s my go-to sob fest movie. But I don’t need Clint Eastwood to break my heart—it’s already broken.
I’ve been bursting into tears all the time. In the middle of eating cereal. While Dina forces me to take a shower I don’t want to. When anguish wakes me up in the middle of the night, or when I’ve only just dozed off.
My grief has its own schedule and is merely using my body as a venue.
“Go away,” I mumble.
Her face creases with compassion. “I can go kick his ass, you know?”
“And how’s that supposed to help me?”
“It’ll make me feel better,” she retorts.
On the morning of the third day at Dina’s, I wake up and find that the crying has gone…quiet.
Not gone-gone—I can feel it behind everything, like a frequency just below hearing—but manageable.
I eat breakfast at the diner, cooked by Jackie, a retired grandmother who pinch-hits when I’m out of commission, which isn’t often.
Jackie keeps things simple, the way most Nashville diners do. There are things she won’t attempt, though—like poaching eggs—so Dina has to take eggs Benedict off the menu, and there are no specials either.
No cassoulet simmering all afternoon, no boeuf bourguignon, which the regulars love almost as much as the biscuits and gravy.
Dina’s place has always had a bit of French country spirit in it—her way of honoring the years she spent as a child in a refugee camp in France. So when I’m in the kitchen, I lean into that, bringing those slow, hearty dishes to a Tennessee diner that somehow made room for them.
After I eat scrambled eggs with toast, I debate whether to call or text Fox. He’s texted me a few times. He’s called, but I let it go to voicemail. I didn’t read or listen to his messages.
But I am braver now, so I can hear his voice and not crumble. That’s what I decide. However, it’s a close thing when he picks up the phone after the first ring and says in his sexy voice, “Luce.”
“I’m coming by today. Around two to get more of my stuff. If that’s okay.”
A pause.
“I don’t want you to be there.” I mean it approximately seventy percent of the way.
Another pause. Long exhale. “Lucy, you sure you don’t need help—”
“No.”
He doesn’t get to be nice. He doesn’t get to be helpful.
He just…damn it. I close my eyes and push the tears back.
“Okay, sweetheart. I won’t be there.”
I want to yell at him not to call me sweetheart, but I like it so much that I don’t.
Now I’m pathetic and stupid. Great combination!
I hang up before either of us can say anything that makes this worse.
“You want me to come with you?” Dina asks as she leans over the counter.
“No.”
She doesn’t push.
I’m going to be a mess when I go there, and I don’t need witnesses for that. As close as we are, I am still a private person, and she knows that.
I drive down I-65, the late morning light flat and white through the windshield, Nashville spreading out on either side of the highway—pockets of old and new side by side. The new construction cranes are visible from everywhere now, and the skyline appears revised every time you look at it.
I don’t have much to take from his place.
I moved my body in, and my clothes, and my kitchen things—the cast-iron pan, the good knives—and I planted things in the garden, and I put books on shelves and blankets and throws around the house because I get cold and like cozy, but I never—I see this now, with the vision that only comes after you’ve left—I never settled my weight into that house.
Never quite trusted the floor, did you, Lucy?
Well, at least that was smart of you, even if it didn’t register as a red flag.
I take the exit toward Germantown, and the city shifts like you’ve crossed an invisible line and becomes visibly more expensive. I have driven this route hundreds of times. I know the gas station on the corner, the dry cleaner Fox uses, and the coffee place that opened two years ago.
I pass Butchertown Hall, our favorite spot for Saturday brunch—on the mornings we aren’t at the farmers market.
I smile at a memory as I stop at a red light.
This was a couple of months after the baby.
Fox was already up when I came into the kitchen, which was unusual—Fox slept late on Saturdays, with the commitment of a man reclaiming something the workweek took. But that Saturday, he was in the kitchen in a T-shirt and old jeans, drinking coffee.
“You’re up,” I remarked.
“That’s accurate.”
He poured me coffee and handed me a cup. “Come somewhere with me.”
I frowned. “Where?”
“Farmers market. On Eighth.”
I looked at him quizzically.
Fox did not do farmers markets.
Fox did not, as a rule, do anything that required standing in a field with other people on a Saturday morning, waiting for heirloom tomatoes.
“Who are you”—I arched an eyebrow—“and what did you do with my husband?”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “I want to see what you do there.”
“What I do there?” I ask, baffled.
“You always seem so excited when you get back,” he explained with an affectionate smile. “Talking for an hour about whatever you found, and I want to be part of it.”
How was I not supposed to fall in love with him?
So we went, and it was one of those mornings that don’t announce themselves as significant while they’re happening.
We moved through the stalls slowly, no agenda, no timeline, and Fox—who approached most things with the efficient purposefulness of a man who had somewhere better to be—did not once check his phone.
He carried the bags without being asked.
He tasted everything I handed him, even the things he was skeptical about, which were most things.
He listened to me talk about dry-farming techniques for an uninterrupted twenty minutes with every appearance of genuine interest. At some point, somewhere between the herb stalls and a woman selling raw honey out of the back of a truck, he took my hand.
I bought persimmons and a bunch of herbs so fragrant the whole car smelled like a garden on the drive home.
I thought then, “This is what love looks like in a marriage.”
I thought it so completely and so surely that I put it away safely in my heart, like a fact I didn’t need to examine because it wasn’t going anywhere.
The light changes.
I drive.
That memory makes my heart tremble, ache.
But I’m tired of crying, so I think about practical things—boxes, knives, whether the blankets in the living room are worth taking or if I should leave them, whether the fig tree will survive the summer without me—and I am not succeeding, because my brain is doing the thing it has been doing for three days, which is reviewing everything with the new information, holding every memory up to the light of him never loving me.
My eyes fill with tears, and I can’t stop it. I press the back of my hand to them, brief, a quick maintenance, the way you clear a fogged windshield—just enough to see.
I’m on the long curve before the turn onto Fox’s street, and I am working very hard not to think about the farmers market and the weight of his hand and the persimmons, and I am not, in this moment, fully here.
I am also crying.
Not a lot.
It’s just the low, persistent version, the one that has become ambient background noise over the last three days.
I reach for the visor to block the sun’s angle.
I don’t see the construction truck—the one that comes from the side street on the left, running the stop sign, heavy with equipment, doing forty in a twenty-five.
I feel it when it hits my car on the driver’s side.
Crash.
I feel the solid crunch of metal against metal, and then, abstractly, clinically, my body is thrown further into the car, the airbags snapping open, slapping against my face.
The world rotates in a way it’s not supposed to—mixing sky, asphalt, oak branches.
Then there is a heavy, loud noise—bang, and then again, bang.
And then there’s nothing.