Chapter Thirty-Three Bram
Chapter Thirty-Three
Bram
I nod, as rust creeps up my throat and fills my mouth with the bitter taste of metal and heartbreak.
How foolish I am. How very old and besotted and ridiculous and selfish, selfish.
And how greedy, I add to the list. To want more when your life is already overflowing with plenty.
It’s a bad person who wants more than enough. Isn’t it? Who looks at their perfect kids, at the job of their dreams, at nosy, messy, loyal friends who’ve stuck with them for years and years, and thinks but I want more?
Not everyone has a day in their life that they can point to and say that was the day they chose to be a good person, but I do.
Sara and I emerged from our hiding places in that field, covered in burrs and mud and scrapes, and we decided.
I decided. I chose rules and logic and consent and equanimity.
And this version of Bram right now, trying not to cry inside the cab of a truck that might as well be an oil spill, his ribs cracking open like dry, termite-eaten wood over someone who has been more than clear from the beginning . . .
This is everything I’ve chosen not to be.
I’ve chosen to be a good man. And I need to act like it.
“If you’ll go inside with the cactus, I’ll put everything else away?” I say, careful to frame it as a suggestion and not as an order.
Which doesn’t matter. Maddie shifts to look at me. I don’t look over, keeping my eyes on my hands instead.
“If we’re going to fight, then let’s fight,” she says. Her voice is steady, pointed. Fighting is where she feels the safest; to her, conflict is clarity, and clarity is relief. Funny to think that ten weeks ago, she was a complete stranger to me, and now I know this indelible thing about her.
“I’m not trying to choose the field of battle, Madelyn. I just want us to be warm.”
I can feel her hesitation, the way she takes temperature after temperature of the moment, wondering if this is a trap, if there’s some angle that she can’t see. Even though it hurts physically to do it, I make myself look at her. I give myself over to her searching green gaze.
“I meant what I told you months ago,” I say quietly. “I’ve got nothing to hide. If you want to ask me something, I’ll tell you the truth.”
“You did have something to hide, Bram,” she says, a sad kind of impatience in her voice. “Not that it makes much of a difference in the end. It was still never going to be . . . more.”
Her eyes rake over me one last time—making sure that I mean it when I say I’m not trying to strategize my way into winning, whatever that looks like here. And then she unbuckles her seat belt.
I get out of the truck, walk around the front, and open the door for her.
I don’t think she’ll want me to hold her by the waist like I did earlier, but I do offer my hand, which she takes with a polite nod, and help her down.
And then she retrieves the cactus from the floorboard and goes into the house.
In the fading daylight, I move the potting soil into the shed and the poinsettias into the greenhouse so I can keep them happy until I give them to Sara’s mom.
I turn the truck back on and roll it into the shed, turning it off again and getting out.
The creak and slam of the rust-eaten door is as familiar to me as my hometown; it’s the sound of high school, of my first job, of those early days with Fern driving all the way to Topeka and back to get her to fall asleep.
I wonder if my grandparents ever did that with me in this same truck.
I wonder if my parents did before they died.
I’ll never know, and by the time I was old enough to think of a question like that, I was old enough to know not to ask it.
My grandparents didn’t like to talk about my parents, and they weren’t the sort to tell you stories about yourself when you were little.
They didn’t allow night-lights, they didn’t read you books at bedtime, and hugs were brought out like the good dishes—on special occasions, and then handled so gingerly that the experience wasn’t all that enjoyable anyway.
The first person to hug me like hugs were things meant for sharing was Joey Fucking Kemp. In sixth grade, I spiked a crucial volleyball serve in gym class, winning the match, and he ran up and threw his arms around me like it was something people did all the time. Like it was nothing.
Maybe my parents would have hugged me like that if they’d still been alive.
I stare at the truck, allowing myself just a moment to ache for what I didn’t have then and for what I don’t have now. A moment of crawling loneliness so deep that it frosts over my bones.
And then I go inside to finish being broken up with.
MADDIE IS STANDING in the middle of the kitchen holding her cactus, just a few feet away from where she told me to masturbate in a shaft of golden sunlight this morning.
When she turns to face me, her lips are open and her eyes are blank, like she doesn’t know how she’s gotten there. Like she’s lost.
But then her eyes sharpen and her shoulders go back. Her chin lifts. She’s holding the cactus the way someone would hold a sacred artifact to ward off evil.
“We said sex and nothing else,” she starts before I can say anything at all.
“I know,” I say.
“This always had an expiration date.”
“Yes.”
“So this is it. The expiration date.” She says it not like a question but also not like a proscription, almost like the echo of a thought. Confirming to herself that something is true.
I take a breath. And then I take another. Draw the air past my aching throat into my lungs, into my alveoli, feel my body trade oxygen for carbon dioxide. Something scalding races down to my jaw. I exhale as I wipe my face.
I’m not ashamed of crying, but I don’t want to make this harder on her when she’s done everything right and I’m the one asking for more.
“Excuse me,” I murmur, and quickly walk to the downstairs bathroom with my head down, taking a moment inside to seal up the breach inside myself. I deadhead and prune. I pull all the sap out of my branches and go dormant.
The tears stop. There’s still a swelling at the base of my throat, but I can talk through it.
When I go back out to the kitchen, passing a dozing Hester Prynne stretched out over the vent and enjoying the heat, Maddie has set the cactus on the counter and is pacing, her head dipped in thought. It snaps up at my approach.
“I have less than two weeks left on my contract,” she says, getting right to the point. Which in a way, I can appreciate. It is what’s immediately necessary—figuring out the money and the logistics. The heartbreak can hollow me out in its own time.
“I’ll call the—” I start, but Maddie cuts in.
“No, I’d like to continue. I mean, if it’s all right for you. I think it’s best for the twins to have some consistency since they’re so young.” She pauses and then adds, with some reluctance, “And I still need to work as much as I can right now.”
I don’t know how I feel about this. I want as much of her as I can have, and the twins and Fern love her. And yet just looking at her hurts right now.
But I summon up my equanimity, my belief that we should do what’s categorically best for ourselves and the girls. “As you’d like,” I agree.
“Is that . . . okay with you? Me staying on with the girls for the last two weeks?”
“Yes.” No. Maybe. Don’t leave me. Don’t look at me with those cat-green eyes, I can’t take it. “It’s what’s best for the kids, I agree. And you’re welcome to stay here as long as you need, Maddie. I mean that. I’ll do everything you need to feel comfortable here.”
Quickly, so fucking quickly, she blurts, “No. No, I-I can’t. I can’t stay here.”
My capacity for being hurt by a person I’ve known for less than three months is astounding. “Okay,” I say softly. “We’ll figure it out.”
Hester Prynne clicks over to Maddie from her spot near the vent and noses Maddie’s hand for attention. Maddie gets down to a knee to pet Hester with both hands. I wonder if she does that so she doesn’t have to look at me.
“I can see if Junie will have me for a bit, or Sloane,” she says, her eyes on Hester’s panting face. Then she glances up with a weak smile. “Or maybe Joey and Riley will need some preemptive childcare and take me in on a barter system.”
I give her a weak smile back. “Maybe.”
She stands up and steps a little closer.
Not much, but enough that I can see the infinitesimal quiver of her chin.
“Bram . . . I want you to know that even though this was a physical relationship and even though it’s ending, it was still important to me.
You are still important. And the time we shared, and getting to hang out with the girls, and all the advice you gave me—it mattered.
I wouldn’t have wanted to spend these last two and a half months any other way. ”
A cynical part of me feels like she’s already playing the role of politician, throwing a bone to a demographic that’s about to be sidelined. We value your voice; we won’t actually change our existing plans for you, but you should feel appreciated all the same. Because we said so.
But I do think she means it.
“You are important to me too,” I say. And then I add, because I know it’s the only time I’ll say these three words to her and I want that, selfishly, at least once, “I love you.”
A broken exhale, like she’s fallen from a height. “I never asked you to.”
I nod, because I know.
“And I never wanted this to hurt.”
I know that too. I step closer and allow myself one last liberty: I take her hand in mine and give it a careful but lingering squeeze. “It’s okay,” I tell her, meeting her eyes. “It’s going to be okay.”
“It would have hurt worse if I dragged it out, right?” She bites her lip, her brows lifted in a kind of plea. Begging me to absolve her. “If we carried on until I felt too trapped or until Veronica caught us again. It’s got to be better to make a clean break of things, you know?”
“That’s right.” My voice is soothing; I squeeze her hand one last time and let go. “Tomorrow, we’ll light up the phone tree and find a new place for you.”
I leave her in the kitchen with another weak smile and then go to my room.
Hester Prynne, the canine Judas, doesn’t follow and stays with her most recent admirer instead.
Which is fine, I know what to do. I did it for years coming home with schoolyard bruises.
I did it before then as a little kid scared of the dark and knowing that if I asked for comfort, I’d be told to be stronger, braver.
I go into the empty corner of my room and slide down to the floor, wedging myself as far back as I can so it feels like the walls are holding me.
And then I wrap my arms around myself in a hug and pull my knees up to my chest. And just like I did when I was a lonely little boy, I pretend that in a minute someone will come in to turn on the light.