Chapter 53
— Chapter 53 —
I’ve been driving Step’s car to shifts so I can work on it at Shorty’s on the break between lunch and dinner. He’s helping me fix it as a present for Aubrey for her birthday. But it’s always awful to drive it home at night when the radio static and smudged dashboard lights feel like a direct switch to Step memories. I drive with the windows down, trying not to think about Lexi Doyle-Davis and what I have done to her. But there’s a constant track of Step in my head. He’s an apparition in the passenger seat and I can imagine the angle of his eyebrows, the sag of his jaw while frowning. “You were supposed to be better than this,” he’d say.
I get a sinking feeling in my stomach when I get home and the lights are on.
It’s Aubrey. It’s Aubrey. I repeat her name in my mind to remember that my mother is not sitting at the table in the sunroom in the stale air, eight hours drunk, waiting to rip into me.
This is not then.
But I still have to fight the urge to run away.
As I walk in the house, Aubrey is stomping around in her bedroom.
“Are you okay?” I shout.
But she doesn’t answer. I hear the closet door roll. I hear her stomping again and it sounds like she has shoes on now.
“Are you okay?” I shout again.
And then I hear her tearing through the hallway, storming down the steps. She’s carrying the old-fashioned suitcase she bought at the junk shop when we sold the bookshelves, the sleeve of a sweater sticking out the side like something out of a cartoon. She has a Gristedes bag full of paint brushes in her other hand, her backpack over one shoulder. And for a moment I picture her on that Greyhound bus to Georgia, even though it’s October, not March, and this is not how she would pack to hike the Appalachian Trail.
“Are you sleeping at Shray’s tonight?” I ask.
She glares at me. She hasn’t washed her makeup off all the way and it’s pooling under her eyes, making her look like a raccoon caught in headlights.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
She lets go of the suitcase handle, the little metal feet on the bottom of the case smack the floor, and it’s so loud that I think the tile may have cracked. She reaches into the pocket of her coat, chest heaving, like she can’t catch her breath. Holds up a fistful of crumpled papers.
“I’m so stupid,” she says, tears running down her face. “I fucking trusted you.”
It’s the checklist Lee Skagway wrote out for me. Across the top in red block letters it reads, Action Items for Sales Success! Lee’s logo is printed at the bottom.
“You were never going to stay, were you?”
“Aubrey!”
“Were you?”
“I wasn’t at first, but then—”
She points to the date on the form. “This is from August.”
“I just wanted to see if we could—”
She sobs. I try to hug her, but she steps away. “You were like the best thing in my whole life, and then you were just gone. And you were going to do it again.”
“No. Aubrey—”
“I don’t even know why you left. Still. You never even told me.”
I have thought a lot about telling her, but I am certain it would be unfair. And I don’t know how to talk about the absence of time. “I wasn’t going to leave you now,” I say. “I thought we could find an easier place to live.”
“Yeah, well…” She shakes her head. “How the fuck do you expect me to trust you?”
I hear a car pull into the driveway, honking.
“Who’s that?” I ask.
“My dad,” Aubrey says, chin trembling. “I’m going home.”
“No.”
“I may as well.” Fat tears roll down her cheeks.
I want to beg her to stay, but I worry that I’m caught in a loop of ruin. If Aubrey wants to go home, I shouldn’t stop her. I can’t stop her. So I don’t say anything.
I watch her navigate the door with her bags, take the safe route down the flagstone steps, load her suitcase into the trunk of Charlie’s Porsche. She gets in the passenger seat. I don’t run out to the driveway until Charlie’s car is gone—tail lights out of sight, tire marks on the wet pavement already settled back to nothing.