18. Ellie
— ? —
Ellie
There are flowers on my desk when I come back from the bathroom.
Sunflowers and daisies, bright and cheerful, sitting in a blue glass vase I’ve never seen before. The card is propped against the stems, small and white with his handwriting on it. I’d know his handwriting anywhere. Those sharp letters, the way he writes like he’s in a hurry even when he’s not.
I’m sorry. J.
I stare at them for a long moment.
He remembered. Last summer, at the farmers’ market, we were walking past the flower stalls and I pointed at a bucket of sunflowers and said they reminded me of summer.
Of Aunt June’s garden in front of the house on Elm Street, the one she used to tend on her knees every morning before the sun got too hot.
Of being seven years old and happy in a way I didn’t know to appreciate yet.
He didn’t say anything at the time. Just kept walking, his hand on the small of my back, steering me toward the vegetable stand because he wanted tomatoes. I thought he wasn’t listening. I thought the words went in one ear and out the other, the way so many of my words seemed to go.
But he remembered. He always remembers. He remembers what shampoo I like and how I take my tea and that I’m allergic to strawberries.
He remembers the exact date of our first date and what I was wearing and what song was playing in the truck on the way home.
He remembers everything. He catalogues it all somewhere in that head of his, files it away, keeps it.
He just doesn’t do anything with it. He keeps it the way he keeps everything, in a drawer, in the dark.
I could name a hundred things he’s kept in that head of his and never once said out loud to me.
The cream from the dairy two towns over that showed up in the fridge and never ran out.
The bracelet he never said one word about.
The swing I mentioned wanting that was hanging from the oak the next week with no note.
He hears everything and he answers with objects, and I’ve spent a year grateful for the objects and starving for the answer.
I pick up the vase and carry it to the break room and set it on the table.
Somebody will want them. One of the other girls from the office, maybe, or Mrs. Bellinger when she comes by later.
Flowers like these shouldn’t go to waste just because the man who sent them thinks sorry is a word that works on its own.
Mr. Bellinger is in his doorway when I come back. He’s got that look on his face, the one he gets when he wants to ask and isn’t sure if he should.
“Those were nice flowers.”
“They were.”
“You going to tell me what’s going on?”
“Not yet.”
He nods, slow and thoughtful, and goes back into his office without pushing. That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about him. He knows when to ask and when to wait.
I sit down at my desk and stare at my computer screen and don’t see a single thing on it. The phone rings twice and I answer it in a voice I recognize as mine and I take two messages I’ll have to ask about later.
I didn’t sleep last night. I lay in the guest bed at the Bellingers’ and stared at the ceiling and listened to Mrs. Bellinger moving around downstairs, trying to be quiet, checking on me every hour even though I told her I was fine.
I thought about Jacob alone in that house with the hole in the roof.
I thought about Daphne’s hand on his arm and the smile on her face.
I thought about the text I sent during the storm, the one he never answered, and I wondered if he even got it.
I wondered if his phone was dead. I wondered if it mattered.
I keep thinking about the pillow on his side of our bed with the crease still in it, and how I’ll never know now whether he punched it down again last night or slept in that hotel.
I keep thinking about the doorknob. The heat of it in my hand.
I said I’d remember that for the rest of my life and it’s been one day and I already do.
Twenty minutes later the door opens and I know it’s him before I look up.
Jacob is standing in the entrance and he looks terrible.
Dark circles under his eyes, deep enough to look bruised.
Stubble on his jaw, thick and rough, and he hasn’t touched a razor since the storm.
The same clothes he was wearing yesterday, dusty and wrinkled, and he slept in them if he slept at all.
He looks like a man who’s been up all night making deals with God.
And I still want him. That’s the thing I can’t get around, standing here with my hand on my desk.
He looks like hell and I want to put my hands on his face and feel the stubble under my palms and I want him to put his hand on the back of my neck the way he does, and I hate that my body hasn’t gotten the news yet.
“Ellie.” His voice is rough, scraped raw. “Can we talk?”
“I’m working.”
“Five minutes. Please.”
I look at Mr. Bellinger through the glass wall of his office. He’s watching us with that careful expression he gets when he’s deciding whether to interfere. After a moment he gives me the smallest nod.
“Outside. Five minutes.”
The sun is too bright when we step out onto the sidewalk.
I forgot my sunglasses at the Bellingers’ and I have to squint against the glare.
The air still smells like the storm, ozone and broken wood and that wet-earth smell that comes after rain.
I fold my arms across my chest even though it’s warm, because I need my hands busy, because I need a barrier between us even if it’s just my own arms. He stands a careful three feet from me.
He’s never stood three feet from me in his life.
He stands on top of me, hand on my neck, hip against mine, and now he’s measuring the sidewalk between us and it’s the saddest thing I’ve seen him do.
“I threw Daphne out.” He says it fast, and he’s been rehearsing it, and he’s afraid I’ll walk away before he can get the words out. “That night, right after you left. I told her to pack her things and go. She’s at her father’s.”
“Good.”
“And I know I messed up. I’ve been going over it all night, Ellie.
Everything I did wrong. Everything I should have done differently.
Every time you tried to tell me and I didn’t listen.
” He runs a hand through his hair, leaving it standing up in dark spikes.
“I’m going to fix it. I don’t know how yet, but I’m going to figure it out. ”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” He looks at me with those dark eyes, the ones I used to think I could fall into and never hit bottom. “But I’ll figure it out. I have to.”
I look at him. My husband, who I’ve wanted since I was thirteen and watching him across crowded rooms, too shy to speak. A man who can run a ranch and a thousand head of cattle and make deals that make other men sweat, but can’t figure out how to make his wife feel loved.
“You know what you are to me,” he says. “You have to know that.”
“I know what I am to you, Jacob. That’s not the problem.”
“Then what is?”
The question sits there between us on the bright sidewalk, cars passing on the street, people walking by who pretend not to notice us but definitely do.
I should tell him. I should say it out loud, plain and clear, so there’s no room for misunderstanding.
I need you to love me like you mean it. I need you to say it first sometimes.
I need you to show up when it matters and not just when it’s convenient.
I need you to choose me, every day, the way I’ve been choosing you.
But I’m scared. I’m scared that if I ask him point-blank, if I put it in words he can’t misunderstand, I’ll watch him try to answer and fail. And then I’ll know for sure that he can’t give me what I need, and I’ll have to decide what to do with that knowledge.
“If I told you I loved you,” he says, the words coming out in a rush, tumbling over each other, “would you come back?”
I flinch. It lands hard and sudden, and I take a step back from him before I realize I’m moving.
“Don’t do that.” My voice comes out quiet. Hurt in a way I didn’t expect. “Don’t say it because you think it’s what I want to hear. Don’t use my feelings against me.”
“I’m not using anything against you.” His brow furrows, confused. “I’m asking a question. I’m trying to understand what you need.”
“And I’m telling you that isn’t how it works.
” I take another step back, putting more distance between us.
“I don’t want you to say it because it’s a magic word that makes everything better.
I don’t want you to say it because you’re scared I’m leaving and you think it’ll make me stay.
I want you to say it because you mean it.
Because you actually feel it. Because it’s true and you can’t not say it anymore. ”
He stares at me. His mouth opens and nothing comes out.
“And if you don’t know whether you feel it,” I say, and my hands are shaking and my voice isn’t, “then we have a bigger problem than I thought.”
He keeps staring. I can see him trying. I can see the words caught somewhere in his chest, fighting to get out, and I can see them losing. His jaw works. His hands clench at his sides. But nothing comes.
“I have to get back to work,” I say.
He doesn’t follow me. I hear him not follow me, the way I heard it in the foyer, and the bell over the door stays quiet.
I turn and walk back inside and I don’t look back at the man standing on the sidewalk with his heart in his hands and no idea what to do with it.
That’s the whole of him, right there on the sidewalk.
He’ll hold anything for you, for years, and never once complain of the weight.
He can’t hand it over. He doesn’t know how to open his hands.
Through the front window I watch him walk to his truck, and I watch him sit in it with both hands on the wheel and not start it, the way he sat in it in our drive the night of the birthday, and I make myself look at my screen instead.
I sit down at my desk and I pull up a file I don’t need to look at and I pretend to work for the next three hours while my chest aches and my eyes burn and I refuse to cry at work over a man who can’t say three words.
***
The next morning I pull into the parking lot at eight-fifty like I always do, and there’s a brand new truck parked across two spaces in front of the door.
Cherry red. Still shiny from the lot. With a white bow on the hood the size of a tire, the way a man buys his wife a truck for Christmas in a movie where money solves everything.
Jacob is standing next to it, holding a set of keys.