19. Jacob
— ? —
Jacob
I ordered it from the hotel bar at midnight.
The dealership in the city has a number that rings a man’s cell phone at any hour if the caller is me, and I sat there with a whiskey I wasn’t drinking and told him what I wanted.
Cherry red, because she mentioned once that her aunt’s truck was red and she loved riding in it as a kid.
Top of the line, because if I’m going to do this I’m going to do it right.
Delivered to her office by eight in the morning, because I want to be standing there when she sees it.
I told myself I was doing it because her car has been making that noise for months.
That grinding sound when she shifts into third, the one she keeps saying she’ll get looked at and never does.
I told myself she needed a new truck and I was in a position to give her one and that was the whole reason.
I told myself a lot of things at that bar.
She pulls into the lot at eight-fifty and I watch her face through the windshield as she registers what she’s seeing. The truck. The bow. Me standing beside it with keys in my hand, an idiot who thinks he can buy his way back into his wife’s heart.
She gets out of her car slowly. She’s wearing the blue blouse I like, the one that makes her eyes look even bluer, and her hair is down around her shoulders, and she looks tired in a way that makes my chest hurt.
She didn’t sleep either. I can see it in the shadows under her eyes, in the careful way she’s moving, every step costing her more than it should.
“What the hell is this?”
“Your car’s been making that noise for months.” I hold out the keys. My hand is steady. The rest of me isn’t. “This one’s new. It’s in your name.”
“I don’t want a truck, Jacob.”
“I know. I just thought.”
“You thought you could buy your way back to me.” She’s shaking now, I can see it, her hands curled into fists at her sides.
“I don’t want things. I don’t want flowers or trucks or big gestures.
I want you to be there. I want you to show up when you say you will.
I want you to look at me like I actually matter. ”
“You do matter.”
“Then show me. Don’t buy me. Show me.” Her voice cracks and I watch her drag it back together, her jaw tightening, her chin coming up. “I’ve never asked you for a dollar, Jacob. Not once.”
I have nothing. She’s right and I have nothing, and the bow on the hood is white and enormous, and every person on this sidewalk can see it.
“Keep your truck.” She turns toward the office door. “I’m not for sale.”
The door swings shut behind her.
I stand in the parking lot with the keys in my hand and the bow on the hood and the sun beating down, and I don’t move for a long time.
People walk past. Cars pull in and out. Someone honks at the truck blocking two spaces and I don’t look up.
I just stand there holding a set of keys with the weight of everything I’ve done wrong pressing down on my shoulders.
Finally I move.
I go inside. The front desk girl looks up and then looks away fast, and she doesn’t want to be caught watching. I walk past her, past the waiting area with its plastic chairs and old magazines, to the door with Mr. Bellinger’s name on it.
He’s at his desk. He looks up when I come in and his face goes careful the way it does when he’s deciding what he’s walking into.
I put the keys on his desk. The paperwork too, the registration and the title with a blank line waiting for her name, all of it in a neat stack next to his coffee cup.
He looks at the keys. He looks at the papers. He looks at me.
He doesn’t say a word.
Neither do I.
I turn around and I walk out.
***
At half past five there’s an envelope at the hotel front desk.
The woman behind the counter hands it to me without meeting my eyes. Same as yesterday. Same as she’ll probably do tomorrow and the day after that, until I figure out how to fix what I broke or give up trying.
The keys are inside. And a note in her handwriting, those soft round letters I’d know anywhere.
This isn’t what I need from you. Please stop.
I take the note and the keys back to my room and I sit on the bed and I read it again.
Please stop. Two words that shouldn’t hurt as much as they do.
The truck cost more than her aunt’s house did, and she gave it back without a second thought.
Because to her it is nothing. All of it is nothing without the thing underneath, the thing I can’t seem to find.
I’m still sitting there when someone knocks on the door.
Hollis. He’s in his work clothes, dust on his boots, hat in his hands. He looks at me and then at the keys on the bed and he doesn’t say anything, just walks past me into the room and sits down in the chair by the window.
“Heard about the truck.”
“Everybody’s heard about the truck.”
“Dealer’s cousin cuts my wife’s hair.” He turns his hat in his hands, slow circles. “Dealer called me this morning asking where to send the plates. Said you paid cash at midnight and had it delivered by eight.”
“Her car was making a noise.”
“Her car’s been making that noise for six months. You never did anything about it before.”
I don’t have an answer for that. He’s right. I heard that noise every time she drove away and I told myself I’d get someone to look at it and I never did, because there was always another thing, because the ranch came first, because I was too busy building a life to actually live in it.
“You want some advice?” Hollis asks.
“Would it matter if I said no?”
“Not really.” He sets his hat on the arm of the chair. “Quit buying her things. Flowers and trucks aren’t going to touch this. She doesn’t want to be impressed, Jacob. She wants to be chosen.”
“I did choose her. I married her.”
“You married her and then you put her on a shelf.” He doesn’t raise his voice.
He never has to. “You gave her a ring and a house and you figured that was the job done. And then every day after that you chose the ranch over her, and you chose Daphne’s comfort over her peace, and you chose keeping your mouth shut over saying the one thing she’s been asking you to say for a year. ”
I look at my hands. The keys are still in them. A truck she didn’t want. A gesture that meant nothing.
“Figure out what you actually did wrong,” Hollis says. “Not the top layer. Not ‘I let Daphne stay too long.’ The thing under it.”
“And if I can’t?”
“Then you don’t deserve her back.” He stands up and puts his hat on.
“And Jenna’s at my house. My wife’s got her.
She showed up on our porch the night of the storm shaking so hard she couldn’t say your name, and she’s not ready to look at you, and I’m not going to make her.
When she is, you’ll hear it. Not before.
” He goes to the door and stops. “One more thing. That woman has been waiting for you to fight for her since the night you met. Not with money. With yourself. Figure out if you’ve got that in you. ”
He’s at the door when I speak.
“Where are you going?”
“Home. Where are you going?”
“To sit outside the Bellingers’.”
He turns back and looks at me. “Then sit. Don’t get out of the truck. You don’t get to knock on that door until she says so.”
He leaves. The door clicks shut behind him.
I sit on the bed with the note on the nightstand and I think about what he said. The thing under the top layer. The thing I actually did wrong.
I don’t know what it is.
I’ve been looking at it for two days now, going over every moment of the last two months, the last year, the whole time I’ve known her.
I can see the surface. I can see every mistake I made, every time I chose wrong, every moment I should have been there and wasn’t.
But underneath all of that there’s another layer, one I can’t quite see, and every time I think I’m getting close to it my mind slides off it and won’t go back.
Hollis said to figure out if I’ve got it in me to fight for her.
I don’t know the answer to that either. I’ve never had to fight for anything that mattered.
The ranch I built with my hands. The money I made with hard work and smart decisions.
Everything I have, I earned by putting my head down and grinding until I got there.
But this is different. This isn’t work. This is a thing I broke, and I don’t know how to fix broken things. I only know how to build new ones.
At six I get in the truck and I drive to the Bellingers’ house.
I park across the street. I cut the engine and the headlights.
The kitchen window glows yellow in the dusk, and through it I can see her moving.
She’s at the stove, her back to me, stirring.
Mrs. Bellinger is beside her, and someone else is at the table.
Zeke, I realize, his broad shoulders unmistakable even in silhouette.
I watch them through the window. I watch her almost smile at whatever Zeke says, and it’s more than she’s given anyone in two days, and it isn’t me she’s giving it to.
I watch Mrs. Bellinger pat her shoulder as she passes.
I watch Zeke get up and start setting the table without being asked, comfortable in this house, comfortable with these people, comfortable in a way I’ve never been anywhere.
She looks okay. From here, from this distance, she looks like herself. The woman I fell in love with at a wedding two years ago. Sunshine, with her hair coming down.
I don’t get out of the truck. I don’t cross the street. I don’t knock on the door or call her name or do any of the things I want to do.
I just sit there and watch her, and I tell myself this is what Hollis meant.
Sit. Wait. Don’t knock until she says so.
I can do that. I can sit here all night if I have to. I can sit here every night until she’s ready to talk to me, or until she tells me to stop, whichever comes first.
The lights in the kitchen stay on for a long time.
I watch them move around, dinner, dishes, the slow rhythm of an evening with people who care about each other.
Around nine the kitchen light goes off and another one comes on upstairs, and I know that’s the guest room, and I know she’s up there, and I wonder if she knows I’m out here.
She probably does. Mrs. Bellinger has a kitchen window and a mouth.
I stay until midnight. Then I drive back to the hotel and I lie on the bed and I stare at the ceiling and I try to figure out what’s underneath the surface, what I’m not seeing, what I need to understand before any of this can get better.
I don’t find it.
I fall asleep around three, still looking.