22. Jacob
— ? —
Jacob
Jackson Long is in his chair in the front room when I walk in with his daughter.
The drive out was half an hour and she didn’t say one word of it.
Her car is still in Sue’s lot. It can stay there.
I’ve driven this road every Sunday since the stroke and I know where the potholes are and I didn’t miss one, and she sat with her arms crossed and her face to the window and her jaw working, and I knew she was building a story.
I let her build it. She can tell it to him if she wants. I’ve got the true one.
He looks old. Older than I’ve ever seen him, and I’ve seen him every Sunday since the stroke, driving out to check on him the way he used to check on me when I was a kid with nothing.
The stroke took more than he lets on. His left hand doesn’t move right anymore, just sits in his lap.
His face droops on one side, pulling his mouth down at the corner.
His voice, when he speaks, is slower than it used to be, and the words have to travel further to get out.
“Jacob.” He looks from me to Daphne and back again, his good eye sharp even if the rest of him is failing. “What’s going on?”
“Daphne has a thing to tell you.”
She stands in front of her father with her arms crossed and her jaw set and says nothing.
The defiance is still there, that lifted chin, those hard eyes, but it’s cracking at the edges.
She’s been silent the whole drive over, staring out the window at the fields going past, and I let her be silent because I knew this moment was coming and there was no point in rushing it.
“Tell him.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Tell him, or I will.”
Jackson looks between us, his good hand gripping the arm of his chair so tight his knuckles have gone white. “Somebody better start talking.”
I give her ten seconds. She doesn’t use them.
So I tell him.
The birthday, and the call from the hospital that never got passed along, me on the phone explaining that one of my boys was in surgery and I couldn’t leave, and Daphne on the other end saying she’d call Ellie at Sue’s, she’d make sure Ellie knew.
Jenna and “wait in the house” and “she’s already inside.
” The ring, and the jeweler first thing this morning, and the whole town standing in Sue’s diner listening to a maid confess what his daughter made her do.
By the time I finish, his face has gone gray.
“Is this true?”
Daphne’s arms tighten across her chest. “I didn’t mean for anybody to get hurt. I just wanted Jacob to see that she isn’t right for him. That she was never going to make him happy the way I could.”
“You almost killed that girl.”
“I didn’t know the tornado would come right over the-”
“You told a maid to keep her in the house during a warning.” His voice cracks down the middle, grief and fury fighting for space. “You told Jacob she was safe when she wasn’t. You stole from her. You stole a dead woman’s ring off her dresser and tried to sell it.”
“Daddy.”
“I’ve spent your whole life making excuses for you.
” He shakes his head, slow and heavy, and the motion costs him.
“I told myself you’d grow out of it. I told myself you were just spirited, just needed time to find your way.
I told myself the things people said about you were exaggerations, that my little girl couldn’t really be that cruel.
” He looks at her, and there’s grief in his eyes, old and deep and tired.
“But you’re not going to change, are you. This is who you are.”
Her face crumples. The mask falls away completely, and underneath it is just a scared woman who’s run out of places to hide. “Daddy, please. I made a mistake. People make mistakes.”
“This wasn’t a mistake. A mistake is forgetting to call. A mistake is saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.” He grips the arm of his chair to hold himself upright. “This was a choice. You made it over and over, every day for two months, and you kept making it even when people could have died.”
“I love him.” She says it as a defense. It’s supposed to explain everything, excuse everything, make all the rest of it acceptable. “I’ve loved him since we were kids. I came back for him. Everything I did, I did because I love him.”
“That’s not love.” Jackson’s voice is tired now, all the anger draining out of it, leaving behind a heavier thing.
“Love doesn’t try to destroy. Love doesn’t manipulate and lie and steal.
Love doesn’t put someone in danger because you want what they have.
” He shakes his head. “What you feel for Jacob isn’t love, Daphne.
It’s wanting. And you’ve never learned the difference. ”
She’s crying now, real tears running down her face, her shoulders shaking with it. I’ve seen her cry before, seen her use tears as a tool, turning them on and off as the situation required. This is different. This is the cry of someone who’s finally been seen for what they are.
It doesn’t change anything.
“You’re on a plane tomorrow,” Jackson says. “Your mother’s people in California. Her sister said she’d take you in.”
“Daddy, you can’t.”
“This isn’t a discussion.” He lifts his good hand before she can interrupt.
“You’re going, and you’re not coming back, and the money stops the day you land.
What I sent you never lasted the month anyway.
If you want to eat, you work. If you want a roof over your head, you earn it.
I’m done paying for a life you use to hurt people. ”
She runs. I hear her footsteps on the stairs, hear a door slam somewhere in the back of the house, and then it’s just me and Jackson in the front room with the morning light coming through the windows and the dust floating in it.
He turns to me.
“I owe you an apology.” His voice is heavy with it.
“I asked you to take her in. I knew what she was capable of, I’ve known for years, since she was a teenager pulling stunts that should have landed her in real trouble, and I sent her to your house anyway.
I told myself it would be different this time.
I told myself being around you and Ellie would be good for her, that maybe your wife’s goodness would rub off. ” He shakes his head. “I was a fool.”
“You didn’t know she’d do this.”
“I knew enough.” He looks at his hands, the good one and the one that doesn’t work right anymore.
“She knew you’d married. I told her the week it happened, and she said nothing, and then she came home and played like it was news.
I knew she was jealous of Ellie from the day you married her.
I knew she’d been talking about you for years, building you up in her head into a man you never were.
I should have kept her away from your house.
I should have found somewhere else for her to go. ”
I take a breath. This is the hard part. This is the thing I didn’t do at dawn on the day of the storm, the thing I should have done two months ago, the thing that’s been sitting in my chest since Ellie walked out the door with a suitcase in her hand.
“It doesn’t buy you my marriage.”
Jackson looks up at me.
“What you did for me when I was fourteen. Everything you taught me. The way you took me on when my grandparents didn’t know what to do with me, showed me how to run a ranch, treated me like I was worth a damn when my own family couldn’t stand to look at me.
” I hold his eyes. “It doesn’t buy you the right to put her in my house and expect my wife to live with it.
I should have said no the first day. And I put what I thought I owed you ahead of my wife for two months, and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. ”
Jackson is quiet for a long time. The clock on the mantel ticks. Somewhere upstairs, I can hear Daphne crying, muffled through the floorboards.
Then he nods.
“You’re right,” he says. “You should have said no. And I should never have asked it of you.” He shifts in his chair, wincing at some pain I can’t see. “A son gets to tell his father no, Jacob. I never taught you that one. I should have.”
I don’t have anything to say to that. He’s never called me son before.
Not once in fifteen years. He taught me to rope and to read a bull’s shoulders and to look a man in the eye when I shook his hand, and he never once called me that, and he picks today, with his daughter crying through the floor above us, and I stand there with my hat in my hand and I can’t get anything past my throat.
“Go on.” He waves his good hand toward the door. “Go fix your marriage. That girl loves you more than you deserve, and you know it.”
“Thank you.” I stop at the door and turn back. “For all of it. I mean that.”
“I know you do.” The smile is tired, but it’s real. “Now get out of here. You’ve got work to do.”
***
I drive to the Bellingers’ because I don’t know where else to go.
Mrs. Bellinger is on her front porch with her arms folded before I have the engine off. Her face is set in that way she has, the way that says she’s already made up her mind and God himself couldn’t change it.
“She’s not here.”
“Where is she?”
“She went out to the ranch. Said she needed to see the basement.” Her eyes are kinder than her voice, softer than the set of her shoulders. “Alone, Jacob. She drove herself. I think she has to look at it before she can move past it.”
I sit in my truck for a long moment, engine still running.
“She didn’t say you couldn’t come,” Mrs. Bellinger adds, softer now. “She just said she needed to go alone. That’s not the same thing.”
I nod. I put the truck in gear.
The road out to the ranch is the same road it’s been my whole life, and it isn’t.
The stop sign at the county road is still gone.
There’s a section of somebody’s roof in the ditch by the cattle guard, tin, folded in half.
Every fence I pass I look at, because that’s what I do, and every fence I pass I don’t care about, because that’s what I’ve become in a week.
The ranch house has a tarp on the roof now, bright blue against the gray shingles, and a construction dumpster in the yard full of debris from the cleanup.
The tarp crew has knocked off for the day, the roofers are still three weeks out, and the place is quiet, the empty quiet a house gets when nobody’s been living in it.
It looks wrong with that tarp stretched across it, a bandage on a wound that hasn’t started healing yet.
Her car is in the drive.
I walk through the wreck of my own foyer, past the place where the tree came through, past the sawdust and the plastic sheeting the crew has put up. The kitchen is cleaner than the rest, mostly untouched by the storm, and I walk through it to the narrow door at the top of the pantry stairs.
It’s open.
Down at the bottom, in the dark, I can see the shape of her sitting on the concrete with her knees pulled up to her chest.
She doesn’t turn around.
“Don’t turn on the light,” she says.
I stand at the top of the stairs with my hand on the frame, where she must have stood three days ago, waiting for a man who said he was coming.