Chapter 33
Thirty-Three
Rhett
Six days of giving her room, and I’m about ready to climb clean out of my own damn skin.
Room was my idea, near enough. I’m the one who said it in the truck coming back from the raccoon fiasco.
Give her space, all three, nobody pulls anything stupid and grand.
I said it looking dead at Cal, like I was the sensible one, like giving a scared woman room was a thing I had any earthly gift for.
And for six days I’ve done it. Kept my distance.
Kept the grin bolted on. Waved across the street like a normal man who did not spend three days learning exactly what she sounds like when she lets go.
Anyway. Room. I’ve been giving it by the acre.
It’s the worst thing I’ve ever been good at.
The decent thing, I’m learning, is sometimes just cowardice with better manners. And I couldn’t tell which one I was doing until it was nearly too late to fix.
Because I can smell it on her now. We all can.
Cal caught it first, standing in her shop measuring for the auction tables, and he came back gray in the face and said the word none of us wanted to say.
Leaving. She’s got the city on her, cool and flat under all that sugar, the smell of a woman with one foot already out the door.
And every day we “give her room,” that smell gets a shade stronger, because room, to a woman built like Wren, doesn’t read as respect.
It reads as confirmation. Every polite inch we hand her, she files as proof we’ve already let go.
We’re not respecting her choice. We’re standing back with our hats in our hands while she makes the wrong one, and calling it patience.
I’ve had front-row seats to it, too. Six days watching a woman brick herself back up.
She’s got the Delgado voice on for all of us now, that bright friendly nothing-behind-it voice she saves for customers, and every time she aims it my way it takes a year off my life.
I did that. I’m the reason she’s got a special voice for holding me at arm’s length.
A month ago, she was chasing my scent across a room, trying to work out what the sweet thing under the smoke was.
Now she smiles at me like I’m a fella who wandered in for a bear claw, and I smile back, because that’s the plan, that’s the room, that’s the decent thing.
It’s like watching a fire I set myself finally reach the good part of the house.
I keep thinking about being six.
I don’t do this. Thinking about being six is not among my hobbies, which run mostly to poker, needling Eli, and, lately, one specific baker.
But the rut cracked something open back in that nest, and it hasn’t shut all the way since, so here I am at thirty, thinking about a kid who worked out the family math early.
The math went like this. When I was funny, people stuck around.
When I was quiet, they didn’t. My old man couldn’t sit in a room with a quiet kid, it made him itchy, made him reach for his keys.
But a kid doing a bit, a kid who could make the room laugh, that kid was worth keeping around.
So I learned to be him, fast, like you learn anything that keeps a roof over your head.
Funny gets you kept. Quiet gets you left.
I had it down cold before I lost my baby teeth.
And it works. That’s the hell of it, it works like a goddamn charm.
Twenty-four years and counting of being the good time, the guy everybody’s glad walked in, and I have never once been left, because you can’t leave a man who’s already halfway out the door making you laugh on his way.
I built a whole self out of it. Charming, easy, disposable on purpose.
You can’t lose what you keep making good and sure nobody has.
The catch, and I only worked it out lying tied to a woman in the dark, is that if you spend your whole life guarding the act, you have no idea what anybody would find under it. You guard a thing long enough, you start believing the guarding was the point.
Which brings me to the counter.
I’ve told myself a hundred stories about that afternoon. My favorite was that it was a laugh on a slow day and I strolled out light because that’s what I do.
That’s a lie, and the rut burned it off with everything else.
The truth is, I walked into that shop, and the floor went out from under me, and I did what I’ve always done the second something turns real.
Made it a joke. Got the last line, strolled out whistling.
It wasn’t nothing. It was the most I’ve felt since I was six years old.
And I taught her, in one clean lesson, that I’m a man who takes what’s fun and leaves light.
She built her whole heat plan on that lesson. Locked herself in alone rather than risk finding out I meant it. Now she’s building her whole leaving on it too. Every wall she’s got up, I helped lay the first brick.
Six days into a plan I helped write, and I can’t stomach it another hour.
Room isn’t working. Room is just handing her fear the pen and letting it sign the lease back in the city.
Eli’s kind of decency assumes she’ll come to us if we hold still long enough, and Eli’s a good man, but Eli’s wrong, because he never had to learn the thing I learned at six.
Some people don’t come to you. Some people got taught too well that the door only opens outward.
You want them to stay, you have to go and say the words out loud, plain, and let them see you mean every one.
You have to knock, even knowing they might not answer.
And I can’t send Cal to do it. Cal would go in a heartbeat, but Cal charming her is the exact wrong medicine, we’ve been over that ground.
Can’t send Eli either, because Eli confessing is a beautiful thing and a quiet one, and quiet is not what cracks this particular woman, I’d stake my life on it.
She needs the one she was surest didn’t mean a word of it standing in front of her with nothing funny left to say.
She needs the joker to finally run out of jokes.
Which means, God help me, it’s me again.
There’s a joke in here somewhere. Rhett Maddox, voice of reason, twice now. A month ago, I’d have reached for it, gotten the laugh, let the whole terrifying thing slide right past. I don’t reach for it. I’m so tired of ducking I could lie down on the bay floor and sleep for a week.
Because the thing I’m actually scared of isn’t her saying no.
I’ve been telling myself my whole life the fear is rejection, but that’s one more joke I’ve been running on myself.
The real one’s worse and a lot quieter. It’s that I’ll put the whole act down, show her the six-year-old underneath, the plain unfunny truth of me, and she’ll take one look and decide he wasn’t worth the wait.
That the quiet kid really was the problem.
That the reason I never let a soul all the way in was dead right the whole time.
I’m going to do it anyway. That’s the new part.
I’m going to walk over there and hand a woman who’s halfway out the door the one thing I’ve spent twenty-odd years making sure nobody could hold against me, and I’m going to do it with no line to hide behind, because the other option is watching her climb on a bus still believing I never meant a word of it.
I’d rather she saw the real me and left than never once got to see him at all. Turns out that’s the whole thing, stripped down, when the jokes finally run dry.
I find Eli in the kitchen. He takes one look at my face and sets his coffee down.
“You’re going over there,” he says.
“I’m going over there.”
He doesn’t try to stop me. He’s had six days of this plan too, and it takes him about two seconds to decide he trusts me with it. From Eli, that’s a cathedral.
“Go as yourself,” is all he says. “Not the act. She’s had enough of everybody’s act, her own included.”
“When did you get wise?”
“Always been wise. You just talk too much to hear it.”
There’s the joke, handed to me by the quiet one, permission and a shove in the same breath. I take it. Then I set it down, and I go.
No punchline. No exit. Just me, crossing a street to knock on a door I helped teach her to keep shut.
About damn time I learned how to knock.