5. Charly
— ? —
Charly
I don’t remember the drive to the guest house.
I remember the lady from the venue. How cheerful she was then apologetic the next, telling me my sister had booked my garden room for her own wedding. I remember Clarence taking the phone out of my hand at some point, because I’d stopped holding it to my ear and was just pressing it to my chest.
After that there’s a blank. And then I’m sitting on the edge of a bed I’ve never seen, in a little place that smells like cedar, which is him, the same thing I smelled on the jacket somebody put around me. I don’t know how I got to the edge of the bed. I just look up and I’m there.
“You should lie down.” He’s crouched in front of me, not touching me, just close enough that I can feel the warmth of him. “You’ve been standing in the middle of the room for ten minutes.”
“They’re getting married.” I hear the words come out of my own mouth like they belong to somebody else.
“I know.” He keeps his voice low and even.
“In the venue I chose. With the flowers I picked out. The wedding they both blew up, except now it’s got her name on it.
” My voice keeps climbing and I can’t drag it back down.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
“She keeps taking everything from me, and everyone just acts like that’s fine.
Like I’m the problem for being upset about it. ”
“I know.” He doesn’t move, doesn’t reach for me, just stays there at my feet.
“Stop saying that.” The phone slips out of my hand and hits the carpet, and I don’t even look at it. “Stop saying you know, because you don’t fucking know!”
And then it all comes out. Everything I held in at the altar because there were too many people watching and I would not give them that.
It comes out of me in a sound I didn’t know I could make, and my legs just quit under me, and then I’m down on the floor of a stranger’s house, crying into my hands so hard my ribs ache with it.
“I’m sorry.” I get it out somewhere between the sobs, scraping for air. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be yelling at you. I just. Everything’s too much right now. All of it.”
He still doesn’t try to fix it. He lowers himself down onto the floor beside me, close but not crowding, and lets me fall apart.
Three years. All those times I thanked God that the two people I loved most in the world loved each other too. It pours out of me until there’s nothing left but the hiccupping and the wet face and the cold floor under my knees.
Clarence doesn’t try to lift me up. He doesn’t shush me or tell me it’ll be okay or do any of the things people do when your crying is making them uncomfortable.
He just sits down on the floor too, across from me, arms on his knees, and waits it out. Close enough to reach. Far enough to leave me alone in it.
It takes a while. When it finally stops I feel scraped out and strange, like my face isn’t mine.
“I gave him everything,” I say to the floor. “My money. Three years of my life. I introduced him to my dad. I let him into every soft part of me and he stood up at an altar and handed all of it to my sister.”
“Yeah.” He says it quietly. “He did.”
“And everyone clapped.”
He doesn’t answer. There’s nothing to say to that.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand, and somewhere in the middle of doing it, something in me changes. The crying emptied me out, and what’s underneath isn’t sad. It’s cold. It’s the same thing that stood up at that altar and made the whole room go quiet.
“They think this is over.” I can hear that my voice is different. He hears it too, because his eyes come up to mine. “They think they’re getting my wedding, my money and my whole life, and I just crawl into a hole and cry until I’m nobody they have to think about again.”
“And what are you going to do about it?”
“They don’t know me very well.” I get up off the floor. My legs hold me. “She got four extra minutes in the world and a lifetime of being the favorite. That’s all she’s ever had on me. She’s about to find out it was never enough.”
He stands up too, slower, looking at me like he’s changing his mind about something while he watches. Whatever he thought he was bringing home off that staircase, this wasn’t it.
“Okay,” he says. There’s something under the word.
Could be respect. Could be a warning. “Then we’ll talk.
Not tonight. Tonight you sleep and you eat something, you need to keep your energy up.
” He goes to the door, then stops with his hand on the frame.
“For what it’s worth, I’ve watched a lot of people get run over by my brother.
You’re the first one who stood back up this fast.”
He’s gone before I can decide if that was a compliment.
***
The third morning, I’m losing a fight with the coffee maker when the door opens without a knock.
Clarence comes in with a paper bag and the face of a man who’s been up since before the sun. Dark sweater, sleeves shoved up, jeans that fit him better than they have any right to, and I hate that I notice. I hate that any part of me has room to notice a man right now.
“You don’t have any food,” he says, putting the bag on the counter.
“I have crackers.”
“Crackers aren’t food. They’re a cry for help.” He starts unloading it. Bread, eggs, fruit, things you have to actually cook. “When’s the last time you ate something that didn’t come out of a plastic sleeve?”
“Are you my mother now?”
“God, no. I’ve met your mother. I don’t have it in me.
” He opens the fridge, looks at how empty it is, and starts filling it, comfortable, like he’s done it in this kitchen a hundred times.
He keeps the eggs and the butter out, finds a pan in a cupboard without having to look for it, and sets it on the burner.
“Your mother called my office yesterday, by the way.”
My stomach drops. “How did she get that number?”
“It’s listed. She called looking for Adam and got my assistant, who put her through because she said it was about family.
” He says it light, but his jaw tightens, the same way it did in the hotel.
“She wasn’t calling about you. Didn’t ask how you were, didn’t even ask where you were.
She wanted to know if I’d lean on Adam about letting Rebecca keep the venue.
She was worried you’d turn up and make a scene. ”
The coffee maker gurgles into the quiet.
“So she knows I’m gone, she knows what he did, and she called you to protect Rebecca’s wedding.” I hear myself say it. “From me.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
I look down at the counter. There it is, the whole thing in one phone call. My fiancé took my sister and my money, and my mother picked up the phone to make sure their day goes off without me ruining it.
“I told her to lose the number.” He cracks an egg into the pan like he didn’t just hand me the one thing about my family I already knew and never wanted said out loud. “Sit down. You’re swaying.”
“I don’t need to sit, I’m...”
“Sit down before you fall down.”
Something in the way he says it puts me in the chair before I’ve agreed to it.
He goes back to the stove. He doesn’t try to fill the quiet, doesn’t ask how I’m holding up, doesn’t make me perform being okay so he can feel better about leaving me here.
He just cooks. And the strange part is that the quiet doesn’t make me want to crawl out of my skin.
I sit there and let it be quiet and it’s almost the first time all week I haven’t had to manage how someone else feels about my disaster.
He puts a plate in front of me. Eggs, toast, a handful of berries thrown on at the end.
“Thank you,” I say, and it comes out more surprised than grateful.
“Don’t look so shocked. I can manage basic human decency.”
“Decency’s cheap.”
It comes out harder than I meant it. He stops with his fork halfway up, and that look crosses his face again, the one that isn’t hurt, more like he agrees with me.
“Adam was decent too,” I keep going, because it’s out now and I can’t take it back. “Adam was so decent, and kind and loving. He brought me soup when I was sick. He knew my coffee order. He was good with my parents. So forgive me if a plate of eggs doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.”
He sets the fork down. Sits back. Lets it sit there a second.
“I’m not asking you to believe my kindness,” he says, calm. “I’m not asking you for anything. I’m making sure you don’t starve to death in a place with my name on the deed, because that’s a hard phone call to make to your father, and I bet he already wants me dead just for being related to Adam.”
A laugh jumps out of me before I can stop it. Small and broken, and it surprises both of us.
“There it is,” he says, and the corner of his mouth moves.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re still in there somewhere.” He picks his fork back up. “Eat. Then we’ll talk about what you want to do about the wedding.”
“I have time.” I push the eggs around the plate.
“Half my unit was at the church, so. Everybody at work knows. A friend from work called by the way and told me not to come back until I was ready, that she’d cover the schedule herself if she had to.
No paperwork, no questions. Just don’t come in.
” I almost laugh. “That’s the one good thing that’s happened.
The people I work with were kinder about it in one phone call than my own mother’s managed in days. ”
He doesn’t say anything to that. He doesn’t have to. He just nudges the toast an inch closer to me, and I eat it.
***
He comes back that night, and that’s the one that gets me.
Not with food this time. With a box. He sets it on the little table and doesn’t say anything, and when I look inside it’s everything I left at the apartment.
The apartment I shared with Adam that I still can’t make myself walk into.
My grandmother’s quilt. The chipped mug I like.
The picture of me and my dad at my nursing pinning.
Things you’d only know to grab if you’d actually paid attention.
“You went to the apartment.”