Chapter 66
Marin
We fight in the kitchen. Where else?
“You took that from me,” I say. “I had a plan. I had the airport. I had the speech. I was going to open the door and say go, just go. And you—you loosened a column and let him walk into an old woman’s house and die on her couch eating banana bread.”
“I didn’t know she was going to—”
“You didn’t know. You didn’t think. You just fixed it. The way you fix everything. Except this time the thing you fixed is dead, Luke.”
He stands there. Takes it. The way he takes everything.
“I was one day away,” I say. “One day.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying I know.”
He doesn’t say anything. He just stands there with rope marks on his wrists and a look on his face that says he’d do it again and that’s the worst part. He’d do all of it again.
I want to scream. I want to throw something. I want to put him back in the basement and leave him there until he understands what he took from me.
Instead I sit down at the table and put my head in my hands and don’t cry because I don’t cry. I plan. I manage. I handle. That’s what I do.
“The cremation needs to happen fast,” I say.
“Marin—”
“The cremation. Fast. Before anyone asks questions no one wants to answer. Dr. Matthews signed the certificate. Mrs. Mather has the story. The town believes it. We just need to close the loop before someone pulls a thread.”
Luke looks at me. I look at him. Two people in a kitchen at dawn planning a funeral for a man one of them kidnapped and the other one freed and a third one killed with banana bread and Psalms.
“I’ll call the funeral home,” I say.
The funeral home is in town. Granger & Sons. I’ve driven past it dozens of times. Never thought I’d be calling to cremate a man I kidnapped who was murdered by my neighbor with baked goods. But here we are.
The woman on the phone is kind. They’re always kind. That’s the job—professional kindness, sold by the hour. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs....”
“Marin. Just Marin.”
The service is small. Because of course it is.
Charles didn’t know anyone in this town.
Charles didn’t want to know anyone in this town.
Charles didn’t want to be in this town. And now he’s being memorialized in it by people who never met him and only knew him as the dying man in the basement with the brave wife who moisturizes.
Patricia leads the prayer. She uses the beads from Father Donnelly. She prays for Charles’s soul with the same conviction she prayed for his body in my kitchen while Meg Ryan orgasmed beneath our feet.
Mrs. Mather brings a casserole. Green bean.
The same one she brought the first week I moved in.
The same one she probably brings to every funeral, every wake, every tragedy that passes through this town.
The casserole of certainty. The casserole that says I did my part and God did his and here’s some green beans.
People I’ve never met shake my hand.
“So sorry.”
“He’s in a better place.”
“Helen told us how brave you were.”
One woman—I don’t know her name—holds both my hands and says “the Lord needed another angel” and I almost laugh because Charles was many things but an angel was not one of them.
Luke stands in the back. Arms crossed. He doesn’t speak.
He doesn’t shake hands. He’s there the way he’s always there—present, solid, taking up space without asking permission.
A few people look at him. The handyman. The one who fixed the house.
The one who was always around. They don’t know what he is to me.
I don’t know what he is to me. Not today.
The urn is small. Smaller than I expected. It doesn’t seem like enough to hold a man who took up as much room as Charles did. A man that big—that loud, that certain, that infuriatingly present—reduced to something I can carry with one hand.
I carry it with both.
Mrs. Mather catches me at the door. Takes my hand. Squeezes.
“You were such a good wife to him, Marin,” she says. “The Lord sees that. Don’t you ever doubt it.”
I look at the woman who killed my boyfriend and is now comforting me at his funeral and I say the only thing there is to say.
“Thank you, Helen. For everything.”
She pats my hand. Smiles. Goes back to the casserole table to rearrange the foil.
Luke follows me to his truck, opens the door. I get in. He gets in. The urn is in my lap.
We drive home in silence. The urn is warm from my hands. The road is quiet. The town is behind us.
The cover holds.
It was never going to not hold. Because the cover wasn’t all lies.
It was built on something stronger—a town that decided what was true and stuck with it.
I mentioned Charles had a tumor. They ran with it.
They decided I was brave. They decided Mrs. Mather was a saint.
And now they’ve decided Charles is dead and it’s sad and the green bean casserole is a little dry but Helen always overcooks it and isn’t it a blessing he went peaceful.
That’s the thing about small towns. They don’t need evidence. They need a story. And the story I gave them was better than the truth.
The truth would have ruined everything. The story gave them something to talk about.