30. Then #2
Danny hitches a shoulder. “That’s great, hon.
” His tone says something else entirely, though.
It says, “That doesn’t really count , ” perhaps, or “Oh, that’s cute you think you surfed .
” But no one listening could accuse him of it.
He’s the master of sucking the life out of my tiny accomplishments, of making sure my wings stay clipped, without ever appearing to have done it.
I’m not sure how I’m just seeing this now.
I think back to him telling me my song was “sad”. To him warning me that “college is a lot harder than high school” when I considered applying. Suggesting a solo at the regional music festival would be too competitive for me.
Maybe none of it had to do with me at all.
“It was great,” I reply, this tight thing in my chest beginning to grow. “I wished I’d done it years ago.”
I grab my shower stuff and head to the neighbors’ house, and as I rinse away the sand, the entire morning, that sadness seems to swell in my throat until I can’t stand it anymore.
God, I wish I could just have told Luke, “Yes . Yes, let’s run away. Yes, I want to spend all my nights with you forever . ”
He offered me every single thing I want in the world, but what kind of person would I be if I accepted? What kind of person am I already, with the things I’ve been doing, with the lies I told? Even now, confused and guilty, all I want in the world is more time with him.
I hear the gate shut outside, footsteps, and then the shower door is flung open.
Luke stands there, naked but for the swim trunks hanging off his lean hips, his eyes moving over me like I’m something he’s been starved of for too long.
When he steps inside, letting the door shut behind him, I close the distance as if we’ve been magnetized.
As if I’ll die without the sleek, sandy feel of him pressed to my bare skin.
His hand cups the side of my face, thumb smoothing a path over my cheek, eyes flickering over my face.
His brow scrunches, and I know he can tell I’ve been crying, but he says nothing.
He knows why. He always knows. My hand goes to his shorts, pushing them down his hips, distracting him from his thoughts and my own.
He lifts me up, holding me against the wall. My legs wrap around him, pulling him closer as he slides inside me. “I haven’t asked you once if this is okay,” he says. “Like, without protection.”
“I think it’s fine,” I gasp.
“You know why I didn’t ask?” His teeth slide over my earlobe like he’s skimming them over an artichoke peel. “Because a part of me wanted it to happen. I’m that desperate to get you to leave, Jules. I know it’s wrong, but that’s the truth. It would mess up our entire future and I don’t even care.”
I realize only as he says it that I’m just as desperate. That a part of me wants my hand forced. “Give me a week,” I beg. I tighten around him, close already.
“Thank God,” he whispers. “One week. I’ll come get you.”
His mouth finds mine as I fall apart, silencing the noises I make. His eyes are dreamy as he finally pulls away and sets me back down.
“One week,” he says, and his smile is so sweet that it makes my eyes fill with happy tears.
“One week.”
* * *
I know, as I walk back to the house, that I should be anxious and guilty, and it’s not that those feelings aren’t there, but right now I’m so thrilled, so overwhelmed by the possibilities, that there’s no room for anything else.
It’s the end of trying to be good all the time. It’s the end of an internship I hate, and cooking dinner for a man who never stops thinking I owe him more. It’s having a room or even an apartment where I can hang things on the wall and set my own schedule.
But best of all, it’s Luke. It’s Luke when he sleeps and when he wakes and all the hours in between. I’ll probably spend the rest of my life missing Donna, and feeling bad for the way I handled things, but Luke is my sun, my moon, my tide, and I’m tired of fighting his pull.
It’s our last night, but I don’t drink. I’m already drunk on hope, and every time I look at Luke, I know he is too.
We barely even speak. It’s just a smile, a knowing thing in his gaze.
“One week,” he whispers by my ear, just before I go to bed.
“One week,” I repeat.
I fall asleep dreaming of it, once again pretending the warm shoulder wedged into my back isn’t Danny’s. I’m dreaming of it still when a phone rings in the middle of the night. The mattress rolls so suddenly that I fall right off the side as Danny reaches for the call.
“I don’t understand,” Danny says into the phone.
I sit up. Over the mattress, his shocked eyes meet mine. “Okay,” he says. “We’re on our way.”
He puts down the phone, his voice barely audible. “It’s my dad. He had a heart attack. We need to get up there.”
We pack as quickly as we can. Grady offers to drive us, since he was going back today anyhow. My gaze meets Luke’s as we’re walking out the door, just before dawn. He’s wondering what happens now. I wish I had the answer.
We make the drive to Rhodes in near silence. Sporadically, Grady says a prayer, or suggests God has a plan. It annoys the shit out of me, but Danny doesn’t even seem to notice.
“I don’t understand,” Danny says out of nowhere. “I thought he had the surgery to avoid this. Why didn’t anyone tell me he was sick?”
Grady glances at me in the rearview mirror as if this is entirely my fault.
“You and I could take over for him,” Grady suggests to Danny. “I can handle the counseling and sermons, you could handle the management of everything else.”
My eyes roll. How like Grady to use Danny’s family tragedy to move himself up in the world, and frame it as charity.
When we arrive at the hospital, we’re told it’s family only, so Danny goes back to his dad and I sit in the waiting room with Grady, the two of us uttering not a single word to each other.
The guilt eats at me: I shouldn’t have left Donna to care for the pastor by herself.
And how the hell am I going to leave in a week?
When the pastor gets home, he’s going to need so much more help than he did, and Grady will be gunning for his job with all he’s got.
And just when I think I can’t take it anymore—the silence, my guilt—the doors slide open and Luke walks in.
My shoulders sag in relief as our gazes meet. I assumed he drove back to school after they cleaned up the house this morning, and I shouldn’t want him here now but, oh my God , I do.
We don’t discuss what is going to happen to our plan because it isn’t the time. He doesn’t hold my hand. But his arm is beside mine and he’s here and that’s enough.
Grady has returned to his aunt’s house to shower when Danny and Donna emerge, gray-faced, to go to the cafeteria during the nurses’ shift change.
Donna hugs us both. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she says, and I try not to ask all the questions that would absolve my guilt: Was she there when it happened? How much did she have on her plate because I left?
We sit together, picking at rubbery burgers and pieces of sweet potato pie.
And we haven’t finished half of it before Donna gets a call telling her the pastor is gone.
* * *
I’ve only seen Danny cry once before, but this is different. He becomes his grief, holding on to me like he’d drown if I removed his arms. So I don’t. He falls asleep like that, beside me on the couch, and even when my whole body hurts from his weight, I let him stay.
Donna comes in to cover us with a blanket. “I’m so glad he has you,” she says.
Luke just looks at me. He’s exhausted, despondent. Any plans we made…they won’t be happening soon.
The pastor’s buried on Wednesday. That it’s done so quickly only makes the shock of it harder to absorb. How does a person eat his dinner and read his wife an article in the paper on Saturday night, and become a distant thing you can’t even touch, far beneath the grass, by Wednesday at lunch?
Afterward, people pour through Donna’s house, offering their condolences.
I take all the dishes they bring, and Luke helps me stack them in the freezer and rearrange chairs and offer people something to drink.
They smile at him, but it feels different when they look at me.
I was the orphan they wanted to warn the pastor about, wasn’t I?
I was the girl who was going to do nothing but cause problems and look at that…
I left Donna to care for the pastor alone when he was sick, and he died.
They think it was selfish that I went on a trip I didn’t want to go on in the first place.
I have no idea what all this means for Donna. The church isn’t going to continue paying for them to rent this house, and I know she doesn’t have much saved. Danny’s already said he’s not finishing the semester, and she was too drained and upset to argue.
But if they have to move, maybe they won’t even have room for me. Would it be acceptable for me to leave then? Or do I still need to stay by their sides, somehow, until they’ve recovered from this newest tragedy? I’m alone in the kitchen, pondering all of this, when Grady appears.
“I hope you’re pleased with yourself, Juliet,” he says. He has two tiny white spots on either side of his nose, his thin lips pressed tight.
He’s blocking my path, and all that stands between us is the big casserole in my arms. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“They’re moving me,” he says. “To Oakland. This church should have been mine, and instead they want me to keep assisting someone.”
“How exactly would that be my fault, Grady? Do I look like I carry a lot of sway with the church?”
“ You had the pastor write them. You convinced him to write them and tell them I’m not ready. They told me he’d said as much.”
“I can’t imagine what makes you think I had any sway with the pastor either.” I step past him toward the counter. “Maybe he just thought you weren’t mature enough yet. Or maybe he knew you were the kind of person who’d confront someone after a funeral.”
He grabs my arm and the casserole crashes at my feet, splattering me in sauce and noodles and shattered glass.
“What the—” I begin, but before I can finish, Luke has crossed the kitchen and grabbed Grady by the lapels.
“Who the fuck do you think you are, grabbing her like that?” he demands, shaking Grady hard. “I ever see you lay a finger on her again and you won’t live to tell the tale.”
The crash of the dish has drawn a crowd to the kitchen, but it’s Luke grabbing Grady that they’ve stayed for. And Danny is among them.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” he says, gently scolding all of us, “but this isn’t the place for it.”
Luke’s jaw grinds as he nods at my feet. “It splattered all over you. Go change. I’ll clean this up.”
Maybe it’s just that I know how he feels, but it seems like Luke used to be better at hiding things than he is now. People are probably wondering if his concern is misplaced.
Grady, glaring at me as he walks away, seems certain of it.
* * *
After everyone’s gone, I heat up the lasagna someone brought. Danny blinks back tears when his mother asks him to say a prayer in the pastor’s place. His hand slides over my own as the prayer ends, and Luke watches, swallowing hard.
That life I imagined with him feels like it’s further away than ever.
Donna asks me to cut up one of the pies that was delivered once the lasagna is cleared, though I doubt anyone will eat it. I put on coffee and cut up the pie. I’m playing the role I always played and it’s never felt more fake than it does now.
When we’re all sitting, Danny lifts his fork and puts it down. “During our last conversation, I told Dad something.” He turns to face me, his eyes bright. “I told him I was going to ask you to marry me.”
My fork freezes in mid-air. I want him to stop talking, but it’s already out there, this thing he assumes I want.
“He was glad. He said he’d prayed for that since the day I brought you home.” He smiles at me, blinking back tears. “So I want to do it, Juliet. I know he won’t be there to see it, but it’s the last thing I promised him I’d do. Mom?”
I watch, astonished, as Donna crosses the kitchen and grabs an envelope tucked between the flour and sugar. She hands it to Danny, smiling at me through her tears and he shakes a tiny, tarnished silver ring out of it. It belonged to his grandmother—Donna’s shown it to me before.
He reaches for my hand. “Juliet, will you marry me?”
My heart is thundering in my ears, and I feel like that bird Luke once told me about.
Too large for its cage, its wings unable to stretch—flapping frantically until it finally stopped trying.
Except I’m wiser than that bird in one way.
I know without even trying that I’m never getting out of the cage.
Luke watches, all expression drained from his face, as I tell Danny, “Yes.”