Chapter 36
Iawoke from a restless sleep to the smell of coffee and something savory. Someone was cooking me breakfast—no doubt, the someone I’d been thinking about nonstop. Over the past few days, our stilted texting had continued. Buck had reached out with small messages—just good mornings and good nights and gentle reminders that I should remember to eat. But I still didn’t know where we stood. I was glad he had availed himself of my garage code and let himself in. It was time for us to talk.
“Mornin’, beautiful.”
He turned away from the stove as I padded into the kitchen. I was still bleary-eyed with sleep. The way his eyes warmed as he took me in made me want to pull both of us back to bed for a long nap before we had to face the music. He still looked sexy as all get-out, but he also looked tired, like he hadn’t slept well in days.
Only for a second, he turned his attention back to the skillet in his hand and deposited a perfect omelet onto a plate. He wasted no time after setting the pan on a cold burner to pull me in tenderly. For a long minute, complex emotions found purchase in our embrace. His heartbeat next to my ear made me feel like I could breathe. Standing in my own kitchen had never felt so much like home.
“I’ve missed you, baby girl.” He murmured the words as he tightened his arms around me. “You get a good night’s sleep?”
Though it was patently untrue, I nodded. The moment was too perfect to ruin with all that troubled me. I needed another minute to stay lost.
“Are you coming or going?” I wanted to know. He smelled showered and clean and wore his station Class Bs.
“Going,” he said. “I spent most of yesterday on Lookout Mountain with my momma. I’m covering half a shift today. But I wanted to see you.”
“So you’re off at eight?” Half a shift was twelve hours.
He nodded and kissed the tip of my nose.
“Stay over tonight. We’ll talk.”
He looked uneasy. “I can’t.”
“Tomorrow?” Even as I asked it, I knew something was wrong. When he hesitated, I knew it was a no.
“Loretta...” His eyes filled with sadness. “My momma?—”
He cut himself off on a choked voice that sent up alarm bells in my mind. Mention of Annelise was enough to remind me there was a bigger picture.
“Is she alright?”
“The way she was when I saw her yesterday...” Buck’s voice sounded haunted. “It’s like something inside her changed.”
“Something inside her did change,” I offered. “You don’t come out the same after meeting the child you had to give up.”
Buck frowned and loosened his hold on me, shaking his head. “Everything’s a mess, Loretta. We have bigger fish to fry than him.”
“What bigger fish?”
His eyes turned grim. “The biggest fish. My father.”
“So he has no idea?”
“He’s been on the road with Trevor and my momma’s laying low. He hasn’t caught a whiff of it. But he will.”
“What will he do when he finds out?”
Buck’s voice became even more grave. “Nothing good.”
The gears started turning in my head. “So we get ahead of him—anticipate the first move he’ll make. Work backwards from whatever it is you want him to do.”
Buck began to shake his head. “Uh-uh. We are not doing anything. I’m taking it from here.”
This was where I would normally mention that I was a private investigator—an expert on helping women get what they wanted, especially if it meant thwarting problematic partners. But Buck taking me off the case didn’t make me want to point out reasons why I should be involved. It only left me feeling hurt.
It must have shown on my face because, the next thing I knew, his arms were back around me. In a single move, he cupped my cheek tenderly and fixed me with his gaze.
“Loretta,” he began. “I couldn’t have done any of this without you. And you ought to know how I feel. I’m crazy about you, girl. But right now...I’ve got the weight of the world on my shoulders. And I can’t carry one more thing.”
His voice and expression were pained, so much that it made me want to overlook him calling me a burden. When tears sprang to the corners of my eyes, Buck dipped his nose and pressed a kiss to my hair. His caring manner didn’t ease the hard slap of the truth. He might have been doing it gently, but I saw this for what it was. Buck was breaking up with me.
“I can’t have you help me. Not right now. There’s too much going on. And I can’t make promises for how much I’ll be around. Between work and my momma and handling my dad?—”
“Stop.”
I pulled back from his embrace.
“You don’t owe me an explanation,” I whispered. I knew it wasn’t true, not after the lip service he’d paid to us making a go of it. Obviously, he’d changed his mind. And I couldn’t take it, for him to go on.
“Loretta.” His voice faltered.
“I get it.” My voice was still a whisp. “You live through a big shock like this and it changes who you are.”
Buck frowned. I gave a little sniff, then took a step back.
“I’m still the same person, Loretta.” His voice was lower now. “Nothing’s changed. I just need time to sort things out. And this next part...” He sighed and shook his head. “You can’t be a part of it. I have to do it on my own.”
I wasn’t alarmedto hear a key in my front door twelve hours later as I lay, dazed, listening to music under a blanket on my couch. Forgetting about lunch plans with Clarine had prompted her to look for me at the station, which had led her to find me crying on my lunch break in my car. As predicted, she came into view. I made no move to leave the couch. I had everything that I could possibly need. My phone could control the sound system. A box of tissues sat next to me. My blanket was cozy and I was warm.
“Did you know there are one hundred and eight breakup playlists on my streaming app?” I mentioned it casually before she could ask me how I was.
“‘Love Stinks’ playing in surround sound was kind of a clue.”
She sat on the ottoman in front of my couch and faced me.
“You know, I respect this song for its simplicity,” I mused. “The parts in between don’t make much sense, but the chorus says it all.”
“I expect you to eat a minimum of three slices of pizza.” Clarine ignored my comments and spoke in her bossy voice.
“Only if you got sausage, garlic, and jalape?o,” I bargained.
“First of all, I’m not an amateur. Only a cut-rate best friend would show up with the wrong pizza. Second of all, you should have seen it coming.”
“Seen what coming?” I was instantly defensive.
“That I’d keep to tradition. I brought reinforcements.”
Only when Clarine looked behind her shoulder did I crane my neck to see. Some part of me knew she didn’t mean ice cream and wine. Familiar faces appeared in the hallway, with Jolene bringing up the rear. In her hand was a karaoke machine.
How could I forget about roast night?
But I had forgotten about the tradition—what COOs did every time another COO wound up with a broken heart. They would descend upon her house with margaritas and harsh words about the offender and belt out a steady stream of F-you songs.
The next thing I knew, I was being set upright and greeted by every COO, receiving hugs as activity swarmed around me and the ladies got to work. In less than three minutes, couches and chairs had been arranged in an arc, a mic had been set up, and the lyrics feed had been linked into my TV. Transforming any living room into a karaoke theater was something all of them had learned how to do.
Peggy started things off by tearing into a heartfelt rendition of “Fighter” by Christina Aguilera. Darlene became Beyoncé on “Irreplaceable.” Clarine’s standard was “A-B-C-D-E-F-U” by a singer whose name I could never remember. Jolene’s rendition of “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” brought down the house. Shenita wasn’t much of a singer, but she joined into the ensemble performance of “Bye Bye Bye” by *NSYNC, made extra entertaining by the group’s attempts to dance the choreography.
The singing had the desired effect of being so silly and over the top that it gave me respite for a while. And the songs they sang were a hell of a lot more uplifting than the playlist I’d been listening to when they came in.
“You gonna tell us what happened?” Jolene asked the question in the pointed manner that only a septuagenarian could. The margaritas were hitting the spot.
I kept it simple. “He said he needs to handle some things on his own.”
Every other voice in the room burst forth with some version of “that’s bullshit.” The solidarity of outrage was meant to comfort me, but it didn’t. Buck and I were doomed—we’d always been. Even before yesterday, I’d come to my own conclusions about how it couldn’t work, which is why it made no sense that I couldn’t let him go.
“That’s what some men do when the going gets tough,” Darlene declared authoritatively. “They’re not made of half the stuff we are.”
“You can say that again,” Jolene agreed. “My first husband was so unequipped to handle being a father, he clean disappeared when Marky was born. Didn’t come back for a week.”
“But he did come back...” There was hope in my voice.
“That’s not what you were supposed to take from that story,” Clarine informed me.
“Not of his own accord,” Jolene answered. “My brothers hunted him down. Brought his sorry ass back.”
And that was the moment my eyes decided to fill up with tears. “But I don’t have brothers.” I broke out in sobs. For the first time since my cryfest at lunch, the dam broke.
“No, but you have sisters,” Shenita said with determination. “Didn’t you say he took you on a date in a nice car? We can go Carrie Underwood on his ass. I can be back in fifteen minutes with my son’s little league bat.”
“Shenita!” I was appalled. “It’s not like he cheated on me.”
“Well someone needs to teach that man a lesson. He practically begged you to date him. Now he’s just gonna cut you off? That’s not how breakups work.”
“Actually, that’s exactly how breakups work,” I said miserably on the heels of a loud sniffle. “One person checks out of the relationship, whether they tell you they’re checking out or not. I hate what he did, but at least he didn’t string me along.”
“You do not have to defend him,” Clarine pointed out strongly. “Stop looking for reasons not to call him a cowardly piece of shit. You can hate him for hurting you, even if you don’t want to key his car.”
But I didn’t hate Buck. I hated myself for ignoring my instinct not to date him, for knowing better but opening myself to getting hurt. I was still convinced that none of it would have worked out over the long-term. I just hadn’t expected him to end it like this.