Chapter Three
Beth
I made enough dinner for two, because two years of muscle memory doesn't care what a text message says.
I'd gotten it at the shop—stuck late, don't hold dinner on me—and I'd come home and browned the chicken anyway, and made the rice the way he likes it, with the little bit of cumin and the lime squeezed in at the end, and set two places at the table before I caught what my own hands were doing.
I ate standing at the counter instead. Standing is honest. Sitting down to one plate at a table laid for two is the kind of thing you have to admit to yourself, and I wasn't in the mood to admit to anything.
The house ticked with heat. August in Hartsong is a wet wool blanket nobody will let you take off, and by nine the walls were still breathing it back at me, so I poured a glass of wine and carried it out to the porch to beg whatever breeze the river felt like sparing.
The cicadas were going like a downed power line.
The air sat on my chest the exact way it had sat there two summers back, on the worst and best afternoon of my whole life—and I swear it was nothing more complicated than that, the weight of the heat, but it reached in and pulled me clean out of the present, and I let it, because the present was a porch with one glass on it and the past was the day I fell in love.
? ? ?
I'd known Alonzo Vargas by sight for five years before I ever actually met him.
That's how it works here. You know everybody and you know nobody.
He was the Vargas boy—one of them, the one who ran the front of the restaurant and made the old women blush and could carry four plates up each arm.
I was the flower girl who'd moved to town from somewhere with sidewalks.
We'd nodded at the post office. We'd stood in the same checkout line at Tucker's and talked about absolutely nothing.
He was handsome in the way you stop noticing in a small town, the way the courthouse is pretty—a fact you walk past. We had orbited each other for five years and never once collided.
Then the Hearse died.
The Hearse was my van, a wheezing '04 Astro the color of dishwater that had hauled more funeral arrangements than anything else on four wheels, which is how it got the name and why I refused to give it up.
On the second Saturday of July it gave up the ghost on the shoulder of the county road, two miles from anywhere, in ninety-nine degrees, with the entire Caldwell wedding wilting in the back—three hundred stems of peony and garden rose and hydrangea, the divas of the flower world, every one of them going limp and brown if you so much as breathed wrong on them in that kind of heat.
The ceremony was in three hours. I was on hold with a tow company in the next county over, the dead AC ticking, sweat running into my eyes, watching four thousand dollars and a bride's entire happiness die one petal at a time, and I was—and I want to be precise—losing my mind.
A truck slowed on the other side of the road, hung a U-turn, and pulled in behind me.
He got out, walked up, looked in the back of the van for about four seconds, and said, "These all gotta be somewhere?"
"The Caldwell wedding. Out at the orchard. In three hours." My voice did something humiliating on the last word.
He was already lifting the back hatch the rest of the way. "My walk-in's five minutes from here. Get the door."
"I'm sorry—what?"
"Your flowers are dying, the tow's gonna take an hour minimum, and El Colibrí's got a cooler the size of your living room." He had a bucket of peonies in each hand before I'd finished processing the sentence. "Unless you'd rather watch 'em cook. Get the door, Beth."
He knew my name. I filed that away for later, because there was no time for it then—there was only the two of us forming a sweating, swearing bucket brigade on the side of the county road, loading my entire ruined afternoon into the bed of his truck, and then there was his walk-in cooler at the back of the restaurant with my flowers crammed into it among the limes and the crates of plátano, drinking the cold back into themselves like something out of scripture.
And then—because the Hearse was good and truly dead and the wedding was now in two hours and I had nobody and nothing—he loaded it all back up, drove me out to the orchard himself, and stayed.
He stayed for four hours. A man I'd traded weather reports with at the post office spent the hottest afternoon of the year hauling my buckets across a hayfield, holding things at the wrong angle until I corrected him, getting rose stems down the back of his collar, following orders from a frantic woman he barely knew.
Hold this. No—the other way. Higher. Don't let it touch the—okay, now it's touching it.
He never once complained. When the bride walked down that aisle under an arch of peonies that had been clinically dead ninety minutes earlier, he was standing next to me at the back, both of us absolutely destroyed, sweat-through and hay-covered and grinning like fools, and I realized I'd been grinning at the side of his face for the better part of an hour.
I learned, that afternoon, the thing about Alonzo Vargas that everybody in this town already knew. That if you needed him—really needed him, no-time-to-think needed him—he would drop the entire world and come, no hesitation, no accounting, no thought for the cost.
I fell in love with that. I want it on the record that I fell in love with the very best thing about him.
? ? ?
After that, El Colibrí developed a sudden and pressing need for flowers.
A fresh arrangement for the host stand, every Monday.
Then every Monday and Thursday. Then he needed to "discuss options" in person, which took an unusually long time for a man who let me pick everything anyway.
Carmen clocked it before I did—honey, no restaurant on God's earth needs hydrangeas twice a week, that man is buying his way into your shop—and she was right, and I let him, and the first time he actually asked me to dinner instead of flowers I said yes before he'd finished the sentence.
It went fast after that, the way it does when it's right and you're both too old to pretend otherwise.
He moved into my cottage the next spring—it was mine first, the little place out past the bridge with the porch I'm sitting on right now, and it became ours without either of us deciding on a day.
He learned which floorboards creaked. I learned he sang in the shower, badly, and talked to his abuela on the phone in a Spanish that went soft and small and made my chest hurt to overhear. Two years. Two good years.
He proposed in December, down at the river, on a night so cold the stars looked frozen in place.
I'd thought we were just walking. He got down on one knee in the snow and his hands were shaking so hard I thought it was the cold until I saw his face, and he forgot the entire speech he'd practiced—he told me that later, that he'd had a whole speech—and what he actually said was just my name, twice, and please, and I was already crying and saying yes before the ring was out of the box.
He nearly dropped it in the snow. We laughed about it the whole walk home, my frozen hand in his coat pocket with the ring on it.
We were going to do it that same month. That was the plan—a courthouse, a quick thing, his abuela and my folks and Carmen as a witness, and a real party in the spring. Alonzo wanted to be married yesterday. He has never once in his life seen a good thing and thought, let's wait.
Then, in January, my father's heart stopped working the way hearts are supposed to.
I won't take you through all of it. There's no version of that hallway worth describing twice.
What I'll tell you is that I spent the gray belly of that winter and most of the spring two hours away at the cardiac unit in the city, sleeping upright in a vinyl chair the color of a bruise, learning the names of medications and the faces of nurses, holding my dad's hand through the parts that scared him so he wouldn't have to be scared alone.
And what I'll tell you about Alonzo is that he was there.
He drove the two hours after close, every night he could, and showed up in that waiting room smelling like the kitchen with a thermos of real coffee because the machine stuff was poison, and he'd sit in the second bruise-colored chair and hold the hand I wasn't using, and he never made me feel like I was asking for too much.
When my father finally came home with a scar down his chest and a list of things he couldn't eat anymore, it was Alonzo who built the railing on their porch steps so Dad wouldn't fall.
You don't plan a wedding from a hospital hallway. So we moved it to March—this coming March, the first warm one—and I didn't mind, because I had the rest of my life to marry him and I only had the one father.
It was that same winter, somewhere in all of it, that I first heard the name Lola.
I wasn't really listening. I had a father with a stopped heart; I had no attention left over for a name.
By the time I came up for air, by the time the spring came and my dad could walk to the mailbox and I could think about my own life again—she was already there.
At the Sunday table. In the restaurant. Folded into the family I was about to join, in all the months I'd spent two hours away with my back to it.
I didn't think anything of it then. I want to be honest about that. I came home grateful—for my father's heartbeat, for the man who'd sat with me through the worst of it—and a grateful woman doesn't go looking for the thing that's going to ruin her.
? ? ?
The wine was warm and the cicadas had quit and the porch had gone full dark around me, and Alonzo still wasn't home.
I gave up around eleven. I rinsed the second plate I'd never used and put it back in the cabinet, and I went up and lay down on my side of a bed too big for one person, and I told myself the things you tell yourself—the restaurant, the closing, he loses track, he always loses track—and somewhere in the telling I slid under.
I surfaced when the mattress dipped behind me. The room was black and the clock said something past one, and I felt him settle in, careful, trying not to wake me, and the cold came off him in a wave—night air, outside air, the smell of somewhere that wasn't our warm shut-up house.
"Hey," I mumbled into the pillow. "S'late. You okay? You were forever."
"Mm." His arm came over me, his chest against my back, and his hand found my hip the way it always did, even half-asleep, like it had a homing instinct. He pressed his cold mouth to the back of my neck. "Yeah. Just restaurant stuff. Go back to sleep, Bethy."
"Mkay."
And I did. I tucked back into the curve of him, into the cold that was already going warm between us, and I let his breathing even out against my spine, and I didn't hold a single thing against him, because I had no reason to and because I was so tired and because I loved him, simple as that, all the way down.
He was asleep in two minutes. He always was.
I followed him down a few minutes after, and the small flat thing he'd said into the dark went down with me, unexamined, harmless, like a stone you drop in a pond at night and never hear hit the bottom.