Chapter Five
Beth
He came down the next morning humming.
Not a care in the world. He kissed the top of my head on his way to the coffee, asked if I'd seen where he'd left his good knife, started in on some story about a produce order that was running late—like the night before was a thing he'd dreamed and shaken off before his feet hit the floor.
I'd been awake since four. I'd lain there in the dark beside him doing the arithmetic I keep promising myself I'll quit, and he had slept the deep clean sleep of a man with nothing on his conscience, and watching him pour his coffee and hum, I understood that if I didn't say it now, it would close over like water over a dropped stone, and we'd never speak of it again, and that would be that.
"You missed my dad's birthday," I said.
He stopped humming. He didn't turn around right away. "Beth."
"I just want to say it out loud one time. You missed my dad's first birthday since his heart stopped."
"We went over this last night." He turned, and his face had already arranged itself into something patient and braced, like I was a weather system he had to wait out, and that was worse than yelling. "There was a flood, Beth. Her whole apartment. What exactly was I supposed to do?"
"Ask if it could wait an hour. Drive over, see that maintenance had it handled, call me from her parking lot and say 'I'm coming, save me a seat.
' Show up for the cake at the end. There were a hundred things between 'walk out of my father's birthday' and 'don't come back at all,' and you didn't reach for a single one of them. "
"She was alone." The coffee mug came down hard enough to slosh over the rim. "She was standing in two inches of water by herself, falling apart, and I was the only person she had to call. I'm sorry your dad's feelings got—"
"It's not my dad's feelings, Alonzo." There it was.
The little sleight of hand where the hurt became my father's instead of mine, where I became the messenger for an old man's bruised night instead of the woman who'd sat at that table with the chair beside her empty in front of my entire family.
"My dad's fine. My dad's tough as a boot.
This is mine. I'm the one who looked up every time the door opened.
I'm the one who had to explain you. Again. "
"Again." He latched onto it. "Right. Because this is really about a pattern, isn't it. This is about Lola."
"This is about you not even pausing. You didn't weigh it.
You heard her voice and you were gone, and I'd like to understand why I'm always the thing that gets weighed and she's the thing that never has to be.
" I made myself breathe. "Was it even an emergency?
Did you see it before you decided? Or did she say the word and you ran? "
Something flickered behind his eyes—I'd swear to this day it did, just for a second, like I'd brushed up against a thing he already half knew—and then it sealed over and came back as anger.
"Wow. Okay." He laughed, the ugly little laugh that isn't a laugh. "So I'm an idiot. I can't tell a real crisis from a—what, a performance? You think she's playing me. That's what you think of me."
"I think you have a blind spot the size of this whole town where she's concerned, and I think—"
"You know what I think this actually is?
" He set his hands flat on the counter and leaned into them, and his voice dropped, which is how I knew it was about to get bad.
"I think you can't stand her. I think you decided that a long time ago, and now everything she does is a problem, and every single time I'm a halfway decent human being to a friend who came back to this town with nothing, you're going to stand here and make me feel like a criminal for it.
" He shook his head slowly. "You want to tell me how I'm allowed to feel about my own friends, Beth?
Who I'm allowed to help? Is that where we are now? "
And there it was. I had walked into my own kitchen wanting one thing—for the man I'm going to marry to have shown up for my father—and somewhere in ninety seconds I'd been turned, smooth as a card trick, into the jealous, controlling, small-hearted woman who wanted to ration his kindness.
I felt it happen. I felt myself become the villain of a story I hadn't written, and the worst part, the part I'm ashamed of, is the flicker of doubt it put in me even then.
Maybe I am being unfair. Maybe a good person wouldn't begrudge a flooded apartment. Maybe it's me.
"That's not what I said," I told him, quietly. It came out small.
"It's what it sounds like." He grabbed his keys off the hook.
"I gotta get to the restaurant before this turns into a whole thing.
We're good. Okay? We're good." He kissed my temple on the way past—he actually kissed me—and then he was gone, the screen door clapping shut behind him, and I stood there in the morning light holding a coffee I didn't want, recast and relabeled and somehow, impossibly, in the wrong.
? ? ?
Sunday I was twenty minutes late to dinner at the Vargas house, because a bride three towns over had changed her entire palette on a Friday and I'd spent the day on my feet rebuilding two hundred stems by hand, and I came up their front walk smelling like eucalyptus and exhaustion and let myself in the side door the way family does.
Lola was in my seat.
I should explain that there's a seat. Two years I'd been coming to that table, and somewhere along the way I'd been given the chair at Alonzo's right hand, between him and his mother—the in-between place, the place that says you belong to both sides of this.
And there was Lola in it, wine in hand, mid-story, the whole table tipped toward her like sunflowers, and the only open chair left was down at the far end by Diego and the kids.
It wasn't the first time. That's what I want you to understand.
It had been happening by degrees for weeks, a chair here, a place setting there, so gradual you couldn't point at the day it started, and every other time I'd swallowed it and told myself I was being petty, it's a chair, Beth, who counts chairs.
But that night, with my father's empty-seat birthday still raw in me, it landed like a slap.
"—and I swear to God, the water is coming through the actual light fixtures," Lola was saying, hands going, "and I'm just standing there, useless, I can't even think, and I call Alonzo, and he doesn't even let me finish, he just goes 'I'm coming,' and twenty minutes later he's there, he's got everything handled—" she pressed a hand to her chest "—I don't know what I would've done.
I really don't. I'd have lost everything. "
"That's my boy," Rafael said, beaming.
And Pilar—Pilar, who I love, who calls me her daughter—Pilar reached over and squeezed Lola's hand and said, warm as bread, "I raised mine to come running when somebody needs them. Both of them. You call a Vargas, a Vargas shows up."
I sat down at the far end of the table between a six-year-old and the salad and I thought, with a flatness that frightened me a little: yes. She certainly did. She raised him to drop the entire world for whoever calls the loudest.
I just hadn't understood, until lately, that the whoever had stopped including me.
Nobody asked about the wedding I'd killed myself on all day. Nobody asked how my dad was doing. Somebody passed me the bread.
Across the table, Alonzo caught my eye. For one second it was just us, the way it used to be in a crowded room—and he mouthed you okay?
, his brow doing that small worried thing I love, and I felt the whole night loosen its grip on me a little, and I started to give him a weak smile, started to shape something back—
And then Lola said his name, and his head turned, and he was gone again, laughing with his whole open face, the face I fell in love with at the back of a hayfield.
So I put another bite of arepa in my mouth, and I chewed, and I let the noise of the two of them close back over the little gap where I'd almost reached him.
I have never in my life felt more like a guest in a house I was supposed to be marrying into.
? ? ?
We didn't talk much on the drive home, and we didn't talk much coming through the door, and I think he could feel the temperature of me, because the second we were inside he turned on the lamp and the warmth and said, light, hopeful, "Hey—you wanna put something on?
That show with the bakers, the one you like. I'll make the tea."
"I can't, babe. I'm done." I toed off my shoes and the relief of it nearly buckled me. "My back is a solid sheet of pain, I was up and down a ladder all day, I just need to lie flat and stop existing for nine hours."
"Okay." He didn't push. He's good at not pushing; it's one of the ways he gets to feel like the patient one. "Go on up. I'll lock up."
I went through the whole small liturgy of it—washed my face, brushed my teeth, found the heat patch for the worst knot below my shoulder blade, eased myself down onto my side of the bed in the dark—and I lay there listening to him move around downstairs, the deadbolt, the dishwasher, the stairs, and I told myself I was too tired and too sore and too sad to do anything but sleep.
He slid in behind me a while later. I felt the dip of the mattress, the heat of him, the careful way he fitted himself to my back, and I stayed turned away and I stayed quiet.
"Hey," he murmured. His mouth found the back of my neck, soft, just below the hairline. "Bethy."
I didn't answer.
"I'm sorry." He said it into my skin, and his arm came over me, his hand spreading warm and slow across my stomach.
"I mean it. About your dad's birthday. I should've been there.
I keep getting it wrong, I know I do." Another kiss, lower, at the curve where my neck meets my shoulder, and a third—and his hand began to move.
Up over my ribs, slow, unhurried, the rough pad of his thumb skating the underside of my breast until my breath snagged and gave me away, then down again, tracing the dip of my waist, the rise of my hip, his fingers spreading along my thigh and drawing my leg back over his.
"I'm sorry," he murmured into the hollow behind my ear. "Let me make it up to you. Let me."
And here's the thing nobody tells you about being loved by a man who keeps getting it wrong: the apology in the dark is real even when it isn't enough, and your own body is a traitor that never got the memo about your principles.
His mouth was warm and his hands knew every road in me by heart, and I was so tired of being angry, so tired of being the villain of it, so starved to be the woman he crossed a room for instead of the one he kept leaving in it—that when he rolled me beneath him in the dark and settled the warm weight of himself down the length of me, I let him.
I more than let him. I told myself it was the same thing as being chosen, and with his sorry in my mouth and his hands doing what they knew how to do, for a little while I made myself believe it.
I won't go into the rest of it. I'll only say that I gave in the way I always gave in—fully, gladly, despising myself a little even as I dragged him closer—and that it was good the way it was always good between us, which was the whole trap of the thing.
And that afterward he fell asleep with his hand curled around my hip, forgiven, weightless, a man who'd set something heavy down.
I lay awake a few minutes longer, in the warm dark, with the heat patch going cold against my back.
That was the shape of us, that whole long autumn.
The hurt, then the defending, then the cold quiet days, and then his mouth on the back of my neck and I'm sorry and let me make it up to you, and me folding because I loved him and because eleven o'clock makes a liar of every resolution you make at four in the morning.
He'd say sorry and I'd believe him, and the sorry would soften the surface of the thing and never once touch the bottom of it.
I should have known a sorry like that has a shelf life. I should have started keeping count of how many we had left.
But I didn't. I just closed my eyes and breathed him in and let it hold for one more night.