Chapter Six #2
"Cake tasting. Hartsville. Beth got slammed at the shop, so I'm the designated mouth." I made a face. "Hour each way. I'm gonna lose my entire mind alone in that truck listening to my own thoughts."
"So don't." She shrugged, already reaching for her bag. "I'm done here. Take me, I'll keep you honest. God knows you can't be trusted to pick a cake by yourself."
And—I want to be honest about how small it felt, how completely like nothing—I was glad. That's it. That's the whole sinister thing. I had two hours of road ahead of me and a friend with nowhere to be and I thought, oh, good, company, the same way you'd think it about anybody.
"Get in," I said. "But you're not allowed to pick the boring one."
Lola
The girl behind the counter at Sweet Clementine's took one look at the two of us coming through the door and said, "Welcome! You must be the happy couple—congratulations!"
I didn't correct her. I'll be honest about that, since I'm being honest. Alonzo opened his mouth to, I think, and then the girl was already steering us toward a little marble table with two chairs and a flight of cake like a jeweler laying out rings, and the moment passed, and I let it pass, and I sat down in the chair she pulled out for the bride.
It's a particular kind of pleasure, being mistaken for the thing you should have been.
They brought the cakes out one at a time on those tiny pedestals—almond with a raspberry seam, a brown-butter thing, a lemon-elderflower, a dark chocolate with espresso that Alonzo's whole face fell in love with on contact.
He's the easiest man on earth to feed. Always has been.
You put something good in front of Alonzo Vargas and he closes his eyes when the first bite hits, every time, like the world just confirmed something he'd hoped about it.
"This one," he said, around the chocolate. "Done. This is the one."
"It's not the one." I took the little fork out of his hand and tried it myself. "It's good. It's also exactly what every man picks because it tastes like a candy bar he loved when he was nine. You want the almond. The almond is what people remember. The almond is grown-up."
"The almond is dry."
"The almond is restrained, there's a difference, you absolute child.
" I cut a bite of the almond and the raspberry and held the fork up, and he leaned in and let me feed it to him without a thought, the way you'd let your own hand do it, and chewed, and I watched him reconsider his entire position. "See."
"...Okay, the almond's good."
"The almond's correct."
"Take a picture of the almond so Beth believes me." He laughed and reached across and stole the chocolate fork back. "She told me not to just pick the one I liked. She knows me."
There was a fleck of buttercream at the corner of his mouth, and I reached over and thumbed it away before I'd decided whether I should—the way you'd do for anybody—and brought my thumb to my own lips and licked it off.
And I caught his eyes drop. Half a second, no more, down to my mouth, and stay there.
Then he blinked, and grinned, and shrugged the whole thing off, and grabbed a napkin to scrub at his own lips.
"That elderflower frosting is a menace," he said.
"I'd eat a whole sheet of it and not be one bit sorry.
" And he let it be nothing, the way he always does.
He is very, very good at letting things be nothing.
She does know him, I thought. Lucky, lucky woman.
She gets to know him the slow way, year over year, gets to keep finding out—the closed eyes, the bad whistling, the way he'll drive an hour for somebody else's errand and never once think it's worth mentioning.
She gets all of it, forever, on a Friday in March, and she doesn't even seem grateful for it.
She sat at that family table looking like a woman doing a chore.
I cut another bite and didn't think about Beth at all.
We picked the almond and the lemon-elderflower for her to choose between, and Alonzo took eleven blurry photos and we got back on the road with the windows down and the late sun coming gold through the trees, and it was—fluent.
That's the only word I've got for it. The old muscle memory of two people who grew up in each other's pockets, and not one minute of effort.
He told me a long stupid story about Diego and a delivery driver and a goose, and I laughed until my stomach hurt, and somewhere outside Hartsville I caught myself wishing the drive were longer.
He pulled up outside my building a little before seven. The water stain was still on my ceiling, I knew, two windows up—a brown ghost of the night he came running. I had my hand on the door and then I stopped, the way you do when you've decided to say a thing and you're choosing the shape of it.
"Hey. Do me a favor." I kept my voice light, kind, helpful—the register of a woman thinking of everyone.
"Maybe don't mention to Beth that I tagged along today.
She's not exactly my biggest fan, you know that, and there's no reason to hand her something to chew on.
No point starting a whole thing over nothing, right? She's stressed enough."
He didn't answer right away.
I watched it happen on the side of his face in the gold light—the small snag of it, the part of him that knew, somewhere, that keeping a thing from Beth was already the wrong side of a line.
He sat with it. I let him sit with it. I've learned that the trick is never to push; you just leave the easier door open and wait.
"...You know what," he said finally. "You're right."
"I usually am." I leaned over and kissed his cheek, quick, and got out, and didn't look back, because looking back is how they remember the moment as yours.
I felt it click into place as I climbed my stairs—that small familiar settling, the sound of a thing going my way. I'd love to tell you it felt like triumph. It didn't. It barely felt like anything at all anymore. That's the part I don't say out loud.
? ? ?
Inside, I poured a glass of the good wine I can't afford and got the album out of the bottom drawer of the dresser—out from under the stack of sweaters I never wear, where it lives so I don't have to look at it.
The album's older than I am, practically—my mother's, then mine. I don't open it often. But some nights, after a good day, after an easy day, it's the only thing that fits the shape of what I'm feeling.
There's my mother on the second page, thirty and laughing, before the cancer came in and hollowed her out a spoonful at a time over two years until there was nothing left in the bed but her wedding ring sliding around a finger.
There's my father a few pages on, squinting into the sun with his arm around her, before he decided—quietly, the way he did everything—that he couldn't manage the world without her in it, and proved it eight months later.
There's nobody after that. No siblings to call.
No house to go home to. The city took the rest, one bad year on top of another, until home was a trash bag and a smile I keep bolted on.
Alonzo phoned me, after my father. Did I ever tell you that.
He said come home, Lola, the town will hold you, like the town was a thing that held people.
As if I could walk down Main Street where every storefront had my mother in it, every corner had my father, every inch had the girl I used to be before the world started subtracting.
I couldn't. Not then. So I stayed gone, and I lost everything else too, and then one winter there was nothing left to stay gone for, and I came back anyway—back to the ghosts, because ghosts are cheaper than nothing.
And then there's the last page. The two of us at eighteen, sunburned, his arm slung around my neck, both of us squinting and stupid and unbearably young, the summer before my parents drove me out of this town and the bottom fell out of my whole life.
I know what we were to each other that summer.
I know what we were a few summers after, too, when I'd come back.
He can call it old friends now, soft and safe, the word he uses at the family table while his fiancée smiles at her plate.
He can tell himself whatever he needs to.
I was there. I remember every page of it.
I traced his eighteen-year-old face with one finger and I thought about Beth, who got to keep him, who couldn't even be bothered to come taste her own wedding cake.
I don't hate her. I want that understood.
I've got nothing left over for hating anybody—grief took the part of me that used to manage that.
I just can't find it in me, anymore, to care very much what it costs a woman who's never lost a single thing she didn't get back.
The world emptied my hands all the way to the bone.
If it leaves one good thing inside my reach, I'm not going to apologize for closing my fingers around it.
I finished the wine. I put the album back under the sweaters and slid the drawer shut.
And I went to bed thinking, the way you think a thing you've decided is simply true: she doesn't know what she has. She never has. I would.