Chapter Eight #2
"And it isn't just the parties. It's the little things—the ones nobody else is around to hear.
" Another quarter-turn of the glass. "A few weeks back she said something to me about my job.
About how the only reason I've got it is that you all felt sorry for me.
That I'm the family charity case." A small, brittle laugh.
"Like I'm a stray somebody picked up off the side of the road. "
That one I sat up at. "Wait—she said that? Beth said that to you?"
Lola lifted a shoulder and let it drop. "Maybe not in those exact words. But it's what she meant. You learn to hear it, under the polite ones."
"That doesn't—" I shook my head. "Lola, that doesn't sound like her. I think maybe you took it wrong. Beth wouldn't say a thing like that, it isn't who she is."
For a half-second—and I only saw it because I've replayed the night ten thousand times since—something crossed Lola's face that wasn't hurt at all.
Then it was gone, and the wounded thing was back, and she looked down at the table and gave a small smile that didn't go anywhere.
"You're probably right. Maybe I took it wrong. "
My mother let out a long breath through her nose and reached over and laid her hand flat on top of Lola's—as if I hadn't said a word, as if my defense of Beth was a small polite noise to be waited out. "You should have told us, sweetheart. You don't have to carry these things by yourself."
"I didn't want to make trouble." Lola's eyes were wet, right on time, and I'd have sworn to you on anything you put in front of me that I thought they were real. "I just want him to be happy. That's all I've ever wanted, is for Lonzo to be happy."
Down at the end of the table, Diego hadn't said a word.
He was working through the last of the glasses with a towel, drying them one at a time, slow, and he wasn't drinking and he wasn't nodding and he wasn't looking at Lola. When the quiet stretched out, he set a glass down on the cloth and said it flat, to nobody in particular:
"I don't remember her being rude to anybody at Santi's."
The table shifted. It wasn't much—a beer set down, my mother's mouth going tight—but I felt the room close ranks against the interruption, gentle and total, the way a family closes over the one member who won't get with the story.
"You were at the grill the whole time, hermano," Mari said.
"Maybe." Diego picked up the next glass.
"I just don't remember it." A beat. "She helped me carry the ice, is what I remember.
Nobody else got up." And he left it lying there, and went back to his drying, and didn't say one more word the rest of the night—which is its own kind of message, coming from Diego.
Except not one of the rest of us was listening for it.
I heard him. I heard him and I let it go by, because his quiet truth was heavier to pick up than Lola's easy one, and I'd already chosen the easy one, the way I chose the easy one every single time it was offered to me.
I drove home a little before midnight feeling—and I'm ashamed of this, but I told you I'd tell it straight—feeling lighter.
Like something I'd been hauling by myself for months had finally been set down out loud by other people, so now it had to be true.
Beth's been hard to live with. Beth's been jealous, and cold, and difficult.
My whole family could see it now. It wasn't just me. It had never been just me.
There was a splinter in it. I'll grant myself that one small thing.
Somewhere under all that relief, way down where I kept the things I didn't want to look at, a quiet voice that sounded a lot like my own said: that doesn't sound like her, though.
Does it. That's not the woman who slept two weeks in a plastic hospital chair so her mother could go home and shower.
That's not the woman who cried in the truck because your dad called her mija.
When did she turn into this other person—and how come the only place she's this other person is in Lola's stories?
I turned the radio up over it. I was good at that, it turned out. Turning the radio up over the one true thing in the car.
? ? ?
The house was dark when I pulled in.
Not strange on its own—it was late, Beth was up before the sun most mornings, she could've been asleep. But the porch light was off, and Beth never left the porch light off when she knew I was closing, and something about that dark made me slow down on my own front walk.
Inside, the air had the particular stillness a house takes on when there's nobody in it. I knew before I found a switch. You can feel the difference between a quiet house and an empty one right there on your skin.
Her keys weren't in the bowl. The little blue overnight bag wasn't on its hook by the door. Her toothbrush—and I don't know why I went and checked, except that my body had figured out something my head hadn't caught up to—her toothbrush was gone from the cup by the sink.
The note was on the kitchen counter, weighted under the salt, where we always left things for each other.
It was short. Her handwriting, but careful—none of the usual rush and slant of it, like she'd had to work to hold her hand steady.
Gone to my parents' for the weekend. I need some space to think.
—Beth
I read it three or four times over.
It wasn't the words that did it. The words were almost reasonable; people need space, that's a normal thing, I could even tell myself it was healthy.
It was the—Beth. We'd shared this house for a little over a year and she had never once signed me a note like that in her life.
They were always xx, or a little crooked heart, or back by 6, there's chili in the pot, or nothing at all, because who signs a note to the person they're about to marry.
Beth. Her whole name, set down at the bottom of the page like a stranger leaving word for the landlord.
That was what finally laid a cold finger flat against my spine.
And then—because I was who I was, because I'd had two years of practice and one good long night of being told I was the reasonable one—I set the cold finger aside.
It was just like last time, I decided, standing there in the dark kitchen.
The cold front after her dad's birthday.
She gets like this; she goes quiet and far-off and needs a few days, and the worst thing a man can do is go chasing her down and crowding her.
I'd give her the weekend. I'd give her the space she asked for.
She'd come back around by Sunday, same as she always did, and we'd put the whole ugly afternoon behind us, and I'd be gracious about it, because that was the kind of man I was.
I put the note back down and weighted it under the salt again, like she might come home and need to find it.
I want to tell you I lay awake that night with some animal certainty that the floor had gone out from under my whole life.
That I felt her leaving in my bones. I didn't. I ate standing over the sink and I got into our half-empty bed and I slept fine—slept like a man who figured he was owed the morning, and every morning after it, world without end.
It was the last good night's sleep I'd get for a long, long time.