Chapter Nine
Beth
My parents' kitchen has a window over the sink that looks out on a bird feeder my father refills like it's a sacrament, and I have watched a lot of weather come across that backyard from the chair I was sitting in that Sunday morning—the chair that's been mine since I was twenty, that my father still pulls out and pats like I might forget where I belong.
I'd driven over the night before with a duffel bag and a face I was trying to keep arranged, and my mother had taken one look at me on the porch and not asked a single question, which is its own kind of love, the not-asking.
She'd just put the kettle on and pulled down the good mugs and let me sit in the warm yellow light of that kitchen and come apart quietly, on my own clock, the way I needed to.
? ? ?
I spent that Sunday letting them take care of me, which is a thing I am very bad at and they are very good at insisting on.
My father is not supposed to exert himself anymore—not since January, not since the morning his heart decided to remind us all that it was a muscle and not a promise—but you would not have known it to watch him try to wrestle a forty-pound sack of birdseed up off the garage floor.
"Dad." I took it out of his hands. "Dad."
"I have been lifting that bag for thirty years."
"And you've got exactly one heart to show for sixty-nine of them, so let's not gamble.
" I carried it out to the feeder myself while he supervised with his hands jammed in his pockets, critiquing my technique, informing me I was overfilling it, that the grackles would clean me out by noon.
We have had the grackle conversation maybe four hundred times.
I could have stood out there and had it four hundred more.
People in Hartsong think my family has always been here, the way they think it about anyone who runs a shop on the square.
We haven't. My parents landed here the way you land anywhere—by accident, and then on purpose.
When they retired they wanted quiet, a porch, a slower street, a sky you could actually see at night; and I was twenty and had just dropped out of a college I'd never wanted to be at, no plan, a head full of static, and I'd watched the two of them boxing up the only house I'd ever known and I could not, for the life of me, picture letting them drive off into the rest of it without me.
So I came too. Everybody said it was a mistake—a grown woman trailing her retired parents to a town the size of a stamp.
Standing at that feeder watching my father fuss over grackles, his mended heart ticking along under his shirt, I thought what I've thought a thousand times since: it was the best decision I ever made.
Inside, my mother was cooking like she expected to feed a regiment instead of three adults and possibly a fourth. She parked me at the sink snapping the ends off green beans, because idle hands make me spiral and she has always known it.
"You don't have to feed me into a coma, Mom."
"I absolutely do." She didn't turn from the stove. "It's the only language I'm fluent in. Sit. Snap."
So I sat, and I snapped, and the kitchen filled up with steam and the low mutter of the radio and the smell of my entire childhood, and for the first time in weeks the thing wound tight in my chest let go a single notch.
My parents had me late, and by accident, and they have never once let me feel like either was a problem.
My mother was thirty-eight and had long since folded up the idea of more children and set it on a high shelf, and then—surprise—there I was.
An oops. A little exclamation point at the end of a sentence they'd thought was finished.
They were stunned, and then they were overjoyed, and they raised me half like two people who'd already had a whole lifetime to learn exactly who they were.
It made me steady. A little serious. Loved in that unhurried way of people who weren't expecting you and chose to keep you anyway.
And watching my mother at that stove, cooking enough to bury a grief she couldn't reach any other way, I understood she'd been choosing to keep me my whole life, and that she'd snap beans through the end of the world before she'd let me sit in her kitchen hurting and not put a plate in front of me.
Jesse turned up a little before noon, the way he does—eleven years older than me and still arriving the instant he catches the scent of his sister in trouble.
He let the screen door bang, kissed our mother on the top of the head, stole a raw green bean off my pile, and looked at me about half a second too long.
"You look like hell," he said, warmly.
"You look like a man who'd let his baby sister haul the birdseed."
"I just walked in." He spun the chair beside me around and sat on it backward, forearms folded over the top, the way he has since he was a teenager who treated chairs like personal challenges. He didn't ask me anything.
That's the gift of Jesse. He was eleven when I was born—old enough to be mortified about it in front of his friends, young enough to be convinced our parents had brought him home a living doll—and he has been standing between me and the world's sharp edges ever since.
He came to this town two years ago carrying the heaviest thing a person can carry; he moved here for the worst reason anybody ever moves anywhere, and I won't tell that story sideways because it's his to tell.
But he came out the far side of it knowing exactly when not to ask.
So he just sat down next to me and started shelling beans with his big scarred hands and let me be quiet inside the noise.
It was my father, in the end, who couldn't leave it alone. "You know," he said, mild as milk, from the far counter, "your mother and I would be glad to drive over there and have a conversation with that young man."
"Hank," said my mother.
"I'm only observing that I still remember how."
"Nobody is having a conversation," I said.
"I'd have a conversation," Jesse told his beans.
"Nobody," I said, "is having a conversation." My mother set a full plate down in front of me before I'd finished the sentence, and my brother knocked his knee against mine under the table, once, and let the whole thing drop.
And sitting there wedged in that full, loud kitchen between the three people who'd loved me longest, I thought a thing I hadn't let myself think in a long while.
I had built a whole life in this town before Alonzo Vargas was ever in it.
I'd found an empty storefront on the square with good north light and a rent I could almost cover, and I'd filled it with buckets and stems and cold water and named it Foxglove I do half the weddings in three counties now.
I built something true here, with my own two hands, out of nothing but stubbornness and a good eye and a town that decided to love me back.
I had not come to Hartsong for Alonzo. I'd had a whole good built life here before I ever rolled up to his restaurant with a van full of dying flowers—and somewhere in the last two years I'd started moving through my own town like a guest who'd overstayed her welcome.
Like the life was his, and I was only visiting it.
Sitting in my mother's kitchen with a plate I hadn't asked for going cold in front of me, I could not, for the life of me, remember deciding to let that happen.
That was the morning. And running underneath all of it, like a cold thread pulled through warm cloth, was the one thing none of them named, because I hadn't given them the words for it yet.
My phone had buzzed once, early, while I was still lying in my childhood bed pretending to be asleep. I'd let it lie face-down on the nightstand the better part of an hour before I turned it over.
Morning, Bethy. Miss you over here. Tell your folks I said hi.
That was the whole of it.
No I'm sorry. No what happened on that lawn was wrong, and I let it happen.
No come home, I can't sleep, let's fix this.
Just miss you over here—breezy and warm and weightless, like I'd gone off on a fun little visit instead of fleeing the afternoon his entire family stood in a circle and watched me come apart and chose, to a person, to study their shoes.
Tell your folks I said hi.
I didn't answer it. I didn't know how to answer a thing that pretended nothing had broken. So I set the phone face-down again and went back to my beans, and I told myself the not-answering was strength, and not cowardice, and it was probably a little of both.
? ? ?
It was my mother who finally said the thing. It's always my mother.
We were on the back porch after supper, just the two of us, my father asleep in his chair inside with the ball game turned down low. The light was going purple over the feeder. She'd given me the whole day without a single question. I figured she'd earned one.
"I'm not going to ask you what happened," she said, turning her mug slowly in her hands. "You'll tell me when you tell me. But I'm going to say one thing, and then I'll leave it be."
I waited.
"When you were small, you were the most certain person I ever met.
You knew exactly where you stood on everything—what you liked, what you wouldn't have, who you were.
" She looked out at the yard. "I've watched you these two years fold yourself smaller and smaller to fit at that family's table.
Apologizing for the space you take up. Explaining yourself.
Making yourself easy to swallow." Then she looked at me, and her eyes were kind and they were not soft.
"I keep waiting to see one of them fold themselves a little to fit at yours. And I haven't seen it yet."
I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say, because she was right, and we both knew she was right, and the knowing sat there on the porch with us in the dark.