Chapter Nine #2
"Go talk to him, baby." Gentler now. "Not a text.
Not from two hours away, hiding in your mother's kitchen.
Go look at him and say the true thing out loud and find out where you actually stand.
" She reached over and squeezed my knee.
"You'll feel better knowing. Even if it's bad—and I'm not saying it's bad—you will feel better knowing than you feel right now, guessing. "
God help me, she was right about that too.
I kissed the top of her head, the way she used to kiss the top of mine, and I went and got my keys.
? ? ?
El Colibrí is closed on Sundays.
It's the one day the Vargas keep for themselves—the one night Pilar cooks for her own family instead of for half the town—and the place sits dark on the square with its chairs turned up on the tables.
So when I came around onto Main a little after eight and saw light still burning low in the back, behind the kitchen, something in me lifted, stupid and hopeful.
He's here. He came in to think. Maybe he couldn't sleep either.
Maybe this is good—maybe we'll have the whole place to ourselves and we'll finally just talk.
I pulled in beside his truck.
There was another car next to it. I knew the car. I made myself not think about the car.
The front was locked, so I went around to the side, to the kitchen door nobody bothers locking when there's someone inside, and it gave under my hand without a sound—and that is how I came to be standing in the dark of the prep hallway, not eight feet from the pass, hearing my fiancé's voice before either of them knew the building wasn't empty.
"—don't know, Lo." Low. Tired. A voice I'd heard him use in the dark with me, on the good nights, with his mouth against my hair.
Hearing it turned toward her did something to my stomach I still don't have a clean word for.
"I look at her lately and it's like I don't even know who she is anymore.
Two years, and I'm standing there going—did I get this wrong? Did I move too fast?"
Every bit of air went out of me at once and didn't come back.
He's tired, something small and frantic offered up from the bottom of me. People say things when they're tired. He doesn't mean it. You walked in on the middle of it and you're hearing it wrong.
"You're allowed to ask that." Lola, soft as falling snow. "It's the rest of your life. Nobody on earth would blame you for having second thoughts. Not after yesterday."
"I keep thinking maybe my family saw something I didn't let myself see."
A high, thin ringing had started up in my ears, the kind that comes right after a slap, and under it the hum of the walk-in and my own heart slamming so hard I was certain the sound of it would carry through the wall and give me away.
"I don't know if I can stand up there in March," he said, lower, "and promise all of it. Feeling like this."
March.
My hand went to the ring without my telling it to—the little rose-cut stone he'd slid onto my finger at the river in the black cold of December—and all at once it sat there heavy and foreign, a thing I'd been handed off the hand of a stranger.
I couldn't feel my own mouth. I pressed my palm flat to the cold tile of the wall the way you brace on a pitching boat, because the floor of the whole world had tilted a few degrees and there was nothing under me holding still.
"Can I say something I probably shouldn't?
" Her voice dropped lower still—intimate, a register meant for one person in a quiet room.
"I think about us sometimes. What we were—all those years.
And I wonder if you ever let yourself think about it.
About what it might've been, if my dad had never packed us up. If I'd just stayed."
Us. All those years. What we were.
And every strange thing from the last seven months rearranged itself in the dark in front of me, fast and silent—iron filings snapping into line around a magnet I hadn't known was sitting there.
Every late night. Every dropped errand. Every she's just an old friend, Beth.
Every single time I'd been made to feel like I was losing my mind over the cold prickle at the back of my neck.
I had not been losing my mind. I had been right.
And being right tasted like a mouthful of broken glass.
He didn't say no.
That is the thing I will carry to the very end of my life.
I stood in that dark hallway and I waited—the way you wait at the top of an unlit stairwell for a step you're sure is there—for the man I was going to marry to say don't, Lola.
There's no us. There was never an us. And he didn't. He let it sit in the air between them like it was a fair and reasonable thing to wonder, and the silence where his no should have been was the loudest thing I have ever heard.
"The summer before they took me," she went on, almost fond now, almost dreamy. "Your room. Half the county over at Santi's pool and the two of us up there instead." A low, soft laugh I felt in my teeth, in my fillings. "I never forgot that. I don't think you did either."
The picture came whether I wanted it or not—a younger him, a younger her, a shut door, the light of some long-gone summer afternoon—and my stomach rolled clean over and I had to breathe slow through my mouth so I would not be sick on his mother's clean floor.
"Lola." But it wasn't stop. It was barely even a no. It was the sound a man makes when something is true and he wishes to God it weren't.
"She doesn't know, does she," Lola said. "About any of it. About us. You never told her."
"...No." So quiet I nearly lost it under the compressor. "It's complicated. I never knew how to bring it up."
I don't remember deciding to move.
I just remember the light, all at once, around me—stepping out of the dark of that hallway into the low gold of the kitchen, and the two of them turning toward me, and the way both their faces came open and went white when they saw who was standing there.
"No," I said. And my voice came out level in a way I will never be able to explain. "I guess it really is a lot easier to lie than to tell the truth."
Lola came up off her stool. "Beth—God—it's not what it—how long have you been—"
"Don't." I didn't look at her. I couldn't, yet; I had room in me for exactly one person in that kitchen, and it wasn't her. "Whatever you're about to say, I don't want it. Get your coat. You're leaving."
"Alonzo." She turned to him, reaching for the version of him that always came when she called. "Tell her it's—"
"Lola." And there it was at last—he found the word go for her, only six years and one fiancée too late. He wouldn't look at her either. "Just... go home. Please."
She went. She took her sweet time about it—the bag, the coat, the gathering up of her wounded dignity—and she paused at the door like she had one more line loaded, and then she read whatever was written on my face and thought the better of it, and the door clicked shut, and then it was only the two of us, alone in his family's dark kitchen, exactly the way I'd wanted it.
The way I'd driven two hours and walked through the wrong door to get.
He said my name. Once. Beth. Like a question. Like the front end of an explanation he hadn't built yet.
I didn't help him build it. I'd spent two years helping this man build things.
I stood there in the low light of the place he loved more openly than he had ever once managed to love me, and I felt the thing my mother had been waiting for me to feel—and it wasn't heartbreak. That came later; that came in waves, for months. This was something cleaner. Something with a spine.
I set my keys down on the steel counter between us.
And then I told him.