Chapter Ten
Beth
For about three seconds after the door clicked shut behind her, neither of us moved.
The walk-in hummed. Out on Main a car went by, tires hissing on a street that had rained earlier and dried.
Alonzo stood on the far side of the steel counter with his hands half-raised, palms out, the way you'd come at a spooked horse—and that, the hands, the careful placating little hands, was what finally lit the fuse I'd been sitting on for two years.
"Don't." It didn't sound like my voice. "Do not put your hands up at me like I'm the dangerous thing in this room."
"Beth—"
"No. You're going to stand right there and you are going to listen, because I just stood in that hallway and listened to you for ten minutes, so you owe me at least that."
He shut his mouth.
"I heard you." It climbed, my voice, and I let it climb—I'd spent two years keeping it sweet and level and I was done, I was so far past done.
"I heard you say you don't know who I am anymore.
I heard you say you don't know if you can stand up in March.
I heard you sit there and let that woman talk about your bedroom—about what the two of you were, about what it might've been if she'd stayed—and I heard exactly how long you waited before you told her no.
I counted, Alonzo. You want to know the number?
It was never. You never said it. I'm still waiting to hear it. "
"That's not—" He came a step around the counter; I took one back; he stopped like he'd hit glass. "What you heard, that wasn't—Beth, I was venting. People vent. I had the worst day of my life yesterday, you left, the whole thing was a nightmare, and Lola was just—"
"Lola was just there." I laughed, and it came out ugly. "Yeah. Funny how she's always just there."
"She's a friend."
"She is not a friend, she is an ex, and you have known that the entire time, and you let me invite her into our lives.
You let me make her a centerpiece. I stood three feet from a woman you used to sleep with and arranged orchids for your grandmother and it never once occurred to you that I might have wanted to know? "
"It was high school." He said it fast, like a password, like the right two words would make the whole thing dissolve into smoke. "Beth, we were kids. It was a hundred years ago, it didn't mean anything—"
"Then why," I said, "didn't you tell me."
And he floundered. I watched him do it. I watched the man I'd loved for two years open his mouth and reach around inside himself for an answer and come back empty.
"Because it wasn't relevant," he finally said, and dragged a hand down his face. "Because I knew you'd do exactly this. I knew you'd take it and you'd blow it up into some huge—"
"Into some huge what." I went very still. "Finish it. Say the sentence, Alonzo. I'd blow it up into some huge what?"
He didn't finish it. Even he, even then, was smart enough not to finish that one.
"You see?" I said softly. "You can't even say it out loud, because out loud it sounds exactly like what it is."
? ? ?
"You want to know the worst part?" I was pacing now, small tight turns in front of the pass, because if I stood still I was going to come apart and I wasn't ready to come apart, not in front of him.
"It's not even her. I could almost—almost—survive her.
The worst part is that these last months, every single time my gut told me something was wrong, you made me feel like I was insane.
You'd look at me across our own kitchen table like I was being small and jealous and crazy, and you'd say she's just a friend, Beth, I don't know what you want from me, Beth, until I was the one apologizing.
Until I learned to arrange my own face so you wouldn't decide I was the difficult one.
I made myself smaller, Alonzo. For two years.
To fit. And I was right the entire time.
Do you understand what that does to a person?
I wasn't crazy. I was just outnumbered."
"You weren't crazy, I never said you were—" He was nodding fast, hands moving, and then he stepped right into the hole. "But Beth—okay, see, this, right here—this is the spiraling I'm talking about, you're not thinking straight, you're exhausted, can we please just sit down and—"
"I am thinking straighter than I have in two years."
"Do you have the first idea what these last months have cost me?
" I wasn't pacing anymore. I'd stopped right in front of him and I was shaking.
"Standing at the edge of every party watching you light up for her?
Watching you dance with her at your cousin's wedding—a slow one, Alonzo, your hand flat on her back—while I stood by the cake table and smiled so nobody would whisper?
Watching her put her hands all over you—your arm, your chest, your face, your back, your thigh, throwing her arms around you for any reason she could dream up—in front of God and your whole family, and every last one of them going oh, those two, thick as thieves since they were in diapers, like I'm the broken one for the way my stomach dropped every single time? "
"Beth—"
"And the things she'd say to me. Always with that little smile.
Always in that voice where you genuinely cannot tell if she just gutted you or paid you a compliment—oh, it's so brave of you, wearing that color—so there's not one thing you can say back without being the crazy, oversensitive girlfriend.
And you'd be standing right there. Every time.
And not once—not once since the day she came back—did you put yourself between me and her.
You never once said hey. That's my fiancée. "
"I didn't always hear what she—"
"My dad is still waiting on that fishing trip.
" It came out cracked and low, and it was somehow the one that hurt the worst to say.
"You couldn't make his birthday, so you promised you'd take him out on the water once he was stronger.
He keeps the rod by the back door, Alonzo.
He is sixty-nine years old with a stitched-up heart, and he asks me—he asks me—when's Alonzo taking me fishing.
And I cover for you. Every single time. I have made myself the keeper of your excuses to the people I love most in this world. "
"Beth, I haven't had the time, the restaurant's been slammed, you know how it—"
"For the people you actually care about, you find the time.
" My voice didn't even rise; that's how I knew how far past saving this was.
"You found time to fix her car. You found a whole free afternoon to drive to Hartsville and taste our wedding cake—with her.
You have not once, since she came back, been too busy for Lola Marchetti. Only for my father. Only for me."
His mouth opened and closed. He had nothing.
"You came home at one in the morning more nights than I can count," I said, quieter, "and I would lie there in our bed doing this math in the dark—is he at the restaurant, or is he being a gentleman for her—and I hated the woman that turned me into.
You made me into someone who lies awake doing that math, and then you looked at me like the math was a defect in me.
" And there my voice broke, right down the middle, and I hated it for breaking.
"And yesterday you stood there and let your whole family circle me up and watch me come apart on a stranger's wedding lawn, and not one of you said my name.
Your mother took my hands and told me jealousy was poison.
To my face. While that woman sat in my chair at your family's table and watched her say it. "
"I'll talk to her. To my mom, I'll—Beth, I will.
" He was nodding harder, the fixer roaring to life now, the man who patches and smooths and makes the trouble go away.
"We'll figure this out. Listen—every couple hits a rough patch, this is just a rough—we can do counseling, we'll do counseling, whatever you need, I'll do whatever you want, just—please. "
And there it was.
I'll do whatever you want. The same raised hands.
The same warm, placating, anything-to-make-the-discomfort-stop voice.
The voice of a man who would promise me the moon at eleven o'clock at night and drift right back into the exact shape of his old life by Tuesday afternoon, and never once notice he'd done it.
And the strangest thing happened.
The heat just went out of me. All at once—like a window thrown open in an overheated room.
I stopped wanting to yell. I stopped, more than that, wanting him to understand—and God, I'd wanted that so badly for so long that letting it go felt like setting down a bag so heavy I'd forgotten it wasn't part of my body.
I looked at him. Really looked at him, standing there in the low light of the kitchen he loved more openly and more easily than he had ever managed to love me, with his good heart and his weak spine and his hands still half-up between us. And I felt almost calm.
"I'm not going to do counseling," I said.
It was quiet, and it was even, and I watched the quiet land on him so much harder than the shouting had. The shouting he could work with. The shouting was a storm you wait out. This was something else, and some animal part of him knew it.
"Bethy." Barely a whisper. "Don't."