Chapter Ten #2
"I figured out what I am to you," I said.
"I've been trying to put a word to it for weeks now, and I couldn't, and standing in that hallway just now—it finally came to me.
I'm the safe one. I'm the sensible, steady, reliable thing a man settles down with.
I'm who you build the responsible life around.
" I nodded slowly, hearing it, knowing it was true all the way to the floor.
"But I am not the one you'd ever burn anything down for.
That was always going to be her—or the restaurant, or your family, or whoever was drowning that particular afternoon.
Everybody on this earth comes first with you, Alonzo.
And I come last. Every time. In a perfectly kind voice, with the best intentions in the world—I come last."
"That's not—Beth, that's not true, I love—"
"You don't even feel yourself do it. That's the part I finally understand I can't fix.
You'd choose me last for the rest of my life and you'd do it gently and you would never, ever feel the weight of it.
" I took a breath. "I deserve to be somebody's first thing.
Not their reasonable thing. Their first one. "
Then I started working the ring off my finger.
"Beth." He saw it, and his voice changed—went thin and high and frightened. "Beth, no. Don't. Please don't do that, don't—"
But he didn't move. That is the thing I need you to understand, the thing that finally told me everything: he stood there on the far side of three feet of steel and watched me do it, begging me with his words and not his feet—the exact way he'd loved me the whole time.
Sweetly. Helplessly. From precisely the spot where it was comfortable to stand.
It came off easier than it had any right to—I'd dropped weight these last months I hadn't let myself notice—and it just slid free, the little rose-cut stone he'd put on my hand at the river in the dead cold of December, the night my breath fogged white and I stood there certain I was the luckiest woman in three counties.
I set it down on the cold steel between us.
The small click of it against the metal was, I swear to you, the loudest sound in that whole building.
"I can't marry a man who has to wonder," I said.
And that was what finally moved him. Now—now that it was already over, now that it was lying on the counter between us—the paralysis broke and he lunged.
He snatched the ring up off the steel and grabbed for my hand, fumbling, his own hands shaking, trying to force it back down over my knuckle.
"No—Beth, no, take it back, put it on, we're not doing this, this isn't—please, please, baby—" and his eyes were streaming now, and for one cruel, traitorous second I almost let him.
Because I had loved him so much. Because some starving animal part of me still wanted his hands on me—even these hands, even now, even after all of it.
I pulled my hand back.
I pulled it in against my chest and closed it into a fist where he couldn't reach it, and I watched the truth of it land on his face—that I had taken my own hand out of his reach, that there was no version of the next sixty seconds where he got to slide it back on and make the whole thing dissolve.
His arm dropped. The ring sat in his open palm like something he had killed.
"You said you didn't know if you could stand up in March." I picked my keys up off the counter. They were warm from my own hand, and they were steady, and they were the only steady thing left in that room. "So let me make it easy on you. You don't have to wonder anymore. The answer is no."
I walked out the side door I'd come in through, into the dark of the gravel lot—and her car was still sitting there beside his truck, and she was leaning against the hood of mine, arms crossed, waiting, like she had every right in the world to the air I was trying to breathe.
"He'll never really forgive you for this, you know." Soft. Almost kind. "Making him pick. He'll do the decent thing tonight, because you cried and you made a scene—but a man remembers being cornered, Beth. He'll spend the rest of his—"
I don't remember deciding to do it. I have never in my life raised a hand to another living soul.
But my arm drew back and my fist came around and I caught her flush across the mouth, and the shock of it sang all the way up to my shoulder—bright and clean and, God help me, right—and she went sideways into the hood of my van with a small wet sound I felt in my own teeth.
She came up with her fingers pressed to her lip, staring at the blood on them, then at me—like I'd reached straight through the bars of a cage she'd spent seven months building and found there had never been any bars at all.
"That," I said, and I have never in my life been calmer, "is so you think very hard before you ever speak to me again.
I have spent these last months being gracious to you.
Swallowing it. Smiling at you. Making room at every table.
I'm done. I don't have one single reason left to be kind to you, Lola—and from here on out, you are going to feel the difference. "
And I turned my back on her and left her there, folded against the hood of my own van with her split lip, and I got in and pulled the door shut.
Then the restaurant door banged open behind me. I heard him come out into the lot, calling my name—"Beth! Beth, wait—"—and for half a heartbeat something in my chest leapt up, stupid and hoping. He's coming. He's finally, finally coming after me.
He wasn't.
Because Lola made a sound—one small, broken sob—and turned and lifted her bloody face up into the light so he could see it, and my name died right there in his mouth.
He caught her by the shoulders. And she folded into him exactly the way she'd been angling to fold into him for seven months, and he let her—his arms coming up around her on pure helpless reflex, the rescuer rescuing, always and forever the rescuer—and he did not look at my van.
He did not take one single step toward me.
The last thing I saw, backing out of that lot, I saw in my rearview mirror: the love of my life standing in the dark with his arms full of another woman. Holding her up. Going nowhere. Not for me. Never, when it actually counted, for me.
I drove.
? ? ?
I don't remember much of the drive.
I remember rolling the window down a few streets on, because I couldn't pull a full breath, and the night air coming in cool and river-damp and smelling of late summer and somebody's charcoal grill, and it was the first whole breath I'd managed in what felt like a year.
I remember the knuckles of my right hand had started to ache—where they'd met her teeth—and that my hands were steady on the wheel anyway, steadier than they had any earthly right to be, the whole way to my parents' house.
My mother was still up. Of course she was. She took one look at me—at the pale band of skin on my left hand where a ring had been, at the raw split across the knuckles of my right—and she didn't say a single word. The not-asking, one more time, the truest love she owns. She just opened her arms.
And then I came apart. Not in his kitchen.
Not where he could see it and try to fix it.
In my mother's arms, in the doorway of the house I had chosen, in the town I had built with my own two hands a whole life before Alonzo Vargas ever walked into it carrying a tray of cooling food and a smile I'd mistaken for forever.
That was the night I stopped being his almost-wife.
I'd love to tell you it was the worst of it, and that from there the road ran clean and uphill.
It didn't. It got worse before it got anywhere—the whole town had the story by Tuesday, and there were weeks in that stretch I would not choose to live through a second time.
I'll tell you about all of it. I'm not going to pretend I walked out of that kitchen and into the sunrise.
But that night, underneath the grief, holding onto my mother in a quiet house, there was something I hadn't felt in two years and didn't have the word for yet.
It felt like standing up straight after a long time bent over.
It felt, for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, like being chosen.
By me. Finally. First.