Chapter Twelve
Beth
I went back to work on Wednesday, because the alternative was lying in my childhood bed counting the cracks in the ceiling, and because Foxglove Rafael called me mija and always, always saved me the burnt-sugar corner of the tres leches.
For one second the sight of them in my doorway felt like family come to check on me.
Then I saw Pilar's face, and I understood they had not come to check on me.
"Beth." Her voice was low and shaking with the particular outrage of a woman defending someone she has decided is innocent. "I think you and I need to talk about what you did."
"That poor girl has a cut on her face," she went on, before I could answer. "She has lost everyone—everyone, Beth—and she comes home trying to put a life back together, and we took you into our family like a daughter, and you raise your hand to her, in a parking lot, like some—"
"Mrs. Vargas." I said it gently. I set down my shears. And I was distantly amazed at how level I sounded, how steady, this calm new voice that had moved into me somewhere on the drive home Sunday night and never left. "I'm not going to talk about Sunday with you."
"She is beside herself—"
"I'm sure she is." I came around the counter, not to crowd them, just to be a person standing on her own floor and not hiding behind a register.
"I understand you came here wanting me to apologize.
And because I did love you both, and some part of me always will, I'm going to be as clear and as kind as I know how to be.
" I folded my hands. "I'm not going to apologize.
Not for Sunday, not for any of it. I spent a long, long time apologizing for things that were never mine to carry. I'm finished doing that."
Rafael was looking at the floor. Pilar's mouth had come open.
"And from here on," I said, before she could fill it, "if you'd like to come into my shop, I'd ask that you come as customers.
I'll always do beautiful work for you—at cost, even, for old times' sake.
But I can't have conversations like this one in here.
This is my place. I built it out of nothing.
It's the one room in this whole town that has only ever been mine.
" I made myself smile, and it barely even hurt.
"And if that feels like too much—Marigold Lane out on Route 9 does perfectly lovely arrangements.
Sandra's a sweetheart. I would understand completely. "
Pilar drew herself up to her full and considerable height. "I don't know what's happened to you," she said. "You used to be such a sweet girl."
"I was," I agreed. "I was a very sweet girl. It cost me nearly everything I had."
They left. The bell jingled over the door, cheerful and absurd, behind them.
And I stood in the green quiet with my hands flat on the cool counter and shook for a minute or two—because being loved and being chosen are two different things, and I had just felt the exact place where the seam between them tore—and then I picked my shears back up and finished the ranunculus, because they were due at a christening Saturday, and grief is grief but flowers are flowers.
I did not cry. I want that on the record. Not over Pilar Vargas telling me I used to be sweet. I'd find plenty to cry over before that week was out. That just wasn't one of the things.
? ? ?
I went home on Friday.
I'd been at my parents' the better part of a week, sleeping in my old room, letting my mother feed me and my father pretend he wasn't watching me like I was made of glass.
And on Friday I decided I was done hiding inside my own childhood.
It was my house. I'd bought it, painted it, planted the hydrangeas along the front walk with my own two hands.
I was not going to let what happened make me a guest in one more place that belonged to me.
So I drove home in the evening, and I came up my own front walk, and the kitchen light was on.
I smelled it before I had the door open. Garlic. Onion. Something low and rich, braising. The exact smell that, for two years, had meant I was home, and fed, and loved.
Alonzo was at my stove.
He turned when the door opened, and the look on his face—hope and terror and something desperate, all of it right there on the surface with no skin over it—was almost more than I could look at straight on.
"Hi," he said. "I, um. I made dinner. It's the short rib thing, with the—" He gestured at the pot, and at the table, which I saw now was set.
Two places. A candle in the middle, unlit, like he hadn't quite found the nerve.
"I've kind of been making dinner every night," he said.
"In case. I didn't want you coming home to an empty house with no food in it, so.
Every night I make something, and you don't come, and I put it in the freezer.
" He tried for a smile; it came out crooked and terrible.
"Our freezer looks like a church potluck threw up in it, Bethy.
There's enough lasagna in there to outlast a nuclear winter. I think I might have a problem."
It was a joke. He was trying to make me laugh, the way he used to, the way it always used to work.
And I stood in my own doorway and looked at the set table, and the unlit candle, and the man at my stove who believed—sincerely, with his whole good heart—that the thing broken between us was a thing that could be mended with short ribs, and I have never in my life felt so far away from another human being while standing six feet from him.
It didn't make me angry. That was the unbearable part.
It made me sad all the way to the bottom of me.
He had made dinner every single night. He loved me.
And he understood nothing—and those two facts just stood there in my kitchen side by side, refusing to add up to anything I could use.
"Alonzo," I said. "We need to talk."
I watched him swallow. Watched the hope flicker up, because some part of him heard the word talk and thought it meant a door easing open.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, of course. Okay.
" He turned the burner off under the short ribs with this awful, tender care, like the food still mattered, like anything on that stove still mattered, and he followed me into the living room.
We sat—me on the very edge of the armchair, him on the couch, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, coiled and ready to fix whatever I set down in front of him. I'd rehearsed a dozen ways to start it on the drive over. In the end I just said it plain.
"I want you to tell me about you and Lola," I said. "All of it. What you were. Back then."
And once he understood I wasn't going to let him paint around the edges of it, he told me.
I'll give him that much. In a low, flat voice, staring at his own hands, he told me.
It had started the summer he was sixteen.
It went on, off and on, all the way through high school and after.
And when I asked him—gently, I was so gentle—where, he told me that too.
The storeroom at the restaurant, after close. His bedroom at his parents', when they thought the house was empty. The bend in the river past the old boat launch, in the bed of his truck, summers.