Chapter Twelve #2
I sat very still and let each one land, because he didn't seem to understand what he was putting into my hands.
The storeroom at the restaurant—the restaurant where I had fallen in love with him, where I'd hauled in a van full of dying flowers and watched him drop everything to save them.
His old bedroom—where I had slept curled against him at Christmas, under a quilt his abuela stitched by hand.
And the river. The river. The bend past the boat launch.
"You proposed to me at the river," I said. It came out of me very quietly. "Just a little further down. By the willow."
He looked up. And I watched it reach him—watched him understand, for the first time in his life, that he had taken me to make the biggest promise either of us would ever make two hundred yards downstream from where he used to lay another woman down in the back of his truck—and his face fell open. "Beth—"
"It's all right," I said. It wasn't, but I had to keep moving or I'd never get through it. "When was the last time?"
"Years ago." Fast. "Beth, years and years ago. Before you. Long, long before you."
"But it kept going. After she moved away. When she'd come back to visit."
He hesitated. Then, quiet: "Sometimes. When she was in town. But it never—it didn't mean anything, it was just—" He stopped, started again. "It was just sex. It never meant a thing."
"Okay." I nodded. I was being so reasonable. I could hear myself being reasonable and it was like listening to a calm woman through a wall. "And since she came back this time. Since the winter. Did anything happen between the two of you?"
His head came up. "No." There was an edge of real offense in it. "Beth, no. I never touched her. I never cheated on you, I swear to God, I never once—"
"I'm not asking whether you cheated." Still calm. I asked it again, the same words, slower, so he couldn't slip off the side of it. "Did anything happen between you and Lola since she came back."
"Nothing happened. Nothing physical, not once, I never laid a hand on her, I would never do that to you—"
"Maybe not with your body," I said.
He went quiet.
"Did you want to?" I asked.
"No." Instant. Far too instant. "No, Beth, God, no—"
"Did it ever cross your mind?" I kept my voice as soft as I owned. "Once. Just once, just for a second. In all these months—her in your orbit, leaning on you, all that history you never told me a word about—did it ever, even for one single second, cross your mind?"
And he didn't say no.
He opened his mouth, and nothing came out of it, and then he closed it again, and he turned his face away from me—toward the window, toward the dark, toward anything in the room that wasn't me—and the silence stretched out long and thin until it had said every single thing a word could have said and more.
I smiled. I felt it happen on my own face, the saddest smile of my entire life, there and gone in a breath.
"Beth." He turned back, and he was scrambling now, I could see it, the fixer lunging for any tool within reach.
"Beth, listen to me. After she came back, I swear to you, I never thought of her as anything but a friend.
An old friend who was hurting. That's all she has ever been to me.
You—Beth, you are the love of my life. You're the woman I want to marry. You're the only—"
"I want you to move out," I said.
It stopped him the way a flat hand to the chest stops a man.
"Tonight," I said. "I want you to pack a bag with what you need for a few days, and I want you to go. You can come back tomorrow while I'm at the shop and get the rest of your things. And then I'd like you to leave your key on the counter."
"Beth—no. No." He scrubbed both hands up through his hair. "You don't end two years like this, over—Beth, we can fix this. Please. Don't make me leave. Let's try, we'll do anything, I'll do anything you—"
"It's over, Alonzo." Quiet. Final. "I'm not even angry anymore. I'm just—I am so tired. I want my house back. I want my own life back. I want to stop having this thing sitting on my chest every minute of every day. It's over. Please. Please just let it be over."
He sat there a moment longer, like the words might rearrange themselves on the air into something he could still work with.
They didn't. And then—and this is the thing about Alonzo, the thing that made every part of it so much harder, because he is not a cruel man, he has never once in his life been a cruel man—he nodded.
He went upstairs. I heard the closet door, and a drawer, and another drawer, and after a while he came back down with a duffel over his shoulder, and he stopped in front of me on his way to the door.
His eyes were wet. Mine, somehow, still weren't.
"I love you," he said. "I know you don't want to hear it.
But I'm not going to stop, and I need you to know—if you ever need anything.
Anything at all. A jar that won't open, a flat tire, three in the morning, doesn't matter what.
You call me and I'm there. I will always be there for you, Beth. I mean that with everything I've got."
And the terrible thing—the thing that very nearly took me apart right there in my own entryway—was that I believed him.
He would come change my tire at three in the morning.
He'd drop the entire world and come, the way he'd dropped the world and come for me the very first day, the way he dropped it and came for everyone, always.
And not one time in two years had that ever turned out to be the same thing as choosing me—and there we stood in the rubble of all of it, and still only one of us understood the difference.
"Goodbye, Alonzo," I said.
He went.
I listened to his truck turn over, and back out of the drive, and fade off down the street until I couldn't tell it from any other engine in the world.
And then the house was quiet. Really quiet—the specific quiet of a place that has just become only yours again, that you fought to get back and didn't entirely want returned to you this way.
The short ribs were going cold and congealing on the stove.
The candle was still unlit on a table set for two.
I sat down on the couch. And then I lay down on it, and I pulled Nana Ruth's crocheted throw down over me, and I curled myself up as small as a grown woman can make herself go, and I cried until there was simply nothing left in me to cry with.
That's where this part ends. On the floor of it. I'm not going to dress it up for you.
There's more—there is so much more, and I swear to you a great deal of it is even good—but that Friday night there was only me, and the blanket, and a cold dinner, and the enormous, ringing quiet of having gotten exactly what I asked for.