Chapter Thirteen
Beth
The thing nobody tells you about heartbreak is how boring it is.
I'd braced for the big dramatic version—the sobbing on the bathroom floor, the dignified weeping into a glass of wine.
There was some of that, the first night.
But mostly what came after was just gray.
Three weeks of gray. I know it was three weeks because the calendar said so and because the weddings kept coming—a Saturday at the vineyard, a Sunday at the Lutheran church, a rehearsal dinner I built the centerpieces for and cannot tell you one single flower of.
I worked. I went home. I didn't eat so much as graze, standing up, over the sink, because sitting down at a table set for one felt like a statement I was too tired to make.
And I slept the way you sleep when sleep is just the room you go into to stop being awake for a while.
He'd come for his things the way I asked, while I was at the shop, and he'd left his key on the counter the way I asked, and the house he left behind was somehow worse than the house with him in it.
He'd been careful—he hadn't taken one thing that wasn't his—and so the gaps he left were surgical.
A clean rectangle of dustless wood on the shelf where his record player used to sit.
Half the closet breathing empty. His coffee gone out of the cabinet, so that my own jar sat in there looking abandoned.
And the freezer still full. God, the freezer.
Stacked and labeled in his blocky handwriting—short rib, lasagna, the chicken with the olives—a whole frozen museum of a man who had tried to love me in the last language he had left when the words stopped working.
I couldn't eat them. I couldn't bring myself to throw them out.
I'd just open the freezer some nights and look at his handwriting on the foil and close it again, and go to bed.
And he didn't have the decency to disappear, either.
That was the thing. He wouldn't go quiet and let me grieve him clean.
The first week, takeout from El Colibrí started turning up at the shop around lunchtime—a paper bag with my name on it in his block letters, still warm, left on the counter while I was in the back with the bell still swinging, or handed across to me by some poor busboy he'd sent over who couldn't look me in the eye.
Tamales. The mole I loved. Soup, the day it rained.
I never opened a single one. I'd carry them two doors down, still warm, and give them away—to the bakery, to the kid working the register at the hardware store—until half the block was quietly eating my ex-fiancé's cooking and a couple of them had started looking at me with this soft, knowing pity I hated more than I'd ever hated anything.
And the texts. God, the texts. I still have them; I never could make myself delete the thread.
Morning, Bethy. Hope you slept. Saw the hydrangeas out front are getting leggy—I can swing by and cut them back, you don't even have to be home.
I'm not going anywhere. I'll wait as long as it takes.
Some mornings I miss you so much I can't get a full breath.
They came in twos and threes all day at first, then tapered to one a night, always around ten—right around the time we used to be turning off the lights.
I read every one of them. I answered none.
He called, too. Never late, never drunk, just a clean missed call most evenings that I'd watch buzz its way across the counter and let ring out, and one voicemail I deleted without playing, because I knew that if I let myself hear his voice say my name I would fold like a bad hand, and I had worked too hard stacking that wall up brick by brick to let his voice just walk back through it.
And the cruelest thing about all of it—though I didn't see it clearly until much later—was that every warm bag and every text and every missed call was still, underneath, somehow about him.
I'm here. I'm waiting. I miss you. I can fix this.
Not one of them, in three solid weeks, ever managed to be the one thing that might actually have meant something. But I'll get to that.
That was the shape of it. Work, the sink, the freezer, the dark, his name lighting up a phone I wouldn't pick up. I told everyone I was fine. I think I even believed it, the way you believe you're warm right before you fall asleep in the snow.
My friends gave me three weeks. On the twenty-second day, Carmen used her key.
"Okay." She was standing in my bedroom doorway with her hands on her hips and Claire and Emily fanned out behind her in the hall like a search party that had finally found the body.
It was eleven in the morning on a Saturday and I was, I will admit, still in bed.
"That's it. That is enough. We let you marinate. Marinating's over. You're getting up."
"I'm fine," I said, into the pillow.
"You said that at the shop on Tuesday with a leaf in your hair and one earring in.
" Carmen came and sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand on the blanket over my shoulder, and her voice dropped out of the bossy register into the real one.
"Bethy. We're not mad. We're not here to fix you.
We just love you, and we're not going to keep watching you do this from across the room.
So you're going to get in the shower, and you're going to put on something with a waistband, and you're going to let us buy you eggs.
That's the whole plan. Eggs. You can survive eggs. "
Claire sat down on the other side. Emily, who is twenty-four and earnest and was clearly trying very hard not to cry, said, "I brought you a coffee. It's probably cold now. I drank half of it in the car. I'm sorry."
And that—Emily apologizing for drinking half my consolation coffee—is what got me up.
I laughed, this awful rusty sound I hadn't made in weeks, and it turned into something wetter halfway through, and Carmen just held onto my shoulder through the whole ugly little storm of it and didn't say anything smart for once.
I got in the shower. I put on something with a waistband.
? ? ?
We got our eggs at the Bluebird, and for about an hour it almost worked.
The booth was warm and Claire told a long story about a kid in her fourth-grade class who'd tried to mail himself to Disney World, and Emily got the good kind of pancakes, and I felt the gray lift just enough to remember there were colors.
I even teased Carmen about a man she'd been not-talking-about.
For an hour I was a person having breakfast with her friends.
Then we paid, and we walked back up Main with our to-go coffees into the bright cold of it, and I looked through the front window of the diner two doors down out of pure idle habit.
The whole Vargas clan was crowded into the big round window booth—the one they always took, the one I'd sat in a hundred times.
Plates everywhere. Rafael holding court with both hands.
Abuela in her good Saturday cardigan, the gray one with the pearl buttons.
Mari laughing with her head thrown all the way back at something.
And Alonzo.
He looked fine.
That's the whole knife, and I'm not going to dress it up for you.
He looked fine. He wasn't gaunt. He wasn't staring into the middle distance like a man whose life had ended.
He was leaned back in the booth with one arm slung along the top of it and his sleeves pushed up, sun coming in on the side of his face, and as I stood there frozen on the sidewalk he said something—I'll never know what—that made his father bark out a laugh and Abuela swat his arm with the back of her hand, and he grinned.
That grin. The one that had taken me apart across a cooler full of dying peonies two years ago.
And Lola was tucked into the booth beside Mari in a soft yellow dress, leaning across to say something low into Abuela's ear that made the old woman reach over and pat her cheek.
The cheek-pat. That's what did it. I had no claim on the grin anymore, I knew that, I'd handed it back with the ring.
But Abuela's hand on Lola's cheek—that small warm absent-minded there, there of a grandmother to her own—that used to be mine, and I watched it land on another woman's face through a diner window, and something I'd been holding shut for three weeks just came open.
Because I'd been picturing him. I hadn't let myself say it out loud, not even to the dark, but I had, every single night under that blanket: I'd been picturing him as wrecked as I was.
Hollowed out. Not sleeping. Standing at his own freezer looking at food he couldn't eat.
It was the one thing I'd had—the ugly little coal I kept warm in the center of my chest—that wherever he was and whatever he was doing, it cost him the way it was costing me.
And there he was in the Bluebird window, tan and laughing in the sun, with the woman who broke us folded into my family like she'd been measured and cut to fit the space I left, and it didn't seem to cost him a thing.
Maybe it did and you just couldn't see it from the street.
I'd find out, a long time later, what that particular afternoon had actually been for him—but you cannot see a man's three in the morning from a sunny sidewalk, and that day all I had was the sidewalk.
And either way the arithmetic came out exactly the same: I was in pieces over a man who was at brunch.
"Beth." Carmen had followed my eyes. I heard the breath go out of her. "Don't. Look at me. Beth." Her hands came up to the sides of my face and turned it, physically turned it, away from the glass and toward her own furious, loving one. "Look at me. Breathe. There you go."
Emily said something underneath her breath about Alonzo that I won't put on the page, anatomical and deeply satisfying. Claire quietly lifted the coffee out of my hand before I could drop it.
And Carmen looked back at that window for one more second with her jaw set hard, and then she looked at me, and she said, "You know what? No. Not here. Not in this town today. Get in the car."
"Carmen—"
"Get in the car, Beth."
I got in the car.
? ? ?
She drove forty minutes east, to Millbrook, where nobody knew my name or my shop or whose ring I wasn't wearing, and the four of us walked around a town that wasn't ours like tourists from a country with no problems. We looked in windows.
Emily bought a hat she'll never wear. Nobody made me talk about it.
The not-talking, after three weeks of are you okay, Beth, was its own kind of medicine.
It was Carmen who stopped in front of the little salon off the main street.
I knew the look on her face. I'd had my hair the same way since before I ever met him—long, past the middle of my back, the kind of hair that's a whole personality and a whole second job.
Alonzo had loved it long. He used to gather it up off my neck in the heat and kiss the spot underneath; early on, when everything was still soft, he'd asked me once never to cut it, and I'd laughed and promised I never would, and I'd meant it.
And somewhere across two years, without my ever deciding it, he loves it long had quietly turned into one more reason I kept doing a thing I'd long ago stopped choosing for myself.
Carmen didn't say any of that. She just looked at the salon, and looked at me, and said, "Yes or no."
I looked at my own reflection in the salon glass—the long hair, the gray weeks under my eyes, the woman I'd been shrinking into without noticing—and I heard myself say, "Yes."
She sweet-talked the owner into lending her a chair; one stylist to another, a slow Saturday, a story told low that I didn't catch but that made the woman glance at me with soft eyes and wave us toward the back. Carmen put the cape on me herself. Her own hands. She met my eyes in the mirror.
"How much," she said. Not really a question.
"Off." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I want it off."
She gathered it all into a low tail at the nape of my neck the way they do, and held it in her fist, and found my eyes in the glass one last time, and I nodded, and she cut.
That first sound. That dry shhk of the scissors going through a fistful of years—I felt it down in my teeth.
She laid the severed tail on the counter in front of me, this thick dark rope of hair that until ten seconds ago had been part of my body, that he used to wind around his fingers in the dark, and I looked at it lying there like evidence and I did not feel triumphant and I did not feel free.
I felt like I was at a small funeral. A funeral for the woman who'd grown that hair long for somebody else.
Carmen worked in the gentle quiet she gets only when something actually matters to her—no chatter, just the snip and the comb and her warm fingers turning my head an inch this way, an inch that way.
Claire and Emily sat along the wall and didn't say a word the whole time, which for the two of them may be a historical record.
And when she finally turned the chair to face the mirror—
I didn't know the woman in it. That was the first thing.
A sharp dark bob to the jaw. Bare collarbones.
A neck gone long and pale and strange and cold where all that weight had hung for a decade.
She looked older. Or maybe just more seen—visible in a way the curtain of long hair had let me hide from.
I lifted my hand to the back of my neck where there was suddenly nothing at all, and the stranger in the mirror lifted hers too, and her eyes were wet, and I could not have told you in that moment whether it was grief or relief, because the honest answer is that it was both, all the way to the bottom, braided so tight together I don't think I'll ever fully get them apart.
It was not a triumph. I want to be honest about that, because the magazines always make it a triumph—the big chop, the woman striding out reborn into her glittering future.
It wasn't like that. It was quiet, and it was sad, and the back of my neck was cold, and I had cried a little in a stranger's chair in a town I'd never set foot in before.
But here is the one small true thing I carried out of Millbrook, the only thing I had that whole gray day.
When Carmen set the scissors down and put her hands on my shoulders and asked me, softly, to the mirror, "You okay?
"—I looked at that cold-necked, sharp-jawed, wet-eyed stranger I didn't know yet, and I found, somewhere very far down, that I wanted to.
Know her, I mean. For the first time in three weeks I was the smallest bit curious about the version of me that came next.
That was all. That was the entire victory, and it was barely anything—a flicker, a hair's width, the difference between a closed door and a door that isn't quite latched.
It turned out to be exactly enough to start with.