Chapter Fifteen
Alonzo
I told my mother it was temporary.
I stood in the front hall of my parents' house at ten o'clock at night with a duffel over my shoulder and the rest of my life in a laundry basket out in the truck, and I told her it was just for a little while, just until Beth and I sorted things out.
My mother looked at me for a long moment with her mouth pressed thin, and then she went and made up the bed in my old room without another word, which I took as a kindness.
My father clapped me on the shoulder on his way to bed and told me these things blow over, mijo. And I believed him. I needed to.
So that became the plan, the only plan I had: believe it, and act like it, and wait.
Every morning I got up and went to the restaurant and worked the line like there was nothing wrong with me.
When somebody's tía asked after Beth, I'd smile and say she was just taking a little time, the smile doing the work of insisting it was nothing.
I needed them to believe it was nothing, because as long as they believed it, maybe it could still turn out to be nothing.
Beth and I were the real thing. Solid as a church—everybody had always said so.
People like us did not end over one rough month and a bad night in a parking lot.
She'd cool off. She'd see how far out of proportion the whole thing had run.
And she'd come home, and we'd get married in March, and someday this would just be the bad stretch we survived.
The days I could manage. I could pack a day so full of prep and service and noise that there was no room left in it for the size of what was missing.
It was the nights that came for me. I'd lie in that narrow bed in the dark and all the daytime conviction would drain right out with the light, and I couldn't sleep—couldn't get within a mile of it—unless I let myself think about her.
The weight of her head on my chest. The way she ran cold all winter and stole my heat.
The little sigh she gave settling into a pillow.
I'd build her piece by piece in the dark until missing her was almost as good as having her, and that was the only thing that ever put me under.
And every single night, right before sleep took me, the same small ugly thought would surface and I'd shove it back down: if she's the last thing in your head every night, how come you spent two years making her feel like the last thing on your list?
A love like that doesn't just evaporate, I'd tell myself instead, on a loop, until the other thought drowned.
A love like that doesn't just go away because a man got some things wrong.
? ? ?
It went on like that for the better part of a month. And somewhere in the fourth week the waiting stopped feeling like patience and started feeling like going down slow in cold water.
I began to think I had it backwards. Maybe sitting on my hands wasn't respect at all—maybe it was just cowardice wearing a nicer coat.
Maybe what Beth needed was to see me fight for her.
Show up at her door. Say the words out loud.
Refuse to let her throw away the best thing either of us was ever going to get.
The idea wouldn't leave me alone; it followed me around the kitchen for two days.
I drove down to the river to think it through.
I parked up by the old boat launch and sat on the flat rock there with the water going by brown and quiet, and I didn't let myself walk the hundred yards downstream to the willow where I'd gotten down on one knee, because I didn't trust myself to look at that spot right then.
I hadn't been there ten minutes when gravel crunched behind me and Lola came and sat down on the rock at my side, close, like she'd known exactly where to find me. Which, I understand now, she had. She always knew where to find me alone.
"You've got that look," she said. "The one you get right before you do something."
I let out a breath. "I'm thinking about going to see her."
Lola was quiet a beat. "Lonzo."
"I mean it this time. Not a text, not flowers left on the porch.
Drive over there, knock on the door, tell her to her face I'm not giving up on us.
This whole give-her-space thing—it's been a month, Lola, and it isn't working.
She's not coming around. I can feel her getting further away and I'm just—sitting here.
Maybe she needs to see that I'll show up and fight for once. "
"Hey." She put her hand on my arm and left it there. "Remember what we talked about? Remember what we agreed?"
"I remember."
"Then think it through with me, before you go do something you can't take back.
" Her voice went soft and reasonable, the voice that could talk me down off anything.
"You go banging on that door right now, all churned up like this—what does that actually get you?
It corners her. She's hurt and she's proud, you know exactly how she gets when she's proud, and if you crowd her she plants her feet just to prove a point.
You push her tonight, you lose her for good.
The only way Beth ever comes back to you is if she decides to walk back on her own.
You have to let her miss you. You have to be patient even when it's tearing you apart—" her hand tightened on my arm "—and I know it's tearing you apart, I can see it, it kills me to watch.
But this is the long game. And I am not going to sit here and let you wreck it because you cracked on one bad night. "
It sounded like sense. It always sounded like sense, coming from her.
She'd known me half my life, and she'd been the steady one through all of it—the one who'd sit at this river and let me come apart and then turn me gently back around toward the goal, every time.
I understand now that "the goal" was a leash, and that every single time I lunged toward Beth she reeled me back a little shorter.
But that afternoon on the rock all I felt was the fight going out of me, warm and easy, like it always did when she talked.
So I nodded, and I said, "Yeah. Okay. You're right. "
"I'm right." She smiled and bumped my shoulder with hers. "Give it more time. She'll come around. You two are meant to be—everybody knows it." She stood and brushed off her jeans. "Now come help me haul the awning poles out of the truck. We've got a whole festival to set up before the weekend."
And I got up and followed her, and helped her carry the poles, and did not go to Beth's door.
I want that on the record too, alongside everything else—that the last clear chance I had to fight for her, I handed to Lola, and Lola talked me out of it in under five minutes on a rock by the river, and I thanked her for it.
? ? ?
The Harvest Festival takes over the town square the second weekend of October every year—booths and food stalls and string lights all around the green, a band on Saturday night, a whole town packed in shoulder to shoulder.
My family's had the same spot for the El Colibrí tent since before I was born, up near the bandstand.
We were stringing lights along the front of the tent Saturday afternoon, me up the ladder and a couple of the part-time guys feeding me the cord, when I caught it.
One of them, low, to the other, not meaning for me to hear: "—walked past the flower stand on the way in, it looks unbelievable this year.
All that new shelving, the arch, the whole setup.
" And the other one: "Yeah, that's the boyfriend's doing, I heard.
Did the whole thing for her himself—real handy, that guy. "
The cord went slack in my hands.
"What did you just say?" I came down the ladder too fast. They both went still as deer. "Whose work? Whose boyfriend?"
"Nothing, man—we didn't say anything. Forget it."
They suddenly had a hundred other places to look, and my feet were already carrying me around the back of the tent before I'd decided a single thing, out across the green toward the far corner by the big oak where the flower stand sets up every year.
And then I saw her, and the whole world went silent and roaring at once.
Beth was standing in front of the most beautiful booth at the festival—and it was, the guys hadn't lied, all warm cedar and a hand-built arch dripping with hanging amber and rust and burgundy, buckets of dahlias and chrysanthemums banked up around her, the whole thing glowing like the inside of October.
And she was laughing. Head tipped all the way back, throat bare, that real laugh, the one I used to live for and hadn't heard in what felt like a year.
She had on a soft rust-colored dress that stopped above a pair of boots, a cream cardigan slipping down off one shoulder, and the low gold light was all over her.
And her hair was gone.
All that dark length I'd wound around my fingers a thousand nights—cut clean off to a sharp dark line at her jaw, so that she looked like a woman I hadn't been introduced to, somebody new and a little dangerous, somebody who had gone and made a whole decision about her own body and her own life without me in the room for it.
It knocked the wind clean out of me. She'd changed.
She was out here changing, in the open, getting better, while I fell apart in a narrow bed across town—and I hadn't let myself imagine that.
In all my nights building her out of the dark, I'd built the old her, the one who missed me.
This one didn't look like she'd missed me for one single minute.
And then Caleb Monroe leaned in—because of course it was him, I'd have known that jaw across a stadium—and tucked a piece of that short hair back behind her ear, easy as breathing, like he had every right in the world to put his hand on her face.
I was across the last of the grass before I knew I'd moved.
"Get your hands off her."