Chapter Fifteen #2
Beth turned, and the second she saw it was me her whole face changed—the laugh died, the warmth shut off behind her eyes like a tap. "Alonzo."
"Don't touch my woman." My voice didn't sound like mine.
Caleb just looked at me, calm, and took a single step back, hands loose at his sides, and somehow that was worse than if he'd swung—a man so sure of where he stood he didn't need to do a thing.
"I stopped being your woman," Beth said, very evenly, "the day I gave you back the ring."
"Don't." It came out almost a plea. "Don't talk like that. You'll always be mine, Beth, you know that—"
She looked at me like I'd started speaking a language she'd never heard. Flat, cold disbelief, and under it something that might have been pity, which was worse.
And something in me caved, looking at her, and the heat drained out of my voice and I heard myself say it soft, almost wondering, like a fool. "You cut your hair."
She didn't answer. She just held my eyes and gave me nothing—not a word, not a flicker.
"What are you doing with him?" I said. "With Caleb. What is this."
"We're friends." Her chin came up. "And I don't owe you an explanation for one single thing in my life anymore. That's the part you never did understand—that I was ever mine to begin with."
"He's your ex, Beth." My voice climbed and I couldn't catch it. "You think I don't remember this guy? I remember this clown—"
"So what?" And there was a terrible steadiness in it. "So what if he is, Alonzo. You want to stand here and be angry about the shape of who I stand next to now? You? Really?"
A hand closed hard on my shoulder—my cousin Beto, his brother on my other side, both of them murmuring fast and low, vámonos, primo, not here, you're making a scene, come on—and they started steering me back, and I let them, more or less, my feet dragging in the grass.
"Beth. Beth, just talk to me. Five minutes—"
"I've got nothing left to say to you." She'd already turned back to her flowers, to her booth, to her good day that I'd walked into the middle of like a chair somebody'd thrown through a window. "And I have work to do."
"I'll find you at the end of the night," I called as they hauled me off. "Beth. We're talking before this is over."
She didn't turn around.
? ? ?
I went back to the tent, and I stood under it, and I pretended to work. But the whole rest of that afternoon, I watched her.
I couldn't stop. All the way across the green, through the whole moving crowd, I tracked her like a man staring at the one lit window in a dark house.
I watched her laugh with Caleb. I watched her laugh with Carmen and the schoolteacher and the young one, and every single time one of them caught me looking they turned and gave me a look that could take the finish off a table—Carmen worst of all, a look that promised she'd remember this.
I watched Caleb carry her a paper tray of food and set it on her stool so she didn't have to stop working.
I watched him bring her a cider. And when the sun came around hard and bright over the oak in the late afternoon, I watched him take the hat off his own head and set it down on hers, and I watched her tip her face up and say something that made him laugh, and every one of those small ordinary kindnesses went into me like a nail driven slow.
He was doing all of it. The little things.
The fetching, the carrying, the shade from the sun, the food she didn't have to ask for.
The things a man's supposed to do without being asked—the exact things I'd never once managed for her, the whole reason I was standing in a tent watching another man do them.
That was the part that put the beers in my hand.
Not jealousy, though I called it that. It was recognition.
I was watching a man love her the plain daily way I'd failed to, and I couldn't stand to see how easy he made it look.
I bought a beer off the Méndez brothers' stand. Then I bought another.
By the time the band started up and couples began drifting out onto the boards they'd laid down for dancing, I was three deep and watching from the dark edge of it, and the beer had turned all that slow grief into something hotter and stupider.
And then Caleb stood and held out his hand to her, and Beth hesitated—she did hesitate, I saw it, some old caution in her—and then she put her hand in his and let him lead her out among the dancers.
And I went across that square like a bull through a gate.
I didn't think. There wasn't a thought anywhere in me. I was just suddenly in it, in the middle of the dancing, both hands flat on Caleb's chest, and I shoved him hard enough that he stumbled back into another couple and nearly went down.
"Alonzo!" Beth's voice cracked across the music. "What is your problem?"
"He doesn't get to touch you." I was breathing like I'd sprinted a mile. "Not him. Not anybody—"
"It's over!"
She screamed it, and the whole square heard her.
The band scraped to a halt, one note trailing off a fiddle.
I felt a hundred faces swing toward us and stay.
She didn't care. She was past caring—tears standing bright in her eyes, fists balled at her sides, her whole body shaking with it—and the worst part, the part I'll never get out from under, is that even then, even wrecking her good night in front of the entire town, some drunk broken piece of me thought there she is, she's still feeling something, feeling something is close to loving something.
That's how far gone I was. I'd take her screaming at me over a stranger walking past.
"It's over, Alonzo!" She was crying openly now and letting the whole square watch her do it.
"You don't get to come out here and act like this—you don't get to want me now, after two years of everybody else coming first!
It's over because you never, not once, made me a priority.
It's over because you were the one carrying on with your ex while we were still together—so don't you dare stand here and play the heartbroken man over somebody's hand on my face, when you spent months letting Lola hang all over you and told me I was crazy for minding!
You want a woman to fight over?" Her voice tore straight down the middle.
"Go find your little high school girlfriend, Alonzo, and leave me alone. "
The square was dead silent. Somebody's kid was crying somewhere off by the food stalls. I stood there in the middle of all those faces with a beer sweating in my hand and nothing—nothing—to say, because every word of it was true and she'd said it out loud to the whole town at last.
"I was having a good day." Her voice dropped, and quiet was so much worse than the screaming.
"Do you hear me? I was having a really good day.
My first one in longer than I can remember.
And you saw me having it from all the way across that green, and you couldn't stand it, so you walked over and put your hands all over it.
Like you always do. Like you always, always did.
" She wiped her face hard with the back of her wrist. "Go home.
There's nobody out here who wants you here. "
Then there were hands on me again, but harder this time—no murmured Spanish, no easing me along.
A fist twisted into the back of my collar and an arm came hard across my chest, and it was Diego on one side of me with his face gone to stone, and it was Beth's brother Jesse on the other, Jesse who I'd split a dozen beers with, the two of them hauling me backward off that dance floor like I didn't weigh a thing.
I fought them. I twisted and shoved and called her name back over the heads of the crowd, and I heard how it sounded, a drunk man bellowing a woman's name across a festival, and I couldn't stop doing it.
They didn't say one word to me. They just dragged me—past the tents, past the lights, past the last of the food stalls, all the way out to the dark edge of the lot where the trucks were parked and the music dropped to a thud in the distance, and they put me up against the side of a pickup and let go.
I came off the truck swinging it at them. "What the hell, Diego—"
"No." My brother's voice. I had never once heard it like that in my life. He had a hand flat on my chest, pinning me to the door, and Jesse stood at his shoulder with his arms crossed and something close to murder held very still in his eyes, and Diego looked at me dead-on.
"You're done talking," he said. "You hear me? For once in your whole life, you're going to stand right here, and shut your mouth, and listen."
Jesse uncrossed his arms.
"Both of us have got some things to say to you," he said. "And you're gonna hear every last word."