Chapter Sixteen
Alonzo
Jesse talked first.
He didn't yell. That was the worst of it—Jesse Thompson, who I'd looked up to like an older brother for two years, who'd taught me to back a trailer down a boat ramp and who'd sat with me on his porch the night my abuelo went into the hospital and not said a word while I fell apart—he didn't raise his voice one inch.
He just stood there in the dark with the festival thudding away behind us and laid it down quiet, like a man setting stones one at a time.
"You want to know what I've been watching these last months?
" he said. "I've watched my little sister get smaller.
I watched her start checking her own face before she'd open her mouth around your family, in case she was about to be the problem again.
I watched her run herself into the ground for your restaurant and your people and call it love, and I watched you take it, every bit of it, and never once turn around and put her first." He shook his head slow.
"And I kept quiet, because she asked me to.
Because she kept swearing it was fine, you were just busy, she was just being sensitive. "
"Jesse—"
"I'm not done." Still quiet. "Then it stopped being fine.
And you know what I told myself even then?
I told myself, okay. The boy messed up bad.
But anybody can see he loves her, and when the dust settles he's gonna fight for her.
He's gonna do the work and win her back, because she's worth it and he's not stupid, he knows she's worth it.
" His jaw flexed. "That's what I believed about you, Alonzo.
Right up until an hour ago. Right up until I watched you shove a man off a dance floor and scream at my sister in front of the whole town like she's a possession somebody walked off with.
" He let that sit. "That's not fighting for her.
That's just wanting to win. And I gotta tell you, Alonzo—I am more disappointed in you than I've got words for. I didn't think this was in you."
I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Because there wasn't a thing to say to it that wasn't true.
Diego went next, and there was a thing in my brother's voice I had never once heard pointed at me.
"I don't even know who you are right now," he said.
"I mean that. I've watched you my whole life and I don't recognize the guy standing here.
Jealous. Wrecked. Acting like she did something to you—when you spent every weekend for a month parading around town with Lola.
The movies, the diner, ice cream on the square like a couple of kids, right out where the whole world could see—while Beth was hiding in her house trying to put herself back together.
And now she makes one friend and you come apart at the seams?
" He laughed, short and ugly. "You're a hypocrite.
That's the only word for it. You don't get to do all of that and then play the heartbroken man because she laughed at another guy. "
"It wasn't like that with Lola, it was just—"
"What was it like, then?" Diego's eyes narrowed, and something occurred to him, and his voice dropped. "And what the hell was that Beth said out there tonight? About Lola being your ex. The whole square heard it. What's she talking about, Alonzo?"
I didn't answer fast enough. I felt it land on my own face before I could stop it.
"Alonzo. What is she talking about."
So I told them. Standing against the cold side of that pickup in the dark, I told them the thing my family had never known—that Lola and I, back in high school and for a while after, had been more than friends.
That it was years ago. That it had never meant anything.
The words came out of me sounding a hundred times worse than they'd ever sounded inside my head, and the silence that landed after them was its own kind of verdict.
"Let me get this straight." Diego said it very slowly.
"Mamá's been treating that woman like a second daughter.
The whole family's been taking her side, eating out of her hand, telling Beth to her face to quit being jealous—and the entire time, Lola is somebody you used to sleep with, and you never said one word. Not to Mamá. Not to me. Not to Beth."
"Beth found out. At the end. That's what the—"
"That's what blew it all up." He took a step back from me, the way you step back from something you've just realized you're standing in. "God. Of course it did." He dragged a hand down his face. "No wonder. No wonder, Alonzo."
He didn't finish the thought. He didn't need to.
I watched the whole shape of it come clear to him in the dark, and I watched it sicken him, and the worst part was I couldn't summon one ounce of anger about it, because standing there hearing myself say the words out loud, it was starting to sicken me too.
Jesse had gone very still and very cold.
"Get him out of my sight, Diego," he said quietly. "Before I do something your mother would have to make a casserole and apologize for." He pushed off the truck. "I'm going to go find my sister."
And he walked off toward the dark line of parked trucks, toward his own tailgate, toward Beth—and he left me standing there with the one thought I had successfully kept underwater for a solid month finally breaking the surface and filling my whole chest:
that I might have actually lost her. For good. And that there was not one single person on this earth I could blame for it but me.
I don't remember the drive back to my parents' that night.
I remember lying in the narrow bed and not building her up piece by piece for once, not being able to, because every time I reached for her all I could see was her face at the dance floor and her father on his porch and her brother walking away from me into the dark.
The conviction I'd been running on for a month—she'll cool off, she'll come home, it's temporary—didn't come when I called it.
For the first time, I lay there in the dark and let myself know that it might really be over, and that I had done it, with my own two hands, slowly, over months, while she begged me to see her and I looked the other way.
It is a long night, the first night you stop lying to yourself.
? ? ?
It was two evenings later, closing up the restaurant, that I ended it with Lola.
I have to explain about Lola and me that month, because it matters to what came next.
After Beth left, Lola had been the one who showed up.
While I was choking down my days and not sleeping my nights, she'd been the one hauling me out so I wouldn't rot in that bedroom—a movie on a Tuesday, ice cream on the square, a late plate at the diner after close.
Just two old friends, I'd told myself. Just somebody keeping me company through the worst stretch of my life.
I hadn't thought twice about a minute of it.
Diego had made me think twice about all of it.
So when we'd wiped down the last of the line and Lola pulled off her apron and said, "Late show? That thing you wanted to see is still playing, we could make it," I shook my head.
"I can't," I said. And then, because she'd earned it straight: "Lola—I think we need to stop doing this. The going out. I've been thinking, and honestly I've been kind of an idiot about it. We need some distance. You and me."
Her face went hurt and open. "Distance? Lonzo, we're friends. We've always been friends. I'm not going to lose that because—" She caught herself. "You're really going to let her come between us? She's not even with you anymore, and she still gets to decide who you can—"
"It's not about Beth deciding anything." I leaned both hands on the counter and made myself say the true part out loud.
"It's about me. I couldn't stand it—watching Beth go around this town with somebody she used to be with.
It would gut me. It is gutting me; I made a fool of myself over exactly that in front of the entire festival two nights ago.
And that, right there, is what I've been doing to her.
For months. Walking around with you—somebody I used to—and never once stopping to think how it landed on her.
So." I straightened up. "We can talk. At work, fine.
But I'm not doing the movies and the diner and the rest of it anymore.
It's not right, and I know it's not, and I should've known it a long time ago. "
For just a second something crossed her face that I couldn't name. Then it was gone, smoothed over, and she gave me a small, sad, gracious smile. "Okay," she said softly. "If that's what you need, Lonzo. I only want you okay. You know that."
And something in my chest eased at how cleanly she took it, how decent she was about it.
Ending those nights out was the first halfway-decent thing I'd done in a month, and I knew it down to my shoes—that the easy habit of her had been a mistake the whole time, and that I'd been a fool not to see it sooner.
I drove back to my parents' feeling, for the first time since the parking lot, like maybe I wasn't completely beyond saving.
? ? ?
The next morning I got up early, and I cooked.
Not the frozen avalanche I'd been burying her under for weeks—I understood now that that had been about me, about not being able to stand my own helplessness.
This was a different thing. I made the food that was hers.
The chicken with the green olives she loved off our menu.
The little cheese arepas she'd eat five of standing at the counter before I could stop her.
A whole tres leches, the good one, because in two years I never once saw her turn it down. I packed it all careful into a box.
And then I wrote her a note, and it took me the better part of an hour and somewhere around nine tries, because every version I'd have written a month ago started with please and ended with come home—and I'd finally understood, standing in the dark while her brother told me the truth, that none of that was the point anymore.
The point wasn't getting her back. I didn't have the right to ask her for that, maybe not ever.
The point was just that she should know.
In the end I kept it short.
Beth—I'm not writing this to ask you for anything.
I just need you to know that I see it now.
The way I treated you. Everything I let you sit through with Lola.
The fact that I never put you first, not once, when it should have been you every single time.
You were right about all of it. I was a coward, and I am more sorry than a note can hold.
You don't owe me a single word back. I just couldn't let one more day go by without you knowing that I finally understand what I threw away. —A.
I drove over early enough that I figured she'd still be home and not yet gone to the shop.
I set the box down on her porch, on the boards by the door where she keeps a pot of something always blooming.
I knocked twice. And then—because this was not about standing there and making her deal with the sight of my face—I went back down the walk, got in my truck, and pulled away from the curb.
At the end of her street I made myself look up into the rearview mirror.
The front door opened. Beth stepped out into the thin early light in her socks, and she looked down at the box for a long moment, and then she crouched and lifted the envelope off the top of it and turned it over in her hands.
She was opening it when I rounded the corner and lost the view.
I didn't get to see her face. I didn't get to see whether it landed or whether she tore it in half over the porch rail.
But she'd opened it. She hadn't carried the whole thing two doors down without looking, the way she had every bag before it.
She'd stood there in her socks in the cold and opened it.
I drove all the way back to my parents' holding onto that one small thing like it was the first foothold on a cliff I had a very long way left to climb.