Chapter Seventeen
Beth
I read his note once, standing on my own porch in my socks with the cold coming up through the boards, and then I folded it back along its creases and I did not read it again.
I'll be honest about why, because it isn't flattering to either of us.
It wasn't that it didn't land. That was the whole problem.
It landed. Every other thing he'd sent for a month had been about him—I'm here, I'm waiting, come home, I miss you so much I can't breathe—and this one wasn't. This one didn't ask me for a single thing.
You don't owe me a single word back. He'd never in two years let me have the last word in an argument, and here he was handing me one in writing.
And a note that doesn't ask you for anything is a far more dangerous thing than one that does.
Because the second I let it in—the second I let myself sit with I never put you first, not once, when it should have been you every single time and feel how true it was and how long I'd waited to hear him say it—I'd start doing the math I'd sworn off.
I'd start wondering. And I had cried myself empty on a living room floor to get to a place where I wasn't wondering anymore.
So I put the note in the drawer of the hall table, under the takeout menus and the dead batteries and the spare key, where I keep the things I don't want to look at. And I shut the drawer.
I'd heard things by then, too. You can't help it in this town.
That Alonzo Vargas had stopped taking Lola Marchetti to the movies.
That he'd gone quiet, kept to himself, worked and went home to his folks' and not much else.
The Buzz had decided he was a changed man, the way the Buzz decides everything—loudly, and on the strength of nothing.
Maybe he was. But I had been the whole center of a good man's world right up until the moment I wasn't, and I'd learned the hard and expensive way that what a man does for a few weeks while he's lost and hurting tells you nothing—nothing—about what he'll go back to the second he feels safe again.
So I didn't wonder. I put it in the drawer, and I went to work, and I let myself have the one good, easy thing I had instead.
? ? ?
What I let myself have, that fall, was Caleb Monroe's friendship.
It was as easy as I remembered and then some.
He fixed the cooler door, and then he noticed the back shelf sagging and fixed that, and then it just became a rhythm—him turning up with his toolbox on a slow afternoon, me out at his granddad's place on Cedar Lane sinking mums into the bed along the porch, the two of us trading work and terrible gas-station coffee and the kind of talk that doesn't cost you anything to have.
No flutter. I keep saying it because it keeps being the truth.
He was a warm, steady, decent man, and I felt about him roughly the way you feel about a woodstove in January. Grateful. Unbothered. Warm.
One Thursday he was wiping down his hands after wrestling my shelf level and said he had to get over to the clinic—he'd been picking up volunteer shifts at the animal hospital out on the county road since he came back, because at thirty-three Caleb was the exact same boy who'd once made me pull the car over on the highway to move a turtle out of the road, just with the degree to make it official now—and did I want to come meet the kittens.
I want it on the record that I went for the kittens. Not for him. For the kittens.
There were five of them. Three weeks old, found in the wheel well of a truck out on Route 9 and bottle-raised at the clinic ever since—five scrappy little tabbies with their eyes barely open, packed into a warming box in the back, mewing like a screen door that needed oil.
Caleb showed me how it's done: the little syringe-bottle, the angle of it, how you have to rub their backs after, the way their mother would.
I was hopeless at it for about ninety seconds.
And then I wasn't, and then I had a kitten the size of my own palm gone boneless and milk-drunk against my thumb, and I made a sound I am not especially proud of.
"There it is," Caleb said, not looking up from the one cradled in his big hands. "The flower lady's got a soft spot."
"I do not."
"You're crying."
"I am not crying, it's—it's the heat lamp. It's very bright in here."
He laughed, that easy unbothered laugh of his, and let it go, and we sat in that warm little back room for the better part of an hour feeding five orphaned kittens while the rain came on against the window.
And at some point one of them hauled itself up the front of my shirt on needle claws and fell dead asleep in the crook of my neck—this warm, buzzing scrap of a thing that had no idea its whole start in life had gone wrong, that just trusted the next warm body to hold it safe—and I went very still so I wouldn't wake her, and something in my chest came loose that had been clenched for a long, long time.
Not for Caleb. I need that to stay clear, even now, even this far along.
There was no part of me that looked at Caleb Monroe across a box of kittens and wanted him.
What I felt didn't have anything to do with him.
It was just—easy. It was a Thursday afternoon where nobody needed managing, where nothing was about to go sideways, where no one in the room was about to decide I was the difficult one, where a small broken thing had looked me over and decided I was safe enough to sleep on.
I had been so busy surviving that I'd forgotten there was supposed to be a life on the other side of the surviving. A life with afternoons like this in it.
For that one rainy hour I sat in the warm with a sleeping kitten under my chin, and I laughed at something Caleb said, and I felt, for the first time since the parking lot, like a whole person and not a wound walking around in a person's clothes.
On the way out I told him I had half a mind to take one home.
He said I should. And I almost did—but the truth is I'm at the shop from dawn to past dark six days a week, and it wouldn't be fair to leave a small thing shut up alone all day in a quiet house, waiting on me to come back.
I happened to know exactly what that does to a person. So I didn't.
What I did instead was keep coming back.
A Thursday here, a Sunday there, an hour after closing—to help with the feedings, to sit in that warm little room with the rain on the glass and a clutch of small needful lives that didn't want one thing from me except to be fed and kept safe.
It became the thing I did for myself. Caleb never once made it strange.
And it turned out it wasn't only the kittens.
I've never been a sentimental woman about animals—I never had so much as a goldfish growing up—but something about that clinic got all the way under my skin.
I fell hard for a three-legged shepherd mix named Biscuit who leaned his entire weight against my shins like a felled tree the second I sat down on the floor.
I fell for the boarding dogs and the runt of a litter of beagle puppies and a one-eyed old tomcat who loathed every living soul on earth except, for reasons no one could explain, me.
Caleb caught me one afternoon actually cooing—out loud, in a voice I didn't know I owned—at a bearded dragon some family had surrendered, this grumpy little prehistoric thing the color of a dead oak leaf, blinking at me from a heat lamp like it had opinions.
He laughed so hard he had to put a hand on the counter.
"You think the lizard's cute," he said, wiping his eyes.
"You're a goner, Thompson. You're all the way gone.
" And I was. I'd walked into that place a wrung-out rag of a woman, and somewhere between the kittens and the three-legged dog and the world's grumpiest lizard, I started—very quietly, when I wasn't looking—to fill back up.
? ? ?
I have always known the exact moment a thing starts to slip. You learn it early, if you grow up the way I grew up—you learn to read a room the way other people read the sky, because your safety depends on knowing when the weather's about to turn.
I felt it the night Alonzo turned down the movie.
Such a small thing. I can't, he said, and then all that careful, decent talk about distance, about how it wasn't right—and I smiled and told him I understood, because that is what you do.
You smile and you understand and you do not let them see the floor go out from under you.
But it went out from under me. I'd had both hands on something solid for months—a chair at that table, a woman who'd started calling me mija, a whole warm family closing around me the way water closes around a stone—and that was the night I felt the first crack run clean through all of it.
I've spent every day since watching it spread.
Diego won't meet my eyes anymore. Pilar still hugs me, but there's a draft in it now, a half-second of hesitation that wasn't there in the summer.
I don't know what Alonzo told them in the dark after the festival—he won't say, and I won't ask, because asking is its own kind of confession—but I know the shape of a family quietly making up its mind about you.
I have been on the wrong end of that look before.
And I know exactly where the wind is blowing from.
It isn't me. I didn't do anything. It's her.
It's Beth—Beth getting better. Beth in a flower stall with the October light all over her and her hair shorn off like a flag she'd decided to plant, laughing, while that man reached over and tucked it behind her ear.
I watched that woman make herself smaller and smaller for months, until I was half sure she'd disappear altogether—and instead she went and got her whole self back, right out in the open where the whole town could stand around and admire it.
And then Alonzo, in the kitchen, telling me so gently, so decently, like he deserved a medal for it, that we couldn't go out anymore. Because of how it would look to Beth.
Always Beth. Gone, finished, the ring back in his pocket—and she still takes up every cubic inch of air in his life. She doesn't even have to be in the room. She never did.
People look at me and assume I came back here with options.
I came back with a duffel bag, four hundred dollars, and a storage unit two states away that I lost in October because I couldn't make the payment.
My mother is a box of ashes in a town I will never set foot in again.
My father—I don't talk about my father. There was no one waiting for me anywhere.
There was nothing soft in this entire world with my name on it.
So I came to the one place that had ever once felt like home, and I made myself useful, and then I made myself necessary, and I built myself a family out of somebody else's, board by patient board.
And I am not going to sit quiet in a back office and watch a woman with a tragic little backstory and good cheekbones walk in off the street and take it from me.
So I'll wait. I've always been the patient one—patience is about the only thing my whole life ever troubled itself to teach me. There's a seam in everything, if you're calm enough to feel for it. There's a way back into any room, if you're willing to stand at the door long enough.
And I'll do what I have always done, which is manage how a room sees me.
That's a skill, whatever people want to call it—knowing which version of a thing to hand someone so they keep looking at you the way you need them to.
Alonzo's family thinks I'm the girl who saved their catering and never asked for a thing in return; the town thinks I'm the brave little stray who came home with nothing and made something of herself.
Let them. As long as everyone keeps believing the version I've handed them, I keep my chair at that table.
What I won't do is panic. Panic is how a person makes the one wrong move that undoes a hundred careful ones.
I've watched people lose everything in a single bad afternoon because they flinched at exactly the wrong moment.
I don't flinch. This town is the last warm thing I've got my hands on, and I am going to keep both of them on it—quiet, and patient, and precisely as helpful as I need to be—for as long as that takes.
There is always a way to make yourself necessary again.
I've only got to keep the story straight. I have always been very good at keeping the story straight.