Chapter Eighteen
Alonzo
I drove back out to the Thompsons' on a Tuesday, and this time I made sure Hank could see my hands the whole way up the drive.
He was in the open garage with the hood up on Diane's Buick, and he straightened when he heard my tires, a wrench in his fist, and I watched him clock who it was and go very still. I stopped a good ways off, out in the middle of the gravel where there was nothing between us but daylight.
"Mr. Thompson. Beth's not here, I know that—I checked the shop's hours before I came.
" I kept my hands where he could see them, which I am aware is a ridiculous thing to feel you have to do, and felt I had to do anyway.
"And I'm not here to ask you for anything.
I came to say one thing, and then I'll go if you tell me to. "
He didn't say anything. The wrench hung at his side.
"I made a fool of myself at the festival," I said.
"In front of the whole town, in front of your daughter.
I scared her and I shamed her and there's no piece of it I'm proud of.
I'm not going to stand here and read you the whole list of what I've done wrong, because we'd be out here past dark.
You know the list. You've known it longer than I have.
" Still nothing. "I owe you a fishing trip.
I told you almost a year ago I'd take you out on the reservoir, and then I never made the time, the same way I never made the time for anything that wasn't the restaurant or—anyway.
I never did it. And I know it's a small thing and it fixes exactly nothing.
But I'd like to make good on it. No agenda.
I won't say her name once if you don't want me to.
And if you say no, I'll get in my truck and I won't darken this driveway again.
I just don't want to be a man who owes a debt he had no intention of paying.
I've been that man. I'm trying not to be anymore. "
Hank looked at me for a long time. Long enough that I started thinking about my keys.
Then he set the wrench down on the fender, and wiped his hands slow on a shop rag, and said, "Saturday. Five a.m. You bring the coffee—the worms are on me." He turned back to the engine. "And you'll bait your own hook. I'm not your daddy."
? ? ?
Saturday morning I was in his driveway at four forty-five with two large coffees and my grandfather's old tackle box, and we drove out to the reservoir in a dark that was just going gray, and we didn't say much, and that was all right.
Hank Thompson is a man who can let a silence sit, and it turned out so could I, once I'd stopped trying to fill every quiet with reasons I was right.
The sun came up pink off the water. The mist burned off it.
We caught a couple of crappie between us and threw the little ones back, and after the months I'd had, it was the closest thing to peace I'd felt.
Somewhere in the second hour, threading a worm onto his hook and not looking at me, Hank said, "She knows I'm out here with you."
My heart did something painful. "Yeah?"
"Mm. Told her last night. Figured she'd rather hear it from me than off the Buzz.
" He cast. The line sang out and the bobber plopped down.
"She didn't say much. Went real quiet. Then she said, 'okay, Daddy,' and got up and washed a sink full of dishes that were already clean.
" He watched the water. "I've known that girl her whole life.
'Okay, Daddy' and re-washing clean dishes—that's not nothing, coming from her.
That's a whole lot of something. Just so you know what you're working with. "
I didn't trust my voice, so I didn't use it.
"I'm not telling you it means you get her back," Hank said, like he'd heard the thought form.
"Might not. Probably oughtn't be easy if you do.
I'm telling you the dishes were clean." He glanced over at me, finally, those pale steady eyes.
"You hurt my girl, Alonzo. I haven't forgiven you, and anyhow it's not my forgiveness that's worth anything here.
But a man who shows up at five in the morning to pay a debt he could've walked away from clean—that's a different animal than the one who screamed at her on a dance floor.
So." He looked back at his line. "I'll fish with you.
We'll see about the rest. Now hush—you're scaring the crappie. "
We fished till nine. He let me carry the cooler back to the truck. It was the most hope I'd had in my hands since the night she drove away, and I held onto it carefully, the whole way home, like something with a pulse.
? ? ?
Lola tried twice that week.
The first time was small. She lingered after close, said her car was making a noise, asked if I'd follow her home just to be safe.
Six months ago I'd have had my keys out before she finished the sentence—it is exactly the kind of thing I'd have done without a second thought, and exactly the kind of thing that cost me my whole life.
I told her any shop in town could find a noise faster than I could, and I said goodnight, and I drove home.
The second time she was better at it, because she always was.
She found me in the walk-in a few nights later with her eyes already wet, and she told me it was a hard night—that it was coming up on the anniversary of her mother, that she'd been alone with it in that little rented room, that she just needed an hour of not being alone, needed her oldest friend, could we get a coffee like we used to, no big thing.
And some of it was probably even true. That was the worst of it—that some of it was probably true, and it didn't change anything, because true or not it was a hand reaching for the exact same rope it had always reached for, and I was the rope.
Six months ago I'd have gone. Instead I stood in the cold of the walk-in and felt the old pull come up in me, the deep reflex of it—somebody I cared about, hurting, right there in front of me—and I just didn't move toward it.
"I'm sorry it's a hard night," I said, and I meant it.
"That's a real grief, and I'm not going to act like it isn't. But I can't be the person you call so you don't have to be alone, Lola.
Not anymore. It isn't fair to you, and it sure isn't fair to her, and I let it be a habit between us for a long time without ever once thinking about what it cost." Her face started to move and I kept on, as gentle as I had it in me to be.
"Call Mari. Call somebody who isn't me. I'll cover your section so you can clock out early if you need to. But I'm not getting the coffee."
She looked at me a second with something flat and unreadable sitting behind the tears, there and then gone. Then she nodded, and wiped her eyes, and said of course, she understood, she was sorry to put it on me. And she went back out to the floor.
I'd done right. I knew I'd done right. But I stood in that cold room a minute longer than I needed to, because doing right hadn't felt like winning anything. It had felt like prying loose a habit I'd carried so long I'd mistaken it for my own character.
? ? ?
Sunday dinner at my mother's was where the rest of it finally came due.
I'd felt it building all week—the careful quiet at that table, the way everyone passed the dishes like the dishes might go off.
I knew the festival had reached them. I knew the whole town's version of me, screaming at Beth in front of the bandstand, had reached them.
I'd been waiting for somebody to say it.
It was my father who said it. He waited until the plates were cleared and the coffee was poured, and then he set down his cup and folded his big hands on the table. "Mijo. We need to talk to you. All of us."
The table went still. My mother had her hands knotted in her lap. Abuela watched me with those sharp old eyes that miss nothing. Mari wouldn't look up from her cup. Only Diego met my gaze, and there was a warning in it—or a mercy. He was the only one who already knew what was about to happen.
"At the festival," my father said, "Beth said a thing.
In front of the whole town. About you and Lola.
She called Lola your—" He stopped, like the word was a bone in his throat.
"We've heard it from a dozen mouths this week.
And we've watched you these last weeks back away from that girl like she's hot iron, after months of the two of you thick as thieves.
So." He spread his hands flat on the table.
"No more dancing around it. You're going to tell us the truth, to our faces. What is Lola to you?"
I looked around the table—my father, who'd called Beth mija and meant every syllable; my mother, who'd taught her to fold empanadas and laughed at how bad she was at it; my abuela; my sister—and I understood there wasn't a single version of myself worth being that kept on lying just to stay comfortable.
So I told them. The same as I'd told Diego in the dark by the trucks.
That Lola and I, years back, in high school and a while after, had been more than friends.
That it had been over a long time. That I'd never told a one of them, and never told Beth, and let Lola sit at this very table as "an old friend" while Beth sat beside me and felt whatever she felt and got told she was imagining it.
I didn't have to finish. I watched it land on them one at a time, and it was the worst thing I have ever had to hold still for, because it didn't land as anger.
It landed as guilt.
My mother made a small broken sound, her hand coming up over her mouth.
"Dios mío," she whispered. "And I—Alonzo, I went and stood in that girl's flower shop and I told her—" She couldn't finish it.
We were a family that couldn't finish our sentences that night.
But I knew the one she meant. The whole town knew it.
You used to be such a sweet girl. My mother had said that to Beth's face, in Beth's own shop, defending Lola—and now she sat at her own table understanding exactly what it was she'd been defending.
"She tried to tell me." Mari's voice came out very low, aimed down into her coffee.
"Beth did. Once. She tried to tell me how it felt—about Lola, about all of it—and I told her she was being jealous and paranoid and that she ought to be ashamed of herself, treating my friend that way.
" She looked up, and her eyes were wet and furious, all of it turned inward.
"She was right. She was right the entire time, and I made her feel insane for it.
What did we do to her, Alonzo? What did we do? "
Abuela hadn't said a word. She just reached out—this tiny woman, eighty years old—and took my father's hand on the one side and Mari's on the other, and held them, and looked at me with eyes that have outlived two countries and a husband, and what she finally said was the worst of all of it, because she said it so softly.
"We owe that child an apology. Every one of us at this table.
We took in a lonely girl with a sad story, and we let her turn us against a good woman whose only crime was loving you and minding when it wasn't returned.
That is ours. We will carry it, and we will say it to her face. " Her jaw set. "But."
She fixed me with those eyes.
"But we are not going to tell you what to do about it.
Do you hear me, Alonzo? We have done a great deal of telling already.
We told that girl she was imagining things.
We told her she was jealous. We told her to make room and be gracious and stop seeing poison where there was nothing but friendship.
Look at what all our telling was worth." She let go of their hands.
"So I will not sit here and tell you to go and win her back.
I have not earned the right, and it would be worth nothing if I had.
If there is a road back to that woman—and I do not know that there is, mijo, I need you to hear that, you may have broken it clean past mending—then it is yours to find.
On your own feet. Not because your abuela sent you. "
She picked her coffee back up, and her hand was steady.
"We will apologize to her, because that piece is ours to carry. The rest of it is yours."
And the whole table sat quiet, and not one of them told me what to do.
It was so much heavier than if they had.