Chapter Twenty-One
Lola
I have lost things before. I want that on the record, because people always assume a woman like me doesn't see it coming, and I see everything coming; seeing it coming is the only reason I'm still standing.
You don't lose it all at once—that's not how it works, that's not how any of it has ever worked for me.
You lose it the way the tide goes out. So slow that if you only glance now and then you'd swear the water hadn't moved an inch, and then one gray afternoon you look up and the boat you thought you were sitting in is lying crooked on the mud, and it was never floating at all, it was just waiting for the water to leave.
I'm standing in the mud now. I can feel it coming up through my shoes.
It started with Alonzo, and I've made my cold peace with the fact that I read him wrong.
I thought I had more time. I thought let her miss you would hold him the way it had held him for months—I'd built that little machine so carefully, talking him down off every impulse toward her, keeping him circling, keeping him mine in the only shape that was left to me, which was the friend who understood him when no one else did.
And it worked beautifully, right up until it didn't, and now he looks at me with this terrible gentle clarity, like a man who's had cataracts scraped off, and there is nothing—nothing—you can do with a man who can suddenly see.
Every tool I have works in the dark. He turned a light on.
But it isn't only him anymore, and that's the part I turn over and over at night in the rented room, with the radiator banging and the four walls I can afford standing too close. It's all of them.
I brought Pilar the linen order Thursday, done before she'd asked, the way I always do it, the way I've made my whole place in that family—and she took the paper from me and said, "Thank you, Lola," and that was all.
Flat. Two words with nothing behind them, no warmth, no you're a lifesaver, what would we do without you, none of the small coin they used to pay me in and never noticed they were paying.
Just thank you, Lola, the way you'd thank a stranger who returned your dropped glove.
And she turned back to her prep before I'd even stepped away.
That's how it goes now. Pilar hesitates before she hands me a plate.
Mari is always, suddenly, in the other room.
Diego looks straight through me like I'm a smudge on glass.
And Abuela—Abuela, who used to pat my cheek and call me pobrecita and feed me before her own grandchildren—Abuela watches me now the way you watch a water stain spreading on a ceiling, doing the arithmetic on how bad the thing must be up above.
They know. I don't know how much and I don't need to; I know the feeling.
I have spent my entire life learning to feel exactly this, the precise second a family closes its ranks and leaves you standing on the outside of a circle you'd convinced yourself you were the center of.
I felt it at eighteen, when this same town decided about me and I was taken away from it.
I felt it in every town since, in every warm kitchen I ever talked my way into and got shown out of.
I know this feeling the way other people know the smell of their own mother's cooking.
It is, if I'm honest—and I'm always honest, in the cold middle of the night, it's the one luxury nobody can take from me—the most familiar feeling I own.
So I did what I do. I made myself necessary, because I learned before I learned to read that when you can't make people love you, you make them unable to run the day without you, and it's slower and it's lonelier but it holds. It has always, always held.
Except Alonzo took even that off me. In front of his mother.
Over a register and a child who isn't worth the breath I spent on her—and that's the thing none of them will ever understand: I wasn't even doing it for anything.
There was no plan. It was just the reflex, just the old habit of tucking a small doubt somewhere it might come in handy later, the way you pocket a stray coin because you never know when you'll be short.
And he pulled it apart in the light and said I can see you now, and his mother looked at me, and I felt the last door I'd been holding open with my whole body swing quietly shut.
I don't flinch. I told myself that the whole way home in the cold, past the dark shops, past her flower shop with its stupid cheerful wreath in the window.
I have never once flinched. Not when my mother was dying and there was no money for the room with the window, so she died looking at a wall.
Not at the funeral I paid for alone, that no one else came to.
Not at the other funeral, years before, the one nobody in this town knows about and I do not speak of and never will.
I am the one who stays calm while the floor drops out.
It is the only thing I have ever truly been good at, and it has kept me breathing when nothing and no one else would.
I'm not going to flinch now.
? ? ?
Here is what I keep circling back to, lying awake: it isn't me. I have to hold that or I'll go under, and I don't go under. I didn't do a single thing those people wouldn't have done in my shoes, and none of it—not one bit of it—would have mattered if she had just stayed gone.
But she didn't stay gone. That's the whole of it, right there.
Beth folded herself smaller and smaller for two years, disappearing by inches, exactly the way a smart woman does when she's losing, and I let myself believe she'd finish the job and vanish for good and leave the space she'd been standing in empty for me.
And instead she cut off her hair and threw her shutters open and went and got her whole life back, right out in the open where the whole town could gather round and admire it, with a good-looking man tucking flowers behind her ear—and the same people who couldn't get enough of her sad little story are now looking at me sideways over their pie and remembering, all at once, that they never did know where I came from.
That's the danger. Not her. The town. A month ago I was the brave girl who came home with nothing and saved the Vargas catering with her own two hands.
Now there's a pause when I walk into the diner.
Now Verna Pinch holds my eye a half-second too long, deciding something.
The story is slipping out of my hands, and a story is the only thing I have ever actually owned—not the money, never the money, just the version of me I could hand people so they'd keep looking at me the way I needed to be looked at. And I can feel that slipping too.
So I'll get it back. That's all. I've clawed worse than this back before, in colder towns than this one.
I've been thinking about Founders' Day. The whole town in the square, everyone watching, the lanterns up on the bandstand—the kind of stage where a thing can be made to land, where the right word dropped into the right ear at the right moment can turn a whole room.
They love Beth right now because they think she's the wronged one and I'm the shadow that wronged her.
But stories like that are strong the way ice is strong; you only have to give people one good reason to doubt the heroine and the whole sheet cracks, because underneath everything, a town would always rather watch a woman fall than watch one win. I've built my life on knowing that.
Beth and that ex of hers. There's something I can do with that—the engaged woman who threw her devoted fiancé away and took up with another man before the snow melted.
Said right. To the right ears. With exactly the right sorrow in my voice.
I'd never say a word against her, you all know that's not me.
I just hate to see Lonzo so destroyed when she's already moved on. I only worry.
I worry. It's the best word I've got. It's the whole trick in two syllables—the doubt goes in wearing the coat of concern, and it lives there, and there are no fingerprints on it, and by the time anyone thinks to ask where it came from, it's already theirs.
I lay in the dark and planned it out the way I've planned everything in my life, from the outside, calm, watching myself do it like a stranger. The radiator banged. The walls kept their careful distance, the way walls do with me.
I have lost things before. But I have always, always landed somewhere—in this town, at that table, in that family, or in some other warm circle a few counties over that doesn't yet know to shut its doors against me.
One more good afternoon. That's all I need. One more afternoon where I tell the story right, in front of everyone, before she finishes telling it for me.
I don't flinch.