Chapter Twenty-Three
Beth
Founders' Day falls on the first Saturday of May, and it is the closest thing Hartsong has to a holiday it invented itself—the whole town pouring into the square, the bandstand strung with paper lanterns, every civic club and church group and small business setting up tables under the new green of the oaks.
I'd worked it every year since I opened.
My booth that morning was the best it had ever looked: buckets of peonies and the first sweet peas, ranunculus in six colors, a banner my own hands had painted.
People kept stopping to tell me so. I'd stopped flinching when they did.
Somewhere around midmorning I caught myself humming—under my breath, without deciding to, the way I hadn't in a year.
Not healed—I don't know that you ever get all the way healed—but light on my feet in the plain uncomplicated sun, with Carmen heckling me from the next table and Claire's kids stealing my ribbon and my father two booths down losing an argument about crappie to a man who'd never caught one.
Caleb came by for sweet peas for his grandfather's grave and stayed to fix the wobbling leg of my folding table without being asked, and went off again, easy, a friend.
Spring was all the way here. I had survived the thing that was supposed to end me, and here I was, humming, selling peonies in the sun.
I should have known the day wasn't going to let me keep it.
? ? ?
I didn't see how it started. I only heard my own name, the way you always somehow hear your own name across a crowd, and my body went cold before my mind caught up.
There was a knot of people over by the lemonade stand—the Pinch sisters, a few of the church women, Sherry Dukes with her phone already half-up out of pure habit—and Lola was in the middle of them, and the Vargas were nearby but not with her, I noticed; scattered at the edges, Pilar and Abuela on a bench, Diego leaning on a post with his arms crossed and his jaw set.
And Lola's voice carried, the way a voice does when it's pitched to carry while pretending it isn't.
"—and I'd never say a word against her, you all know that's not me," she was saying, soft and sorrowful, touching the corner of one dry eye.
"It just breaks my heart, is all. To see Lonzo so destroyed—that boy hasn't been himself in months—and meanwhile she's already, well.
You've all seen her and the Monroe boy. Engaged in the winter and stepping out with somebody new before the snow melted.
" A delicate catch in the throat. "I only worry what it does to Alonzo.
Watching her move on like he never mattered at all. "
I stood frozen behind my buckets with a wet stem dripping in my hand, and the old sickness came up my throat, the exact one from the Whitfield wedding, from the Sunday table, from every time this woman had painted me into a shape and handed it to a room.
There it is, I thought, sick and dull. She's doing it again.
Right here. In front of everybody. And some cowardly animal part of me wanted to sink down behind the table and let her, the way I'd let her all autumn, because fighting it had never once worked and had only ever made me look more like the crazy woman she was describing.
It was a good move. I'll give her that, even now. It was the exact move that had worked on this town for a year and a half. A season ago it would have gone through the square like fire.
It didn't catch.
I watched it not catch. There was a silence around the lemonade stand—the wrong kind, the kind that means a room has heard something and quietly declined to pick it up.
The church women found things to look at on the ground.
And Verna Pinch, who had narrated my disgrace all last autumn with her whole heart, looked at Lola with her mouth pressed to a flat line and said, into the pause, not unkindly, "Hm," and nothing else.
Just that. Hm. One syllable, and a world of having reconsidered inside it.
And the not-catching was so total, so foreign to her, that I watched it rattle Lola down to the foundation. I watched her feel a room refuse her for the first time in her life, and I watched her do the thing cornered people do, which is grab the broken lever with both hands and pull harder.
"I mean, honestly." Sharper now, the sorrow slipping off it. "After everything that family did for her? Pilar treated her like a daughter. And the minute it got hard she threw a punch in a parking lot and ran off to play house with her ex. I'm sorry, but that's the truth nobody wants to say out—"
"Lola."
Alonzo's voice.
He'd come up from the El Colibrí tables with a serving tray still in his hands, and I hadn't seen him arrive, and he set the tray down on the corner of the lemonade stand, slow and deliberate, and the whole knot of people turned.
My stomach dropped clean through the grass, because I knew that voice.
It was the quiet one. The one from all the way underneath the noise.
"Don't," he said. "Don't do that. Not to her. Not anymore."
Lola turned to him and the wounded face came up like a curtain going down, smooth, instant. "Lonzo—I was defending you. I'm only saying what everyone here is already—"
"Nobody's thinking it but you." No heat in it, which was somehow worse than heat, and a murmur went through the little crowd, and more people were drifting over now the way they do when they smell something, and I saw Mari come out of the drifting crowd and stop dead when she understood what she was watching.
Alonzo looked at his sister for a second.
Then he looked at his mother on the bench.
Then he looked at the whole gathering square, and he took a breath, and half a second before he opened his mouth I understood exactly what he was about to do and my hand went up toward him without my permission—no, Alonzo, don't, not for me, not like this—and there was nothing on earth I could have done to stop it.
"Most of you spent last fall thinking Beth was jealous," he said, loud, clear, to the town. "Paranoid. Cold. Impossible to her own fiancé's family over nothing but a friend."
"Lonzo." Lola's voice had a warning under it now. "Stop."
He didn't stop. "I let you think it. My family let you think it. We looked her in the face and told her she was imagining things—"
"That is not what—"
"—and she wasn't." It came out of him hard enough that Lola actually took a step back.
He gentled it, but he didn't stop. "Lola and I were together.
Years ago. Before Beth—but we were together, more than friends, and I never told one single person in this town, and I never told Beth, and then I let this woman sit at my mother's table calling herself Beth's friend while all of you decided Beth was out of her mind for not wanting her there. "
The gasp went through the square like wind through the oaks.
I heard it. I heard Sherry Dukes breathe "oh my God" behind her glowing phone.
I heard a church woman say "mercy" under her breath.
I felt the whole green center of the town tip and swing, and I stood there behind my peonies unable to move, unable to breathe, my own heartbeat loud in my ears.
"She knew something was wrong because something was wrong." His voice had gone rough but it did not break. "The only thing Beth ever did was love me more than I had any right to, and mind that I never once put her first. That's it. That's the whole crime you all convicted her of."
"Alonzo." Diego's voice, low and even, from over by the post—not stopping his brother. Backing him. Just his name, laid down like a hand on a shoulder. Go on. I've got you.
Alonzo swallowed. "So if you want to be ashamed of how somebody got treated in this town this year," he said, "be ashamed of how we treated her.
Not her." He found me across the crowd then, and his eyes were wrecked and steady at the very same time, and the whole square followed his gaze to where I stood frozen at my booth.
"Not her," he said again, quieter, but the hush was so total it carried anyway.
"Me. And I'm not saying it to get anything back—I gave that up, I know what I threw away.
I'm saying it because it's true, and because you should never have had to stand alone in it, Beth. Not for one day."
? ? ?
I have thought, since, about what it cost him.
To stand in the middle of the town he'd lived in his whole life and hand it the worst true thing about himself, on purpose, out loud, to lift a weight off a woman he had every reason to believe would never take him back.
The old Alonzo would have died before he let himself be seen like that.
The old Alonzo had, in a way—that was the whole disease, wasn't it, two years of it: a man who'd do anything, tell any small lie, take any easy road, rather than be the one standing exposed in the open.
This one set down a tray of somebody's lemonade and told the truth and asked for nothing.
And here's the part the town gets wrong in the telling now, the part I have to keep setting straight in my own head: he didn't ruin Lola. He just stopped holding her up. And the difference between those two things is the difference between everything.
Because the second he let go, she had nothing under her—and she did the rest herself, right there in the sun, in front of God and the lemonade stand.
"He's lying," she tried, turning to the crowd, and her voice had gone wrong, too high, the sorrow curdled out of it. "He's—can you not see what he's doing? He's making himself the—"
"Lola." He said it tired.
And that was the thing that broke her. Not an attack—his weariness.
The way you'd say the name of someone you'd finally stopped protecting.
The mask came off her all at once, and I watched it go; I was close enough to watch it go.
The sorrow, the brave little catch, the whole gentle brave-little-stray of her—it dropped clean off her face, and what was underneath was cold and fast and cornered and ugly, and she rounded on him with her voice flat and venomous and pitched, for one fatal second, to carry.
"You coward." It cracked across the square. "You begged me. For years. You came to me, every time, you came crawling to me when she bored you, don't you dare stand up there and play the—"
She heard it a half-beat too late.
I watched her hear it. I watched You came to me land in the middle of a silent square full of the Pinch sisters and the church women and Sherry's little recording light, and I watched her understand, in real time, that she had just said out loud, in her own voice, the one thing she'd spent a year and a half insisting was the other way around.
Her mouth stayed open on the next word that never came.
And the town saw her. All at once, the way a crowd sees—a hundred faces arriving at the same understanding in the same second—they saw the actual shape of her.
Not the brave girl who came home with nothing.
The woman who'd threaded herself into a good family and turned them against the best of them and lied about it with her hand pressed flat to her heart.
I felt the square finish turning. It's a real thing, a town turning against someone; it has a temperature, and the temperature dropped.
It was Abuela who ended it.
She got up off the bench—this tiny woman, eighty years old, taking her time, and the whole square waited on her because you wait on Abuela—and she crossed the grass and stood in front of Lola and did not raise her voice one inch.
"We took you in," she said. Quiet, and it carried to the back of the square anyway, the way true things do.
"We fed you at our table. We believed every word out of your mouth.
We let you tell us our own daughter's heart was poison, and we listened.
" Her chin lifted. "You will not sit at my table again. Not while I live."
And she turned her back on Lola—the whole, slow, total, final turning of an old woman's back, which is a more complete thing than any words could be—and she walked to where I stood frozen behind my flowers, and she reached up and took both my hands in her small dry papery ones, and her eyes were streaming, and she said:
"Mija. Forgive an old fool. I chose so wrong."
I didn't have a single word. There weren't any.
I just held Abuela's hands in the spring sunshine while behind her the town closed, quiet and complete, against Lola Marchetti—and Lola stood alone in the exact center of the square she'd chosen to make her stand in, and understood, I think, all the way down, that there was nothing left in this whole town worth trying to save.
She didn't cry. I'll give her that, to the very end.
She looked around the square once, slow, counting what she had left and finding it was nothing, and then she lifted her chin the way she'd lifted it her whole life, and she walked out through the middle of all of us, straight-backed, and the crowd parted around her the way a crowd parts around a thing it has decided it is finished with.
Sherry got every second of it. It was in the Buzz before Lola reached her car.
The band started up again after a while, uncertain at first, then finding the tune, and the day tried to close back over the wound of it the way a small town's day always does.
And I stood there holding an eighty-year-old woman's weeping face against my shoulder, vindicated at last in front of the entire town that had broken me—and I waited, God help me, for the thing I'd been so sure I'd feel.
I keep going back to that. I'd rehearsed this exact moment in the blackest weeks of the winter, so certain it would land like winning, and I stood there in the sun and waited, and it didn't come.
Abuela's tears went warm through my shirt.
Across the square Alonzo stayed exactly where he was, hands empty at his sides, not taking one step toward me—holding himself all the way back, letting me have the whole of it without making a single part of it about him.
Verna Pinch was watching me now, her flat mouth gone soft.
Somebody's child shrieked with laughter over by the bandstand.
And what came up in me instead was quieter than triumph, and much harder to hold, and it took me days to find the word for it.
Seen. That was the word. They had finally, all of them, in the sun, seen me.
Too late to give me back the year they took. But not, it turned out—and this is the thing that undid me, standing there—not too late to mean something anyway.