Chapter Twenty-Four
Lola
It takes less time than you'd think to pack a life when you've never been allowed to gather much of one.
I had the duffel still—I'd never fully unpacked it, not in a year and a half, not really; some part of me always keeps the duffel where I can reach it, half-full, ready, and that tells you everything about the kind of life I've had that I could ever tell you.
The rest fit in two boxes and a garment bag.
My hands knew the work without me; they've packed this same duffel in this same order in a dozen towns, and there's a terrible restfulness in that, in doing a thing your body has done so many times it doesn't need you present for it.
Fold, roll, corner, fill the gaps with the soft things.
The radiator clanked while I worked, the way it had clanked every night I lay awake in that rented room planning how to hold onto a thing I had already lost.
The last thing in, the way it's the last thing in every time, was my mother.
She rides in a plain tin at the bottom of the duffel, under everything, because there has never been anywhere to put her down.
No family plot. No mantel in a house that stays a house.
You'd think a person would find, in three years of towns, one windowsill steady enough to set her mother on—but you'd be wrong, and I stopped looking for it a long time ago.
She goes where I go. She has seen every warm kitchen I ever talked my way into and every gray dawn I ever drove out of, from the bottom of a bag, in the dark.
I settled the boxes on top of her the way you'd tuck someone in, and I did not think about it too hard, because thinking about it too hard is a luxury for people who have somewhere to arrive.
I did not cry. I want that on the record, even though there's no one left to keep the record.
I buried both my parents and I didn't cry at the second funeral, because there was no one there to cry at—crying is a performance and a performance needs an audience, and I had neither.
I didn't cry packing the duffel for the same reason.
Alone, tears are just salt water. They don't buy you a single thing.
I learned that before I learned my letters, and it is, God help me, the most useful thing I know.
I'd misjudged it. That's the only honest way to say it, and I am, in the end, honest with myself, which is more than most of the people who think themselves better than me can manage.
I read the room wrong. I pushed the lever one time too many in front of one crowd too many, and I let Alonzo Vargas—soft, guilty, finally-grown-a-spine Alonzo—catch me flat-footed in the middle of a square, and I said the one sentence in the world I should have swallowed.
You came to me. A year and a half of the most careful work of my life, and I undid all of it in three words, because for one half-second I wanted—more than I wanted to keep everything I'd built—to wipe that righteous, wounded, decent look off his face.
That was the flinch. I'd told myself my whole life that I don't flinch. Turns out everybody does, exactly once, if you corner them hard enough in front of enough people. Now I know that about myself. It's worth the knowing. It cost enough.
? ? ?
Pilar came to the door. I'll give her that—she came herself, which none of the others had the stomach for.
She stood in the hall in her good coat with her hands folded in front of her, and she did not come in, and she did not sit, and I understood that she'd rehearsed this in the car the way decent people rehearse the things that frighten them.
"We won't be needing you at the restaurant anymore," she said. Quiet. Not cruel. Pilar was never once cruel; that was always her whole trouble. "Rafael's in agreement. I wanted to say it to your face. You deserved that much—to hear it from a person and not a letter."
I could have gone quietly. I want to be clear that I knew, standing there, that quiet was the smart play—take the coat, close the door, be gone by dawn with my dignity in one piece.
But there's an old thing in me that can't leave a warm room without reaching for it one last time, and I heard myself reach.
"I saved your catering." My voice came out even. "When you were drowning in it after your regular girl quit and half your staff walked—I'm the one who kept it running. I worked myself to the bone for you people and asked for nothing."
"You did." She didn't deny it. She didn't even flinch from it, which I hadn't expected.
"You worked harder than anyone. And we were grateful, and we would have given you a home for the rest of your natural life for it, Lola.
" Something moved across her face then, and it wasn't anger, and it wasn't even quite hurt—it was a grief that had somehow made room in itself for me, which was unbearable.
"That's the thing I can't get past. That's the thing I keep turning over.
We would have. You never had to do any of it.
You never had to take one single thing from anybody in that family.
All you ever had to do was sit down at the table and let us love you, and we'd have just—" her hands opened, helpless, "—we'd have just given it to you.
Freely. That was always on offer. You couldn't see it. "
And there it was, the sentence, laid down soft in a hallway, that I have carried out of that town and will carry into the next one and the one after that, because I don't have anywhere to set it down either.
We'd have just given it to you.
I didn't have an answer. I still don't, if I'm honest, and I'm always honest in the places no one can see.
Because she was wrong and she was right at the very same time, and both of them cut.
Nobody has ever given me a thing they didn't later find the seam to take back.
I learned that in a house I don't talk about, before I could read, and I have watched it prove true in every warm kitchen since.
Pilar Vargas, with her open arms and her endless pots of food, has no idea—none, not the faintest—what it does to the inside of a person to spend an entire life knowing that the warm room is always, always rented, and that the rent always, always comes due, and that the ones who tell you it's free are just the ones who haven't sent the bill yet.
But I also know—in the cold flat middle of the night, where I keep the things I can't use—that she meant it. That this once, with these particular people, in that particular kitchen, the room might truly have been free.
And I will never, to the last hour of my life, be able to believe it.
That's the thing none of them will ever understand, and the thing I gave up trying to explain to anyone a long time ago.
Some of us are not built to live in houses.
Some of us are built out of the leaving—out of the packing and the driving and the gray dawns—and you can set us down in the warmest home on this earth and we will still stand in the middle of it with one hand on the duffel, waiting for the floor to go.
And a woman who spends her whole life waiting for the floor to go will, in the end, when the waiting gets too loud, pull it out from under herself—just to be the one who did it.
Just to stop the terrible waiting for someone else to.
"Goodbye, Lola," Pilar said. And she meant even that kindly, which was the very worst of all of it. A cruel goodbye I could have driven out on clean. A kind one follows you.
She turned and went down the walk, an old woman in a good coat who'd come in person to fire the girl who'd wronged her, because that was the decent thing, and I stood in the door and watched her go and felt—nothing I would name, nothing I would give her the satisfaction of, even alone.
I shut the door before she reached her car.
? ? ?
I left before dawn. It's how I do most things; the leaving goes easier when the world isn't awake to watch it.
The town was gray and empty and the bandstand in the square still had the paper lanterns strung up from Founders' Day, sagging and rain-spotted now, and I drove past the exact patch of grass where it had all come apart in the sun, and I did not slow down, and I did not look at it long.
There are other towns. There have always been other towns; that's the one mercy in a life like mine.
Somewhere out ahead of me on some road there is a diner that needs a hostess who'll never call in sick, a little business drowning that needs a sharp girl who works twice as hard as anyone and asks for nothing up front, a family with a long warm table and a generous heart and no earthly idea—not yet—that they'll ever need to close their ranks against anyone.
I'll find them. I always find them; I have a gift for the finding.
I'll be useful, and then I'll be necessary, and for a little while, a season, a year, it will feel exactly like home.
It always feels like home for a little while.
That's the part I don't say out loud, even to myself, most nights: that the little while is real.
That I'm not pretending, in the little while.
That when I sit at their table and remember the grandmother's medicine and get to the linens before anyone asks, some starved thing in me is warm, and believes it, right up until the day it ends—and it always ends, because I always end it, because I cannot bear to wait for them to.
I don't think about Beth, driving out. People imagine I must—that I lie awake burning over her, the woman who beat me.
I don't. She was never the point of any of it.
She was just the one already standing in the warm spot I needed, and she turned out to have a spine I'd badly underestimated and a whole town that, when it finally troubled itself to look, chose to love her instead of me.
Good for her. She earned it the slow, stupid, honest way I've never once had the luxury of.
She'll have her flower shop and her grown-up boy and her small bright ordinary life, and every bit of it fits her, and none of it has one thing to do with me anymore.
My mother rides in the tin at the bottom of the bag. I keep the duffel where I can reach it.
The sun came up somewhere behind me as I crossed the county line, and I didn't look in the mirror, because there was nothing back there I needed to see, and the road out ahead ran long and gray and exactly as empty as I am, and I drove down into it the way I have driven down into everything my whole life.
Calm. Careful.
Already, before the town was even out of sight, planning the next warm room.