Chapter Twenty-Five
Beth
The week after Founders' Day, the apologies came.
I'd braced for them to feel like a procession—everyone who'd whispered me down filing past to be absolved—and some of them were exactly that.
The church women, the diner crowd, quick and a little self-serving, wanting me to say the words that would let them feel better about having been wrong.
We're so glad it all came out. We always wondered.
I gave them what they came for. It cost me nothing by then, and I'd discovered there's a strange flat power in absolving people who haven't earned it: you watch the relief wash over their faces and you understand, standing there, that their comfort was never in your gift to begin with, and you hand it to them anyway, and you feel almost nothing, and the almost-nothing is its own kind of healed.
The one that mattered came on a Wednesday, and it was Pilar.
She didn't buy flowers as a cover, the way the others had, clutching a single carnation for something to do with their hands.
She came in empty-handed and stood in the middle of my shop, this woman who had taught me to fold empanadas and laughed until she cried at how badly I did it, who had also stood in this exact spot in the fall and told me I used to be a sweet girl—and she looked older than I'd remembered, and smaller, the way grief shrinks a person, and she said, "I don't have any right to be in here. "
"You can be in here."
"I said a terrible thing to you. In this shop.
" Her voice was steady but I could see what it was costing to keep it that way.
"I told you that you used to be sweet. Like you'd done something to yourself.
Like the hardness was yours, that you'd grown it on purpose to spite us, instead of—" She pressed her lips together until they went white.
"Instead of it being something we put there.
The four of us, with our hands. I have thought about that sentence every single day since, Beth.
I lie awake with it. I taught my children that jealousy is poison—I preached it, in my own kitchen, like I was somebody wise—and I said it to your face over and over, and the whole time the only poison in that house was the woman I was defending, and the only thing you were guilty of was being angry in the one way you had left after we'd taken all the others.
And I called your anger jealousy. I made my own future daughter feel like she was going crazy because I was too comfortable to look at what was right in front of me. "
I'd imagined this conversation in the bad weeks too. I'd imagined it would feel like a wrong being set finally, mercifully right.
It didn't. I'm learning that almost nothing feels the way you rehearse it.
It just felt like watching a kind woman I had genuinely loved understand, far too late to help either of us, exactly what her kindness had been worth when she spent all of it on keeping the peace instead of one cent of it on me.
Her kindness had been real. That was the terrible part. It had just never once been brave.
"It really hurt," I said. The same words I'd given Mari.
I'd decided I was done shrinking the truth to fit the listener.
"And I don't mean the parking lot, or the wedding coming apart.
I mean you. All of you, but you especially, because I loved you the most and I trusted you the most. You looked at me drowning and you decided the problem was that I wouldn't stop splashing.
And you said it so gently, Pilar. That was the worst of it.
You broke my heart in the kindest possible voice, and it took me months to understand that gentle and kind aren't the same thing—that you can do a cruel thing very gently and it's still the cruel thing. "
"I know." Her eyes had filled. She let them, didn't wipe at them, a dignified woman letting me see the cost.
"You don't, though. You keep saying it and I believe you mean it, but you don't know.
" I wasn't cruel. I just needed it to stand at its full height between us, once, before either of us tried to be gracious.
"You don't know what it is to make yourself smaller and smaller at a table full of people who love you, and to be told the shrinking is your own fault, and to start to agree with them.
To look in the mirror and wonder if maybe you really are the jealous, difficult woman they keep describing, because surely all these people who love you can't all be wrong.
You don't know what it costs to climb back out of that and remember who you actually are.
Being sorry isn't the same as having been down there. "
"No," she said. "It isn't." And she didn't argue, and she didn't reach for any grace I hadn't handed her, and then she said the thing that undid me.
"I'm not here about Alonzo. I want you to hear that plainly, because I know what it would look like—a mother coming to plead for her son.
I'm not. Whatever happens or doesn't happen there is yours, completely, and after this year I would sooner cut off my own hand than put a thumb on that scale.
" She drew a breath. "I'm here because you were mine.
In my heart. From the first Sunday you sat at our table and tried to fold those empanadas.
You were mine, and I failed you, and I needed to stand in the place where I hurt you and say so out loud.
That's all this is. That's the whole of it. "
And that—I'm not here about Alonzo—was what broke the last cold thing in me, because it was precisely the sentence none of them would have known how to say in the fall.
In the fall it had always, always been about the family, about the peace, about the boy and his comfort.
This was a woman who had finally, at terrible cost, learned how to come to me about me.
"Stay for coffee," I heard myself say, and my own voice surprised me. "There's a pot in the back."
She cried then. Quietly, the way the dignified ones do, with her hand pressed flat to her mouth like she could hold it in.
And we drank coffee among the buckets of peonies, the two of us, and we didn't fix anything—because some things don't get fixed, I'd learned that this year too, they only get carried differently, set on a different shoulder, walked with a different gait.
But it was a start at carrying it differently.
It was Abuela's hands in the square all over again: too late to give me back the year, and somehow, impossibly, not nothing.
? ? ?
Rafael came on Friday, and he was the hardest to watch, because he'd been the easiest to charm and so had the furthest to fall in his own estimation.
He'd loved Lola's flattery the way a man loves being told he's still young, and now he stood in my shop turning his hat in his big hands like a boy called to the principal, and he couldn't quite get to the center of it.
"Mija," he kept starting, "I—you know I always—" and then losing the thread.
I let him find his way. I didn't make it hard, because there's no profit in watching a proud old man humble himself past what's useful.
When he finally got it out—a clumsy, genuine, I should have seen, I should have stood up for you, I am ashamed—I touched his arm and told him it was all right, which wasn't quite true, but which was the true-enough thing that let us both keep our footing.
He left looking like a man who'd set down a sack he'd been carrying a long way.
Mija, he said again at the door, and this time it landed different than it used to, back when it had been easy.
Now it cost him something to say it, and so it finally meant something.
And through all of it, in the spaces between all of it, was the thing nobody named directly but everybody orbited: Alonzo.
He didn't come.
That was the loudest thing in my whole spring.
After Founders' Day—after standing up in the middle of the town he'd lived in his whole life and handing them the worst true thing about himself to lift a weight off a woman he had no reason to think would ever take him back—he didn't come to my shop, didn't call, didn't send so much as a folded note.
The weekly flower order kept arriving, paid full price, but it was Diego who came for it now, quiet Diego with his careful eyes, and I understood the message in that the way I understood weather: Alonzo was giving me room.
He'd said it in the square, in front of everyone—I'm not saying it to get anything back, I gave that up—and he was, maddeningly, infuriatingly, actually living inside the promise.
And here is the thing I could hardly stand to admit, scrubbing buckets at the end of those long spring days: it would have been so much easier if he'd pushed.
If he'd shown up on my step with his heart in his hands the way the old Alonzo would have, making it about his pain and his hope, asking me—the way he always used to—to manage his feelings on top of carrying my own.
I had years of practice holding the line against that man.
I could have done it in my sleep. I knew every move in his book.
I didn't know what to do with this one, who'd told the truth and then stepped all the way back and left me alone with the whole of my own life.
There's no defense in the manual for a man who simply stops asking anything of you.
He'd taken away the only weapon I was sure how to use, which was my anger at being pursued, and left me standing in the quiet holding nothing but the question itself.
? ? ?
"You could just date Caleb," Carmen said Tuesday, over coffee, watching my face the way you watch a struck match to see if it'll catch.
"I'm not going to date Caleb."
"Why not. He's gorgeous, he's kind, he fixes things without being asked, he's obsessed with rescuing baby animals, and the man looks at you like—"
"He doesn't look at me like anything. We're friends.
There has never been one second of anything else and we both know it, whatever this town wants to believe.
" I turned a peony stem in my fingers, not meeting her eyes.
"And I'm not going to take a good man and use him as a way of not dealing with—" I stopped.
Carmen didn't fill the silence. She just let the half-sentence hang there in the air between us, the way I'd left it, unfinished and ringing.
Because the truth was that Caleb was the test, in a way—not a romantic one, there'd never been a flicker of that and there never would be—but the test all the same.
He was the safe door standing wide open.
The woodstove in January. A good, gentle man who would never once in his life make me feel like too much, who'd give me a warm uncomplicated life on his restored porch with his rescued cats, and I could have walked through that door any day that whole spring and been comfortable inside it until I died.
He'd have been a wonderful thing to settle for.
Some people build entire good lives on settling for the warm thing, and they're not even wrong to.
And I didn't want it. That was the answer Carmen was sitting there waiting for me to say out loud, and I couldn't quite, not yet, but I knew it with my whole body, turning that peony stem.
I didn't want safe. I didn't want the woodstove.
I'd had two years of loving a man who set me on fire and chose everyone else, and the cruelest, most inconvenient truth of my entire life was that the comfortable warmth of a good man I didn't love would not, could not, was never going to reach the place where that fire had been.
I still loved Alonzo. That was the thing humming under everything else, under the anger and the vindication and the shop and the spring.
It had never actually been the question—I'd loved him the whole way through, loved him even punching his old friend in a parking lot, loved him handing back the ring with my hands shaking.
The love had never once been in doubt. What had been in doubt—the expensive thing I'd had to learn alone over a whole winter—was whether love was enough.
Whether a man could love you with his entire heart and still fail you on every ordinary Tuesday that mattered.
And the answer, the one that had cost me everything to learn, was: yes.
He could. He had. Love hadn't been the problem.
Love is almost never the problem. It's just the thing everybody points at so they don't have to look at the harder thing standing next to it.
So the question was never do I love him.
I'd wasted no time at all on that one. The question was the other two, the ones with no easy answer: had he truly become a man who would choose me—first, plainly, every unremarkable day?
And even if he had—even if—was there any way on earth I could let myself trust it, after what trusting it had cost me last time?
I didn't have those answers yet. But I noticed, watching the match burn down in Carmen's eyes, that I'd stopped reaching automatically for the safe one.
That I'd let the dangerous half-sentence hang there instead of finishing it the comfortable way.
And after the year I'd had, that small thing felt enormous.
"Drink your coffee," I told Carmen. "And mind your own business."
She grinned, slow and knowing, because she'd gotten exactly the answer she'd come fishing for—which was the one I hadn't said, the one sitting in the unfinished sentence, louder than anything I could have spoken out loud.