Chapter Twenty-Six
Alonzo
After Founders' Day I expected to feel lighter, and I didn't, and it took me a while to understand why.
I'd told the truth. The whole town knew it now.
Lola was gone, my family had come back to themselves, the weight I'd watched Beth carry alone for months had been set down in front of everyone and named for what it was.
By any reckoning I should have felt like a man who'd finally done the right thing.
But I kept waiting for the next part—the part where doing the right thing earned me something back.
I caught myself at it one morning over the comal, the old hunger taking shape in me before I'd even noticed it start: I confessed, I stood up in that square, I've been good all winter, surely now.
And I made myself stop, because I recognized it.
It was the same disease that had ruined everything in the first place, just wearing a nicer coat.
I'd spent two years doing things and expecting Beth to be the prize at the end of them.
The flowers, the truth, the public reckoning—if I'd done any of it to win her, then I hadn't learned a single thing this year.
I'd just gotten slicker at the performance.
So I sat with the hard version instead. The version where I'd hurt her past mending and the truth in the square didn't fix it and never would.
Where I'd become, finally, the man I should have been all along—too late, for nobody.
Where she got her bright life and her flower shop and maybe in time some better man, some Caleb who'd never had to grow into being decent because he already was, and I got to live the rest of mine knowing exactly what I'd thrown away and exactly whose fault it had been.
That version. I made myself live inside it for a few days, no fantasy allowed in. It was the worst thing I've ever done on purpose, and I think it might have been the first genuinely grown thing.
Which is the state Diego found me in, breaking down the line the Tuesday after.
He'd been quiet all night—quieter than usual, and Diego quiet is a different animal than most people quiet; it's a man building up to something. He scraped the flattop, set the spatula down, and said, not looking at me, "So what are you gonna do."
"About what."
"Don't." He looked over. "About Beth. You stood up in that square and told the whole town. Lola's gone. The family's right again." He spread his hands. "So. You don't figure you've earned something? After all that?"
And there it was—the exact temptation I'd spent three days starving out, handed back to me across the flattop by somebody who loved me and wanted, I could tell, for me to say yes. Yes, I earned it. Yes, surely now. It would have been so easy to take.
"No," I said. "No. That's the whole thing right there, Diego. That's how I got here in the first place."
"How you got where."
"Doing things and expecting her to be the prize at the end of them.
" I leaned on the counter. "If I switched the flowers and told the truth and stood up at Founders' Day so that she'd owe me—then I didn't change a damn thing this year.
I just learned to fake it better. Two years I treated her like something I deserved to keep instead of a person who gets to choose.
I don't get to keep doing that. Not even now. Especially not now."
Diego was quiet a moment. "So you do nothing."
"So I do nothing. I stay the man I'm figuring out how to be—because it's the right way to be a person, not because there's a Beth waiting at the finish line.
" Saying it out loud cost more than thinking it had.
"And she gets her life, and maybe some better man, and I live with what I did.
That's it. That's the honest shape of it. "
"That's bleak, hermano."
"It's true, though." I picked the pan back up. "First time in a long time I'm not dressing one up to make myself feel better."
He studied me a second. Then he did something he hadn't done in months—reached over and squeezed the back of my neck, rough, the way he had when we were kids.
"For what it's worth," he said, "you're a better man tonight than you were a year ago.
I didn't think you'd get here. I'm not saying it fixes anything. Just saying I see it."
It was more than he'd said to me since the night I told the family the truth. I had to swallow before I could get back to the pans.
? ? ?
Jesse Thompson found me by the trucks two evenings later, which is where everything important seems to happen to me lately.
I tensed up. The last time Jesse had me by the trucks he'd taken me apart, quiet and total, and I'd deserved every word. But he just leaned on the tailgate next to me and looked out at the lot.
"My sister's doing good," he said. "In case you were wondering. Shop's busy. She's laughing again—the real one, not the one she did for everybody's benefit there for a while."
"I'm glad."
"Mm." A while passed. "What you did at Founders' Day.
Saying all that in front of everybody." He worked his jaw.
"I'm not gonna call it beautiful, since half of why it had to be said is on you.
But it took something. I been around long enough to know the difference between a man performing sorry and a man just telling the truth and eating it.
That was the second one." He glanced at me.
"Didn't think you had it in you. I had you written off. "
"You had every reason to."
"I did." He pushed off the tailgate. "I lost my wife, you know.
Few years back. That's why I came out here, to be near family.
" He said it plain, a man who'd carried it long enough to set it down without dropping anything.
"So I know a little about a thing being gone and not getting it back no matter what you do.
And here's what I learned, and then I'm gonna go, 'cause this is more than I've said to you in my life.
" He looked at me straight. "You don't get to decide if you get her back.
That's not yours. You did your part wrong for two years, and now you've started doing it right, and that's all you control.
The rest is hers. And if you actually love her—the real thing, not the wanting-to-win thing—you'll let it be hers and mean it. Even if it goes a way you can't stand."
I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say that wouldn't cheapen it.
"She's the best person I know," Jesse said, walking off. "Including me. Including you, obviously." And then, almost to himself, not unkind: "Be a damn shame if she settled. For anybody. Including the easy one." And he was gone into the dark.
Including the easy one. I didn't let myself read too much into it. But I heard it, and I turned it over a long time standing there in the cold, and I made myself put it down, because hope was just the hunger wearing a different coat, and I'd starved that out for a reason.
? ? ?
I wrote her the letter that night. The last one—I'd decided.
I'd sent notes through the winter, the kind that didn't ask for anything, and God help me, I'd watched from a parked car like a man with no dignity left as she carried them inside instead of leaving them on the step.
But this one was different, and I knew it while my pen was moving, because this one wasn't a foothold. It was a letting go.
I told her she didn't owe me anything—not a conversation, not an answer, not a backward look.
I told her the flowers would keep coming because her shop was the best in three counties and that had nothing to do with us.
I told her I'd spent two years loving her like she was a thing I deserved to keep, and that I finally understood she was a person who got to choose, and that I'd made it almost impossible for her to choose me, and that I'd earned that.
And I told her I hoped—whatever she did, whoever she did it with—that she'd be chosen, first, every single day, the way I never once managed.
And then I told her I wasn't going to come around anymore. That I'd be at the restaurant if she ever wanted to find me, and I'd wait the rest of my life and never hold it against her if she didn't, and either way I'd be all right, because I'd finally become a man who could be all right.
You were never chosen last because you were worth less, I wrote at the end.
You were chosen last because I was a coward who took the surest thing in my life for granted.
That was never about you. It was always, only, about what was broken in me—and I think I've finally fixed it, Beth, too late to do you any good.
I'm sorry. I love you. Go be happy. You don't have to tell me how it turns out. —A.
I read it once. Didn't soften it, didn't sharpen it into a hook. Sealed it.
The next morning I drove it over and put it through her mail slot before the shop opened, before she'd be there—and this time I did not wait around the corner to see if she'd take it in.
I drove back to work and started the morning, because the morning was the work in front of me, and I'd finally learned to let the rest of it go.
It was the freest and the worst I've ever felt in the same hour.
I think that might be what it feels like to actually love somebody. I wouldn't have known before. I was forty kinds of fool for two years.
But I knew it now. And I'd let her go, and meant it. The rest was hers.