Chapter Twenty-Seven
Beth
The letter was on the floor under the mail slot when I opened up Thursday, and I knew his handwriting before I picked it up, and I almost didn't read it standing there, because I'd gotten good over the winter at saving his notes for later, for when I had my walls braced.
I read it standing there anyway.
And it wrecked me, quietly, among the buckets, in a way none of the others had—because all the others, even the good ones, had still been reaching for me.
Even the one that didn't ask for anything had been a foothold; I'd said so myself, dangerous precisely because it left the door cracked.
This one wasn't a foothold. This one closed the door, gently, from his side.
You don't have to tell me how it turns out.
He'd let me go. He'd actually, finally, let me go, and meant it, and the maddening, upside-down truth of it was that the only thing in two years that had ever made me want to reach back for him was the moment he stopped reaching for me.
I stood there with it a long time.
You were never chosen last because you were worth less.
I read that line more times than I'll admit.
Because it was the whole wound, wasn't it.
That was the thing I'd never been able to say even to my mother—that underneath all the anger about the flood and the wedding and Lola, there'd been a quieter, uglier conviction I'd carried since I was the oopsie baby in a house of grown-ups, the late surprise, the one who had to be a little bit easier to keep than everybody else: that I was, somehow, the thing that got chosen after the real choices were made.
He'd named it. He'd reached all the way down to the bottom of me and named the exact thing, and then told me it was never true, and that the fault was his and not mine, and that he was sorry, and that I should go be happy without him.
I put the letter in the drawer of the hall table, eventually, with the others. But I didn't stop thinking about it for one minute of that whole day.
? ? ?
I went to see Caleb that evening. I told myself it was to talk about the porch boxes.
It wasn't, and I think we both knew it the second I walked up the steps of his grandfather's house, which he'd brought all the way back to life—new paint, the rot cut out, light in the windows, a place made to look loved again, exactly the thing he was best at.
We sat on the finished porch with the spring dusk coming down, and I didn't say anything for a while, and Caleb, who never pushed, didn't push.
"He let me go," I said finally. "Alonzo. He wrote me a letter telling me I don't owe him anything and he's not going to come around anymore and I should go be happy. With—" I made myself say it. "With anybody. He said it real plain."
Caleb nodded slowly, looking out at the yard. "And how's that sitting?"
"Terrible." I laughed, a little wet. "It's sitting terrible, Caleb.
Two years of him chasing me and failing me and making everything about his feelings, and I knew exactly how to hold the line against all of it, and now he does the one thing I had no defense for, which is stop, and I can't—" I pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes.
"I'm in trouble. I think I'm in real trouble here. "
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, gently, the kindest man I know, "Can I say a thing, and you don't have to like it?"
"You're going to anyway."
"I am." He turned to look at me. "You keep coming around here.
To the clinic, to the porch, to me. And I want to be real careful about this, because you're one of the best friends I've got and I'm not—Beth, there's nothing I'd ever say to push you anywhere.
But I think part of why you keep coming around is that I'm safe.
I'm the woodstove. Nobody ever got their heart broke standing next to a woodstove.
" A small, rueful smile. "And you could do that, you know.
You could keep standing next to safe things for the rest of your life, and they'd keep you warm, and you'd never once have to be that scared again.
Some people do exactly that. It's not even the wrong call, for some people. "
"But," I said.
"But I don't think it's you." He said it like he was sure of it. "I think you're a woman who'd rather be cold and honest than warm and lying to herself. I've watched you all spring. You don't want a woodstove, Beth. You never did. You're just scared of the fire, and God knows you've got cause."
I didn't say anything. The dusk went a deeper blue.
"For what it's worth," Caleb said, looking back out at the yard, "people change.
Not most of 'em. But some. I've seen it.
And from everything I hear—and I hear a lot, town this size—that man changed.
The slow real kind, not the kind that lasts a weekend.
" He shrugged. "I'm not telling you to go to him.
That's not mine to tell. I'm just saying don't not go to him because you're scared.
Scared's a bad reason to make a forever decision.
I'd hate to see you settle for safe and call it being smart.
" A beat, and then, lighter, letting me off the hook: "And I'd hate to lose my best customer because she married her ex and got weird about coming to the clinic. "
I laughed, properly this time. "You'd never lose me at the clinic. Those kittens are the best thing in my week."
"Damn right they are." He grinned. And then, almost shy, looking at his hands: "There's, uh.
There's a new vet tech started up at the county clinic.
Rosa. She's—we've gotten coffee a couple times.
" The tips of his ears went red. "So. You're not the only one figuring things out, is what I'm saying.
Don't go thinking I'm sitting out here pining over you, Thompson, I've got my own situation developing. "
"Caleb Monroe." I put my hand over my heart. "Coffee. Twice. In this economy."
"Get off my porch," he said, laughing, and threw a dish towel at me, and I caught it, and that was the whole of it—the cleanest, warmest, most uncomplicated closing of a door two people ever managed, two friends who'd never once been anything else letting the town's gossip die unfed and being glad for each other instead.
? ? ?
I drove home in the dark with the windows down and the spring air coming in, and I thought about the letter in my drawer, and the man across town who'd finally stopped chasing me, and the safe warm door I'd just gently, finally closed.
Don't settle for safe and call it being smart.
I thought about being twenty-five and choosing my own life in this town, alone, before any of them.
I thought about building the shop with my own two hands, the one thing that had only ever been mine.
I thought about how I wasn't that scared, splintering girl from the parking lot anymore—I'd put myself back together over a long hard winter, brick by brick, and I was strong now, strong in a way I hadn't been even when I was happy, and a strong woman gets to want what she wants without it being a surrender.
I still loved him. That had never been the question.
The question had always been whether he'd become a man who would choose me, every ordinary Tuesday, first—and whether I was brave enough to find out for sure instead of hiding behind a wall I'd more than earned.
I pulled into my driveway and sat there with the engine ticking.
Then I went inside and I did not go to bed. I sat at the hall table with all his letters spread out in front of me, the whole winter's worth, the foolish ones and the brave ones and the last one that let me go, and I read them in order, start to finish, like a story.
And somewhere around midnight I made up my mind. Not from fear, and not from weakness, and not because he'd worn me down—he hadn't; he'd done the opposite; he'd stepped back and left the whole choice sitting in my hands where it belonged.
I made up my mind because I wanted to. From strength. On my terms.
I was going to go and have the real conversation. The whole of it. Everything I'd never said and everything I needed him to say. And then, only then, with all of it on the table in the light—I'd decide.
But I already knew. Sitting there at midnight with his letters, I think I already knew.