Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
"Everything you just said is true." My voice wouldn't come out steady and I quit trying to make it.
"I'm not going to soften one word of it.
The flood—I didn't check because I didn't want to check, because being the one who came running felt like being a good man, and I'd built my whole idea of myself on being the one who runs in for everybody.
It never cost me a thing until it cost me you.
" I made myself keep my eyes on hers. "The wedding—I nodded along with her version because I'd stopped paying enough attention to have a version of my own.
And that's worse than lying, Beth. Do you understand that that's worse?
I'd let you go so blurry in my own head that when she painted over you, I couldn't even find the real you to hold up against it.
And Lola—" I said it flat, no cushion, because a cushion would have been for me and not for her.
"I should have told you the first week we got serious.
Four sentences. Lola and I have history, it was years ago, it's long dead, I want you to hear it from me and not from anyone else.
That's all it would have taken, ever. And I didn't say them, because telling you felt complicated and staying quiet felt easy, and I chose easy—the way I chose easy about every single thing—and then I stood by and let you carry the blame for a lie that was mine.
You weren't jealous. You weren't crazy. You were the only person in that whole building with your eyes open, and I let them break you for it, and I will be sorry for that until the day I die. "
She sat very still, listening, giving me nothing, and I made myself keep going into the nothing.
"And I'm not going to sit here and put it on her," I said.
"I could. It'd be so easy—she's gone, she was working all of us, she steered me wrong on purpose, and every bit of that is true.
And none of it matters, because I was the one who made you the promise.
She never owed you a thing. I did. I owed you the truth and I owed you first place and I gave you neither, and I handed them both to whatever was easiest in the moment, over and over, for two years, while you got smaller and I called it love.
" My throat closed and I forced the last of it out.
"That's mine, Beth. Not hers. Mine. I need you to know I know that, all the way down, with nothing standing in front of it. "
I had to stop. I sat there and got my breath while she watched me do it, and I let her watch, because I'd hidden enough from this woman to last ten lifetimes.
"You said you don't need me. Good. I mean that—you shouldn't.
You're the strongest person I have ever known and you proved it this year doing the hardest thing there is, which is putting yourself back together with no help at all from the man who broke you.
" My voice went, and I let it go, right in front of her.
"I don't want you to come back because you need me.
I'd want you to come back—if you ever came back—because you wanted to.
From strength. The way you do everything now.
Not because I'm the warm thing, or the safe thing, or because you got tired of being alone.
Because you looked at the whole ugly truth of it, the worst of me included, all of it laid out, and you chose it anyway with your eyes wide open.
" I swallowed hard. "But I gave that up.
I told you so in the letter and I meant every word.
So this—whatever this is, you walking through that door tonight—I am not going to grab it.
I'm just going to sit here and answer every question you have, for as long as you want to ask them, and then I'm going to let you walk back out and decide, and whatever you decide, I will be all right.
Because I finally became a man who can be.
That's the only thing I've got left that's worth giving you. The not-grabbing."
? ? ?
Beth
He didn't reach for me.
That was the thing. I watched everything in his face strain toward it—I could see it, the way you can see a held breath—and he kept his hands flat on that table and he did not close the space, and somehow that, the not-reaching, the deliberate leaving of the whole choice in my own two hands where it belonged, reached me in a way that every grand gesture of the old Alonzo never once had.
He'd spent two years grabbing at me, at everyone, at every easy thing.
Watching him sit on his own hands and bleed and let me hold the reins did more to mend the torn place in me than an ocean of apology could have.
"Ask me a question," I said. "Something real."
He thought about it a moment, really thought, and then he said, "Are you happy? Not about me—leave me out of it. Your life, right now. Is it good?"
It wasn't the question I'd braced for. The old Alonzo would have asked something about us, about his odds, about his own hope—he'd have found a way to make even his question about himself.
This one asked, quietly, whether my life was good, with no visible thought for whether the answer had room in it for him.
"Yes," I said, and it was true, and saying it out loud steadied the shaking in me.
"It's good. The shop's the best it's ever been.
I've got my friends, and my folks, and I figured out who I am when I'm not arranging myself around somebody else's needs.
It's a good life, Alonzo. That's exactly why I get to be careful about who I let back into it.
" I held his eyes and made myself ask the thing I'd come to ask.
"My turn. If I walked out that door right now, and you never heard from me again—really, truly, never—what would you do? "
"Be sad the rest of my life," he said, no hesitation at all, "and not blame you for a single day of it.
And keep being the man I finally learned how to be—because I didn't fix myself for you, Beth.
I tried to at first, I won't pretend I didn't. But somewhere in the middle of the winter it stopped being about winning you and started being about just—not wanting to be the man who did that to a person.
Ever again. So I'd keep on being him. And I'd hope, every day, wherever you'd gone, that somebody there was choosing you first." He looked down at his hands, then made himself look back up at me.
"And I'd move the flower order over to Marigold Lane, probably.
Because seeing your handwriting on that invoice every week, knowing you were right across town and not mine—" He stopped, and let out a small broken laugh that I felt land somewhere under my ribs.
"Sorry. That's the one part I'd handle badly.
The flowers. I'd manage the rest and fall apart over an invoice. "
And that was it. That was the moment—not the confession, not the taking of the blame, not a single one of the big things.
The flowers. The small, stupid, unbearably human truth of it, the thing that wasn't a speech at all, the thing he hadn't meant to say.
That was the moment I felt the last of the wall come quietly down inside me, brick by brick, all the way to the ground.
I reached across the table. I did it—not him, me—and I put my hand down over his where it lay flat on the wood being so carefully, painfully still, and I felt him go rigid under my palm, a man holding himself so still he'd stopped breathing, terrified of doing the one wrong thing that would send me back out the door.
"I'm not deciding tonight," I said, quiet. "I need that clear between us. This isn't me coming back, not all at once, not fast. I've got too much now that I'm not willing to lose to do this any way but carefully."
"Okay," he breathed. And then, slow, he turned his hand over beneath mine, so that we were palm to palm on the wood—and he didn't close his fingers, didn't grip, just let his open hand lie there under mine, leaving even that, even the smallest holding, entirely up to me.
"Okay. However you want it. As slow as you want.
Forever, if that's how long it takes you. "
The radio played low. Outside, the spring night pressed soft against the windows. And inside the closed restaurant where every single thing had broken apart, we sat with his open palm beneath mine and both of us barely breathing, and I felt the shape of something I'd been sure was gone for good.
"Slow," I said. And I closed my fingers around his hand—my choice, my grip, the first thing I'd chosen freely in that room. "We do this slow. And you tell me the truth even when it's hard. Even when it's nothing but an ordinary, boring, no-crisis Tuesday."
"Even then," he said, and his hand tightened around mine at last, careful, like something he'd been given and was afraid to bruise. "Especially then. I swear it to you."
I didn't kiss him. We weren't there yet, and I wasn't going to pretend we were, and—this was the thing that told me more than anything else in that whole long night—he didn't try.
He just held my hand across the table and let it be enough, because it was mine to make enough, and he'd finally learned the difference.
So we sat there a long time in the low gold light, palm to palm across a steel table in an empty restaurant, two people who had broken everything there was to break and were going to try, carefully and honestly and slowly, to build something truer out of the wreckage.
It was the most hopeful I had felt in over a year.
And this time, I let myself have it.