Chapter 29 A Little of the Truth — Ii
“I can’t,” I said, pulling back into my own seat, into the door, my hand finding the handle out of pure animal reflex.
“Wes, I’m sorry, I can’t, I’m — this is the one thing I can’t afford.
Being — seen. Being — you don’t understand, the last time somebody’s life was in my hands because I was the calm one, I —” I couldn’t finish it.
Not that piece. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“I have to go in. Thank you for the ride. Thank you for — the other thing. All of it. I’m sorry. ”
He didn’t chase it. That’s the thing about Wes I keep learning and re-learning, he does not chase.
“Birdie,” he said, gentle, as I got the door open.
“Nothing happened tonight that you have to run from. You told me eight years and a callsign. That’s it.
That’s all that happened in this truck.” He let that land.
“I’m not going anywhere. Take your inch back if you need it.
I’ll still be at the hardware store buying screws I don’t need. ”
I got out into the warm dark and stood on my own sidewalk and watched his taillights go, and my heart was pounding and my hands were steady and I hated both of them equally, and then Ren’s kitchen light came on upstairs, which meant her shift got cut early, which meant — and right on cue, her window went up and her head came out.
“Was that the fire marshal dropping you off at midnight, Roberta Jean Vance?”
“It’s not what it looks like,” I said, which is the stupidest sentence in the English language and I said it anyway.
“Get up here,” Ren said. “I made too much. Theo woke up and we’re doing eggs at midnight because my whole schedule is a war crime.
Earl’s coming, he texted, he’s bringing pie he definitely bought at Kroger and is going to claim he made.
Marcy’s already on her way, she smelled drama from her apartment.
” Her head disappeared, then came back. “You look like you’ve been through it.
Come be through it up here where there’s cheese. ”
And that is how I ended up at Ren’s scarred kitchen table at half past midnight, in the yellow light, with eggs and Kroger pie and Theo in his dinosaur pajamas insisting he was not tired while falling asleep against my arm, and Earl telling a lie about the crust, and Marcy narrating her fiancé’s texts aloud to a jury of the whole table, and nobody, not one of them, asking me the real question, because they didn’t know there was a real question, because to all of them I was just Birdie who’d had a long night volunteering.
Earl caught me at the counter when I got up to help with plates, which he never does, Earl does not help with plates, Earl believes plates are a younger person’s war.
He dried a fork with a dish towel he’d produced from somewhere and he didn’t look at me, he looked at the fork, and he said, low, under Marcy’s ongoing coverage of her fiancé’s texting habits, “Long night at that rec center.”
“It was fine.”
“Fran says the marshal was there.” He set the fork down.
Still not looking at me. Earl’s known me three years and hired me when I was a stranger in a bad way and never once asked me a single question I didn’t want to answer, which is the entire reason I could work for him.
“I don’t need the story, Birdie. I just want to say one thing and then I’ll leave it be.
” He dried another fork that was already dry.
“Whatever it is you’re so busy not being around here, I’ve had a suspicion about it for about two and a half years, and I don’t care what it is, and there’s a stool behind the counter with your name on it as long as you want it, and if anybody ever comes around here trying to make you smaller than you are, they’ll have to come through an old man and a lot of sharp objects first.” He handed me the fork. “That’s all. Go sit with your boy.”
I took the fork. I did not trust my voice. Earl nodded like a transaction had been completed and went to lie some more about the crust.
I sat there being loved by people who didn’t know the half of me, or who knew, in Earl’s case, that there was a half and had decided to love the shape of it sight unseen, with a marshal’s promise in my pocket and the ghost of an inch on my forehead, and Theo asleep and heavy and trusting against my side, and I thought, in my own real voice, the one nobody in that room but a boy asleep had ever heard: I cannot stay invisible.
Not because of the kiss I didn’t have. Because of him.
Because there are twenty-two of him. And I don’t know yet what it costs to stop hiding, but I’m starting to know what it costs to keep going.
I ate the pie. I let Earl claim the crust. I stayed till one.