Chapter Thirteen
Beau · Now
◇ ◇ ◇
Here’s what nobody tells you about being a good man: it’s a story you have to keep getting told.
I was a good husband because Martha looked at me like one.
I was a good father because two small people opened their arms when I came through the door.
I was a good anything because the whole town we left was full of people who’d known me long enough to have decided I was, and that decision lived in their faces, and I could read it back off them anytime I started to doubt it.
You don’t notice you’re running on someone else’s belief in you until you move two and a half hours away and the room goes dark and there’s nobody left holding the lamp.
That’s what the move did. I know how it sounds—poor me, the promotion, the house with the good light.
But a man is partly a thing other people agree he is, and I’d moved somewhere no one had agreed to anything yet.
I’d wake up at five and lie there and not be able to find myself in the dark, and I started to understand how a person could just—drift off the edge of his own life and not make a sound.
And then Dex pulled up outside the new office with that grin, and a bike, and a question—you ride?—and I felt the lamp come back on.
I want to be careful, because I’m going to tell you something true that’s going to make you hate me, and I’d rather you hate me for the real thing than the wrong one.
The crew didn’t give me freedom. They gave me an audience.
Out on the canyon road with the engine screaming under me and four other men in formation, I was a person again—somebody whose name meant something, who had a place in a shape.
Dex would clap me on the shoulder at a gas station and say Hartley, you mad bastard, and I’d feel it patch some hole I hadn’t admitted was there.
I told Martha it was about the riding. It was never about the riding.
It was about being someone other than a man disappearing in his own house.
Sienna I’m going to tell you about plainly, because the lie I told myself about her was the most expensive lie of my life, and lies are cheaper when you say them out loud.
She rode her own bike, fast and clean, and she looked at me like I was interesting—not useful, not needed, not the guy who was supposed to remember the pediatrician’s number.
Just interesting. Do you know what that does to a man who’s spent four months feeling like furniture?
She’d ask me questions about myself and then actually listen to the answers, and I’d ride home buzzing off it and feel like a teenager and not once let myself finish the thought this is what it feels like to be wanted by someone who needs nothing from you.
Because finishing that thought would’ve made me look at it.
And I had gotten very, very good at not looking at things.
I knew about the showcase. I want that on the record, because later I tried to tell myself I’d forgotten, and that’s the kind of lie that should disqualify a man from forgiveness.
I hadn’t forgotten. Martha told me in the kitchen with the water off and her hands very still, and she didn’t yell, and that should have terrified me more than yelling.
We are going to have a serious problem. I heard every word. I felt them go in.
And then I did the thing I’d been practicing for months without knowing it was practice.
I took the words, and I carried them into the garage of my head where the inconvenient things go, and I set them down next to all the calls and the Sienna saids, and I shut the door, and I smiled at my wife and told her it was two days.
It’s one show, I told myself, lying in the dark next to her while she breathed in that careful way that meant she was awake and not talking to me. He’s twelve. There’ll be a hundred more. I never get to be a person anymore. I have given everything to this family and I cannot have two days?
Every word of that was true, and arranged into exactly the wrong shape, the way a man can use true bricks to build a wall to hide behind.
That’s the part I didn’t understand yet.
You don’t drive off a cliff. You take an exit that feels reasonable, and then another, and every single one is defensible, and you wake up two hundred miles from the people who love you, telling yourself you’re just getting some air.
I told Dex I was in.
I remember the relief of it, God help me.
The clean, uncomplicated yes, the not having to choose between two versions of myself anymore because I’d just—picked.
Sienna texted a single line when she heard, knew you wouldn’t be a coward about it, and I read it three times and felt fifteen feet tall, and I did not stop to ask the obvious question, the one any honest man asks before he lets a stranger flatter him into something:
A coward about what?
The night before the trip I packed in the office so I wouldn’t wake the kids.
Theo’s cello case was in the hall, leaned against the wall where he’d left it, ready for his morning.
I had to step around it to get to the garage.
I want you to know that I saw it. I saw it, and I felt something in my chest try to surface, some last decent instinct kicking against the door of that garage in my head—and I stepped around the case, and I shut the door on the instinct the way I’d shut it on everything else.
I told myself I’d be back Sunday night in time to hear all about it.
I told myself a lot of things. That was the year I learned what my own voice sounded like when it was lying to me. It sounds, it turns out, exactly like me.