15. Josie
JOSIE
Not really mine to say.
Hers. There’s a mine in that sentence. There’s a hers in this, standing three feet away holding wine I just poured, swirling it, watching me over the rim of it with something patient in her face, something that has all night, and my body understands the whole thing entire—before my brain agrees to one word of it, my body has already signed off.
The roar in my ears. The cold hand. The tilt.
My body’s not asking ask him. My body knows.
Him and her. A few weeks back.
“Excuse me,” I say. To her. I say excuse me to her—three years of manners firing on pure autopilot while the house burns down—and her eyebrows do something small and almost sorry, almost, and I’m already moving.
I don’t remember putting the bottle down.
I don’t remember leaving the table, don’t remember one single step of the room—it’s just gone, spliced out, fifty feet of crowded floor, bodies I must have gotten around somehow, somebody’s laugh I must have walked through, the pool table, the cake table, all of it deleted—and the next thing that exists is my own hand shooting out and grabbing his sleeve, black shirt I bought him, my knuckles white around his forearm hard enough that two of my nails are biting fabric.
He turns around still smiling.
That’s the thing that breaks something small in me right off, before one word gets said. He turns with the smile still on—big, loose, shot-glass happy, my name half out of his mouth—“Jo, hey, they got Casey doing tequila, you gotta?—“
And then he sees my face. And I watch the smile die.
I’ve never watched anything like it. It goes out in stages, fast, like windows going dark in a building—the eyes first, then whatever holds a mouth up, and what’s left standing there is a man I know better than anybody on this earth wearing an expression I have never seen before.
And his eyes flick—quick, helpless, involuntary, half a second?—
—toward the drink table.
Toward her.
“Josie? What’s wrong, you look?—“
“What happened with Marley a few weeks back?”
I keep my voice down. Habit, I guess. Three years of being careful with his standing in this room, protective of him in front of his brothers—I’ve bitten back annoyances at parties, saved every disagreement for the truck, kept his face for him in front of his family like it was part of my job, like it was a thing wives-in-everything-but-paper do—and the habit’s still running even now, even here, my voice low and level under the bass while the question goes off between us like something dropped from a great height.
Tucker’s still right there, close enough to touch, saying something to somebody, a laugh going up around him.
Nobody in this room knows anything’s happening.
It’s happening in a two-foot bubble in the middle of a hundred people, the way I guess these things always happen, at drink tables and in kitchens at parties, quiet, while the bass line walks on top of everything.
He doesn’t answer.
One.
His mouth opens. Nothing. His face is doing math—I can watch it, actually watch it, numbers moving behind his eyes, what does she know, how much, from where?—
Two.
—and that’s the answer. The math is the answer.
Innocent men don’t calculate. Innocent men say what happened with who?
with their eyebrows all the way up, annoyed, already half-laughing at how small towns talk.
I’ve seen this man innocent a hundred times—accused of eating the last of the pie, accused of losing Casey’s good pen, accused, once, memorably, of liking my sister’s cornbread better than mine—and innocent Levi comes back instant and loud and wounded, every time, it’s one of my favorite shows.
This isn’t that. This is a man at a slot machine watching the wheels come up one lemon at a time.
Some huge slow trapdoor starts opening under my ribs, and I am so cold all of a sudden, June night, hundred bodies in this room, teeth-cold, my dress with no warmth in it anywhere, my hand still white-knuckled on his sleeve like a stranger’s hand in a photograph of a party.
Three.
Three full seconds. I count every one of them, standing in the middle of his family with my hand on his arm and the bass going and Tucker two feet away still mid-sentence about something, oblivious, and a tiny separate part of me floats up near the string lights and watches the two of us stand there—the couple of the hour, the anniversary couple, her hand on his sleeve like always, nothing to see here—while underneath, in the actual world, everything is ending at a speed I can feel in my teeth.
And in second two of the three, some doomed little bookkeeper in me files the last entry of the old ledger: four hours ago this man had me laughing against a dresser with his hands in my dress.
Tonight he ironed a shirt for me. Wednesday he burned the garlic bread and made a second tray.
Every one of those was real—that’s the thing I already know I’m going to have to survive, standing here watching his face calculate—they were all real, and none of them were the whole truth, and I’m going to have to learn to hold both of those in one hand for the rest of my life.
“Jo.” That’s what he comes up with. My name.
Just my name, and it comes out wrecked—low and scraped and already asking for something.
Already sorry. Nine hundred years before he says any actual words, his voice gets there first and tells me everything, and the trapdoor under my ribs finishes opening, and whatever was standing on it goes.
Not a denial. Not confusion. Not Marley?
What about Marley?—which is what an innocent man says, which is what he’d say, right now, instantly, if there were anything innocent to say, and instead I got my own name in a broken voice, and mine comes out of me quiet and even and final as a door clicking shut:
“That’s not a no.”
His hand starts to come up—toward mine, toward my hand on his sleeve, the fixing reflex, the hands, always the hands?—
And I let go of his sleeve finger by finger—slow, deliberate, one at a time, making myself feel every single one of them let go of him, because if I do it fast I’ll do it screaming, and there are a hundred people in this room who love us, and I will not do it screaming?—
—and over his shoulder, forty feet back, past all the heads and under the string lights, Marley’s at her tripod.
Not shooting. Just standing there with her hands resting on the camera, watching us across the whole room, and even at this distance, even through the party, I can read her posture the way you read weather, and what it says is: there it is.
She dealt this. Ten minutes ago, with a wine cup in her hand, on purpose or on carelessness—I don’t know which yet, and I don’t know which would be worse—and now she’s standing behind a camera watching it land.
My hand finishes letting go. The last finger.
And the strangest thing happens in that exact second, standing untouching in front of the man I built my whole life on: nothing holds me up, and I stay up anyway.
Some spine I didn’t know was load-rated takes the weight.
Good to know, some far-off part of me files, cold and small, for later. Good to know I stand.
—and behind me the mic crackles and Wyatt’s voice booms out over the whole room, big and warm and happy: “Alright, alright, everybody grab a glass and get in here—where’s my two? Levi! Josie! Three years, people! Get up here!”