20. Levi
LEVI
She doesn’t answer the first knock.
I stand on my own porch like a salesman, listening. No feet, no voice, nothing—but her car’s in the drive, ticking as it cools, and I saw the blinds twitch when my headlights swept the house. She’s in there. Ten feet of wall between us.
I knock again. Softer, which is stupid, like the volume’s the problem.
“Jo. It’s me.” Nothing. “I know you don’t—I just need to see you got home okay. That’s all.”
That’s not all, and even I know it, and the door opens anyway.
Not wide. She stands in the gap with her arms crossed, still in the green dress, barefoot now, and the porch light does me the enormous unkindness of showing me her face—eyes swollen half shut, past crying, gone somewhere quieter and worse—and everything I lined up in the truck on the way over dies right there on the doormat.
“You saw,” she says. Flat. “I got home.”
“Can I—five minutes. Please.”
I watch her think about it. Genuinely think about it, like a math problem, like weighing whether five minutes of me is survivable—and that alone should tell me the state of things, that letting me in the house I pay half the mortgage on requires cost-benefit—and then she steps back from the door and walks away into the dark living room, which isn’t a yes, but the door’s open.
I come in careful, the way you enter a room with a hurt animal in it, and I mean that with no disrespect to her, I mean the animal’s me too, I mean the whole room’s hurt.
Our room. There’s the couch we picked out in Bozeman arguing about cushions.
There’s her grandmother’s afghan. There’s the water ring on the coffee table I never fixed from before she moved in, and her keys in the bowl by the door where they’ve landed every night for three years, little domestic proof that she came home and this is home, and I did this to it.
The room’s the same room and it’s got a crime scene in it now and I’m the guy in both photos.
She sits on the arm of the couch. Doesn’t turn a light on. So we’re doing this by streetlight through the blinds, her in stripes of it, me standing in the middle of my own living room like it’s a place I’ve never been.
“Josie. What happened—it didn’t mean anything.”
Wrong. First swing, wrong. I hear it be wrong while it’s still coming out of my mouth.
Her head comes up slow. “It didn’t mean anything.”
“That’s not—I mean it wasn’t?—“
“Because that’s so much better, Levi.” Her voice is sanded flat, worn past sharp, and that’s worse than the parking lot, I’d take the yelling back in a heartbeat. “You blew us up for a thing that didn’t even mean anything. That’s your opening. That’s what you drove over here with.”
“I’m trying to tell you it wasn’t—it’s not like I’ve been—it was one time, Jo, one night, we were in that stretch where you’d hardly look at me, and I thought—“ Stop. Stop. I hear it, I hear what’s coming out of me, I’m watching myself pour gasoline and my mouth keeps going anyway, too fast, clumsy, every sentence with an excuse hiding in it like a burr. “I’m not saying that’s a reason?—“
“You keep saying it, though.” She stands up off the couch arm.
“You’ve said it twice now. The week I wasn’t looking at you.
” Her arms wrap tighter around herself, and in the streetlight stripes I watch her face do the thing it did at the party—close, lock, go somewhere I can’t follow.
Every word I’ve said since I walked in has moved her further from me.
I can see it happening, actual distance, like watching taillights again.
“One night. Didn’t mean anything. Rough patch.
You’ve got all the parts, you know that?
Every guy in every bar that ever did this, you’ve got the whole kit. ”
“Then tell me what to say.” It comes out too loud for the dark room and I bring it down, palms up, begging with my hands because my mouth’s a disaster. “I mean it. Tell me the words and I’ll say them. I’ll say anything?—“
“That’s the problem, Levi.” Quiet. Flat.
Worse than anything. “You’d say anything.
I need the thing underneath the words and I don’t think you’ve ever once shown it to me, and I don’t know if that’s because you won’t or because there’s nothing—“ she stops herself, jaw tight, and I watch her decide not to hand me the rest of that one either. Second sentence tonight I don’t get the end of. They’re stacking up.
“That’s not fair—“ And I catch it that time. Barely. Same three words from the parking lot, loading up again all by themselves. I shut my mouth around them and stand there, jaw working, hands opening and closing at my sides, and the silence goes on about a year.
“I’m so tired, Levi.” And she sounds it—sounds like something running on the last of a battery, her arms still wrapped around herself in her own living room like she’s waiting outside somewhere for a ride.
“Tomorrow, or Monday, or—sometime, we’re going to have to do the whole thing.
All of it. I know that. There’s things I have to—“ she stops, resets, and something crosses her face that I can’t read, some second freight behind the first one.
“There’s more to talk about than you know.
But not tonight. Tonight I don’t have anything left to do it with.
I can’t do this tonight. I need you to leave. ”
Everything in me sets up against it like bad concrete.
Leave—while she’s swollen-eyed in the dark and it’s my fault, leave with nothing fixed, nothing even started, leave her alone in this house with what I did—every animal instinct I’ve got is roaring to stay, to close the distance, to fix it with my hands somehow, hold her till it—that’s what got you here, some flat cold voice says, way down.
Doing what you wanted instead of what she asked. Wanting your way out of it.
She asked you to leave.
“Okay,” I say.
Her eyes come up—quick, surprised, checking—like she’d braced for the fight and can’t figure out where it went. First time all night I’ve done the thing she asked instead of the thing I wanted. One for nine, maybe. One for twenty.
“Okay,” I say again, quieter. “I’ll go.”
And I go. Don’t reach for her on the way past, though my whole arm aches with it.
Don’t stop in the doorway for a big line—I haven’t got one, and she’s had enough of my mouth tonight.
I pull the door shut soft behind me, and stand on the porch one second, and walk to my truck through the yard I mow and get in.
And then I just sit there.
Can’t turn the key. My hand’s on it and it won’t turn, because turning it makes it real—driving away from that house with her inside it and everything broken, that makes it a fact, a done day, the first day of whatever comes now.
So I sit in the dark drive like a man in a parked truck at midnight, which is exactly what I am, ten minutes by the dash clock, hands on the wheel, watching the dark front window of my own house.
Once—maybe—the blinds move. A finger’s width, there and gone, or maybe just the streetlight doing something, a moth, nothing. I sit up like a kid who heard sleigh bells anyway, and I watch that dark window with my heart going, and it stays dark, and the door stays shut.
Ten minutes. Then I turn the key and back out slow, headlights raking across the front of the house one last time, and drive.