21. Josie
JOSIE
Sunday morning I’m at Dot’s by seven, before church traffic, before the counter fills, because if I sat in that house one more hour with my own ears ringing I was going to start screaming into a pillow and maybe not stop.
I didn’t sleep. Not really—I did that thing where you lie diagonal across a bed built for two, listening to a house tick, cataloguing every sound an empty house makes that a full one doesn’t, and somewhere around four I gave up and cleaned the bathroom, which is what the women in my family do instead of therapy, and at six-thirty I was sitting in my car in the diner lot watching Dot flip the sign, engine off, hands in my lap, like a woman waiting on a bank to open. Which, in a way.
Dot takes one look at me through the pass window—one—and comes around the counter untying her apron strings like she’s rolling up sleeves.
“Booth in the back,” she says. It’s not a suggestion.
She brings coffee I didn’t order and pancakes I didn’t order and sits herself down across from me with her own cup, and she doesn’t say a word.
That’s the thing about Dot Pruitt that took me a year to learn: she interrogates nobody.
She just makes it warm and quiet and puts food in front of you and waits, and it works on bikers and it works on me.
“Levi slept with somebody.” I hear myself say it into my coffee. First time out loud. It sounds smaller than it is and also worse. “Three weeks ago. I found out at the party.”
Dot’s cup stops halfway up. Goes back down. Her face does something old and sad and completely unsurprised at the world—not at him, at the world—and what she says is, “Eat something first.”
“Dot—“
“Eat, honey. You look like a paper sack. Then we’ll talk.”
So I eat. Half a pancake, then somehow all of them, because my body’s apparently still running its own errands regardless of management, and somewhere in there the crying starts again after all—quiet this time, just leaking, tears dropping straight off my jaw into the syrup while I keep mechanically cutting pancake, and Dot doesn’t fuss, doesn’t grab my hand across the table, just pushes her napkin dispenser over and lets me come apart at a reasonable volume in the back booth of her diner like I’m sure a hundred women have before me.
I don’t tell her about the baby. I get right up next to it twice and swerve. That’s Levi’s to hear before it’s anyone’s—even now, even after everything, some stubborn law in me holds the line on that.
But everything else comes out. The party, the drink table, Marley’s careless little grenade—Dot’s mouth goes flat and thin at the name, and she says, quiet, “In your own party. Lord,” and that’s all the editorializing she allows herself.
The parking lot. The half of a sentence I wouldn’t finish.
Him showing up after, and it didn’t mean anything, and me sending him home.
“And the worst part,” I say, somewhere in the middle of it, surprising myself, “the actual worst part isn’t even the—her.
It’s that I keep doing the math backward.
Every sweet thing he’s done for three weeks, I have to go back and re-file it.
The flowers. The dinners. All of it was—“ my voice does the cracking thing and I ride over it—“all of it was guilt with a bow on it, Dot, and I stood in my kitchen feeling like the luckiest woman in the valley. I feel so stupid. That’s the part I can’t get past. He didn’t just do it, he watched me be happy about the cover-up. ”
Dot doesn’t rush in. She turns her coffee cup a quarter turn, thinking, and when she talks it’s slow and level.
“You’re not stupid. You loved a man and he handed you reasons to.
That’s not the same thing.” She points at my plate—eat—and waits till I do.
“And I’ll tell you something for free, honey, sixty-six years in this valley: I’ve watched a lot of men be sorry.
There’s two kinds. The kind that’s sorry at you—flowers and speeches and feeling terrible real loud so you’ll hurry up and make it stop.
And the kind that’s sorry like a job. Shows up for it every day whether anybody’s watching or not.
You can’t tell which kind you’ve got in the first week.
Nobody can. The only thing that tells you is time and work, and the only way you get to see it is if you’re still standing somewhere nearby.
” She shrugs, small. “Doesn’t mean you owe him the standing.
Just means don’t let anybody rush you out of finding out—him or your own pride either one. ”
Somewhere in the middle of it a couple of Sunday regulars come in, and Dot, without breaking eye contact with me, calls out that the back section’s closed, hon, sit up front—and hangs the little CLOSED sign on the divider like it’s nothing, like she hasn’t just shut down a third of her own diner on a Sunday for one crying woman and a plate of pancakes.
That’s the club, right there, more than the bikes ever were.
Somebody hangs a sign between you and the world and refills your coffee and doesn’t make you say thank you for it.
“So,” she says, when I’ve wound down and the plate’s half gone. “What do you want to do?”
“Everyone’s going to ask me that.”
“I’m not everyone, and I asked first.”
And I turn my cup in its little wet circle on the table, and the answer comes up out of me slower than I expect, and steadier.
“I’m not leaving. Not—“ I press on, because her eyebrows didn’t move but I felt something move—“not because I’m scared to be alone, and not because I think I deserved it, none of that, I promise you.
I’ve just—I built this too, Dot. Three years.
It’s mine too. I’m not walking off and leaving it to burn because he lit a match, that lets him off cheap.
And I’m not going back to normal either, smiling at the shop picnic like nothing happened, because that lets him off free.
” The shape of it is arriving as I talk, firming up word by word, and it feels like the first solid ground in two days.
“If he wants this—if he actually wants this—he’s going to work.
Real terms. Out loud. Things that cost him.
And if he won’t pay, then I’ll know, and then I’ll go, and I won’t look back, and he’ll have picked it himself. ”
Dot looks at me a long moment over her cup.
“There she is,” she says.
Driving home from Dot’s, I practice what I’m going to say to him, out loud, alone in the car—which is its own bitter little joke, because that’s how the party started, me practicing lines in mirrors for a man who wasn’t going to hear them right anyway.
This one’s shorter. This one doesn’t need string lights.
I call him that afternoon from the porch steps, phone in one hand, the other one flat on my stomach—I don’t notice I’m doing that until it’s done, and I leave it there anyway.
My heart’s going hard, which makes me mad.
He cheated, and my body still does the ringing-phone thing for him.
Somebody should be able to turn that off. There should be a valve.
He picks up before the second ring finishes. “Jo?—“
“We need to talk,” I say, flat and final, and hang up before he can put one more word in the space, because the next part happens on my ground, at my speed, on my terms, and it starts with him sitting with a dial tone wondering, the way I sat with a roaring in my ears at my own party.
And then I stay on the porch steps a while with the phone dark in my hand, watching the light go long across the yard he mows, and I let myself feel the full strange weight of what I decided at a diner booth over pancakes: I’m staying to fight.
Not staying to endure—the way my mother stayed—staying to fight, with terms and teeth, for a thing I built and am owed.
There’s a difference, and the difference is the whole ballgame, and I’m going to have to check for it every single week like a woman checking smoke alarms, because the road from one to the other is smooth and downhill and paved with exactly the kind of quiet Sundays my mother got good at.
Terms tomorrow. Tonight, me and the poppy seed are eating crackers and watching bad TV and holding the line.