29. Josie
JOSIE
Casey’s office always smells like burnt coffee and motor oil, even with the window unit going, and I’ve got a stack of invoices in front of me I stopped seeing ten minutes ago.
Coming here was my idea—the club’s quarterlies, a thing I actually do help Casey with every June, so it’s a real errand, but we both knew what it was within about four minutes of me sitting down.
Casey Doss doesn’t fish. She just works next to you, dry and unbothered, entering numbers, occasionally sliding the good pen across the desk without being asked, until the quiet gets comfortable enough that things start walking out of you on their own.
She knows. Everybody knows by now—that’s not paranoia, that’s Paradise Valley, the story’s been through the diner twice and come back wearing different clothes.
Nobody’s said a word to my face, which is the club’s way of saying a thousand of them: Dot’s pie showing up at my door twice this week, uncut.
Reyes calling me mija at the gas pumps with a hand on my shoulder, first time in three years.
Even Tucker, God bless him, texting me a video of Gasket falling off a creeper with no caption at all, which in Tucker is practically a sympathy card.
The whole family, closing ranks around both of us at once without picking a side, which I didn’t know a family could do.
Through the office’s inside window I can see the bay. Levi’s at his bench with the Road King up, head down, working. He doesn’t know I can see him. He works different lately—no radio-singing, no hollering at Tucker—just steady, closed, like a man doing laps.
“I keep waiting to catch him at it,” is what finally walks out of me. “Being fake. I watch him like it’s my job now. And I can’t catch him, and somehow that’s worse? Like—either he means all of it, or he’s better at this than I ever knew, and I can’t tell which, and I’m so tired, Case.”
“Mm,” Casey says, still typing.
And then, because her office is a confessional with a filing cabinet, the rest comes: the thing I’ve never said out loud to anyone but a dark living room.
“I’ve always been scared I love him more than he loves me back.
The whole three years. Like I showed up to this thing with everything I had and he showed up with—most of it.
Ninety percent. And I told myself ninety of Levi is more than a hundred of anybody else, and I built a life on it, and then he?—“
My voice does something and I stop and square it. “And the worst part of the party wasn’t even finding out. It was the half-second before I grabbed his sleeve, when I thought: you knew. Some part of you always knew you wanted this more than he did. And there’s your proof.”
Casey stops typing.
She swivels her chair around, and her face is doing something I’ve never seen on it—Casey does deadpan, Casey does dry, and this is neither, this is careful—and she says, “Okay. I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to file it under context, not excuse. Deal?”
“...Deal.”
“You know anything about Ray? Levi’s dad?”
“He left when Levi was a kid. That’s the whole file. Levi doesn’t talk about him.”
“He wasn’t a bad man.” Casey says it plainly, like correcting a ledger.
“That’s the thing nobody tells you, because ’he left’ is a tidier story.
I was little, but I grew up on my dad’s version.
Ray Ford was a scared man. Difference matters.
He loved Levi’s mom—Dad swears to this—and he spent about ten years being half-gone before he was ever gone-gone.
Checked out in stages. Like he’d decided somewhere early that it was all going to fall apart eventually, so he quit maintaining it—you know how a guy stops fixing a truck he’s already decided to sell?
And the more it rattled, the more it proved him right. ”
She shrugs, small. “Levi grew up riding in that truck, Josie. His whole childhood was watching a marriage rust out because his old man was too scared of losing it to take care of it. You learn young that permanent things just—go that way. Why get attached to forever if forever’s a thing that happens to other people. ”
I sit there with an invoice in my hand, not seeing it at all now.
“It’s not an excuse,” Casey says, watching me.
“I want to be real clear. Scared is a reason, it’s not a pass—my dad would say the same thing, he did say the same thing, apparently, to Levi, yesterday, with the door shut.
” A beat of dry returning: “Which, the door was shut, so obviously I know everything.”
And I laugh, wetly, and it surprises me.
“What happened to her?” I ask, when the laugh’s done. “His mom. He never—we’ve been together three years, Casey, and I’ve met her twice. Christmas cards. That’s the whole relationship.”
“She’s in Missoula. Remarried, nice guy, sells insurance.
” Casey shrugs. “She got out okay, eventually, if that’s what you’re asking.
But Levi was fifteen when Ray finally left, and you know how it goes—she survived it by closing that whole chapter, and Levi was in the chapter.
Not her fault. Not his. Just the kind of thing where everybody swims for their own shore and nobody means anything by it.
” She turns back to her screen, and then adds, so level it takes me a second to feel the weight of it: “He learned that too, by the way. That when a marriage dies, everybody swims alone. Just—for the record. Since we’re doing context. ”
Since we’re doing context. God.
“Casey. Why didn’t he ever tell me any of this?”
She actually thinks about it, fingers paused on the keys. “Honestly? I’d bet everything in these books that he doesn’t know it’s a thing to tell. You don’t tell people about water if you’re a fish.”
Then she goes back to her numbers and leaves me alone with it, which is the kindest thing anyone’s done all week—because I need both hands for this, this new heavy thing: Levi at eight, at ten, at twelve, down the hall from a slow leak of a marriage, learning the physics of it before he could’ve had any idea he was learning anything.
Never sure he believes in forever. Three years I heard that as a verdict on me—on us, on how much, the arithmetic of who loves who louder.
And it was never my math at all. It was just the one truck he ever rode in.
It doesn’t make it okay. I check twice—it doesn’t, the motel’s still the motel; scared explains, it doesn’t absolve.
But it does do one thing, turning it over in Casey’s burnt-coffee office with the window unit rattling: it re-answers the question I’ve been sleeping next to for three years.
Because I always read the arithmetic as him loving me ninety percent—loving me less, loving me capped, some ceiling in him with my name on it.
And if Casey’s right—if what I’ve been calling a ceiling was actually a flinch, a boy at the window of a rusting marriage learning that forever is a thing that leaves, so don’t lean your whole weight on anything—then it was never a verdict about me at all.
He wasn’t holding ten percent back from me.
He was holding it back from the whole concept.
From weather. From the stove that burned him.
Which doesn’t fix anything. A woman can’t live on diagnosis. But it moves the wound about four inches off my heart and onto the house we both grew up in, his and mine, two kids at two windows learning two versions of the same bad math, and there’s a strange, sad, furious kind of company in that.
But I sit there a long time after Casey goes back to work, invoices cooling in front of me, turning it over and over.
And somewhere in the turning, something in me—not the hurt, the hurt’s still exactly where I left it—but something under the hurt, some ground floor of it, hardens a little less than it was when I walked in this morning.