36. Jamie
JAMIE
Ihad decided, in a moment of what I can only call temporary courage, to do Valentine’s Day.
This was a mistake roughly on the order of deciding to perform my own dental work.
I am a man who communicates affection by salting a step.
The last romantic gesture I had attempted in earnest had involved a restaurant and a ring and a woman named Rachel, and it had not ended in a manner that encouraged repeat business.
But Zoe had said three words into the dark and gotten silence back, and I could not give her the words yet, the words were still frozen solid in me.
What I could give her was an evening. I could try, at the very least, to say the thing in the only alphabet I owned.
This required help, and help, in Pinewood Ridge, means Marge, and Marge means Della, and the two of them together mean a committee with strong opinions and no quorum rules whatsoever.
I made the tactical error of asking Marge one single question about flowers, and by the following morning my Valentine’s Day had acquired a steering committee.
“Roses are a coward’s flower,” Marge informed me, leaning across the diner counter like a coach chalking up a play. “Anybody can buy a rose. You want something that says you noticed her.”
“I noticed her,” I said. “That’s the entire problem.”
“Then say it with a flower that has some personality.” She slid a napkin across the counter with a diagram drawn on it. I still could not tell you what the diagram meant.
Della made her contribution by text message, because Della believes the spoken word leaves a trail. Candles, the first one said. Then, a minute later, Not the cheap ones, they smell like a gas station. Then, Cook something. Then, ominously, with no further detail offered, Nothing with bones.
What followed was three days of escalating incompetence.
I bought flowers that the woman at the stand down the valley swore to me were unexpected, and they were, in the sense that I am fairly certain one of them was a weed with ambitions.
I bought candles that did not smell like a gas station, an achievement that used up my whole allotment of competence for the week.
And, on Della’s instruction, I attempted to cook.
The chicken deserves its own paragraph, as a warning to others.
The recipe Della sent me, in seven separate installments, assumed a baseline level of skill I did not possess and was too proud to confess I did not possess.
I am very good with a scalpel and useless, it turns out, with a paring knife, which I would not have predicted about myself.
There was a moment, somewhere around the part of the recipe that said only sear, when I understood that I had more in common with the chicken than with the cook, and that the both of us were, in our separate ways, finished.
The smoke detector and I became closely acquainted.
Biscuit ate better that week than he has eaten in his entire life.
In the end I salvaged what I could, and what I could salvage was the wine.
By the third day the whole town knew, and I do not mean that as a figure of speech.
Coy Dunn stopped me at the feed store to wish me luck with the solemnity most people save for surgery.
Hank Dooley, who has not asked me a personal question in four years, asked whether I had considered a poem, and then, before I could answer, told me not to bother, that a poem was how he had lost his second wife.
Tom Garrety said nothing at all, which from Tom amounts to a blessing, and quietly paid for my coffee.
I had set out to plan one quiet evening for one woman, and somewhere along the way I had become a municipal concern, a public works project with a deadline, and the genuinely awful part was that it helped.
It is very hard to lose your nerve when twelve hundred people have decided, without bothering to consult you, that you are going to be brave.
I got the boy delivered to Brenna’s for the night, over his strenuous objection that he too enjoyed Valentine’s Day and could be extremely romantic if somebody would only give him a chance.
I lit the good candles. I put the weed-flowers in a jar, because we do not own a vase, and I stood in the middle of the apartment in a clean shirt feeling like a man who has wandered onto a stage in the middle of the wrong play. And then Zoe came down the stairs.
And here is the thing about all of my flailing, the thing I had not seen coming.
It worked, though not because I had pulled it off, which I certainly had not.
The chicken was a war crime. One of the flowers was visibly dying as we watched.
It worked because she let it. She came down in a dress I had never seen before, and she looked at the candles and the jar of doomed flowers and the smoke still hanging faintly in the air, and instead of laughing, or instead of only laughing, her eyes went bright and wet at the corners, and she said, “You did all this.” Not a question.
A kind of wonder, as though nobody had done all this, or anything like all this, for her in a very long time.
And I understood, watching her face, that the disaster was not the point.
The trying was the point. She had spent years with a man who gave her expensive, effortless, meaningless things, and here was a burned chicken and a weed in a jar, and it undid her, because it had cost me something, and she could tell.
We did not eat much of the chicken, for reasons of basic survival.
We sat on the floor in front of the woodstove instead, with the candles and a bottle of wine that Della had also selected by text, and we talked the way we have slowly learned to talk, which is honestly and without hurry and with long comfortable silences laid in between.
“This is the best Valentine’s I’ve ever had,” she said into my shirt. “I want you to know the bar was low. But you cleared it by a mile.”
“The chicken nearly killed us.”
“The chicken was a love letter,” she said. “A terrible, terrible love letter. I’m keeping it forever.”
We talked about the small things, which are the only ones that matter.
She told me about a class she had found, a real one, the first step back toward the thing Brett had once talked her out of wanting, and her voice did something when she said it, went shy and young, like a person trying on a future she is not yet sure she is allowed to keep.
I told her I had been turning the counselor’s number over in my hand for a week, that I had not called yet but that I was going to, and that I was telling her so that I would not be able to take it back.
She did not make it into a big thing, which is exactly how I knew that it was one.
She squeezed my hand once, hard, and let it go, and we sat there with the fire ticking and the snow coming down soft past the dark window, two people who had each spent a great many years being careful, learning by candlelight that we did not have to be.
For a while neither of us said anything at all, and the silence was the good kind, the kind you can lie down in.
The candles burned lower. The snow kept coming.
Somewhere out in the dark a plow scraped past and faded, and the apartment held the two of us in its small gold light as though the whole world had been narrowed down to exactly our size, and I thought, with a clarity that frightened me a little, that I would burn down everything I owned before I let anyone take this away from me.
And that is when it came up in me. Not the way it had come up every time before, fighting and frozen and impossible.
It came up easy. It came up like a thing that had finally finished thawing, and I looked down at the top of her head, at this brave, wrecked, beautiful woman who had handed me her whole heart at one in the morning and then waited, patient as weather, for me to find the nerve, and I felt the words arrive in my mouth fully formed and ready and entirely mine.
I love you. They were right there. They were not stuck.
For the first time in five years they were not stuck, and I opened my mouth to set them loose, to finally, finally hand her back the thing she had handed me, and I felt myself start to smile, because I knew, I knew, that this time it was going to come out.
“Zoe,” I said. “I...”
And the knock came.
It was three raps on the door, unhurried, almost courteous, the knock of a man who has all the time in the world and is well aware of it.
It went through the warm room like a crack running across ice.
Zoe went rigid against my side. Nobody knocks on our door at that hour.
The town does not knock, the town walks straight in hollering a name.
A knock at that hour, on that night of all nights, was wrong in a way the two of us understood in our bodies a full beat before our minds caught up, and I felt the words I had been one breath from saying die in my chest all at once, the way a candle dies when a door swings open on a winter wind.
I stood up. I do not remember deciding to.
There is a part of me that has been waiting my whole life to put myself between the people I love and whatever is at the door, and it stood me up and walked me across the room before the rest of me had finished voting.
And right alongside it, firing at the very same instant, was the other thing, the old thing, the cold certainty that had run my life for so long, the one that leans in close and whispers you could not protect the last one either.
Both of them at once, the protector and the coward, the man who would die on this threshold and the man who is dead sure he will fail on it, and I carried the both of them across the room and laid my hand on the knob with I love you still half-built on my tongue, unfinished, abandoned, and I opened the door.
And there he was.
I had built a hundred different versions of Brett Calloway in my head across that long winter, and not one of them had braced me for how ordinary he turned out to be.
A good coat, the expensive kind that does not crease.
Snow on his shoulders that he had not troubled to brush off, because brushing it off would have meant admitting the cold could reach him, and the entire point of a man like that is that nothing reaches him.
A smile with all the lights on and nobody home behind it.
He stood on our porch in the falling snow looking like an advertisement for a life that nobody actually gets to live, and he took his time looking me over, up and down, slow, the way you appraise a thing you have not yet decided is worth the bother of buying.
“Well,” he said, pleasant as you please, his breath clouding white in the cold. “You must be the babysitter.”
And the most important sentence of my life, the one I had finally gotten all the way to the edge of, the one that had been thawing in me for five years and had been, I will swear it to my grave, two seconds from the open air, folded itself quietly back up and climbed down into the box, and the lid came down on top of it, and I stood there in my clean shirt with a dying weed in a jar on the table behind me and I said nothing at all.
Maybe for good.