3. Lo
— ? —
Lo
The lake beach is already crowded when I come down the path from the house.
Half of Ridley must be here. Trucks parked in the grass, kids running between the trees, the bonfire throwing sparks up into the darkening sky.
Someone’s set up a speaker playing old country, and the smell of woodsmoke and grilled meat hangs in the air like a memory of every summer I’ve ever lived through.
This is supposed to feel like home.
It doesn’t.
The test is in my pocket. I checked three times before I left the house, once in the bathroom, once at the top of the stairs, once on the porch with my hand pressed flat against my jeans like I could feel the future through the fabric. It’s there. It’s real. In an hour, maybe less, Jesse will know.
I scan the crowd for him. He was supposed to walk down with me, but Sloane pulled him aside for “one quick thing” and the one quick thing turned into twenty minutes, and I finally told him I’d meet him at the fire.
“Lo!” Martha Hendricks waves at me from near the coolers. “Get over here and tell me if this potato salad needs more salt.”
“I trust your judgment, Martha.”
“My judgment’s been off since 1987. Come taste.”
I taste. It doesn’t need more salt. I tell her so, and she beams, and I let myself be pulled into the orbit of women I’ve known my whole life, Martha, Donna, Patty from the pharmacy two towns over who came out for the party despite the drive.
They talk around me and over me and I nod in the right places and the test sits in my pocket like a bomb with a very slow fuse.
“You must be so glad to have him home,” Donna says.
“I am.”
“Three weeks is a long time.”
“It is.”
“And that bus!” She fans herself dramatically. “I about died when I saw it pull up Main Street. Said to Bill, I said, ‘That boy’s come a long way from singing at the Lazy Star.’”
“He has.”
“You must be so proud.”
“I am.”
The words come out flat. I hear them and I can’t fix them. Donna gives me a look, concern or pity or something in between, and I excuse myself to get a drink I don’t want.
The cooler is full of beer and soda and the hard lemonade that June Pritchard makes in her basement and pretends is legal. I grab a bottle of water and stand at the edge of the light, watching the fire, waiting for Jesse.
He should be here by now.
“Lo.”
Cal appears at my elbow. He’s got a beer in one hand and his hat pushed back on his head, and he looks almost relaxed, which is rare for him.
“Hey.”
“You okay?”
“Fine.”
“Uh-huh.” He takes a sip of his beer. “You’ve got that look.”
“What look?”
“The one where you’re about to either punch someone or cry.”
“I’m not going to punch anyone.”
“Didn’t rule out crying.”
“Cal.”
“Just saying.” He turns to look at the fire with me. “He’s down by the water. Saw him heading that way about ten minutes ago. Sloane was with him.”
“Of course she was.”
“You want me to go get him?”
“No.” I straighten up. “I’ll find him.”
I make my way through the crowd, smiling at people I’ve known for years, stopping to hug Jesse’s aunt Rosa, complimenting Tommy Wheeler on his new truck even though it’s ugly as sin.
The whole time I’m moving toward the water, toward the sound of the guitar I can hear now, cutting through the noise of the party.
He’s playing something. I can’t make out the song yet, just the melody, and even that feels familiar in a way that makes my chest tight.
I know his playing. I know the shape of his songs.
I learned them on a tailgate nine years ago, watching his too-big fingers fumble over strings, and I’ve been learning them ever since.
The crowd parts and I see him.
He’s on a hay bale near the water’s edge. Someone’s strung lights through the trees there, and they catch the angles of his face as he plays, and he looks exactly like the man on the billboard. Larger than life. Untouchable. A stranger wearing my husband’s skin.
Sloane is next to him.
Not near him. Next to him. Thigh against his on the hay bale, her body angled toward him like a flower toward the sun. She’s got a drink in her hand and a smile on her face, and she’s watching him the way I used to watch him before watching him became another chore.
He starts to sing.
“I sat down where I shouldn’t, on a stranger’s tailgate throne…”
No.
No, no, no.
“She could’ve told me off or told me gone, but she left me alone…”
That’s my song. That’s our song. That’s the song he made up the day we met, the terrible song that got better, the song that’s supposed to be about me.
“And her eyes are the color of honey, golden-warm in the light. And I swear if she’d let me, I’d spend every day of my life making sure she knows she’s the reason I breathe, she’s the reason I sing, she’s my heart, she’s my home, she’s my everything…”
He’s not looking at me.
He’s looking at Sloane.
He’s singing our song, looking at Sloane, and she’s mouthing the words like she knows them.
She probably does. She’s probably heard him sing it a hundred times this year, in tour buses and green rooms and hotel rooms I try not to think about.
She knows the lyrics better than I do now because she’s been there and I haven’t.
The crowd around them is growing. People are pulling out phones. Someone whistles and someone else cheers and Jesse grins, that performer’s grin, the one that doesn’t reach his eyes, and keeps playing.
“Honey eyes, honey eyes, you’re the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen. Honey eyes, honey eyes, you’re every dream I’ve ever dreamed…”
I can’t move.
I’m standing at the edge of the firelight with the test in my pocket and my heart in my throat, and I can’t move. People are looking for me now. I can feel it. Glances sliding through the crowd, searching for the wife, wanting to see her reaction to this beautiful romantic gesture.
But it’s not for me.
It was never for me. Not tonight.
Jesse finishes the chorus and Sloane laughs and touches his arm, and he ducks his head like he’s embarrassed, like she’s just paid him a compliment he doesn’t deserve. The way he used to duck his head when I told him I loved his voice. The way he used to go shy under praise.
He gave her that.
He gave her the shyness and the song and the moment, and I’m standing in the dark watching it happen like a ghost at my own funeral.
“I’ll never write another song, not one that isn’t yours. You’re the melody, the harmony, the music and the words…”
The final verse. I know it by heart. I’ve heard it a thousand times, sung to me across pillows and kitchen tables and the cab of his truck, and now I’m hearing it sung to her while the whole town watches.
People are definitely looking for me now. I see heads turning, eyes scanning. Martha cranes her neck. Rosa frowns and says something to the woman next to her.
They’ll find me in a minute. They’ll see my face. They’ll know.
“Honey eyes, honey eyes, I was lost until you found me. Honey eyes, honey eyes, I’ll love you till the stars fall down around me.”
The last chord hangs in the air. The crowd comes apart. Applause and whoops and someone shouting “Play another one!” and Jesse laughs and shakes his head and sets the guitar aside, and Sloane leans in to say something in his ear, and he nods like whatever she said was important.
He still hasn’t looked for me.
He doesn’t know I’m here. He doesn’t know I watched the whole thing. He’s too busy being Jesse Cooper, the star, the sensation, the man who sings about honey eyes to whatever woman happens to be sitting next to him.
I turn and walk away.
“Lo?” Cal’s voice, somewhere behind me. “Lo, wait-”
I don’t wait. I can’t. If I stop moving I’ll scream or cry or both, and I refuse to do either in front of half of Ridley. I push through the crowd, past the coolers and the grill and the trucks, heading for the path back to the house.
Cal catches up to me at the tree line.
“Lo. Stop.”
I stop. I don’t turn around.
“It’s just the show,” he says. “You know that. The guy’s a performer. He was performing.”
“I know what the show looks like.” My voice comes out flat. Dead. “I married it.”
“He didn’t mean-”
“Which part?” I turn around now, and whatever’s on my face makes Cal take a step back. “The part where he sang our song to her? The part where he looked at her like - like she-”
I can’t finish. The words catch in my throat like broken glass.
“Lo,” Cal says softly. “Come back to the party. Have a drink. Let him find you and explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know exactly that.” I take a breath. Another. Force my shoulders down from where they’ve climbed up near my ears. “I’m going back to the house.”
“Let me walk you.”
“No. Stay. Enjoy the party.” I try to smile. It doesn’t work. “Someone should.”
I leave him there. I walk up the path through the trees, past the old oak where Jesse carved our initials the summer we got engaged, past the fence line I’ve mended a hundred times alone. The house looms at the top of the hill, dark except for the porch light I left on.
The test is still in my pocket.
I was going to tell him tonight. I was going to pull him away from the crowd and find a quiet spot by the water and put his hand on my belly and say we’re going to have a baby, Jesse, we’re going to be parents, please come home to me, please remember who we are.
God, I was so stupid.
I let myself in the back door. The kitchen is quiet, Sloane’s iPad still on the counter where she left it, blinking with notifications I don’t care about. I climb the stairs in the dark. I don’t turn on any lights. I don’t need to see where I’m going.
The bedroom is cold. Empty. The bed is made the way I made it this morning, the pillows arranged the way I arrange them, everything exactly as I left it because Jesse hasn’t touched anything in this room. Why would he? He’s barely here.
I sit down on the edge of the bed.
I take the test out of my pocket.
Two pink lines, still there, still real, still telling me something I can’t unknow. I look at them for a long time. I try to remember the hope I felt two nights ago, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, imagining how his face would look when I told him.
I can’t find it.
The nightstand drawer opens with a creak. I put the test inside, next to my watch and the book I’ve been trying to read for six months and the anniversary card I never gave him. I close the drawer.