15. Jesse #2
“Don’t thank me. I didn’t do it for you.
” He glances toward the cabin on the hill, where Lo is probably working on something, probably not thinking about me.
“I did it for her. She needs to know you can be trusted, and the only way she’s gonna know that is if she sees it.
So you show up. You do the work. And maybe, if you’re lucky, she decides you’re worth the risk. ”
“And if she doesn’t?”
“Then you still showed up and did the work, and that’s worth something even if it’s not worth her.” He shrugs. “Either way, you’ll be a better man than you were. That’s not nothing.”
***
Rosie finds me on day five.
I’m in the tack room, reorganizing the bridles for the third time because I keep finding ones I missed, when a small face appears in the doorway. She’s wearing overalls and a purple t-shirt and her hair is in two braids that are already coming loose.
“You’re the man from the phone,” she says.
“Hi, Rosie.”
“Mama showed me a video. The one where you were sitting on the porch with your guitar.”
“Yeah?” I set down the bridle I’m holding.
“You were crying.”
“I was.”
“Why?” She asks it the way only a kid can, straight through.
“Because I was sad.”
“Why were you sad?”
“Because I hurt someone I love. Someone who didn’t deserve to be hurt.”
Rosie takes a step into the tack room, looking around at the organized chaos. “Lo cries. Did you know that?”
My hands stop moving.
“Sometimes when she thinks no one’s watching.
In the barn, mostly. Or at night when she’s walking back to her cabin from the big house.
I saw her once from my window. She stopped in the middle of the path and just stood there, crying, and I wanted to go out and hug her but Mama said sometimes grown-ups need to cry alone. ”
“That’s - yeah. Sometimes they do.”
“But it made me sad. Seeing her sad.” Rosie picks up a hoof pick, examines it, sets it back down. “I asked Mama why Lo was crying, and she said sometimes grown-ups are sad about things that are hard to explain. Things that happened before, that they can’t fix.”
“Your mama’s right.”
“Are you the thing that happened before? The thing she can’t fix?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to make her not sad?”
“I’m going to try.”
“How?”
“By being here. By doing what she needs. By not leaving again. By being someone she can trust, even if it takes a long time for her to believe it.”
Rosie nods slowly. “That sounds hard.”
“It is.”
“What if it doesn’t work? What if you try and try and she’s still sad?”
“Then at least I tried. And at least she knows I tried. That’s better than nothing.”
“Is it?”
I think about Lo crying where she thinks nobody can see her. Trying is a start. But trying isn’t the whole answer.
“Yeah. It is.”
Rosie reaches into her pocket and pulls out a slightly crushed juice box. “I brought you lemonade. Mama said you might be thirsty. It’s not real lemonade - it’s the kind from a box - but it’s still pretty good.”
“Thank you, Rosie.”
“You’re welcome.” She sets it on the workbench and turns to leave, then pauses at the door. “Jesse?”
“Yeah?”
“Lo talks about you sometimes. When she doesn’t know I’m listening.
She says your name in her sleep, and sometimes when she’s cooking, she’ll say things like ‘Jesse would like this’ and then get really quiet.
” Rosie looks at me with eyes that are too old for her face.
“I think she misses you. Even though you made her sad. I think missing someone and being mad at them can happen at the same time.”
“I think you’re right.”
“I usually am.” She grins, quick, bright, gone. “Bye, Jesse.”
She disappears into the sunshine, leaving me alone with a juice box and the image of Lo crying on a path in the dark where no one can see her.
I sit down on an overturned bucket.
I don’t cry. I’ve emptied myself out already, all those nights on the porch talking to a camera, all those confessions to an audience of strangers. There’s nothing left to cry.
But I feel it. The weight of what I did.
The months of her alone, running this place, carrying our baby, walking to her cabin at night and crying in the dark because her husband chose wrong.
Because I chose wrong. Because I was so busy protecting myself from what might happen that I forgot to protect her from what was happening.
She cries in the barn when she thinks nobody’s there.
That’s what Rosie said, and it’s worse than anything Dot said, worse than anything Rafael said, because at least crying for a month has an end. At least thirty-one days is a number, is finite, is something that’s over.
But crying in the barn when no one’s watching? That’s still happening. That’s now. That’s today, while I’m here, while I’m supposedly trying.
Rafael said it doesn’t get fixed by feeling bad in public. He’s right. But it doesn’t get fixed by feeling bad in private either. It gets fixed by showing up. By doing the work. By being the kind of man who deserves the chance he’s been given, even if he never actually earns forgiveness.
I finish the lemonade.
I get back to work.
***
The inn is exactly what Lo described, basic, clean, the kind of place truckers stay when they’re passing through. Room 7 has decent water pressure and a bed that’s too short for me by about six inches and a view of a parking lot where nothing ever happens.
I’ve had worse.
My phone keeps buzzing. I’ve been ignoring it because I know who it is. Sloane’s called six times since I got to Marigold, and I haven’t answered once.
The seventh time, it’s a text.
The press knows you’re in Marigold. You want me to keep them out or not?
I stare at the screen. Then I call Peter, the sheriff. Pruitt gave me his direct number through Ruth, part of the safety coordination I’m finally being included in.
“Jesse. What’s wrong?”
“Sloane just texted that the press knows I’m in Marigold. I don’t know if that’s a real threat or her fishing for information.”
“Forward me the text. I’ll check with Pruitt’s team - they’re monitoring her communications as part of the investigation. If she’s leaking your location, that’s relevant to the case.”
I forward it. I don’t sleep well, but at least someone’s watching.