19. Lo
— ? —
Lo
I keep the shirt.
It’s practical, I tell myself. Soft cotton, broken in, the kind of thing you sleep in when your own clothes start feeling like costumes.
I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything. It’s fabric.
It happens to smell like cedar and hay and the specific warm-skin underneath that is only ever Jesse, and that is a coincidence I am choosing not to examine.
I wash it once and regret it immediately. The smell fades to detergent and a ghost. I wear it anyway.
The baby kicks when I pull it over my head at night, a low insistent shove right under my ribs, like she recognizes the terrain.
I choose not to read into that either.
It’s eleven o’clock when I pick up the phone.
I am not going to call him. I have been telling myself that for three hours, lying on my back in the dark with his shirt rucked up over the swell of me, staring at a ceiling I could map from memory.
I am not going to call because I don’t need to.
Because I am fine. Because a wife calling her husband at eleven at night, a husband she asked to leave, a husband she still hasn’t let back in, is a sentence I am not ready to say out loud.
I call him.
It rings once.
I hang up so fast my thumb cramps.
The phone buzzes thirty seconds later.
i’m up. i’m always up.
Three dots, then gone, then back.
you don’t have to say anything. just wanted you to know.
I type I wasn’t calling you. Delete it. Type Are you okay. Delete that too. Type I miss your stupid voice and stare at it until the words look like a dare.
I delete that one like it burned.
Finally: Go to sleep.
you first.
I put the phone face-down on the nightstand. I do not sleep for another hour. I do not call again.
I count that as progress. I am a liar. I have always been a liar about this particular man.
***
The county fair is Molly’s idea, which means it is not an idea so much as a kidnapping with snacks.
“You need to get out,” she says, occupying my cabin doorway like a very stylish warrant. Saturday morning. Sunlight. The kind of weather that makes staying inside look like a personality disorder. “You’ve been cooped up for a week.”
“I work on a farm. I am outside constantly. I have dirt under my nails as we speak.”
“You’ve been cooped up emotionally. The baby needs funnel cake.”
“The baby doesn’t have teeth.”
“You have teeth. She’ll experience it vicariously through your digestive system. That’s science.”
“That is not science.”
“It’s farm science. Different peer review.” She takes my jacket off the hook without asking. “Come on. Two towns over. Nobody knows you there. Funnel cake. Fresh air. A single corn dog consumed without a Greek chorus of opinions. Non-negotiable.”
“Molly-”
“If you tell me you’re fine one more time I am going to start screaming in a register that disturbs livestock. You are not fine. You are hiding in a cabin wearing your husband’s shirt to bed and calling that a coping strategy.”
I freeze with one arm in the jacket. “How do you know about the shirt.”
“Bree. Bree knows everything. It’s a gift and a threat.” She holds out the other sleeve. “Fair. Now. I already told Jesse we’d be there.”
“You what.”
“Safety in numbers,” she says, too innocently. “Very practical. Very uninteresting. Don’t look at me like that.”
Jesse is at the fairground entrance when we pull in, hands in his pockets, baseball cap pulled low, trying to look like someone who’s never been on a stage in his life. It would work on someone who hadn’t watched him try the same trick for years. Molly’s eyebrows do a whole conversation.
“I didn’t ask her to text you,” I say, because I need that on the record.
“I know.” He glances at Molly. “She volunteered. Aggressively.”
“You’re welcome,” Molly says. “Try to look less like a man waiting at the altar. It’s giving me secondhand nerves.”
“I wasn’t-” He stops. Looks at me instead. The look is careful. Like I might bolt. “You okay?”
“I drove here. I’m upright. That’s the report.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“That’s the report you’re getting in a parking lot.”
His mouth almost does the thing. The almost-smile. Then he tips his head toward the gate. “Agricultural entertainment awaits.”
“Never say that again,” Molly says. “I’m begging you.”
“I’m frequently ashamed. It’s part of my brand.”
“Your brand is questionable.”
“So I’ve been told.” He falls into step on my left without taking my hand, close enough that I can smell the soap on him, far enough that anyone watching would think we were polite. I hate how much I notice the gap. I hate how much I want to close it.
For an hour, it is almost easy.
We walk the midway. The air is sugar and diesel and fried everything. Kids scream on a ride that should be illegal. Jesse wins a stuffed elephant at the ring toss on the fourth try and presents it to me like a man who has never been humbled by carnival physics.
“That took you four tries,” I say.
“Three of those were research.”
“The fourth was a miracle.”
“The fourth was destiny. Don’t cheapen destiny.”
“I’m naming it after the number of dollars you wasted.”
“Please don’t. He has a sensitive trunk.”
The baby kicks every time we pass the music stage, a rhythmic little protest against bass.
“She’s going to be a drummer,” Jesse says, watching my hand go to my stomach.
“She’s going to be whatever she wants.”
“What if what she wants is a drum kit and 3 a.m. ambition.”
“Then I will invest in earplugs and a personality transplant for her father, who is currently advocating for this.”
“I’m advocating for letting her want things.” He says it lightly. Then he doesn’t. “I’m going to be the kind of dad who’s there. The rest we can argue about when she can argue back.”
Something in my chest performs a slow, inconvenient collapse. I do not have a joke ready for that. I look at the elephant instead. Its trunk is crooked. I hold it against my side like it can hide me.
We are at the funnel cake stand when it goes wrong.
Powdered sugar in the air. The woman in front of us turns with her order and her phone already coming up, face opening in that particular hungry way I have learned to dread.
“Jesse.” I say it low. “We should go.”
“What?”
“People are-”
“Oh my God.” She’s fully around now, camera up, delight sharp as a pin. “You’re Jesse Cooper. Oh my God. My sister is going to lose her mind. Can I-”
“I’m just here with-”
“Is this her? Is this the wife?” A friend materializes. Already filming. Already smiling like this is a gift we owe them. “Oh my God, you’re pregnant. How far along are you? Is it his?”
“We’re trying to get food,” Jesse says, and the warmth has gone out of his voice like someone cut a wire. “Please don’t.”
“When’s the baby due? Is it true about Sloane? Are you two back together or is this like a-”
More heads turn. It happens the way a wave happens, no single person deciding to become a crowd. Phones. Hands. A thickening of bodies. Fifty little black rectangles aimed at my face, my mouth, the unmistakable round of me.
“Back up.” Jesse’s voice goes hard. “Give us space. Now.”
“Just one picture-”
“Can you sing something?”
“Are you getting divorced?”
“Is the baby even-”
He moves.
It is not dramatic. It is not slow. He turns and puts his whole body between me and them, shoulders squared, arms slightly out, the full stupid breadth of him making a wall where there wasn’t one.
A hand catches at his sleeve. Someone shoves in from the left.
He takes it. He takes the next one too. I feel the jolt go through his back and none of it reaches me.
Keep moving, he says without looking back, and his hand finds mine behind him, and I grip it hard enough to hurt.
I think, bitterly, viciously, that this will look great on somebody’s feed. The pregnant wife. The human shield. The funnel cake stand like a punchline. I can already see the stills. My belly. His back. A caption with too many question marks.
“Don’t look at them,” he says. “Lo. Walk.”
A door bangs open on our right. A woman in a faded fair vest, weathered as fence wood, jerks her chin at a squat building with LIVESTOCK OFFICE stenciled over the lintel.
“In. Both of you. Move.”
Jesse pulls me through. The door slams. The lock hits like a gunshot in a small room.
“You all right?” The woman looks at my stomach first, then my face. “Damn vultures. Stay put. I’m getting security to clear the midway. Sheriff’s boys are on the grounds today, thank Christ.”
“Is there another way out,” Jesse says.
“Not from here. Not unless you want to climb out a window into more of ‘em.” She nods at a desk drowning in clipboards and worming schedules. “Sit. Don’t unlock this door for anybody who isn’t wearing a badge or this vest. I’ll knock twice.”
She is gone. The lock clicks again, final as a verdict.
The room is ten by ten and built for paperwork, not people.
It smells like sweet feed and dust and that pink spray they use on animals that have been through something.
Fluorescent light. A window too high and too dirty to help.
The muffled roar of the fair goes on outside like the world did not just try to eat us.
Jesse is on me before I can sit.
Not kissing. Checking.
“Did anybody touch you.” His hands are on my shoulders, down my arms, quick and shaking. “Did anybody - Lo. Look at me. Did they get their hands on you. On her.”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s not what I asked.” He’s already moving, palms skimming my sides, the curve of my belly, as if a bruise might have bloomed in the last forty seconds and he’s the only one qualified to find it. “The shoving. I felt someone grab - I don’t know if it reached you. I don’t know if-”
“Jesse.”
“Did anybody touch you.”
“No.” I catch his wrists. They’re trembling so hard I can feel it in my teeth. “Nobody touched me. You took all of it. That’s the problem.”
He blinks. Like the sentence arrived in the wrong language.
“That’s not a problem.”
“You were shaking before we got through the door.”
“I’m not-”
“You are. You’re shaking worse than I am.” I lift his hands between us so he has to see it. “Jesse. Look.”