24. Richard
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Richard
She’s decided. She’s telling Ciara, in person, tomorrow. She settled that before we even left the kitchen, an hour ago, in that flat wrung-out voice that meant there was no talking her out of it and I wasn’t going to try.
So tonight there’s nothing left to decide.
She’s still anxious, though. She’s fidgeting, pacing around in front of the sofa.
I’m not good at this part, the sitting still, the not-fixing.
My whole life I’ve solved things. Hand me a problem and I’ll find a way through it.
But there’s nothing to solve here. Her mother spent her whole life choosing another man’s kid over her own and never once told her why, and there’s nothing I can buy or threaten or build that undoes a single day of that.
So I do the only thing I can think of, I pull her down so she plops down on the sofa.
She curls next to my body, smaller than I’ve ever seen her, her knees pulled up, and I wrap my arm around her, and for a long time neither of us says anything at all.
The lamp’s low. The house ticks and settles around us.
She stares at the middle distance and I let her.
“I always thought it was me,” she says, finally.
“When I was a kid. I thought there was something wrong with me, that’s why she loved Carmen more.
I figured if I got better grades, or got prettier, or stopped being so much trouble, she’d love me the regular way.
The way Carmen got for free.” Her voice is flat and tired.
“I spent my whole childhood trying to earn a thing that was never on the table. It was never going to happen no matter what I did, because it was never about me at all. I just happened to have the wrong father.”
I want to drive to that woman’s house and put my fist through a wall. Instead with my other hand I reach over and take her hand. She lets me, and I hold on.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I say. “Not as a kid. Not ever. You know that, right? You were a kid who needed her mother to love her. That’s the most normal thing in the world.”
“I know it up here.” She taps her temple. “Doesn’t mean I feel it.”
We sit with that for a while. She doesn’t say much, and I don’t push her to, and the silence between us is an easy one.
“Talk to me about something else,” she says, out of nowhere, a while later. “Anything. I don’t want her in my head anymore tonight.” She turns her face into my chest. “What were you like before all the money? I don’t actually know that. You at, like, nineteen.”
I have to think back. “I was broke and homesick and angry most of the time, honestly.” I feel her go still, listening.
“I went to college on a football scholarship. That was the whole plan, far back as I can remember. Play ball, go pro, never think about money again. Then sophomore year I took a hit wrong and blew out my knee. I had to get two surgeries. They told me I’d walk fine but I’d never play at that level again. ”
“Richard.” She tips her head up. “You never told me that.”
“Doesn’t come up much.” I shrug, though it still sits heavy even now.
“Lost the scholarship with it. So there I was, no plan, no money, the one thing I’d ever been good at just gone.
There was this diner by campus that put free bread out on the counter, and I basically lived on it for a while.
I’d buy one coffee and make it last three hours just to have somewhere warm to sit and figure out what the hell I was going to do. ”
“So what did you do?”
“I got mad, and then I got stubborn, and I decided if my body wasn’t going to make me anything, my head would.
” It sounds simpler than it was. “I started small, a deal here and a deal there. The first one I ever closed on my own, I went out to my car after and sat there shaking, couldn’t even drive, because the thing I’d bet everything on had actually worked.
” I rub her shoulder. “And then I realized there was nobody for me to call about it. Not one person.”
She’s quiet a beat. “And now?”
“Now I’ve got the biggest house I could find, with a butler, a cook, furniture nobody sits on. Lived there two years, and it still didn’t feel like mine.” I look down at her. “Then some woman started leaving her shoes in my front hall and complaining the place was too quiet.”
“You’re saying I fixed your house by being messy in it,” she says, and it’s almost a smile, the first one all night.
“I’m saying it wasn’t a home until you were in it. It was just a big empty house.” I press a kiss into her hair. “Turns out I didn’t need a butler. I needed somebody to argue with me about onions and call the place creepy at night.”
“God, that was almost romantic. From you.” Her mouth twitches. “Careful, Reed, I’ll start thinking you like me.”
“Jury’s still out. You did flood my kitchen once.”
She huffs something that’s almost a laugh, and it’s small, but it’s real, and I’ll take it. She tips her face up to look at me.
“You know what’s strange,” she says. “Henry never did this. Anytime something was hard, he had opinions. Advice. A list of everything I’d done to cause it.
He couldn’t let a bad day just be bad, he had to turn it into a project where I was the problem.
You’re over here telling me diner stories and letting me be a wreck. ”
“Did you want advice?”
“God, no.”
“Then why would I give you any?”
“How do you know that’s what I need?” she asks. “The distraction. The dumb stories. Instead of all the, the talking it through and fixing.”
“Because I know you.” I say it plainly, because it’s the simplest truth I’ve got.
“You climbed out of that marriage on your own, with a bag and a few hundred bucks, before I did one single thing to help. That’s not somebody who needs a man with a plan.
It’s somebody who needs a man who’ll stand next to her and tell her a dumb story when the quiet gets too loud. ”
She doesn’t say anything to that. She just looks at me for a second, then leans up and kisses me before settling back against my chest.
“I love you,” she says.
“I love you too.”
She falls asleep on me slowly, her breathing going slow and even against my side. I don’t move for a long time. Eventually I get an arm under her knees and carry her up to our room, and she stirs just enough to loop her arms around my neck.
“Stay,” she mumbles, half under, when I lay her down.
“I’m right here.”
I mean it more completely than almost anything I’ve ever said. I lie down beside her. She curls into me, her back to my chest. I pull the blanket up over both of us, and I don’t sleep. I just lie there in the dark with my arm around her, feeling her breathe, listening to the house go quiet.
Every woman before her, I thought love was a show you put on.
Buy the right gift, say the right line, handle what’s wrong, get bored with the rest. I was good at it.
None of it ever felt like this. Lying in the dark holding a woman whose hurt I can’t fix, with nothing useful to offer but staying, and not wanting to be anywhere else.
***
She wakes up clearer.
I feel it before she says anything, the change in how she moves, the resolve back in her spine. She rolls over to face me in the gray early light and her eyes are clear in a way they weren’t last night.
“You don’t have to do this alone, you know,” I say. “I can drive you. Wait in the car.”
She shakes her head. “If you show up it’s a whole thing. The billionaire on the doorstep.” She touches my face. “It should just be me and her. But come here.” She kisses me, quick. “Be here when I get back.”
“Where else would I be?”
She showers, dresses, pushes breakfast around a plate without eating any of it. I don’t tell her to eat. I’m learning. At the door she stops and turns back to me.
“Thank you,” she says. “For last night. For not trying to fix it, just letting it be terrible and staying anyway.”
“Anytime. Genuinely. It’s the one thing I turned out to be good at.”
She gives me a tired smile. “I love you.”
“I love you too. Go do the brave thing. I’ll be right here when it’s done.”
She goes. I stand in the doorway and watch her car until it turns out of the gate. Then I go back inside, and I wait. For once the waiting doesn’t kill me, because I know exactly where she’s going, and I know she’s coming back.