13. Perry
Perry
The Dallas contract has been sitting in my email six days now. I’ve read it forty times and signed it zero.
It’s near dark and I’m at the kitchen table with the vendor list on one side and my laptop open on the other, Dale’s contract on one screen and Kylie’s fundraiser on the other, my whole life laid out down the middle of a pine table my great-grandfather built with his hands.
Mama’s gone up to bed. The house ticks and settles around me.
I’ve had a pen in my fingers for an hour and I haven’t touched either page.
Here’s what I can’t make myself do. I can’t sign the thing that takes me to Dallas.
I can’t call Dale and hand back the only dream I’ve ever had.
And I can’t drive to that library and tell Kylie I’ve been sitting on a way out for three weeks, since the second I say it out loud I lose her.
I’ve gone greedy. I want every last day I can steal before this thing ends.
I’ve been telling myself I’ve got time to sort it.
That’s the story every coward tells. I sit here night after night and look at that contract, then at the flyer with her handwriting all over it, and I let myself believe I can hold both a little longer if I just don’t say the words out loud.
Like a man can stand in a doorway forever and the house and the weather won’t eventually make the call for him.
I hear the truck before I see it. Tires on the gravel, coming too fast. Headlights swing across the kitchen wall and cut out. A door slams hard enough to reach me through the walls.
I know it’s her before her boots hit the porch steps. I know it from the slam. Kylie doesn’t slam doors.
She comes in without knocking. She’s got the Amarillo book in one hand, my book, held out away from her body like a thing she found and needs to give back, and her face is something I have never once seen on it, white and set and blazing all at the same time.
She’s still in the cardigan she wears to knitting. She came straight here. She didn’t stop home to take her armor off first, and somehow that guts me worse than the fury does, that she drove out to my mother’s house in her Thursday-night sweater to look me in the eye while it broke.
“Dallas,” she says. Not a question. “The end of the month. A comeback. Stetson. A world title.” Each one a stone she sets down on the table between us. “Which part were you going to tell me. And when.”
I could lie. My whole life I’ve kept a lie for every occasion, smooth and easy and kind. I open my mouth for one and nothing comes out. She’s looking at me like she already holds every card I’ve got, and she does, and the lie dies in my throat.
“Kylie…”
“Don’t.” She sets the book down on the table, square on top of Dale’s contract, like she aimed it there.
“I found out at a knitting circle, Perry. That the man I’ve been…
whatever I’ve been to you… is leaving the county in two weeks.
From Nadine Deekes. In front of five other women, every one of them watching my face come apart.
So don’t you Kylie me. Tell me the truth.
One time. You owe me one clean true thing. ”
So I give it to her. It’s the least I can do and about the most I’ve got left.
“Dale called three weeks ago,” I say. “Stetson wants to build a comeback around me. Surgery in Dallas, rehab, back on the circuit by winter. A real shot at a world title.” My voice comes out like it belongs to some other man.
“I’ve known three weeks. I didn’t tell you.
I didn’t tell anybody. I’ve sat at this table every night not signing it and not turning it down, and I let you walk around not knowing.
There’s no version of that that isn’t exactly as low as it sounds. ”
She takes it standing up. She doesn’t cry. I half wish she would.
“You want to know the part that actually breaks it,” she says, quiet now, and the quiet is worse than the blaze.
“It isn’t that you got an offer. God, Perry, it’s the chance of your life.
I’d have been glad for you. It’s that you looked at me every single day for three weeks, in my bed, in my library, and you decided I couldn’t be trusted with the truth.
You decided I was a thing that happened to you on your way somewhere else. ”
The words land like a boot to the ribs, worse than the bull. There’s no getting up off the floor from true.
“That’s not…” I stand up too fast and my knee screams and I don’t care.
“I didn’t tell you because I hadn’t decided.
I still haven’t. Every night I sit here and I can’t sign it.
You want to know why I can’t sign it? It means leaving you.
I’ve never once in my life not wanted to leave a place, Kylie.
You’re the first thing that ever made me want to stay, and I didn’t know what to do with that, so I did the coward’s thing instead. I hid.”
I take a step toward her. I don’t rightly know what I mean to do with it. Take her hand. Get down on a knee that won’t bend. Promise her a thing I didn’t have the spine to promise an hour ago. She steps back, one clean step, and it stops me colder than any wall ever could.
“Wanting to stay isn’t staying.” Her voice doesn’t rise.
“And it sure isn’t being honest with me while you decide whether I’m worth it.
” She shakes her head slow. “I spent fourteen years loving you from behind a desk. Fourteen years. And I finally, finally get you, and it turns out I’m still just standing here watching you decide whether to leave. I’m done watching.”
Fourteen years. The number goes through me like something cold, and half a memory turns over in the dark of my head, a girl at a desk, a Saturday, a book I wasn’t supposed to be reading. Before I can catch hold of it, my phone rings on the table.
We both look down at it. The screen lights the dark kitchen. Kendrick.
The timing of it is so cruel I nearly laugh. My best friend. Her brother. Calling straight into the middle of this.
Kylie goes still. She looks at the phone, then at me, and something shifts behind her eyes.
“Does he know?” she asks. “Kendrick. About the comeback. About us. Any of it.”
“No.”
“So you lied to him too.”
“I didn’t…”
“You’ve been hiding from everybody.” Her voice cracks for the first time, one hairline crack. “The whole county knows about us, Perry. Everybody but the one man who asked you to look after me. You let him find out from a rumor, same as you let me.”
The phone stops. Then it starts up again. Kendrick, twice.
“Answer it,” she says.
I answer it. I don’t know what else there is to do. I put it to my ear and I hear the circuit behind him, the loudspeaker, the stock pens, a whole arena of somewhere else.
“Perry.” Kendrick’s voice is wrong. Flat and careful. “Somebody just sent me a picture. You and my sister. Some fundraiser thing, your arm around her.” A breath. “Tell me it’s what it looks like, or tell me it’s not. And don’t you dare grin your way out of this one.”
Here’s the moment. I could soften it. I could manage him, do the thing I’ve done my whole life.
And Kylie’s standing three feet off with her arms wrapped around herself and my book on the table and fourteen years I never knew about sitting in her eyes, and I am so bone-tired of being a man who manages people.
“It’s what it looks like,” I say. “I’ve been seeing Kylie. For weeks. I should have told you. You asked me for one thing and I gave you my word and I broke it, and there’s no clean way to say that, so I’m just saying it.”
Silence on the line, long enough that I hear a chute gate clang shut somewhere in Wyoming.
“You son of a bitch.” His voice isn’t flat anymore. It’s shaking. “I asked you for one thing. One. My baby sister. The one good, decent thing that ever came out of my family, and you what, you got bored, you got benched, and she was standing there?”
“It’s not like that.”
“Then what’s it like? You marrying her? You taking her to Dallas with you?
Because I heard about Dallas too, brother.
The whole circuit’s heard. Everybody heard but me, and I’m guessing but her.
” A short, bitter sound. “You’re leaving.
You’re always leaving. So you went and did the one thing I got down on my knees and begged you not to do.
You made my sister one of your goodbyes. ”
I don’t have a word to give him. It’s true. Every syllable of it is true, and I built the whole thing with my own two hands.
Across the kitchen Kylie makes a small sound, and I look up, and she has heard all of it. My arm around her at the fundraiser. One of your goodbyes. She heard me say it’s what it looks like about her, like she’s a rumor a man confirms.
She picks her keys up off the table. She leaves the book.
“Kylie.” I’ve got Kendrick still in my ear and the only woman I’ve ever wanted walking for my door, and I can’t chase a single thing, I can’t even get around the table without the crutch. “Kylie, wait. Please…”
“I hope you get your buckle, Perry.” She says it at the door, and she isn’t blazing now, she’s just done, which is so much worse than blazing. “I hope it’s worth everything you’re trading for it.”
She goes. The truck turns over. The headlights swing across the wall and away down the drive.
I don’t go after her. I tell myself it’s the knee. It isn’t the knee. It’s that she’s right, and Kendrick’s right, and a man doesn’t get to chase people down to apologize with the same mouth he lied to them with. Not tonight. Not with nothing in his two hands but sorry.
And Kendrick’s still breathing in my ear, and the contract’s still on the table under a book she left behind, and I sit there in my great-grandfather’s kitchen having lost, inside of ten minutes, the two people I would have stepped in front of a bull for.
“Kendrick,” I say into the phone. “Kendrick, I…”
The line’s already dead.
I set the phone down on top of the contract, next to her book, and I put my head in my hands in the dark. And for the first time since I was a boy at my daddy’s funeral, I don’t have one single thing to say. No joke, no grin, no easy way out the side door.
Just the quiet, and the wreck of it, and the plain true fact that I did this. All of it. Myself.
After a while I lift my head. Her book is still there on the table, the Amarillo L’Amour, the one true thing I ever owned, and I handed it to her, and she left it behind.
I sit with it a long time in the dark. And the half-memory I’ve been chasing since the first day in that library comes back and stays this time.
A girl at a desk. A dead Saturday. A book I had no business reading, and my own voice, young and easy: you won’t tell on me, will you, Barnes.
Fourteen years she said. I start, fourteen years too late, to understand exactly who I threw out my door tonight.