17. Jacob
— ? —
Jacob
Every time I close my eyes I see her face in the foyer.
The dust in her hair. The flatness in her voice when she said “I’m fine,” and fine was the furthest thing from what she was.
I see her backing down the drive with her headlights cutting through the dust. I see Daphne’s hand on my arm and the smile curving her mouth when she said “You poor man,” and I want to put my fist through the wall.
At seven I give up on the bed and go downstairs because I need coffee and I need to do anything other than lie in the dark replaying the last two months frame by frame.
It wasn’t one moment. That’s what I figured out around four in the morning. It was all of it. Every day. Every choice. Every time she tried to tell me and I waved her away.
I walk into Sue’s and the room goes quiet.
Not the ordinary quiet of people looking up when the door opens.
Not the brief pause and then back to conversation.
This is the other kind. The deliberate kind.
Forty faces turn toward me and then turn away in the same second, and the only sounds are the griddle hissing and somebody’s fork scraping against a plate and the ceiling fan clicking overhead.
I’ve lived in this town my whole life. I’ve eaten at this counter since I was old enough to climb onto a stool. Sue used to give me free pie on my birthday and extra bacon when she thought I looked too skinny. I’ve never walked into this room and felt like a stranger before.
I sit at the counter anyway.
Sue is three feet away from me with the coffee pot in her hand.
She’s already pouring. I watch the steam rise from the cup of the man on my left.
I watch her top off the woman on my right.
I watch her set the pot back on the burner and pick up a rag and start wiping down the counter, and she never once looks in my direction.
“Sue.”
“Coffee’s broken.”
“The pot’s in your hand.”
“Then we’re out.” She keeps wiping, her back half-turned to me. “Try somewhere else.”
I don’t try somewhere else. I sit on that stool and I wait.
The man on my left finishes his eggs and bacon.
He leaves cash on the counter and walks out without looking at me.
Someone else takes his seat, a woman I recognize from church, and Sue brings her a menu and pours her coffee and takes her order, all without acknowledging that I exist. The woman on my right gets a refill.
The couple in the booth by the window gets their check.
A family comes in with two kids and Sue finds them a table and brings crayons and waters and never once glances my way.
Forty-five minutes I sit there.
Forty-five minutes of watching every other person in this building get served while I get nothing. The griddle keeps hissing. The coffee keeps brewing. The door keeps opening and closing as people come and go, and not one of them speaks to me. Not one of them meets my eye.
I understand. That’s the worst part. I understand exactly what this is and why it’s happening.
These people watched me fail her. They sat in this diner two weeks ago while she blew out candles alone, while the chair beside her stayed empty for two hours, while she smiled and laughed and pretended everything was fine because she didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her.
They watched her wait. They watched her hope.
They watched her finally give up hoping and light the candles anyway, and they know I wasn’t there.
They picked a side that night, and it wasn’t mine.
When I finally stand up, my legs stiff from the stool, Sue says it from the register without turning around.
“Come back when you’ve earned it, cowboy.”
I don’t answer. There’s nothing to say. I put a twenty on the counter for the coffee I didn’t get and she doesn’t touch it, and it’s still sitting there when the door swings shut behind me.
The gas station next. I just need coffee at this point, anything with caffeine, anything to get me through the day.
The girl at the counter is young, barely twenty, and she can’t find the register key while I stand there holding a cup of their bitter gas-station coffee.
She looks in the drawer. She looks under the counter.
She looks in her pockets. She calls into the back for her manager, who doesn’t come.
I stand there for ten minutes watching her not find a key that’s probably hanging around her neck, and finally I set the cup down and leave.
The hardware store. I need to start thinking about repairs, about tarps and lumber and the thousand things that need to happen before that roof gets any worse.
The owner sees me coming through the glass door and his face goes flat.
By the time I get inside he’s disappeared into the back, and the kid at the register says he’s in a meeting.
I can see him through the window of his office.
He’s sitting alone at his desk reading a newspaper.
The deli. The woman behind the counter has packed my lunches for ten years. She knows my order by heart. Roast beef on rye, extra mustard, pickles on the side. She looks straight through me at the man behind me and asks him what he needs.
I stand on the sidewalk outside the deli with my hands in my pockets. Two women I’ve known since grade school cross the street to avoid walking past me. The preacher’s wife gives me a look over her glasses that would strip paint off a barn and keeps going.
On the way to the hotel last night I stopped at the staff quarters.
Jenna’s room was cleaned out, the picture gone off the mirror, the bed stripped.
She told me to my face that my wife was in that bunker, and I’m going to hear why from her mouth.
Not today. Today nobody in this town is going to let me within ten feet of anybody.
By noon I understand the shape of my life for the foreseeable future.
This town raised her. Every single one of these people watched her grow up in that little house on Elm Street with nothing and nobody, watched her bury her daddy and then her aunt, watched her take a job at seventeen and turn into the person who brings soup when someone’s sick and remembers everyone’s birthday and never asks for anything in return.
They love her. They’ve loved her since she was seven years old and they’ll love her until she’s ninety, and right now they hate me for hurting her.
I go back to the hotel and sit on the bed.
I think about calling her. I’ve thought about it a hundred times since last night.
My phone is in my hand and her number is right there and it would take two seconds to press the button.
But what would I say? I’m sorry? She knows I’m sorry.
Sorry doesn’t mean anything without change behind it.
I love you? I couldn’t even say it when she was standing in front of me, asking for it, needing it.
Around three I give up thinking and get in the truck.
I drive to Mr. Bellinger’s office because I need to see her and I don’t have a plan for what happens after that.
The truck knows the way. I’ve picked her up from work a hundred times, back when I used to pick her up from work, back when I remembered that I had a wife who might want to see me at the end of the day.
I park across the street. I sit there for twenty minutes with my hands on the wheel, watching the front door, watching the window.
I can see her through the glass. She’s at her desk with her hair pulled back in that ponytail she wears when she’s working, bent over papers, writing.
Her face is tired. Even from here, even across the street and through the glass, I can see the shadows under her eyes.
She didn’t sleep either. She’s sitting there pretending it’s any other day while her whole life is in pieces, and she’s doing it because that’s who she is.
She keeps going. She doesn’t fall apart where anyone can see.
I open the truck door. I get out. I’m halfway across the street when I stop.
What am I going to say to her? What words do I have that will fix this?
She asked me what she needed me to do and I couldn’t answer.
She asked me to tell her I loved her, not in those words, but in the way she looked at me, in the way she waited, and I choked on it.
I’ve had a day to figure out what to say and I still have nothing.
I stand in the middle of the street. A truck honks at me and I don’t move. The driver swerves around me, yelling, and I’m still standing there staring at the window where my wife is working.
I turn around. I go to the florist instead.
The florist is on the other side of the square, a little shop with green awnings and buckets of flowers out front.
The woman inside knows who I am and knows what happened, everyone knows by now, and she doesn’t freeze me out the way the others did.
She just looks at me with sad eyes and asks what I need.
Sunflowers and daisies. Ellie pointed at a bucket of them at the farmers’ market last summer. She said they reminded her of summer, of her aunt’s garden, of being happy when she was small. I didn’t say anything at the time. I just kept walking. But I remembered. I always remember.
I pay for the flowers and drive back to her office and I sit in my truck across the street and I wait until she goes to the bathroom. Then I go inside, fast, and leave them on her desk with a card that says I’m sorry. J. and I’m back in my truck before she comes out.
I watch her through the window. I watch her walk back to her desk. I watch her see the flowers, pick up the card, read it. Her face changes in a way I can’t read from this distance, and then she picks up the whole vase and carries it to the break room and leaves it on the table.
She doesn’t want my flowers.
That’s fair. I deserve that. I sit there another twenty minutes anyway, watching the top of her head over the monitor, and Mr. Bellinger comes to his window once and looks straight across the street at my truck and doesn’t wave, and I don’t put it in gear.
I sit there and I try to think of what else I can do.
What else I can give her. What gesture, what gift, what words will make her understand that I can’t breathe when she’s not in the room, that food doesn’t taste like anything and sleep won’t come and the world has gone gray and flat without her in it.
Nothing comes.
I can’t build my way out of this. I can’t work harder and fix it. I can’t throw money at the problem and make it go away.
For the first time in my life, I don’t know what to do.
I’ve stood in a pen with a bull that wanted me dead and known exactly what to do.
I’ve had a man pull a knife on me in a bar in Amarillo and known.
I’m sitting in a parking lot across from a woman who used to smile when I walked in, a woman I’ve had in my bed a thousand nights, and I’ve got nothing.
Not a plan. Not a word. Not one thing I can put my back into and lift off the ground.
I get out of the truck anyway, because sitting in it is the one thing I know for certain doesn’t work.