26. Jacob
— ? —
Jacob
She’s quiet a long time and I let her be.
I’ve done enough pushing to last both our lives.
I sit on the step beside my wife with my hands hanging between my knees and the night sounds going on around us, crickets in the grass, a dog barking somewhere down the block, the distant hum of a truck on the highway, and I wait.
I’ve gotten good at waiting. I’ve had a lot of practice lately.
The porch light throws a warm glow over both of us, catching the gold in her hair, the shine of her eyes when she looks at me.
She’s not looking at me now. She’s looking out at the street, at the dark shape of my truck across the road, at the night that’s swallowed everything except this small circle of light.
“You said you loved me,” she says finally. “In the basement.”
“I meant it.”
“I know.” She pulls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them the way she does when she’s thinking hard, when she’s trying to figure out how to say a difficult thing.
“That’s the thing. I believe you. I believe you love me.
I’ve always believed it, even when you couldn’t say it. I decided that was enough.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is loving somebody isn’t the same as choosing them.” She turns her head to look at me, and the porch light catches her eyes, makes them shine in the dark. “You loved me the whole time. It didn’t stop one thing.”
“I know.”
“You’ve been trying. The flowers. The truck. The keys on the table. Sitting out here all night watching me eat dinner.” She almost smiles, and it’s the first time I’ve seen anything close to a smile on her face in over a week. “You’re not subtle.”
“I don’t know how to be subtle about this. I don’t know how to do anything except throw myself at it and see what sticks.”
“Then stop throwing.” She turns to face me, and her knee brushes mine on the step, and I feel the contact all the way up my leg, and I’ve been missing it for so long I forgot what it felt like. “I’m going to tell you how this works. Once. And you’re going to do it or not.”
“Tell me.”
She’s quiet. The crickets chirp. The dog down the block stops barking. Somewhere inside the house, I can hear Mrs. Bellinger moving around, the soft creak of floorboards, the clink of dishes being put away. Not listening. Just there.
“Don’t make promises,” Ellie says finally. “Just do it. Let me see it.”
“Okay.”
“No more gestures. No more buying things.”
“Okay.”
“And if I tell you to go, you go. Even when you don’t want to. Even when it’s the last thing in the world you want to do.”
I take a breath. My hands tighten on my knees, the knuckles going white.
Everything in me wants to fight that one, wants to say no, I won’t go, I can’t go, I’ll stay and I’ll fight and I’ll make you see.
That’s what I’ve always done. That’s who I’ve always been, the man who doesn’t give up, who doesn’t back down, who holds on until his hands bleed.
But she didn’t ask me to hold on. She asked me to let go when she says so, and of the three it’s the one that costs the most.
“Okay,” I say. The word feels like a surrender. Maybe it is. I’ve said okay to her more times in the last hour than in the whole year we were married, and every one of them has cost me more than the last, and I’d say a hundred more.
She told me how it works. Once. She didn’t raise her voice and she didn’t cry and she didn’t give me the list, the birthday and the door and the word, the way she’s had to give it to me over and over since April because I kept making her.
She just laid the three of them down on the step between us, and I understand that this is the last time she’s going to explain anything to me.
After tonight, either I know it or I don’t, and she’s going to find out which by watching, the way I told her to in the basement, and there’s nothing I can say from here on that will count for more than what I do tomorrow morning.
She stands up. I stand with her, my knees stiff from sitting on the hard step, my back aching from a week of bad sleep on a hotel mattress. She’s looking at me now, really looking, and I don’t know what she sees but I hope it’s worth keeping.
“Go,” she says. “Back to the hotel. I need to think.”
Every part of me wants to argue. I want to tell her I can’t do another night in that room with the water stain on the ceiling and the smell of mildew in the carpet and the empty bed that’s too big for one person.
I want to tell her that being away from her is a hand around my throat, and it squeezes a little tighter every day.
I want to tell her that I haven’t slept, haven’t really slept, since the night she left.
But she just told me the rule.
“Okay.”
I walk back across the road to my truck.
Every step is heavy. I get in. I sit there for a moment looking at her on the porch with the light behind her, and I think about all the times I’ve driven away from her when I should have stayed.
All the times I chose the ranch or the work or the easy excuse over the woman standing right in front of me.
I start the engine.
She’s still standing on the porch with her arms folded, watching me.
I drive away.
***
The hotel room is dark when I get back.
I don’t turn on the lights. I just stand in the doorway for a minute, letting my eyes adjust, looking at the room that’s been my home for the past week and a half.
The bed with its sagging mattress and scratchy sheets.
The nightstand with the lamp that doesn’t work and the Bible nobody’s opened in years.
The window that looks out on the parking lot, the neon sign that buzzes all night, the water stain on the ceiling that I’ve memorized.
This is what I have now. This is what I traded her for, two months of keeping the peace with Daphne, two months of choosing the easy path over the right one, and now I’m standing in a room that smells like mildew and cigarette smoke and nobody.
I sit on the edge of the bed. I take off my boots, one at a time, and set them by the door, the way she used to line them up by ours, toes to the wall, because she said a man who couldn’t find his boots in the dark was a man who’d be late. I lie back on the mattress and I try to sleep.
I can’t.
I keep thinking about what she said, back when we drove past Elm Street one night and she went quiet, staring out the window at a house that wasn’t hers anymore.
“It’s the only place I ever felt like I belonged.”
Her aunt’s house. She said it once and never again, and I’ve carried it for a year.
The little white place with the sagging porch and the overgrown garden, where she grew up after her daddy died, where June raised her on Sunday cookies and hand-stitched quilts and rosemary in everything she cooked.
The house she had to give up when June died because she couldn’t afford the payments on a secretary’s salary.
The house that belongs to a couple who don’t know what it meant to her, who let a stranger dig a cutting out of their front bed this spring because he asked nice and looked like he meant it.
I found photos once, when I was looking for wrapping paper last Christmas.
A box under our bed, tucked in the back corner where nobody would find it.
I wasn’t trying to snoop. I just needed paper for her present and I ran out of places to look.
But there they were, photos of her and June on that porch, photos of her as a kid climbing the oak tree in the front yard, photos of birthday parties and Christmas mornings and ordinary days that meant everything to a girl who didn’t have much else.
I put them back where I found them. I never told her I saw them.
Around ten I give up on sleeping and get back in the truck.
I don’t know where I’m going. I just know I have to move, have to do anything at all, have to stop lying in that bed counting the cracks in the ceiling and going over every mistake I’ve made for the last two years.
I pull out of the hotel lot and onto Main Street, past the gas station that wouldn’t sell me coffee, past the hardware store where the owner hid in his office.
The town is quiet at this hour, most of the businesses dark, just the streetlamps casting pools of light on empty sidewalks.
I turn left at the church with its missing steeple, still tarped over from the storm.
I pass the elementary school where Ellie went as a kid, the playground empty now, the swings moving slightly in the breeze.
I pass the cemetery where my parents are buried, where I stood three days ago trying to figure out how I ended up the man I am.
I’m not driving anywhere in particular. I’m just driving. Letting the road unspool in front of me, letting the yellow lines blur past, letting the motion do what lying still couldn’t.
But when I finally stop, I’m on Elm Street.
I don’t remember deciding to come here. I don’t remember turning onto this road or slowing down or pulling over. But here I am, parked across from a small white house with a porch light on and the oak tree spreading its branches over the lawn.
The house is the one in those photos. White siding, a little dingier now.
Blue trim on the windows, still. The oak in the front yard is bigger than it was in the pictures, its branches spreading wide.
The porch sags more than it did, the steps listing to one side, and the garden is overgrown, weeds choking out whatever June used to grow there.
But it’s her house. It’s where she belongs.
I don’t move for a long time, the engine off, the windows down, the night air coming in warm and soft.
I think about Ellie as a kid, climbing that tree.
I think about her sitting on that porch with her aunt, learning to shell peas or snap beans or whatever it is people do on porches in the evening when the day’s work is done.
I think about her learning to cook in that kitchen, learning to sew in that living room, learning how to be the person she is in every room of that little house.
I think about what it would mean to give it back to her.
After a while I get out of the truck.
The street is quiet. No traffic, no dogs barking, just the sound of my boots on the pavement as I cross to the other side. The walk to the front porch feels longer than it should, every step carrying me closer to it.
The steps creak under my weight. The porch boards groan. There’s a light on inside, dim, a lamp in a back room, and I can see the shadow of someone moving behind the curtains.
I raise my hand and knock on a door I’ve knocked on once before, this spring, for a handful of rosemary.