Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
WILLA
The thing nearly happens on a Tuesday in the first week of January, in the Mercer kitchen, over of all things a sink full of dishes.
Cooper is in bed. Sam and Asa are out checking a hive that pinged Asa’s worry in the night, and Jonah has run to town for a part, and it is somehow only me and Beau and a sink, and I am washing because I cannot stand in a kitchen and not work, it is a medical condition, and Beau is drying, badly, and we are laughing about something, the goat, always the goat, and then we are not laughing, because he hands me a plate and his hand stays a second on the plate over mine, warm, and I look up, and Beau Mercer is looking at me with the charm all the way off.
I have only seen him with it off twice. Once crying on my shoulder on Christmas Eve, and once when he said thank you with nothing performed in it.
This is the third time, and it is different from both, because this time there is nothing sad in it at all.
He is looking at me the way you look at a thing you have decided about.
The kitchen is warm and smells like dish soap and, under it, the thing that always hangs in this house now that I have stopped pretending I do not notice, the honey and the woodsmoke and the bread, and Beau’s hand is over mine on the wet plate and he says, low, easy, no joke in front of it, “You know I see you. Right? Not the sunshine. You. I clocked you on the Square the first day, same as you clocked me. You do the bright thing so nobody looks too close. I invented the bright thing. Takes one to know one.” His thumb moves, once, over the back of my hand.
“I’m looking close, Willa. I have been for a while.
And I like what’s under there a whole lot better than the sunshine, and I wanted you to know that at least one of us has stopped pretending. ”
And here is the moment. Right here. This is the moment where a braver woman, a woman who believed the marker, leans the half inch it would take, and lets a good man who has dropped his whole armor for her finish what he is plainly asking to start.
I drop the plate back in the sink and I step back and I go bright.
I do it so fast and so smooth it would impress you.
I laugh, the warm deflecting laugh, the one I taught Roz to spot, and I say, “Beau Mercer, are you flirting with the help while everybody’s out of the house, your sister-in-law raised you better than that,” and I make it a joke, I turn the whole thing into a bit, his bit, I hand him back his own tool so he will pick it up, and he does, because I gave him no choice, he picks the charm back up and grins and says something light and the moment closes like water over a stone, and I dry my hands and I get my coat and I say something about an early morning and I leave, I flee, I drive off the farm with my heart going like a rabbit’s and my hands not steady on the wheel and the word help ringing in my own ears in my own voice, because I said it, I called myself the help, out loud, to his face, the truest thing I have said in months disguised as the lightest.
You want to know the worst part? I beat him to it.
That is the whole maneuver, that is the genius of me, I got there first. A good man told me he sees me and likes what he sees, and before he could get one inch closer to the place where he might change his mind, might look closer and find the sunshine was the best part after all, might decide come June that the reading teacher was a nice idea that ran its course, before any of that could happen to me, I did it to myself.
I declined. I am never the one who gets left.
I make extremely sure of it. I leave first, every time, with a joke, in a good coat, and I call it being fine.
I am still shaking when I pass the turn for my own house and keep going, because I cannot be alone in a house with a porch light tonight, and I drive the two blocks past it to the only place I have ever been able to go when the floor drops out, which is Roz.
The shop is closed but the back light is on and Roz is there doing inventory the way she does when she cannot sleep, and she takes one look at me coming in out of the cold with my face undone and she does not say I told you so, she does not say anything, she puts down her clipboard and she pours two glasses of the wine she keeps for exactly this and she sits me down in the good chair among the buckets of January carnations and she waits, the way she has been waiting since November, the way she promised me she would.
“He sees me,” I say, finally, to the carnations. “Beau. He said he sees me. The real one. And I called myself that and I ran.”
“Mm,” says Roz.
“Don’t mm me, I invented mm.”
“I know you did. You’re going to have to bear it being used on you, it’s only fair.” She drinks her wine.
And I try to deflect it, because I have to try, it is a reflex, I file things, I hand things back across counters. “It’s not what you think,” I say. “It’s complicated, Roz. They’re grieving. A grieving man reaches for the nearest warm thing, that’s all this is, it does not have to mean anything.”
“You told me once that nothing’s complicated,” Roz says. “That I was complicated, and the situation was the simplest thing you’d seen in months. You want me to keep going? I kept all of them.”
“I’m his teacher. There are lines, real ones, professional ones, I cannot walk across them like they aren’t there.”
“There are, and you will handle them, because handling things is the one thing you have never once failed at in your life. That is not what has you in my chair at ten o’clock at night with your face undone, and you know it.”
So I reach for the bottom of the bag, the last defense, the one I have run my whole life, and I hear myself do it even as I do it. “I’m fine, Roz. Honestly. I got rattled, that’s all. It’s fine. I just,” and I do not finish, because Roz has gone still.
“That’s twice,” she says, soft. “You said fine twice. In a row. In my shop.” Her eyes have gone wet.
“You taught me what fine twice means, Willa Tate. You wrote it on my own calendar back in the fall and you would not delete it. So you are going to sit in that chair and let me tell you the thing I have been holding since November.”
And I nod, because I owe her this, because six years ago she sat exactly where I am sitting and I made her hear the true thing, and turnabout is the only fair play either of us has ever cared about. She sets the glass down, and she clears her hands the way you clear your hands for something heavy.
“You make everybody’s love story happen,” Roz says.
“It is the most beautiful thing about you and it is the wall you have hidden behind your whole life. You made mine happen. You stood in my kitchen and you would not let me lie, and I have four men and a cat and a whole life because of it, and not once, in twenty-two years, have I watched you let a single soul do that for you. You carry the casserole to every wedding in this county and you have never once let yourself be the bride. And I used to think that was just generosity. I thought you were the most generous person God ever made and you simply didn’t want it for yourself.
” She leans in. “But that’s not it, is it.
You want it so bad you can’t look straight at it.
You decided a long time ago, before either of us had the words, that the big love is a thing that happens to other people, that you’re the one who arranges it, the supporting character, the best friend, and that if you ever once reached for the lead in your own story you’d find out the truth you’ve been running from since we were girls, which is that you think, down underneath all that sunshine, that you are not the kind of person somebody keeps. ”
The carnations blur. I do not say anything. I am extremely busy not saying anything.
“And here is what you did tonight,” Roz says, gentle now, merciless and gentle at once, the way I was with her, “a man dropped his whole guard and told you he saw you, the real you, and wanted her, and you called yourself the help and you ran, because being the help is safe: it never gets chosen and so never gets unchosen, it gets to go home at the end and be lonely and call it being fine. You ran the white flag up, sugar. Fine. I have watched you do it your entire life and I have let you, because you’re you, because you’d never once let me get away with it but you’ve always gotten away with it yourself, and I am done letting you.
You are in love with those four men. You are in love with that whole broken beautiful family and that little boy who drew you into the middle of the picture, and you are about to hand it all back in June and call it the responsible thing, and it is not responsible, Willa, it is the oldest fear you own wearing its Sunday clothes, and I will not sit in my shop and watch you do to yourself the exact thing you would not let me do. ”
She sits back. She picks her wine back up. “That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You can mm me now.”
And I cannot mm her. That is the trouble.
I open my mouth to deflect, to file it, to hand it back across the counter the way I hand everything back, and nothing comes, because she has done it to me, she has done the thing I did to her on a kitchen floor with the good marbles, she has said the true thing out loud so it cannot keep growing teeth in the dark, and there is no defending against being loved that accurately by somebody who learned the accuracy from you.
“Cooper drew me holding his hand,” I say. It comes out wrecked. “In the middle. With Della watching. He titled it my pack and Miss Tate. He’s eight, Roz. He doesn’t know you’re not supposed to want a thing that’s going to leave.”
“Neither did you,” Roz says, “at eight. Somebody taught you. You can unlearn it. People do. I did. You taught me.”
And I put my face in my hands among the January carnations and I let her see it, all of it, the whole thing I have been keeping under one flat hand against my own breastbone since a gymnasium in October, and Roz comes around and holds me the way I held her, and does not tell me it will be okay, because I taught her not to, and we sit there in the closed shop in the dark until I can breathe.
It is starting to rain when I leave. Not hard yet.
But the radio in the car says it in that flat excited weatherman way, a system coming up out of the Gulf, warm air over the cold ground, two days of it, the worst of it Thursday, and I drive home through the first of it with Roz’s whole terrible accurate speech sitting in my chest cracked wide open, and I do not, for once, file it.
I let it sit there and be true. I am in love with all four of them.
I have decided I am not the kind of person somebody keeps.
Both things at once, the want and the wall, and somewhere out past the county line a man is wrapping his hives against a wind that is coming, and the rain comes down a little harder, and I leave the porch light on, and I lie awake listening to the storm find its feet, and I think, for the first time, not don’t, but what if I let myself.
What if I stopped running. What if I let them keep me.
The rain answers all night, against the glass, getting louder, and Thursday comes up out of the Gulf toward us in the dark.