Chapter Thirty-Five
Leanne made her way back to the motel alone, the sound of her sandals sticking faintly to the pavement with each step.
The evening air had cooled, but the day’s heat still clung to the asphalt, rising in little waves around her ankles.
In a strange way, this felt like a test. A dress rehearsal for what the future might look like—her, by herself, learning to walk without someone else setting the pace.
After Leanne had used a bobby pin and a pair of tweezers to pick the lock on the handcuffs they’d managed to get themselves locked into, Joe had asked Nora to stay a little longer.
They would grab a bite, maybe find some pie and coffee, maybe not come back until much later.
And Leanne had waved her not-so-little girl off with a smile, swallowing the sharp pang that caught her in the throat.
Nora deserved something like this—a summer story, a boy with ink-stained fingers, a memory that would live in the margins of her life forever.
A luxury Leanne had never let herself indulge in.
There had been a boy, once. Back before secretarial school.
A young-looking Humphrey Bogart who drove too fast and smelled like tobacco and motor oil from his mechanic shop.
Her parents hadn’t approved, of course. He wasn’t “serious” enough.
He wasn’t “the future.” So she had done the right thing and let him go.
God, she was so tired of doing the right thing.
She rounded the corner of the motel and spotted the phone booth—mercifully unoccupied. The glass pane was streaked with dust, and someone had scribbled a peace sign in black marker across the metal. She stepped inside, clutching the coins with her damp palm like they were tickets to the moon.
The receiver stared back at her, daring her to lift it from its hook. Was it even worth it?
Dean probably wouldn’t answer. Or if he did, it would be short, hurried, like she was in the way.
There was always a meeting, or maybe he’d decided to go to the club for dinner.
Or she’d call his office, and he’d have left five minutes ago and was on the train, or he was about to leave and rushing out the door.
And really, what could she possibly say from three thousand miles away?
The conversation she wanted to have was not appropriate or fair to conduct over a long-distance delay.
But the silence between them had grown louder than any argument she could imagine.
Leanne released the breath she’d been holding and slipped in the first coin. Then another. Asked the operator to connect her.
Rang once.
Twice.
And then—his voice.
“Hello?”
Leanne froze. That voice, so familiar and foreign all at once. The air in the booth seemed to vacuum itself out.
“Leanne?”
She swallowed. “Hi,” she said softly. “Dean.” His name strange on her tongue. Stranger still that it had only been a few weeks, yet she felt she was calling from another life.
“Where are you?” he asked. Not unkindly. Not warmly. Just…expectantly. Like he was still trying to fit her into his schedule.
“We’re in Seattle,” Leanne said into the receiver, her voice sharper than she intended. “At the Seattle Pop Festival.”
There was a beat of silence on the line. Then Dean said, “Seattle? I thought you were going to California.”
She bit the inside of her cheek. That had been weeks ago. “I told you when I caught you last. And I’ve sent you postcards from each stop we’ve been at.”
Another pause. A faint rustle—papers being shuffled, maybe. Like he was searching for the postcards in a pile of mail. “Well,” he said, “this is the first I’ve heard of it.”
Of course, he never listened when the details didn’t involve him. And the mail, well that had always been her domain.
“We found my mother,” Leanne said, in case he didn’t remember her mentioning it as he’d hung up the last time.
“So why aren’t you returning to New York already?”
There it was. The question cloaked in command. The unsaid Wrap it up, would you? He didn’t ask how Eleanor was. Didn’t ask how Leanne was. Or Nora, for that matter. Just…logistics. Always so clean and efficient with him. Cut and dry. Emotions were inconvenient.
As if everything—people, marriage, even grief—could be penciled in like another weekly board meeting. And so he expected her home. Wanted his dinner on the table by five o’clock. And it was almost Thursday, and that’s when they had sex.
“She’s happy,” Leanne added, softer now. “My mom.”
“She’ll be happier when she’s back in New York,” Dean said, the certainty in his voice cutting like a blade.
But Leanne wasn’t so sure. When they returned to New York, Dean wasn’t the only one she’d have to have a challenging conversation with.
Where serious life decisions would have to be made.
What did her mother want? What was the plan when her mother couldn’t live alone anymore?
What was the plan when she didn’t remember who she was?
Leanne’s fingers tightened around the receiver, knuckles white. The phone cord coiled like a snake around her wrist, the plastic slick with sweat. Heat climbed up her neck, and her breath quickened.
How could he speak with such authority about a person he barely knew?
The thought rose in her chest like a wave—and this time, she didn’t stop it. “Sometimes people are happy doing things they love,” she said aloud, her voice firm, no longer trying to keep the peace.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Of course, he didn’t understand. Of course, he bristled the second she questioned anything—his routines, needs, and expectations. He liked her pliant. Predictable. And she had been for so many years.
But not anymore.
“It means”—she kept her voice steady now, finding the confidence to tell him what she needed to—“we’re going to have a serious conversation when I get home.”
She had no idea what that conversation with Dean would look like. But she had a couple weeks to form the words. And frankly, a couple weeks for him to figure some things out too.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked again, his voice, at last, edged with something other than indifference.
“It means things need to change.” Leanne hung up the phone.
Not because she was trying to be dramatic. But because she didn’t owe him more than that. Especially when he wasn’t even concerned. He was only concerned with one thing: himself.
And if that wasn’t a clue about how their future would unfold, then she’d been wearing blinders for twenty years.
Leanne stepped out of the phone booth, the summer air pressing against her skin like steam. Across the parking lot, a young couple was necking on a bench, tangled in each other like they didn’t care who saw. Leanne offered them the ghost of a smile and kept walking.
Next door, a dive bar with flickering neon signage called her in like a confessional booth.
She wasn’t one for bars. She wasn’t one for drinking, really. But that was mainly because Dean didn’t think it was appropriate for his wife to imbibe too much. He preferred she stick to sherry or the occasional white wine cocktail at parties.
Tonight, she didn’t care what Dean preferred.
She stepped inside, her borrowed sandals clicking against the sticky floor, and slid onto a cracked brown vinyl stool. The air smelled like cigarette smoke and regret. A Patsy Cline song crooned from a battered jukebox in the corner.
“What’ll it be?” The bartender was wiping a glass with a towel that looked like it had seen better decades.
“Whiskey,” she said, surprising even herself. “Neat.”
He raised a brow but poured it without question. Leanne took the glass in both hands and stared at the contents, letting it catch the dim light like gold.
The first sip burned in the best way.
This wasn’t a polite glass of wine. This wasn’t a husband-approved cocktail on a coaster. This was a shot of fire that went straight to her belly and told her she was still alive.
Leanne grabbed a handful of peanuts from the communal bowl, the shells gritty against her fingers. She cracked them open and tossed them back like a woman who knew what she was doing—even if she didn’t.
“Another,” she said when the first glass was empty.
The bartender grinned and poured her a second.
Leanne spun the shot glass slowly on the bar top, watching the whiskey swirl like liquid courage.
She thought of all the nights she’d played bartender to Dean.
Perfectly measured old-fashioneds, soda water for herself.
The good little wife. The quiet little shadow.
Not tonight.
Tonight, she was the woman at the bar. Drinking the real thing. Starting to feel real herself.
“Actually,” she said, her voice low but clear, pushing the still-full shot glass forward, “can you make that an old-fashioned? And…have this one on me.”
The bartender’s brow lifted, amused. “Sure thing.”
He knocked back the shot with a practiced flick of his wrist, then set to work mixing the sugar and bitters, the clink of the spoon a steady rhythm behind the bar. The orange-peel twist caught the light like a flame.
Leanne brought the cocktail to her lips and took a slow sip. Strong. A little sweet, a little bitter. Like the truth she was finally letting settle on her tongue.
She turned on her stool to take in the rest of the bar—the sagging booths filled with truckers and locals, a jukebox warbling “Crazy” in the background, the scent of stale beer and cheap cologne clinging to the air.
The atmosphere wasn’t glamorous, but it was real.
Honest in a way that country clubs and charity luncheons never could be.
And maybe that’s what she was craving now. Something real. Something hers.
As she took another sip, her eyes caught on her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. She barely recognized the woman staring back. Wind-tousled hair, no lipstick, bell-bottom jeans she’d borrowed from her daughter. A little rumpled, a little tired.
But alive. The same word Nora had used to describe her.
She wondered what her life might look like if Dean couldn’t—or wouldn’t—change. If he insisted on going back to the way things were, pretending this summer had never happened.
Would she agree, shrink herself down again, tuck her dreams behind his desk calendar, fit her joy into the sliver of space he allotted her between dinner and Thursday-night sex?
Leanne didn’t think she could.
She hadn’t come all this way, literally and figuratively, just to hand her independence back like it was something borrowed.
No. This time, she’d keep it. The first half of her life had belonged to everyone else. Parents. Husband. Expectations. But the second half? That was going to be hers.
“Damn straight,” she murmured. She lifted her glass to her own reflection. “To me.” Then she drank.