10. Juliette #2
I’m on the porch before dawn, coffee in hand, when his headlights appear around the bend. He parks. He gets out. He walks up the lane with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched against the early morning chill.
This morning he’s carrying his own coffee. Gas-station cup, lid chewed at the edge, the drink of a man living out of a bed and breakfast at the end of the world.
“What is that,” I say.
“Coffee. Allegedly.” He considers it. “The ferry terminal machine and I have an arrangement. It provides something brown, and I provide exact change and low expectations.”
“Rosie’s store has a real machine.”
“Rosie’s store has Rosie in it, and Rosie looks at me like she’s pricing caskets.”
“She is.”
“I know.” He toasts me with the terrible cup, dignified as a man with nothing left to lose but posture. “Tell her I’m a standard length.”
“This is harassment,” I say when he reaches the bottom of the steps.
“Probably.”
“I could call the police.”
“You could. Chief Patterson plays poker with the bed and breakfast owner where I’m staying. He already knows I’m here.”
“Of course he does.” I set my coffee down on the railing. “This island has no secrets.”
“None.” He looks up at me, and there’s something almost like humor in his expression. “Did you know there’s a betting pool at the pub? Odds on whether you take me back.”
“What are the odds?”
“Three to one against.”
“Only three to one? I’m insulted.”
“The odds were seven to one last week. You’re trending.”
“What changed?”
“Rosie’s been seen feeding me. The fishermen say nobody feeds a lost cause twice.”
“The fishermen,” I say, “are going to be very disappointed in the house’s final ruling.”
“The house,” he says, “hasn’t ruled. That’s why I keep showing up for the hearings.”
“The fishermen think you’re a soft touch.”
“The fishermen have never met me.”
“They’ve met Rosie. She’s been talking you up.” He shifts his weight. “She also threatened to gut me like a cod if I upset you again, so I’m trying to be very careful about what I say.”
“Rosie would never gut you. She’d make you gut yourself and then critique your technique.”
“That tracks.”
The silence stretches between us. The sun is starting to come up over the water, painting the sky in shades of pink and gold, and I should be looking at that instead of looking at him.
I look at him anyway.
“Why are you really here?” I ask.
“I told you-”
“You told me you’re leaving something. Standing at my steps. That’s not an answer, that’s a performance. So tell me the real reason, or don’t come back.”
He’s quiet for a long moment.
“I kept a drawer,” he finally says. “In my closet. Every note you ever left me, every bookmark, every photograph of those coffee foam stars. I kept all of it, and I never told you, and I don’t know why.”
“That’s still not an answer.”
“I think I was scared.” He runs a hand through his hair.
“I think I was so scared of how much you mattered that I couldn’t let myself show it.
So I kept evidence instead. Proof that I was loved, hidden away where no one could see it.
And now you’re gone, and I have a box full of paper that proves I was an idiot, and I don’t know what to do with any of it except-”
“Except what?”
“Except show up. Every day. And hope you eventually believe that I’m trying.”
I pick up my coffee. Take a sip. Set it down again.
“Go home, Zachary.”
“Okay.”
He turns. He walks down the lane. He gets in his car and drives away.
I stay on the porch until his taillights disappear, and I don’t let myself think about why my chest aches.
***
Rosie finds me on the fifth evening, sitting on the porch with wine and a novel I’m not reading.
“This is getting ridiculous,” she says, settling into the chair beside me.
“Tell me about it.”
“That man has taken a ferry and bad roads every single day this week to stand at the bottom of your steps and let you send him away.”
“I know.”
“He’s not sleeping. Jenny says he looks like death warmed over.”
“I don’t care how he looks.”
“Mmm.” Rosie takes the wine I’ve poured her. “So what are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing. I’ll keep telling him to go home and eventually he’ll get the message.”
“Will he?”
“He has to.”
Rosie lets that sit. She has a whole vocabulary of letting things sit - this one has an eyebrow in it, and patience, and about forty years of watching islanders lie to themselves on their own porches.
“Does he?” Rosie sets her glass down. “Because from where I’m sitting, that man is doing more work for your attention in one week than he did in six years of marriage. And you’re sitting here pretending you don’t care.”
“I don’t care.”
“Bullshit.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” Rosie’s voice is sharp now. “You care so much you can’t sleep. You care so much you’re on this porch every morning at dawn, waiting for him. You care so much that when he drives away, you watch until you can’t see his taillights anymore.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means everything. And you need to decide what you’re going to do about it.”
“I’ve decided. I signed the papers.”
“You signed those papers because you were hurt and angry and you wanted to hurt him back. That’s not a decision, that’s a reaction.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Life isn’t fair. Neither is love.” Rosie leans forward.
“Listen to me. I watched your mother love your father for the five years they had together, and I watched her mourn him for the thirty years after. She never stopped loving him, even when it made no sense, even when everyone told her to move on. And when she got sick, do you know what she said to me?”
“Rosie-”
“She said she was glad. Glad she’d loved him completely, without holding back, even though it hurt when she lost him. Because the loving was worth the losing.”
“This isn’t the same thing.”
“Isn’t it?” Rosie stands. “Your mother would tell you to fight for what you want. And I’m telling you to figure out what that is. Either shoot him or feed him, honey. The island can’t take the suspense.”
“What if I don’t know what I want?”
“Then figure it out.” She pauses at the edge of the porch. “But do it soon. Because that man is going to keep showing up until you give him a reason to stop, and eventually you’re going to have to decide if you want him to.”
She walks away into the darkness, and I sit alone on my mother’s porch, watching the place where Zachary’s car will appear in the morning.
The wine is warm and the night is cold and the honest ledger, since no one’s here to audit it, reads like this: I want him to stop coming.
I want him to never stop coming. I want the last six years back with interest, and I want the man at the bottom of my steps to have been the man I married all along, and none of those wants can share a page, and I am so tired of being my own accountant.
Figure out what you want, Rosie said.
Fuck, Rosie. That IS the fight.
Figure out what you want.
I want to stop hurting. I want to stop caring. I want to go back to being the woman in the library who hadn’t learned yet what love could cost.
But I can’t go back.
And I’m starting to wonder if forward means something I’m not ready to face.