32. Matt
Matt
Iwoke up on Becca’s couch with a crick in my neck and gray light coming through the blinds, the kind that means it’s later than you think and earlier than you want.
For a few seconds I didn’t remember why I was there instead of my own bed, and then I did, all at once, the whole night coming back down on me like a shelf giving way.
Levi came in a little after that, straight from the station, a cardboard tray of cups in one hand and a bag from Violet’s swinging off two fingers of the other.
“You’re up,” he said, like it was a mixed result.
“Define up.”
“Vertical. I’ll take it.” He set the bag on the counter and started pulling muffins out of it, and Becca appeared from the back a minute later in one of his old shirts, and reached past both of us for a coffee without a word, which told me she’d been awake before either of us and just hadn’t bothered getting up yet.
“You look terrible,” she said, sitting down across from me at the little table.
“Thank you.”
“I mean it kindly. You look like a man who’s been rehearsing a conversation with the ceiling all morning.” She peeled the paper off a muffin, unhurried, like the day hadn’t caught up to her yet. “Are you going tonight?”
“I don’t know that I’m invited anymore.”
Levi leaned against the counter with his arms crossed, unhurried, the way a man gets after enough hours watching other people’s worst nights. “Nobody uninvited you. You’re still a contestant. Technically that still makes you her—”
“Don’t,” I said.
“—date,” he finished anyway, grinning, and Becca didn’t even look up, just kicked him lightly under the table, an old married reflex that had nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing.
“Here’s what I know,” Becca said. “I know you did something stupid and kind at the same time, which is extremely on brand for you, and I know whatever happened out there hit hard enough that you ended up on my couch instead of your own bed.” She said it gently, and something about the lack of any edge in it made it land harder than yelling would have.
“So no. You don’t get to duck out tonight because it’s easier.
You’ve spent your whole life showing up for everyone else without fail.
Don’t let tonight be the first time you don’t show up, right when it matters most.”
“I’m not ducking out. I’m trying to figure out what I’d even say.”
“Then figure it out standing up, tonight, in front of the whole town, instead of on my couch by yourself.” She pushed a muffin across the table at me like she didn’t trust me to feed myself either.
“You want to apologize small. Corner her by the punch bowl, say the right sentence quiet enough that only she hears it, hope it lands. I’ve watched you build a whole filing system out of a feeling before you’d let yourself feel it, Matt.
Don’t think I don’t see you doing it right now.
” She tapped the table once, for emphasis.
“Don’t do small. Say it out loud, where you can’t take it back, and she can’t pretend she didn’t hear it.
That’s the only kind of sorry that means anything to a woman who’s spent her whole life making things smaller so nobody has to feel them. ”
I looked at my sister across that little table, somehow the wisest person in the room. “When did you get good at this?” I said.
“I had a good teacher.” She glanced at Levi, who had the decency to look at his coffee instead of either of us. “Go home. Get some more sleep if you can stand it. You’ve got all day to fall apart in private before you have to do it in public.”
I drove home with the muffin uneaten on the passenger seat.
I had the day off, which turned out to be the worst possible thing to have.
A shift would have given me somewhere to put my hands and a reason not to think in complete sentences.
Instead, I had a whole house and nothing in it that needed me, which is a specific kind of misery I hadn’t felt since the week after the wedding, standing in these same rooms wondering what a man does with himself once nobody needs him for anything.
I turned the television on and didn’t watch it.
Some home renovation show, a couple arguing cheerfully about countertops, and I sat there through two full episodes without absorbing a single word either of them said, my mind running the same loop of the barn, her voice telling me to go, over and over until the words stopped meaning anything and just became sound.
I paced. I picked up my phone four different times and put it down four different times, because there was nothing to say to her yet that wasn’t the small, careful, corner-of-the-punch-bowl version Becca had told me not to do.
Around the middle of the afternoon I gave up pretending I wasn’t already thinking about tonight and went and stood in front of the closet. I tried on the charcoal suit and looked at myself in it for a long minute and took it back off in favor of the dark blue.
I showered again anyway, longer than I needed to, and shaved carefully, twice over the same stretch of my jaw, watching my hand in the mirror to make sure it stayed steady the whole way through.
I was straightening my collar when somebody knocked—three hard raps, no patience in them—and I opened the door to Aggie on my step, still in her coat, a foil-wrapped loaf in one hand and a thermos tucked under her arm.
“Becca says you’re in a mood. She told me everything,” she announced, pushing the thermos at my chest so I had to take it.
“Pumpkin bread’s still warm. Coffee’s the good stuff, not that tar you make.
” Then she got a proper look at my face, and her own went tight and grim, the brightness dropping off it like a coat sliding off a hook.
“But that’s not why I’m here, and you already know it, because you’ve gone the color of a bad conscience.
Tell me it isn’t true. Tell me you did not file a grant application on the Starling farm. ”
“Aggie—”
“Because I had tea with Eileen this morning.” She came in past me, set the bread on my counter, and turned around with her arms crossed.
“Eileen, my best friend who sits on that grant board, who has sat on it twenty years, was fit to be tied, she told me, because apparently the board wanted to throw the whole application out the second they pulled the title and saw there was a lien on the property. Rules are rules, they said. Encumbered land, no grant.” Her chin came up.
“And Eileen stood up in that room and raised the roof. Told them the Starlings have farmed this mountain for a hundred years, and that if they were going to punish that family for being in trouble instead of helping them out of it, they could do it over her resignation.” A breath.
“So they approved it. In full. Because Eileen made them. That’s the only reason it came through at all. ”
She watched it land on me, the whole shape of what I’d done and hadn’t understood I was doing, and whatever she saw on my face took all the fight straight out of her.
“Oh, Matt.” She crossed the kitchen and wrapped me in a hug, the way she used to when I was a boy and had gotten myself worked up over something I couldn’t fix. “Sit down before you fall down. Sit.”
I sat. She poured me a cup of the coffee she’d brought, pressed it into my hands, and pulled out the chair across from me, and for a second she just let me hold the warm cup and breathe.
“Now you listen to me,” she said. “It is going to be all right.” She reached over and tapped the back of my hand.
“You went around that girl. You went around her whole family. However good your reasons were, and I know they were good, you took something that was theirs to decide, and you decided it for them, alone, in secret. That’s the wound. Not the grant. The secrets.”
“I know,” I said. It came out wrecked.
“I know you know. So.” She sat back and folded her arms, and something in her had gone brisk and certain, a general who has finished assessing the damage and moved on to the plan.
“Becca and I are in agreement. You are not going to fix this with a phone call. You are not going to fix it with a nice note and a casserole. You went around her in private, so you are going to have to come back to her in front of everybody, out loud, where she and this whole town can see you do it.” Her eyes were bright and fierce.
“You’re going to have to do something big, Matt.
Bigger than you’re comfortable with. About ten times bigger than a man like you will want to.
That’s the price. That’s the only thing that’s going to reach her now. ”
I looked at the coffee going still in my hands, and thought about a stage, and a microphone, and a whole town that had, just once, watched me stop hiding.
“I might have an idea,” I said.
“Of course you do.” Aggie stood, and kissed the top of my head, and picked her thermos back up off the counter. “Eat the bread. You’ll need it.” She got as far as the door and turned back. “See you at the Harvest Ball tonight.”
And then she was gone, and the house was quiet, and it was just me and a foil-wrapped loaf and a plan that was going to take more nerve than anything I’d ever done in a uniform.
But the plan was for tonight, in front of everyone, and there was one piece of it that couldn’t wait for a crowd. Because there was a version of the evening where Elizabeth heard about the grant approval secondhand, from somebody else’s mouth, and I couldn’t let it happen.
So I drove out to the farm early, before the Ball was set to start.