26. Tessa
TESSA
Iasked for the space. I want that on the record somewhere official: it was my idea, I stand by it, and it is eating me alive.
Nobody tells you the space comes pre-loaded with him. That’s the design flaw. I got a whole town stocked with two years of us and then asked him to vacate it, and the town didn’t get the memo.
I drive past the shop with my eyes forward like it’s a wreck on the highway—do not look, looking helps nobody—and my eyes drift anyway, every time, hunting the lot for his bike before I can stop them.
The hardware store has the wall of shop rags he buys by the brick.
The gas station has his jerky brand at eye level like a billboard.
My own truck has the cold-start stutter he kept swearing he’d fix, and every single morning it stutters twice and catches, like the truck’s clearing its throat to bring him up.
I’ve started saying “I know” to my own dashboard. Out loud. That’s the level we’re operating at.
Sleep’s broken too, but not the way I expected. Falling asleep is fine—I’m exhausted all the time now, falling asleep is the one thing my body still does like a professional.
It’s 3 a.m. that’s the problem. 3 a.m. has opinions. I wake up on the dot like I’ve got a shift, heart already going, and the quilt’s too warm and then too thin, and I lie in Casey’s guest room under the water stain rebuilding fights with better lines. Sharper comebacks. Colder exits.
Some nights I win them. Some nights I let him win, which is worse, because then I’m lying there at four in the morning having forgiven a hypothetical man who hasn’t earned a damn thing, and I’m furious at myself in advance, and THEN I can’t fall back asleep, because now I’m mad at two Cals and one of them doesn’t exist.
Food’s gone stupid. I cooked Dot’s chicken thing for Casey on Tuesday—my chicken thing, the good one, the one I was making That Night, which possibly should have told me something before I had a spoon in my hand—and I stood at Casey’s stove doing all the steps right, and it came out right, and it smelled exactly like my own kitchen.
That was the problem. It smelled like six-thirty on a weeknight and a man coming through the door hunting the pot with his nose like a cartoon.
I ate four bites. Chewed each one longer than chicken requires, throat doing this little close-up thing on every swallow, and then I pushed the rest around the plate the way you do when you’re twelve.
Casey ate two servings and didn’t say one word about my plate, because Casey is the last perfect person alive.
And then Thursday happens.
Thursday I’m at the diner—normal, functional, out running errands like a functional normal person, picking up the pie Casey ordered—and Dot’s at the register and the radio’s doing nothing songs and the whole place smells like coffee and fryer oil, and the door bell dings behind me.
It’s not him. It’s Earl. Just Earl, in his feed cap, here for his four o’clock coffee like every day of his life.
But for half a second—the ding, the cold push of outside air—my whole body turns toward that door with its hand already coming up to wave.
Two years of Pavlov. Two years of that bell meaning sometimes-him, of looking up from a booth and getting the grin across the whole length of the diner, the one he never gave anybody else.
My body’s halfway into the wave before my brain catches up and delivers the news.
It’s Earl.
And I have to put down the pie.
That’s all the warning I get. Pie box on the counter, “one second, Dot” in a voice I hear leave me sounding almost right, and then I’m in the diner bathroom with the door locked and my back against it, and it hits like a nosebleed.
No ramp-up. Just ON. Crying so hard and so fast it scares me—whole-body, ribs heaving, ugly hiccuping gulps of it—and I grab a fistful of paper towels out of the dispenser and jam them against my mouth to kill the sound, because Earl is eight feet away drinking coffee and this is a door, not a wall.
My knees want to go. I let them, halfway, sliding down until I’m crouched with my back on the door and my elbows on my knees and both hands full of brown institutional paper mashed to my face, shaking, leaking snot, making these small strangled animal noises into the towels.
Ninety seconds. Maybe two minutes. The whole storm, start to finish.
At some point in the middle of it I catch us in the mirror over the sink—a woman crouched on a bathroom floor sobbing into paper towels because a door made a noise—mascara shot, face blotched red in patches, and some dry little voice way at the back of me looks at her and goes: there she is. There’s the bill.
You can white-knuckle the days all you want. The body keeps its own books, and it collects when it collects.
Then it’s done. It shuts off almost as fast as it started, like weather.
I stand up. Run the cold water and hold my wrists under it, Casey’s trick, then my fingertips under my eyes.
Fix what’s fixable with one-ply and a prayer.
Breathe at myself in the mirror—in for four, out for longer—until the woman in there looks less like a crime scene, and then I unlock the door and walk back out and pay for the pie.
“Anything else, hon?” Dot says, normal as anything, counting my change.
“Nope,” I say.
And I walk out to my truck absolutely certain—certain—that nobody clocked it.
For two days I believe it.
Saturday I’m back, because Casey wanted the meatloaf plate and I have reached the stage of grief where I run other people’s food errands for something to do with a truck.
I’m waiting on the to-go order in the front booth, picking at a napkin, and Dot comes out from behind the counter carrying a slice of the peach pie I did not order. She sets it down in front of me.
And then she slides into the other side of the booth—which Dot does not do. Dot doesn’t sit. I have known this woman three years and I have never once seen her sit on the customer side of anything.
My stomach goes wary before she’s said a word.
“Eat some of that,” she says, “and listen a minute.”
“Dot—”
“Two things. I’m only saying them once, and then we never had this conversation.” She folds her hands on the table, calm as church. “One. Thursday, when you went into my bathroom.” My whole face goes hot, fast, and she waves it off before it can turn into anything.
“Honey, I see everything that happens in my own restaurant. Been seeing it forty years. Girls have been crying in that bathroom since before you were born, and I know the sound of it through a door like I know my own compressor. You came out with cold water on your wrists and paid for a pie.” She says it flat and kind at the same time, no drama in it, just fact.
“You’ll eat when you eat. I’m not your mother. But you’re down weight you didn’t have to spare, and I notice, and now you know I notice, and that’s all I’ll ever say about that.”
I look at the pie. I take a bite, because it’s Dot, and refusing Dot’s pie in Dot’s diner is not a thing that happens in this valley.
It’s very good pie. My throat almost doesn’t let it through, but it goes, and she watches it go with exactly one nod, like a foreman signing off on something.
“Two.” She waits until I look up at her. Takes her time about it. Forty years of this town’s men keeping and breaking their word are sitting in her face, and whatever’s coming, she’s already decided I get to have it.
“Whitney Doyle has called that boy’s phone twice since it all came out. Once the Sunday after. Once Wednesday last.”
My stomach drops through the floor of the booth. Straight down, no stops, the fork suddenly loud against the plate because apparently my hand set it down harder than I told it to—and Dot keeps going, even, unhurried, a woman reading the weather.
“He didn’t pick up either time. Didn’t call back. Didn’t text. Nothing.” She slides out of the booth, straightens her apron, and collects my empty coffee cup on principle.
“Now—how I know that’s my business. Everything in this town’s my business, that’s the arrangement.” She looks down at me, and her voice doesn’t soften exactly, but it settles.
“But you sat in that back booth three weeks ago and told him you didn’t know yet if any of it meant anything. Wasn’t going to let you sit out there not knowing the score.”