Chapter Five
LUCY DIDN’T KNOCK, because as far as I could tell Lucy had never knocked on anything in her life.
The door hit the wall hard enough to rattle the lamp, and there she was, tiny and furious and somehow managing to take up the doorway, one hand on her hip and a travel mug in the other that I was pretty sure was coffee in name only.
“Alright,” she announced, to the room, the compound, heck, they could probably hear her in town. “That is enough of this!”
I was in the chair by the window where I’d more or less lived for the better part of a week. Fiona had the edge of the bed, one hand resting on the blanket over Brenda’s hip, where she’d been most of the day and a good part of the days before it.
Brenda was like a mother to her. She was the one who’d raised Fiona after her mama died. Horse’s daughter, Bolt’s old lady, if anybody had the right to that bed, it was Fiona.
She’d sat there all week, just calm, close, and not going anywhere.
But I’d caught it a couple times when Brenda wasn’t looking. Something would change around Fiona’s eyes, like she was working really hard not to be angry. And she was angry. Really angry. She just kept it tucked away somewhere Brenda couldn’t see it.
It wasn’t at Brenda. And I didn’t think it was really at Tom, either. Whatever it was, Tom had just brought it back up. Like he’d reminded her of something she’d been trying not to think about for a really long time.
She never said what. I never asked.
I knew better than most that sometimes you didn’t want somebody asking.
Brenda was where Brenda had been, in the bed, on her side, facing the wall, the quilt up to her chin.
She’d been eating again, a little. Sleeping, thanks to the tin on the nightstand.
But she hadn’t gotten up, not really, not in the way that counted, and between us, Fiona and me, we’d spent days trying not to push her. Maybe not pushing was the problem.
Not pushing wasn’t Lucy’s problem.
“Lucy.” Brenda didn’t turn over. “I love you. Go away.”
“No.” Lucy walked straight to the window and hauled the curtains open so hard one of the hooks pinged off somewhere and the room lit up.
Brenda made a sound like a vampire. “Nope. No more! Look at this. It’s two in the afternoon and it smells like a funeral home in here and you have got two pretty girls half your age sitting vigil like you’re on your way out.
You’re not on your way out, Brenda. You got your heart broke.
Welcome to being alive, it’s humiliating, everybody’s done it, get up! ”
I put my hand over my mouth. It was that or laugh, and I wasn’t sure laughing was allowed yet.
“You don’t understand,” Brenda started.
“I understand fine, keep up.” Lucy set her mug down on the dresser and put both hands on her hips now, full artillery.
“You listen to me. I have been on this compound one year. One. And in that one year I have watched you run this entire place like a woman twice your size, comforting every soul who comes through that door whether they’ve got the sense to ask for it or not, taking in the ones nobody else had room for, sitting up half the night with the drunk, the grieving and the plain scared, and never once, not one single time, letting anybody do a damn thing back for you.
And you know me. You know I asked around about you the second I got here, because I ask around about everybody, it’s a sickness, Spinner says I’ll get myself shot one day and he’s probably right.
So I know the story. I know you loved a man who kept you at arm’s length half your life.
I know you raised that man’s girl like your own when her mother passed and never asked for one bit of credit.
” Her voice didn’t soften but something in it went fierce.
“I made it my business to know exactly who you are, Brenda, and who you are is the strongest person on this huge sorry compound, and I include the ones who ride. So no. You do not get to let Tom Montgomery — Tom, Brenda, a man who wears pleated khakis — you do not get to let him put you in a bed for a week.”
Something flickered in Brenda’s face. The first live thing I’d seen in it in days.
Fiona caught it too. I saw her ease half a notch, the breath a woman finally lets out after holding it for days. She leaned in and pressed her mouth to Brenda’s temple. “There she is,” she said softly. “I knew you were still in there.”
“Don’t you start on me too,” Brenda mumbled, but her hand came up and caught Fiona’s and held on.
“I’m not starting anything. Lucy’s got the starting covered.
” Fiona’s mouth moved, not quite a smile.
“I hate to leave you to it, but Bolt and I have a thing we can’t push.
I’ve got to run.” She said, squeezing Brenda’s hand.
“You’re getting up out of this bed today.
For me. I’ll come by tonight, you’ll be up, dressed and you’ll tell me Lucy was a pain in the ass. Deal?”
“She’s always a pain in the ass,” Brenda said, and it came out almost a laugh.
“That’s the spirit.” Fiona stood, and caught my eye and Lucy’s on her way past, like she was making sure we had Brenda before she left.
And there it was again, that little change around her eyes I’d been noticing all week.
I still thought it was anger, but there was something else mixed up in it too, something I couldn’t quite figure out.
Whatever it was, Fiona had gotten really good at hiding it from Brenda.
By the time she reached the door, it was gone.
Then she was gone, and it was the three of us.
The flicker had guttered by the time the door shut, and Brenda’s eyes went to the phone lying face-down on the nightstand like it was a snake she was keeping one eye on.
“He won’t quit callin’,” she said, small. “All hours. And I can’t — ” She stopped.
And I knew exactly what she meant, because I’d heard enough of Brenda’s thoughts this week to recognize the bad ones before she even finished saying them.
She couldn’t say the true thing to Tom. Not one word of it.
Devil had been crystal clear the night he told her: whatever passed between her and that man from here on, nothing, nothing, about what he really was, or how we’d come to know it.
The man not knowing he’d been made was worth more to the club than anything Brenda might feel like screaming at him.
And Brenda, being Brenda, understood that even flat on her back with her heart in pieces.
That was the part eating her alive. The one true accusation she had, the only thing that would’ve let her stand up straight and hate him clean — you used me, you’re a cop, every bit of it was a lie — was the one thing she would never once get to say out loud.
She had to let him think it was just a woman gone cold on him for no reason.
And nobody had even meant to be cruel to her. It just worked out that way.
“So don’t say anything,” Lucy said, like it was simple.
“You don’t owe that man a reason. You don’t owe him a word.
You owe him a dial tone.” She crossed her arms. “But you’re gonna be the one to hang up the phone, not the one hiding from it under a quilt.
There’s a difference and you taught it to half the women on this property. Amy. Back me up.”
They both looked at me.
“She’s right,” I said. “Not about all of it. But about that.” I got up out of the chair I’d been dying to leave for a week and came and sat on the edge of the bed.
“You don’t have to explain yourself to him, Bren.
You’ve said a hundred times a grown woman’s no is a whole sentence.
So make it one. Close the door yourself.
That’s not hiding. That’s the opposite of hiding, and you know the difference.
You’re the one who showed me there was one. ”
The phone buzzed.
Face-down, walking itself a slow half-inch across the wood. All three of us looked at it.
“That him?” Lucy asked.
Brenda didn’t need to check. “That’s him.”
“Okay.” Lucy’s voice came down, gentler than anything she’d said yet. “So answer it sitting up.”
And Brenda did. She pushed herself upright against the headboard first, spine straight, the way I’d bet her own mama taught her you don’t take a hard call slumped down like the world already won, and she picked it up, and she answered.
“Tom.”
Whatever he said came fast and low and a lot of it, that pleading rush of a man who’d been rehearsing into voicemail for a week and finally got a live person.
I couldn’t make out words from across the bed, just the meaning of it, up and desperate.
Brenda shut her eyes and let him run all the way out.
“No,” she said, when he finally stopped. “I’m not gonna tell you what happened. It doesn’t change anything and it isn’t yours to have. What I’ll tell you is it’s done. All the way done. And I want you to stop callin’ me.”
He started again. I saw her jaw flex.
“Because I said so. Because I’m a grown woman and I’ve decided, and that used to be enough for a no.
” Her free hand had a fistful of quilt now, knuckles pale, but her voice stayed dead level.
“You keep askin’ me what you did wrong. Stop.
Some doors just close, Tom. You don’t always get to stand there and be handed the reason. Let it be closed.”
A pause. Something smaller from his end.
“Goodbye, Tom.” And she hung up, and set the phone face-down, and laid her hand flat on top of it like she was holding a lid on a pot about to go.
The room was quiet.
“He kept askin’ what he did,” she said, to nobody, wondering. “Like a man who truly doesn’t know.” Her mouth twisted. “He sounded gutted, Lucy. I know what that man is and it sounded like something broke in him.”
“Men sound like a hundred things they aren’t,” Lucy said. But even she said it soft, because I think all three of us had heard it, that thing in the tone of his voice through the phone, and none of us knew what to do with a liar who sounded like he was telling the truth.
I remembered that. I’d gotten pretty good at remembering the little things that didn’t make sense. He sounded hurt. Really hurt. It didn’t fit with everything I’d been told about Tom Montgomery, and I didn’t know what to do with that yet, so I didn’t.
“Right.” Brenda took a breath, and let go of the phone, and when she looked up something had come back into her face that had been gone since the trees. “Right. Somebody was gonna buy me lunch.”
Lucy came off the dresser like a shot. “Now you’re talking!”
“The green blouse,” Brenda told me, already swinging her legs out of the bed. “In the closet. Not the dark one. The one that makes me look like money.”
Lucy whooped loud enough to wake the dead.
* * *
We took her to a place by the water and made an afternoon of it, a good place with the tables outside, where Lucy ordered Brenda the expensive fish and a glass of white wine at three in the afternoon and dared her with a look to say a word about it.
She told a story about Spinner getting his boot hung in a stirrup at a run two counties over and hopping around a field on one leg cussing while his bike idled without him, and she did all the voices, and Brenda laughed, mascara safe this time, the sound of it turning heads two tables over.
That was the thing I hadn’t understood about Lucy until that afternoon.
The loud was real, but the loud was also a job she did on purpose.
She’d walked into that depressing room and made herself into a wall of noise and nonsense for one reason, which was that Brenda couldn’t sink while somebody was making that much racket right next to her.
You can’t drown next to a woman doing bird calls.
It’s just not possible. Lucy knew it, and she’d done it on purpose, and I loved her for it in a way I hadn’t expected to when she blew that door open.
By the time we split something chocolate three ways, Brenda was Brenda again. Still hurting. But back. Sitting up in her green blouse looking like money, telling Lucy she was going to hell for the stirrup story.
* * *
It was on the bridge going home that she went silent, watching the water do its pink-gold thing the way it did in that hour, and she said, mostly to the glass, “He really did sound like he meant it.”
“I know,” I said, from the back seat.
“That’s the part I can’t set down.” She wasn’t crying.
She was past that, at least for today. Just turning it over, honest and tired.
“If a man’s just cold about it, you can hate him and go on.
Hate’s easy, hate does half the work of gettin’ over somebody for free.
But one that sounds like that — ” she shook her head slow — “that’s the kind you have to do all the work yourself. ”
And I sat in the back seat and watched the back of her head, this strong wrecked wonderful woman who’d just closed a door on a man without getting to say a single true word about why, who’d swallowed the real thing and hung up the phone anyway because she had to.
And I thought about a garden behind a cabin I hadn’t let myself look at in months, and a man who’d kissed me like I was the only woman he could see and then walked away with somebody else, and I understood her better than I wanted to.
I had my own true thing I never got to say. My own door I kept shut with my back against it.
I’d gotten so good at closing it I used to not even feel it anymore.
I was starting to feel it. That was the trouble. Somewhere in the last few weeks, watching Brenda, the door had gotten heavy in my hands, and every time I shut it now it wanted to swing back open, and I didn’t know what I was going to do about that.
Lucy turned the radio up and sang the wrong words at full volume, Brenda snorted and told her to hush, the compound came up in the windshield big and familiar, and I put it all away again where I kept it.
It was just getting harder to close. That was all. I kept telling myself that was all.