18. Lori #2
The hours between that decision and the evening meal blur into a haze of nervous energy, my armor locking into place so tightly I forget how to breathe without it.
Dinner that night is a quiet disaster. Cadie at one end of the table eating macaroni and watching her father and me with the focus of a six-year-old who can tell something is wrong and gets zero information about what.
She keeps looking between us without asking, which is how I know it is serious, because Cadie always asks.
Carson is at the other end, trying. He is talking about the small-block engine in the shop, the one he has been narrating to me in the mornings since November because I once told him I like hearing him talk about engines.
I do like it. I like the low steadiness of his voice when he is explaining something he understands down to its smallest bolt. I like it this morning. I like it right now, sitting across the table from him in the last light through the kitchen window, and it makes tonight worse.
I pick at the chicken and say okay. Once. Twice. The third time he stops mid-sentence and looks at me, and I do not meet his eyes, and he closes the sentence with “…anyway.”
“I think Junie liked when you sang the lullaby, Lori,” Cadie says out of nowhere.
I put my fork down and get up to refill my water because if I talk about Junie at this table, I’m going to come apart, and I need to hold it together for another forty-five minutes until Cadie is asleep. Carson watches the back of my head.
After Cadie is in bed, I linger in the kitchen. Only the under-cabinet light is on. Carson is at the table with his hands flat on the wood. I’m at the counter with my back half-turned. The duffel and the box are by the front door, and they’re the loudest thing in the house. We both know it.
I can see his forearms in the low light, his sleeves pushed up. I can see his hands on the table, trying to keep steady. I know exactly what those hands feel like on me and I am not going to think about that right now because I am trying to leave this house and my body is not helping.
I build the case all afternoon and it is airtight.
He does not need someone who cannot sit still in his kitchen.
He has a daughter and a station and a mother and a town.
I am a woman with a duffel and a long history of being somebody’s crisis.
He deserves a woman who shows up steady, a woman who knows how to be loved without keeping a running tally.
The fair thing is to go. The fair thing is to let him have the quiet he earns.
My armor can frame this argument and hang it on a wall.
I turn around.
“Carson.”
“Hm?”
“I have to go.”
He doesn’t look up right away. He looks at his hands on the table. When he does look up, his face is careful, composed, not asking for anything. He notices the duffel and the box, I’m sure of it. He sits with that knowledge all evening without a word.
“Okay.”
I brace for don’t, or why, or what the hell are you talking about.
I do not brace for okay. It goes through me wrong, finds the weak spot behind my ribs, and sits there.
I grip the counter behind me because my knees remember what they did on the gravel this morning and they would very much like to do it again.
“The house is too quiet.” My voice comes out steadier than I deserve.
“Junie’s gone. I don’t — Carson, I don’t know how to be here if I’m not needed.
I never figured that part out. I never stay somewhere I am not earning my keep, and I don’t know how to be still and let someone choose me without working for it.
Without having a job to do. I don’t know how to. ”
Say it. Say it clean.
“I rented a place. Off the highway. Past the feed store, that little house with the porch on the wrong side. I signed last Thursday. The keys are at the realtor's. I will pick them up tonight.” It comes out flat.
His jaw works once. Neither of us speaks for a long moment.
“I’m sorry, Carson.”
“Okay,” he says again. “I’ll be here.”
It is the most devastating sentence of my life.
He doesn’t tell me to stay.
Or don’t go.
Or please.
Or I love you, Lori, what are you doing?
Just okay and I’ll be here, in that voice, the quiet one he only uses with me. The one that makes the kitchen shrink to just us.
I want him to fight me on this so badly I can feel it in my teeth.
I want him to stand up and put his hands on my face and tell me I am not leaving this house.
I want him to be the man who makes me stay so I don’t have to be the woman who asks.
He sits at his kitchen table and lets me go, because that is who he is, and I love him for it, and it’s killing me.
Ten seconds.
“About Cadie —” I start.
“I’ll tell her.”
“Okay.”
I cross the kitchen. The paper crown is on the table where Cadie leaves it after dinner, construction paper and too much glitter, QUEEN LORI in her shaky handwriting across the front. I fold it once and slip it into my jacket pocket.
I am at the duffel when he speaks.
“Lori.”
I stop with my back to him. I do not turn, because if I turn I am going to say something neither of us can take back, and I do not trust myself to say it right. Not begging. Choosing. There is a difference and I do not have it in me tonight.
“Drive carefully.”
I nod. I pick up the duffel and the screen door closes behind me. I come back for the box and climb into Jason's truck and drive away.
The gravel crunches under my tires. The porch light is on behind me and I fight myself not to check the rearview mirror.
The highway is empty. The stores along the road are dark. The little house with the porch on the wrong side sits at the end of a gravel turnoff with one light on by the front door.
I park but do not get out.
My driveway now. My gravel. My porch is on the wrong side of a house I do not want, on a road that goes straight back to a kitchen where a man I love says okay and doesn’t stop me from leaving.
I’m sobbing without a sound, hands on the wheel. Silent and contained and nobody’s burden. Even now, even when there is nobody else in the truck, I still cry silently.
I don’t understand why okay sounds like a door closing when I’m the one who walks through it.