Chapter 28 #2
They’ll have it gossiping by dinner. Lauren Reeves still squatting at Kevin’s place.
Give it twenty minutes and every woman in this town with a phone would know, and here I am still sitting here waiting on a man who wouldn’t answer his fucking phone.
Maybe he’d rather picture me under Jackson than listen to me explain it.
I sat on the kitchen floor, back against the cabinets, phone still in my hand. I didn’t move.
Jackson
The front door opened at four-fifteen, and I knew it was Mrs. Chen before I looked up.
Nobody else in this town could come through a door that quiet.
She shuffled in, let her purse thunk against the bar first, then hauled herself onto her usual stool.
The wobbly one I’d been meaning to fix for six damn months.
“Hello, Jackson dear.”
I grabbed the Harvey’s Bristol Cream. Same bottle, same shelf. Dust on it, because she was the only person in town still drinking that stuff.
“Mrs. Chen.” I poured her a glass, set it down, and picked the rag back up.
She took a sip and settled in like she had nowhere else to be. Good. I’d been here alone since six, and my head had been pounding all goddamn day.
“Harold needs reading glasses,” she said.
I ran the rag over the same patch of bar I’d already wiped an hour ago. “He’s needed reading glasses for three years, Mrs. Chen.”
“Four.” She held up four fingers. “Four years of squinting at everything. Last week at the hardware store, he couldn’t read the price on a box of screws. Stood there with it inches from his face while some teenager asked if he needed help.” She took another sip. “You know what he said?”
“I’m guessing he said no.”
“He said, ‘I can see fine.’” She shook her head. “Standing there blind as a bat, telling a sixteen-year-old boy he can see fine.” Another sip. “Pride’s a hell of a thing, Jackson. Makes you too blind to see the people trying to help. And in this town, people see more than they should.”
I stopped wiping.
She wasn’t talking about glasses. We both knew she wasn’t talking about glasses. Heat crawled up my neck, and I kept my eyes on the bar. The whole damn town knew what happened. Mrs. Henderson made sure of that. By now half the town had heard some version of it, and Mrs. Chen wasn’t stupid.
I started wiping again.
“How’s the garden?” I asked, because there was no way in hell I was touching that.
“Hydrangeas are coming in.” She let me dodge it.
That was Mrs. Chen. Slide the knife in nice and easy, then start talking about flowers.
“The grandchildren pulled up my tomato plants last weekend. Amy’s two boys.
They thought they were weeds.” She laughed under her breath.
“Harold almost had a heart attack. Those were his tomatoes.”
Her glass was getting low, so I set the rag down and gave her another splash.
My forearms ached from wringing that stupid rag out all day, and I’d been clenching my jaw so long it was starting to hurt.
The bar was dead. Half the chairs were still upside down on the tables.
The jukebox hadn’t been turned on once. Nobody since lunch, and lunch had been two guys who ate burgers and left without saying ten words between them.
I picked the rag back up. Better than just standing there.
“Harold almost left me once,” Mrs. Chen said.
I stopped dead. Rag in my hand, mid-wipe.
“Year five. No affair. No big blowup. Nothing you could point at and say there, that’s it.
” She turned her sherry glass slowly against the bar, not looking at me.
“He just quit trying. Came home, sat in his chair, watched television. Every night. Like it was settled, and that was supposed to be enough.” Then she looked right at me.
“I told him he could keep that chair and the television if that was all he wanted.”
“What’d he do?”
She was already smiling. “He cooked me dinner. Tried to, anyway. Steak, potatoes, the whole works. Set off the smoke alarm so bad the fire department came. Truck in the driveway, neighbors out on the lawn, Harold in the kitchen with a burnt pan and no eyebrows.” She laughed for real then, loud enough to fill the whole empty bar.
“The Hendersons thought the house was on fire. Margaret called the church prayer chain.”
I laughed. Couldn’t help it. Burnt steak, fire truck, Harold with no eyebrows. It got me. For maybe half a second, I felt almost normal.
Didn’t last, but still.
She quit laughing first. When I looked over, she was watching me again. That woman saw way too much.
“He burned the steak,” she said. “The potatoes were raw in the middle. I ate every bite. It wasn’t about the food.
Lord knows it wasn’t about the food. It was him showing up in that kitchen and trying.
Forty years later, and he still can’t cook worth a damn, but every anniversary he shows up in that kitchen and he tries. ”
You ruin everything.
My old man. Right on time.
But Mrs. Chen was still sitting there with her sherry, and somehow it landed different with her right there. The noise still got in.
“Some things are worth fighting for, Jackson.” She finished her drink and patted my hand where it was clenched around the rag on the bar. Her fingers were cold and bony. “Especially the ones you broke yourself.”
My hand tightened harder around the rag.
She slid off the stool, got her purse back up on her arm, and shuffled toward the door. Her hip had been bad since winter, but she refused to see a doctor about it. She got the door open, then turned back.
“And fix that stool, would you, dear? I almost fell off it.”
The door shut behind her. The bar empty and dead quiet behind her. I looked down and realized I was wringing the rag again. Didn’t even remember picking it back up. I dropped it on the bar.
I came around the end and sat on the stool next to hers because I was too wound up to stay on my feet. Sitting on this side felt wrong. I’d spent eight years building this place into something that didn’t look a damn thing like him, and right then all I could see was how tired it looked.
My phone was facedown on the bar all day. I put my hand on it, pulled back, then flipped it over.
Kevin’s name lit up the screen. Two years ago, that fishing trip.
He’d caught a bass on his first cast and was grinning like an idiot, sunglasses crooked across his face.
I still remembered how close we’d been sitting that day.
Didn’t need his face hitting me that hard right then.
I wanted to call him. I wanted to drive over there and fix it face to face.
I didn’t call. I sat there staring at his name till I got sick of myself.