Chapter 8
brOCK
"Take me home," she said, climbing into the rental with the dress bundled around her like a shipwreck she'd decided to keep. "Might as well go face the firing squad."
So, I drove her home.
I had the heater going full before we hit the end of the island, because she was soaked through and she'd started to shiver in that fine, steady way a body does when the cold's gotten into the deep parts of it.
The vents kicked out that hot-dust smell rental cars get the first time you run the heat all season.
She held her hands up to one and said nothing.
I said nothing back. We rode the causeway in a quiet that should've been awkward and wasn't, the marsh sliding by gold and silver on both sides, the two of us steaming gently in our wet clothes.
I kept my eyes on the road and worked the problem the only way I knew how, which was to not look at her and fail at not looking at her about every fifteen seconds.
It was the touch in the water that had done it.
Her hand closing around my forearm, that's all, a woman catching her balance—and something had gone up my arm and through me like I'd grabbed a fence somebody'd run a current through.
A jolt. Clean and physical and instant. I'd put my hands on more people than I'd ever count, in every way a man can put hands on another person, and I had never once felt a thing like that.
It put me in mind, of all the damn things, of those movies my mother used to watch.
Sunday afternoons, when the work let up enough to let up at all, she'd have one going on the little set in the kitchen while she cooked—the old ones, black and white or close to it, where the music swelled at the right times and the man and the woman fought and fought and then quit fighting.
There was always, always a happy ending waiting at the back of it like a held breath.
And there was always that moment. The one where they looked at each other and the whole picture went still and you understood that this was it, this was the thing they'd known the second they touched.
When you know, you just know, one of them would say, and my mother would smile at the stove like she was hearing good news.
I'd thought it was horseshit, even then.
A pretty lie people paid a quarter to sit in the dark and believe.
Real life didn't run on swelling music and happy endings.
Real life ran on loss and the hard daily work of surviving it, and I'd had a closer look at that engine than most. There was no zing.
No spark. No bolt out of the blue that told you here's the one, here's where the hurting stops. Men who waited on that died waiting.
And yet.
Something in me—some dumb, stubborn thing I'd have sworn died at sixteen—was sitting up in the dark of my chest and itching to believe the jolt was real. That it meant something. That the old pictures had been onto a truth I'd been too bent to receive.
It wasn't. It couldn't be. I didn't have the equipment to believe in it, and a man should know the limits of his own machinery. I put it away.
"It's coming up," she said. "Off Tradd. The blue door with the—"
She dropped.
Folded herself down sideways into the footwell so fast and so low that for half a second, my hands wanted to do something violent before my head caught up.
"Keep driving," she said, from down around my knee. "Don't slow down. Just—keep going, normal, please."
I kept going. Normal. Same speed, same easy hand on the wheel, eyes moving without my head turning, the way you learn to look when looking can get you killed.
I read the street. Parked cars down both sides, nose to tail, the genteel crush of an old neighborhood.
A sedan. A wagon. Two SUVs and a work truck.
Nobody in any of them. No engines running, no warm hoods I could see, no shape sitting low behind a wheel waiting on a door.
No threat. Just a pretty Charleston block dressed in afternoon light.
"There's nobody out here," I said. "Who're we hiding from?"
"The gray Mercedes. Across from the house, the one under the crepe myrtle." A pause from the floor. "That's my father's car."
I clocked it on the next pass without slowing. "Then they're inside," I said. "Waiting on you."
She made a small sound that wasn't a word.
I did not offer to walk her in.
There are things a man knows in his bones, and one of them is that there is no version of a soaked stranger escorting a runaway bride up to a houseful of the family she'd just humiliated that ends in anything but a scene, possibly a swung fist, possibly a phone call to people with badges.
There ought to be a law against a grown man being seen within a hundred yards of a runaway bride. If there wasn't, it was an oversight.
"Can you let me out around the corner?" she said. "I can walk from there."
"You sure?"
"Yes."
I found a side street a block over, narrow and shaded, and the kind of live oak this town grows like a weed—huge, low-armed, dripping moss, throwing enough shadow to hide a parade. I pulled in under it and put the car in park. Quiet engine. Quiet street. The heater ticking.
She climbed up out of the footwell and back into the seat and sat there a second, gathering herself. I watched her do it—watched her pull the nerve up from somewhere the way you'd haul a bucket up a deep well, hand over hand.
"What would they think," she said, mostly to the windshield, "if some man none of them have ever seen walked me up to that door right now?"
"Nothing good."
A breath of a laugh, no air in it. "Yeah. You're probably right."
And the woman who'd jumped off a pier was gone.
Just like that. The grin, the dare, the reckless shine—all of it drained out and left somebody smaller sitting in my passenger seat, shivering.
Not all of it was the cold anymore. I'd seen the change come over enough people in enough doorways to know fear when it sat down next to me.
She was scared. Plain and simple and bone-deep scared of a blue door and the people behind it, and there wasn't a thing in my line of work that prepared a man to do anything useful about that.
I reached over and put my hand on hers where it sat fisted on her knee.
The jolt came again. Of course, it did. I ignored it. Or I told myself I did, which is the same lie a man tells about a lot of things.
"I'll walk you home," I said. "If that's what you want. I'll stand on the sidewalk and not say a word and let you do all the talking, and I'll be there if you need me to be. You just say."
She turned and looked at me, and her eyes had gone wide and bright and frightened. For one second, I'd have walked into that house and let her whole family take their swings at me, if it'd have made the next ten minutes easier on her.
Then, she shook her head. Hard. Twice.
"No," she said. "No. I have to do this part alone. If I bring somebody, then I'm the girl who left her wedding for a man, and that's not—that's not what this is. This is mine. I have to walk in there by myself."
Inside, in a place I don't let see daylight, I wished it weren't so.
But the wishing didn't change the arithmetic.
This wasn't one of my mother's pictures, where the music came up and the man got to be the answer.
This was the real thing—a beautiful woman about to break a good man's heart and a houseful of hearts behind him, walking into it on her own two feet, the way the brave ones do.
She squared her shoulders. Gave a short, sharp nod, like a soldier who's decided.
"Okay," she said. "Time to nut up."
I laughed. Couldn't help it—it cracked right out of me, loud in the quiet car. Nut up. Out of that face, in that ruined ivory dress.
"What?" she said, almost smiling.
"Nothing. You're just—" I shook my head. Who in God's name was this woman? "Nothing."
She put out her hand. Formal. Like we were closing a deal across a desk.
So, I shook it. Her hand was small and cold in mine, that current running up my arm again. I pretended it didn't.
"It was nice to meet you," she said.
"Same," I said. And meant that one, too.
She got out. Worked herself back into the dress as best a person can alone—shrugged it up over her shoulders, reached behind her in vain for a zipper she couldn't reach and gave up on, left it gaping open down her back.
Then, she did the last thing I expected, which by now should've been the only thing I expected: she turned in the shade of that oak and did a little spin, skirts and all, and faced me through the open door.
"How do I look?"
I should've said fine. I should've said good. Any man with sense keeps the dangerous truths behind his teeth.
"Like the most beautiful runaway bride I've ever seen," I said.
Her face went pink to the ears. And I sat there in the wreckage of my own mouth, calling myself every kind of fool, because that is twice now I'd handed this stranger a line out of a movie I didn't even believe in.
But she let me off the hook. Smiled, soft at the edges.
"Thank you," she said. "I'll hold onto that. While I'm in there breaking Daniel's heart and asking my mother how I could ever, ever pay her back for all of it." The smile wobbled and held. She straightened. "Goodbye, Brock."
She'd half turned to go when she stopped and looked back.
"Can I buy you a drink?" she said. "Sometime. To say thank you, properly. A thank-you that isn't just the word over and over."
"My phone went swimming," I said, and shrugged. "Drowned somewhere off your pier. No way to reach me."
Her face scrunched up at that, working on it. And where any reasonable person would've taken the out, said ah, well, and walked off into the rest of her life—
"Then, pick me up here," she said. "This corner. Midnight. On the dot." That shine flickered back into her, daring me. "If you've got the balls for it."
Surprised me again. She kept doing that. I was starting to think it was just what she did to a person.
"It'd be an honor," I said.
And there it was. Another one. Some sappy, gallant, ridiculous line, sliding out of a mouth that had spent years saying only what a situation required and nothing more, and me with no idea where the man saying it had come from.
She didn't tease me for it. Just held my eyes one beat longer than she needed to, then shut the door soft and turned and walked off down the dappled street toward the corner and the blue door and the firing squad—shoulders back, chin up, dress gaping open down her spine, picking her way over the brick in bare feet like a queen who'd lost her shoes and not one ounce of her crown.
I did my level best not to watch the way she moved.
I failed at that, too.