Chapter One #2
I did one more sweep after he left. Found the hair tie behind the coffee maker on that one, which is how I ended up standing here at four in the afternoon with it in my pocket, staring at a house that still looked wrong to me even with everything I'd cleared out of it, because the wrongness wasn't really about objects.
The wrongness was that I'd let another woman occupy the space Marisol built while Marisol was three hundred miles away burying her mother, and no amount of clearing drawers was going to undo the fact that it had happened, that people had watched it happen, that some of them had smiled while they watched.
I checked my phone. She'd texted an hour out from a gas station somewhere past Barstow, said she was tired but fine, said she'd see me soon.
I'd read that message probably eleven times since it came in, trying to find something in the wording that would tell me how much she already knew, and finding nothing, because Marisol doesn't waste words on people she's decided not to trust yet, and I had no idea yet whether that's what I already was to her.
I went out to the porch a little after five, because standing inside the house waiting felt worse than standing outside it.
The light was doing that thing it does in Ember Creek in the early evening, going gold and long across the dirt lot, catching the dust the way it always does, and under different circumstances I would have found it pretty.
I sat on the porch step and I put my head down and I thought about my father, actually, more than I thought about Marisol in that stretch, because some old instinct in me still wanted him to tell me what to do, even though he was the reason I didn't know how to ask anybody for help in the first place.
He built this club on never showing a crack.
I'd apparently decided the way to honor that was to fall apart in private and let it wreck everything I actually cared about.
I thought about the night he died, too, six months back now, a heart attack that took him fast in the garage behind the clubhouse while he was working on a bike that didn't need fixing so much as he needed something to do with his hands.
Marisol had been the one who got to the hospital first, before me, before Deacon, sat with my mother in that waiting room holding both her hands while I was still an hour out on the road, and by the time I walked through those doors Marisol already had a list going, who needed to be called, what needed to happen with the club, what my mother needed and wasn't going to ask for herself.
She held all of us up that week without once asking anybody to hold her up in return, and I remember thinking, even in the middle of that grief, that I'd never deserve a woman who showed up like that.
I hadn't thought about that memory once in the two months she was gone.
I'd been too busy drowning in my own version of the same kind of grief to remember that the person who knew best how to help me carry it was the same person I was, at that exact moment, betraying in the ugliest way I knew how.
Somewhere down the road a dog barked twice and went quiet.
The security light over the shop two lots down flickered on early, the way it always does before full dark.
I sat there and let the last of the gold light go gray around me, and some small, useless part of me hoped that if I just sat still enough, none of the last nine weeks would turn out to be real.
I heard her truck before I saw it. That engine's had a particular knock in the manifold for three years and I've told her a dozen times I'd fix it and never gotten around to it, and hearing it come up the road did something to my chest that I wasn't ready for.
I stood up. Wiped my hands on my jeans like that would help anything.
Watched the truck come around the bend and slow down in front of the house.
She looked wrecked when she stepped out.
Not dramatically. Marisol doesn't do dramatic.
Just wrecked in the quiet way a person gets after watching someone they love disappear over two months, dark circles under her eyes, black dress from the funeral still on because she hadn't had it in her to change, hair pulled back in a way that looked more like giving up than styling.
I walked toward her. Didn't know what I was going to say.
Had run through about forty versions of an opening line over the last four days and every single one of them sounded like an excuse the second I imagined saying it out loud, so I hadn't landed on any of them, and now I was walking toward my Old Lady with nothing in my mouth but her name.
"Mars," I said.
She looked up at me, and for just a second there was something in her face that was only exhaustion, only grief, only a woman who wanted someone to hold her up for a minute after the worst two months of her life.
I almost reached for her. God help me, I almost did, before I remembered I didn't have the right to anymore.
She looked past me then. Toward the porch. Toward the front door.
I followed her eyes before I understood what she was looking at, and when I did, my stomach dropped straight through the floorboards, because there, tucked half under the porch bench where I never once thought to check in four straight days of clearing this house out, sat a pair of cheap rubber flip-flops.
Small. Not Marisol's size. Left there some night I couldn't even place anymore, forgotten in exactly the kind of careless, comfortable way that only happens when somebody's stopped thinking of a place as somewhere they're just visiting.
Marisol went still. Not tense. Still, in a way that was worse than tense, the kind of stillness that happens right before something breaks all the way through.
I opened my mouth, and nothing came out that was going to fix a single thing.