Chapter 16
Dear July,
I’ve started looking for change in the fucking streets, hoping to find enough for an international call…
Joe
“Thanks again for coming to help me with the thing with Maisie.” July finishes her stretches, bounces a couple of times on the balls of her feet, and sets off at a faster clip than last night.
The sway of her ponytail above her solid curves mesmerizes me, and it takes me a minute to catch up.
“How did you know she was going to tell us about that?” I’ve been wondering. And thinking about how odd it felt for July to ask for my input as a…friend? Rather than as her boyfriend. Her other half. In a flash I’m back in her family’s kitchen, dazzled all over again by her mischief, by the tiny freckles sprinkled across her nose, by her dimples and her laughing eyes as she holds out a spoonful of something for me to taste.
“Sam came to me privately just before. Asked me to schedule them together. I pressed him on it, to make sure he wasn’t being stalkerish.”
“Hard to imagine Sam stalking anybody. And they seem really tight.”
“Yeah.” She glances over at me. “How worried do you think I need to be about the bully? About her?”
“Definitely worth keeping an eye on.” I can’t be objective on the subject of men bullying women. “I’ll help. I’ll try to run up that way more often when they’re not working. Especially once school’s out.”
“That’d be great. Thanks.” There’s relief in her voice.
“Think she’ll tell her mom?”
“I think so? I’m surprised she hasn’t already.” Her ponytail swishes as she shakes her head.
“Do you know her mom?” July knows everybody else in Galway, that’s for sure.
“Just met her once, when they first moved to town. First time I met Maisie.”
“They seem close?”
“Yeah. They were really cute together.” Her smile reaches her voice. “Her mom must’ve been young when she had Maisie. It was one of those could-be-her-older-sister things. Why do you suppose Maisie hasn’t told her already?”
To me, it seems like a freaking miracle when kids do have parents they can confide in. “I can think of a few reasons. Maybe her mom works a lot and Maisie’s trying not to worry her. Maybe Maisie’s afraid her mom’ll blame her. Or…people hide relationship stuff. Bad stuff.”
When July finally responds, it’s so quiet I can barely hear her over our footfalls on the pavement. “Joe, how did you turn out okay?”
“What?” Who says I’m okay? “I don’t know. Wait, yes, I do. Some people have good role models, right, to show them how to act. I had a role model show me exactly how not to be. So I just…avoid being my dad.” As much as I can, anyway. A guy in Germany—a would-be bully who picked on me one too many times right after I gave up writing to July—probably still has scars. And he was lucky his friends pulled me off of him because I’m not sure I would have ever stopped hitting him.
But I can’t tell July that.
Another pause, another soft question. “Was your mom good to you at least? Tell me to hush if this is too nosy.”
“Mom was…okay as long as I didn’t try to talk her into leaving my dad. As long as I didn’t bad-mouth him. As long as I didn’t say we should tell somebody or get help.”
“But he hurt you too, didn’t he?” First time I’ve heard steel in her voice.
“She’d try to step between him and me. I tried to do the same thing for her. Didn’t work—he’d just hit both of us.”
“Didn’t anybody ever notice? Like teachers or neighbors?” Steel with an edge now. The concept of not helping must be completely foreign to her.
I shrug as I run. “I’m sure people suspected things sometimes. Maybe that’s why he moved us around so much. Keep us off-balance. Keep us from making friends who could help us get away.”
“Joe, I’m so sorry I didn’t know. I’m so sorry I didn’t ask.”
That’s just silly. “Why would you? Why would you even think of it? You have a really nice family. You’d probably never seen anything like mine, had you?”
“Not in real life, no. But I saw that big bruise on your back that one time.”
“I’m sure I gave you an excuse for it.” Like Mom always did.
“I should’ve kept asking, Joe.”
“No. You know what I’ve just realized lately? Watching how Maisie and Sam are—how young they are—has made me see that we were just kids too when we knew each other. How were you going to see and understand what was going on with my family? And how the hell could you have fought it?” I glance her way.
Her jaw juts out. “I would have tried, Joe. I wouldn’t have let you go home to that.”
“I know. But I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want to, like, dirty you with it. Didn’t want you to see me as part of it either.”
Her next words are practically a whisper. “I didn’t think we had any secrets.”
I don’t have an answer for that.
It’s four blocks before she speaks again.
“You’re so good with Sam and Maisie. But you’ve stayed single, right? How did you learn to be so good with kids?”
I think about my answer for a few strides. “I just…like people. Unless I see somebody like my dad staring out their eyes. The young people who worked for me were really interesting. How they thought, what they hoped for. How they’d screw up and what they’d try to do to fix things. How often they were stuck in a bad situation they didn’t make. Sometimes it helped them just to have somebody listen.”
She turns her head. Meets my eyes. “That why you decided to go into social work?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re going to be really good at it, Joe.” Her smile is tiny and private. One I don’t remember from our past.
Her words feel like a physical touch. A soft, warm gift of a touch.
***
July
I didn’t even think Rose and Andi knew each other well, but here they are, on a Sunday of all days, leaning in and talking up a storm when I bring Rose’s meal out on my break.
“What y’all talking about?” I slide her salad and my sandwich onto the table, sit down beside her, and take a long drink of my iced tea.
“You.” Rose spears a sliver of chicken and pops it into her mouth.
“You and Joe.” Andi meets my eye matter-of-factly.
What the—? “There is no me and Joe.”
Rose swallows her bite. “Exactly. Why the hell not?”
Across the table, Andi opens the take-out box she’d come in for and pulls out half of her sandwich. She doesn’t say anything but she’s smirking.
I sigh. “Rose, I told y’all already. I killed any chance we might’ve had before it even got started.”
“But you all are running together now.” Rose drizzles vinaigrette on her salad.
Andi nods, not looking up from her food. “And playing ball.”
What did I do to deserve this today? It was a perfectly nice morning. I was in such a good mood. “Yep. Nothing remotely romantic about that. We don’t even have to talk if we don’t want to.”
There’s a pause as we all chew in silence. I’m just starting to breathe normally when Rose speaks up again.
“Do you?”
Oh, for the love of god. “Do we what?”
“Talk?”
This would be a good time for me to look into her sweet, caring face and tell her to mind her own business. I sigh. “Yeah.”
“About the weather?”
“No.” I will her to pick up her fork and jam a big bite into her mouth.
“About your luuuuv?” There’s a tiny dimple in Rose’s cheek when she’s being a pain in the ass. I never noticed that before.
Andi snorts, chokes on her sandwich, and starts coughing.
I reach across the table and whack her on the back. “What is with you today, Rose? We’re not in freakin’ middle school.”
Her face falls. “Are you honestly saying there’s nothing between you two anymore?”
“I’m honestly saying that whatever is between us now is much different than before. It’s platonic. It…doesn’t feel magic like it used to.” Except when we’re asleep. “We’re grown-ups now. We don’t…click anymore. We’ve changed.”
Rose puts one elbow on the table and turns in the booth to look me full on. “Are you sure it’s platonic? Joe shot back to the kitchen to help the minute I told him you were hurt.”
Andi regains control of her lungs and joins in, damn her. “He watches you, you know. When we play ball.” She holds up a hand as if she thinks I’m going to protest. “And not in a creepy way. You know my tendency to see red flags everywhere. This isn’t that. He just…watches you like you’re the most interesting thing he’s ever seen.”
My head hurts and, maybe for the first time ever, I’m wishing I was eating alone in my office. “I’m sure it’s platonic, okay? And the reason I’m sure is that Joe told me so. He doesn’t want so much as a kiss from me. Things don’t feel the same to him now. He said so. So even if I wanted to pursue somebody who doesn’t want me—which I don’t—it wouldn’t do me any good with Joe. It would just embarrass us both.”
Kinda like this conversation. I lift the top of my sandwich and peer at the precisely centered tomato slice. Smells good. Ripe. Too bad I’ve lost my appetite. The idea of chasing an unwilling Joe is, as Rose would say, depressing as fuck. “The guy’s been through enough. If he can find some peace here, he deserves it. I’m not going to mess that up by pressuring him to be with me.”
Rose picks up her fork again and looks down at her salad, then glances toward the kitchen and opens her mouth to say something else.
I cut her off. “Rose, I think he just missed cooking. Missed working as part of a team. Everybody said he fit right in. Slipped in easy and did a great job and seemed to have fun with it.”
She closes her mouth and jabs a piece of arugula, then a chunk of tomato, then a sliver of boiled egg.
“And you”—I point at Andi—“stop looking at me like that. Of course he watches me when we play ball. It’s left fielder’s job to back up third base. He has to know what I’m doing all the time.”
Andi shakes her head and raises her hands in the I-give-up gesture.
“Don’t you want him anymore?” Rose’s voice is soft beside me.
Yes. “No. Doesn’t matter anyway. It’s gotta be a two-way thing, and it’s not. Besides, y’all saw me that first couple of weeks after he came back. I was a wreck. That’s no way to live. I don’t want that.”
Andi reaches back into her carryout box for the other half of her sandwich. “So you’re saying if one of the women on the team develops an interest in him, you’d be okay with that? You’d be just fine watching him go out with somebody else?”
No. The idea makes me want to puke. And cry. And puke while I cry. “If that’s what would make him happy, yes.”
That shuts them up. I feel them staring at me as I pick up my sandwich. “Can we change the subject, please? Rose, what you got going on at the foundation?”
Rose sighs, but then perks up as she tells us about a project someone proposed this week: tiny homes built around a community garden where the old supermarket used to be, on the east side of town. Angus is excited about that too, she says. He works two jobs, and one involves counseling veterans. And vets—especially homeless vets like my friend Devon—will have first shot at the tiny houses.
This news makes me feel a lot better.
Andi’s excited about work too. She has a mysterious new idea for how to present material on sexual assault and domestic violence to the football team at Galway High. She won’t tell us exactly what she’s planning, but I know one of the volunteers is an excellent videographer, so it should be interesting to see what develops.
We talk away the rest of our meal, and I relax once I see that they’re really going to let the subject of Joe and me drop. Thank god. It’s depressing enough to think about it without having to explain out loud to other people that yes, I’m completely sure I’ve broken what we had. The thing that I’d hoped—and yeah, feared—could be amazing again, with the only person who ever felt that right to me.
But I meant what I said. If he can find some peace here, let him. Let him be. I’ll do what I can to help, quietly, and do my best to be a friend to him. And then I’ll just let the man be.
I’m working on convincing myself that I’d be just fine with that when my phone buzzes in my pocket. I fish it out.
Speak of the devil. A text from Joe: Need help with kids. Not quite emergency but can you come? Maisie’s cabin.
I’m on my feet on my way to the kitchen, belatedly waving goodbye to Andi and Rose, before I even know I’m moving.