Chapter 32 Charleston
Summer
We leave before the sun. Colt loads the trunk of the rented SUV while I stand in the doorway in a hoodie and yesterday's mascara, holding both our coffees. The light is the color of wet stone. The block is still asleep.
"You okay?" He looks up from the cargo zip.
"I'm operating on caffeine and stubbornness."
"Two of my favorite things about you."
"Don't act like you didn't sleep either."
"I slept four hours. Banner night for me."
"Bragger."
He closes the trunk. Comes up the front steps and takes one of the coffees from me. Kisses the corner of my mouth. Light. Asking, not taking. I tilt into him for half a second because I can, and his free hand goes to my waist, careful, like he's still asking.
"You want to drive first or you want me to."
"You drive. I want to fall asleep against the window like a child and you can wake me up at the Indiana line."
"Done."
We get on the road. The city falls away in panes of gray light. I lean my forehead against the cool glass and watch the warehouses thin into highway and Colt drives one-handed, his elbow on the door, the other resting on my knee.
"Tell me when you want music."
"Mm."
I sleep, kind of. The half-sleep where the road is still moving under me.
The sun comes up somewhere around the Ohio border.
I sit up and rub my face. Colt hands me a granola bar without looking away from the road.
He used to do this on long drives when we were nineteen, before everything, and I'm realizing only now how much I've missed it.
The kind of attention that doesn't announce itself.
"Where are we?"
"Just past Indianapolis. Want me to stop?"
"Pee. Then I'll drive."
"Deal."
***
I take over at the gas station. We have driven a lot of miles together over the years and we have the choreography down.
He sleeps with his cap pulled low and his arms crossed and his head tipped back.
I drink the bad coffee and put on the Coastal Cowgirl playlist quiet enough to not wake him.
The highway opens up across Kentucky and Tennessee, and I think about the last time I drove this road.
Fourteen hours, alone, north. Crying at a rest stop because I hadn't yet figured out how to be a person who didn't have a husband.
It is a different highway today. Same road. Different woman driving it.
He wakes up somewhere in Knoxville. Stretches. Looks out the window at the hills he told everyone about Saturday night.
"They are turning."
"Mm."
"You okay."
"Yeah."
"You want to talk."
I think about it.
I haven't asked him the question yet. The big one.
I haven't asked it because part of me has been afraid of the answer and part of me has been afraid that the answer would be too much, would close some door I'm not yet ready to walk through.
But we are in a car together. The trees outside are turning the colors I forgot Tennessee has in October.
Colt is careful and quiet beside me, and I think this is the only place I'm going to be able to ask it.
"When did you notice that you started pulling away from me?"
He doesn't flinch. He has been waiting for this question and he hasn't pushed for it because Dr. Ramos, Dom, the lawyer, and probably his own bones have told him not to.
"October."
"Last October?"
"Yeah."
"Specific date or general?"
"Dr. Ramos and I have been walking it back.
There was a Tuesday after the Charlotte trip with the Tidewater team.
Cheyenne and I drove back together. We stopped at a gas station outside Florence and she asked me what my favorite song was when I was sixteen.
I told her. I hadn't thought about that song in eight years, and the whole way home I kept thinking about how good it felt that someone had asked.
I got home and you were at the kitchen island writing.
You looked up and asked how the drive was and I said fine and went upstairs to shower.
I sat on the edge of the bed for ten minutes feeling guilty for no reason I could name.
I didn't know I was making a decision. I know now.
That was the night. That was when it started. "
I keep my eyes on the road.
"What was the song?"
"The Avett Brothers. I and Love and You. You used to sing it in the truck."
"I remember."
"She didn't know that. She wasn't weaponizing it. I'm not blaming her for asking. It just hit somewhere that had gone quiet. I had stopped letting you ask me anything real. I told myself you already knew me so it didn't matter, and that was a lie. It was easier than letting you in."
The highway hums under the wheels.
"That is the most honest sentence you have ever said to me."
"I have a lot of them now. Dr. Ramos pulls them out one at a time."
"Tell me another one."
He looks at me for a long second. Then back at the road.
"By Christmas, you were lonely. I see it now in a way I refused to see then.
The Calloway gala in December. You stood by the window with your back to the room and your arms wrapped around yourself, looking out at the harbor.
I remember watching you. I remember thinking you were having a moment, that you would come find me when you were ready.
I went to the bar. I told my father a story about the firm.
Dr. Ramos and I have come back to that night more than once.
I saw something and I looked away. The story where I just didn't see it would be easier. It isn't the true story."
I drive for a long time without saying anything because if I open my mouth I'm going to cry and I don't want to cry on I-75 outside Knoxville.
He puts his hand on the back of my neck. Light. Asking again.
"Yeah," I say. "Please keep that there."
He keeps it there.
By the time we cross into South Carolina, I'm exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with driving. I pull off at a rest stop. Lean my head against the steering wheel.
"You want me to drive?"
"In a minute. Just let me sit."
He sits. His hand on my back, between my shoulder blades. Warm. Steady.
"Summer."
"Yeah."
"Thank you for asking."
"I've been afraid of the answer, but it wasn't as bad as I thought."
"Worse, in some places."
"Yeah."
"Better than I deserve, that you asked."
I lift my head and look at him.
"Drive."
He pulls back onto the highway.
***
We don't make it to Charleston tonight.
Colt finds a hotel off the interstate in Tennessee.
He doesn't ask if I want to stop. He takes the exit and I let him.
He orders food. We eat on the bed. After a while I lean against him and he shifts so my head is on his shoulder, and we stay like that until the food goes cold.
I shower alone. I'm too tired for company.
When I come out he has turned off the light.
"Come here," he says.
I come. His arm goes around me and I fall asleep with one hand on his chest and the other curled into my own ribs.
In the morning we drink bad coffee and get back in the car.
***
We cross into the Lowcountry in the afternoon.
The air through the vents goes salt, pluff mud, and something almost jasmine but not yet.
I roll the window down even though it's too cold for it.
Charleston smells like home and like the worst thing that ever happened to me.
I've decided, on this trip, that I'm going to let it be both at once.
The B&B on Queen Street is a yellow Federal house with a haint-blue porch ceiling and a woman named Lorna at the desk who knows my mama from church.
"Summer King. Lord have mercy. Look at you."
"Hi, Miss Lorna."
"Two rooms?"
"Two rooms, please."
She raises an eyebrow exactly one quarter of an inch. Doesn't say a word. Hands us two keys. Two rooms on the second floor across the hall from each other. Colt carries the bags and doesn't comment on the configuration.
"Dinner at the diner at seven," I say at the door of my room. "Mama is making everything."
"I'll be ready."
"You okay?"
"I'm okay."
"Colt."
"Yes."
"Don't flinch when my daddy shakes your hand. He is going to grip like he's testing for fractures. You handle it."
"I'll handle it."
I close my door. Sit on the edge of the bed. Look at my hands.
I'm back in Charleston.
I'm back in Charleston with my husband.
The sentence has too many true parts to hold at once.
I go take a shower.
***
King's Diner. Closed sign in the window. Lights on inside. The G on the neon sign is still threatening to die. Mama is in the doorway in her Sunday dress before I even cut the engine.
I get out. She is on me in three steps.
"Baby girl."
"Hi, Mama."
She holds my face in both her hands and just looks.
She has done that since I was four and I've never been able to look back at her without crying.
She doesn't wipe the tears, she doesn't say don't cry, and she doesn't move.
She just holds my face, and behind her I can see Daddy through the diner window, his hand on the counter, giving us our minute.
"He out of the car yet?"
"He is getting the wine."
"Wine."
"He insisted. Said he wasn't showing up empty-handed."
"He's right. Walk him in, baby. We are all in there."
I walk back to the car. Colt is standing on the sidewalk with two bottles of wine and a face I've never seen on him. He has done a lot of hard things lately. This is the hardest. He hasn't seen Greg King since the morning Greg told him not to bother calling.
"Ready?"
"As I'm going to be."
I take his hand.
The bell over the door does its thing. Daddy is behind the register. He puts down the receipt book. Comes around the counter. He is in jeans and a flannel, his hair combed, and he has shaved for this. When he stops three feet from Colt, the diner gets very quiet.
Daddy puts out his hand.
Colt sets the wine on the counter and takes it.