Desperation Road(38)
“I do. Jesus. The doors don’t close in my mind, either.”
He stood up from the steps and walked into the yard. Hands in his pockets. He faced her. Looked at the blue tarp. Looked at the old Ford.
“What happened to your windows?” she asked.
“Just replacing them. You know how windows get on older houses.”
He then wanted them to be quiet. No more words. All he wanted was to walk over and sit down next to her and hold her hand. He thought that if he could do that then there would be something to hope for. That he could think he was really home.
So he walked over and sat down next to her and he held her hand. And she let him for a long, silent moment that reached back into the years. But then she took her hand from his and rubbed her palm down his back and she stood up and took a piece of paper from her pants pocket. She handed it to him and he looked at it. The note that he had dropped in the mail slot of her front door.
“Russell,” she said. “You can’t do this anymore.”
He wadded the note and held it in the palm of his hand.
“Okay,” he said.
“I’m not kidding.”
“Okay.”
“There’s a lot between us now. A whole lot.”
“I know. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you,” he said.
She folded her arms. Looked toward the sky. “That doesn’t mean I don’t love you, either,” she said. “Just means there’s nothing to do.”
“It means that and a helluva lot more.”
“It’s probably not even the same kind of love.”
“Maybe not for you.”
“I can’t come back over here. You gotta promise you won’t come around the house.”
“I promise.”
“You probably wouldn’t even like me anyhow the way I am now.”
“I could say the same thing. But I bet I would.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I bet I would, too.”
She then reached into her other pocket and she took out a ring. The ring he had given her. The ring she had said yes to. She placed it in the middle of her open hand and held her hand out to him.
He looked at it. “I don’t want that.”
She moved back to the steps and set it down beside him.
“I got to go,” she said.
“Sarah, take that back. It’s yours.”
“It was. Once upon a time.”
He nodded. And she nodded. And she stood there waiting for him to get up. Waiting for him to say something else. But he didn’t move and he didn’t speak. So she walked to her car and got in. She looked at him as she drove away but she didn’t wave. And neither did he.
26
SHE WASN’T TO THE END OF THE BLOCK BEFORE SHE WANTED IT back. God, she wanted it back. Couldn’t understand now why she had given it to him so forcibly. Without compassion. Couldn’t understand now why she had felt like she had to bring it with her at all. She stopped at the stop sign and looked over her shoulder. He was still sitting on the steps. Looking not at her but ahead. She realized now that it was much more than a ring. Much more than something she had kept buried in her underwear drawer for eleven years. Much more than something she had been careful to conceal when she moved in with a husband and careful to conceal when they moved from the smaller house to the larger house. More than white gold and a small diamond. She realized now as she sat at the stop sign and looked over her shoulder at him that the ring was much more. Something magical. Never too far away. That led through a doorway and to another life in another world with another man and as long as she had the ring there would be that possibility in her mind. That place to drift toward. Not a world that she could cross into and not a world she was certain she would cross into if given the choice but a world that was available to her to think about sometimes when she was alone.
And now she had taken that small and magical thing and delivered it to the man who was in the center of that other world and she knew that by leaving it with him this part of her life would disappear. She turned right and began to make her way toward her mother’s house. Stopping at the end of each street and telling herself to go back though she damn well knew that she couldn’t go back after she had only minutes ago declared to him that she couldn’t come back. Not even to ask him to give her back that precious thing.
She moved across town. Driving and thinking about how she felt as she saw the note lying on the floor yesterday morning. Near the front door in the same place that the mortgage and the electric bill and the Christmas cards and other evidence of their existence fell every day except Sunday. How she had known who it was from and what it said before she knelt and picked it up and how she had read it once, twice, five, eight times as she stood in the quiet of the house in the earliest light. How she had read it over and over and how she had looked out the wide, rectangular window in the front door and imagined what he looked like in the night as he walked up her sidewalk and up her front steps and across her porch and to the door and how she had imagined what he looked like as he walked away from her door and down her steps and across her sidewalk, disappearing in the dark as he walked down the street with his hands in his pockets. And how as she stood there imagining him delivering the note, how she squeezed it between her fingers as if trying to get it to give one last drop and then hearing the first small voice of the day calling Mommy and then the other small voices following behind the first. Mommy, Mommy. And how she had felt as she smoothed the wrinkled paper on her thigh and then pulled out the waist of her pajama bottoms and stuck the note into the front of her panties as she heard the small feet hit the floor, preparing to come look for her. Helping to wash faces and brush teeth and then pouring cereal for the boys and sitting with the girl and helping her learn with her spoon as she felt the note flat against her skin as if it were his own warm hand against her soft flesh reaching down and touching her in a place that he knew. And how she was relieved when the big steps came down the stairs and the big voice came into the kitchen, giving good mornings and kissing heads and already prepped for the day with the tie tied and the face shaved and the smell of a freshly cleaned man. Your turn, he said. I’ll finish them up. She headed upstairs and she took the note from her panties and read it again and then she folded it while she hurried to get it together. In and out of the shower and hair and makeup done quickly and dressed and shoes and then the note folded an extra time and put into her pants pocket just as he called out. They’re ready. I gotta run. And how she sat down on the edge of the bed and then it occurred to her to take the ring and keep it with her until she found the courage to go and see him and how she took it from the back of the drawer where it had sat all those years and where it had allowed her to go through that doorway and into that other world. And she thought now that if she went back and asked for it then maybe he could somehow understand all these things that she had felt.