Jane Doe(25)

“You got her! She’s gorgeous!”

“Thank you.”

“What’s her name?”

I shrug and rub my palm along her soft tail. “I don’t know.”

“She didn’t have one at the shelter?”

I grimace. “They called her Bunny.”

“That’s cute!”

“No, it’s awful. She’s far too regal for a stupid name like that.”

He scratches under her chin and she stretches to give him better access. “She is very regal.” When he stops scratching, she butts his hand and rubs her cheek against him, marking him as another of her new possessions. He gives her more scratches. “Well, you have to name her.”

“She’s a cat. What does she care? She’s not going to come when I call her. Not unless there’s food.”

“Good point.”

“So you like cats?” I ask.

“Sure. I had one when I was little. What’s not to like?”

Exactly.

“What about you? Did you have cats?”

“No. She’s my first.”

“Dogs?”

“Just junkyard dogs who lunged at everyone, including me.”

“Yikes. That doesn’t sound very fun.”

“No. It wasn’t. The dogs didn’t seem to like the situation much either.”

“Where did you grow up again? Oklahoma?”

I feel a jolt that he knows the truth. I must have told him in some offhand conversation during college. But it hardly matters. He already knows my real name and where I went to school. It’s not as if I can disguise my identity from him.

“Yeah. Out in the boonies near the panhandle.”

“I grew up in the boonies of Bemidji. It probably wasn’t that different. More trees, though.”

“And fewer tornados,” I add.

“Yeah, and I’ve gotta be honest, I never had a junkyard dog.”

I laugh. “Did you have a white picket fence?”

“Uh, we did, actually.”

“Wow. Sounds like the American dream.”

“To be honest, it really wasn’t.”

“Why not?” I’m curious now, but Luke goes silent, so maybe that was a question I wasn’t supposed to ask. Sometimes I’m not sure of boundaries.

But then he decides to answer. “I don’t know. It should have been. A middle-class life in the country. Nuclear family. Nobody ever hit me.”

He leaves it at that, and I understand, at least a little. I didn’t come from a broken home either. We were never middle-class by any means, but my parents were together. I got hit every once in a while, but no one ever beat the tar out of me, and that’s the minimum standard for abuse in Oklahoma.

But those are surface issues. It’s the underneath that makes you who you are.

It’s your parents drinking with their trashy friends while all of them make fun of you for wetting your bed the night before. It’s your mom cackling when the handsy guy who rents the back room asks when you’re going to get titties. It’s living alone for five days in first grade and wondering if your parents have finally decided they don’t want to come back. It’s your dad saying he’ll send you to the Cherokee orphanage if he gets another letter from that stacked kindergarten teacher about your bad behavior.

Luke blows out a long breath. “Let’s just say I only went back a couple of times after I left for college.”

“Yeah,” I whisper. “Me too.”

“But now,” he says, “now you have a cat.” It’s sweet and simple and true.

Luke reminds me a lot of Meg.





CHAPTER 19

Be nice.

That’s what she used to tell me. Not often. Just when she needed me to be better. Be nice, Jane. Just be nice, okay?

And I would be nice. For her. For a little while. Long enough to listen to her problems and not tell her what she was doing wrong. Long enough to meet her new boyfriend and not scare him away.

She told me to be nice about Steven too. We were drinking. We both said mean things. He’s still a really good guy. Be nice, Jane.

So I’d be nice and not remind her that he’d called her a stupid whore. I’d keep my mouth shut and not tell her it seemed like she believed all the terrible things he said.

I shouldn’t have been so nice about him. Or maybe I should’ve been nicer to Meg? I don’t know. But I did something wrong; that much is obvious.

I only came back to the States once while she was dating him. They’d just broken up, and she was a weeping, terrified mess. She seemed to think she couldn’t go on without him. She was stupid, helpless, not good enough.

He’d kicked her out of his house again, and since she’d given up her apartment to live with him, she was sleeping in a friend’s basement. I’d gathered her up, rented a cabin on the coast of Lake Superior, and we’d stayed there for two weeks.

But I’m not a nurturer. I can’t heal people. I thought she was better when I returned to Malaysia, but my clumsy offerings of love—wine, s’mores, bad movies, sunburns, margaritas—they hadn’t done the trick. A week later she was back with him and sending me texts about how great everything was now. How nice he was being. How happy she was.