Never Have I Ever(10)
“Who are you meeting, girl-child?” I asked instead, quite stern.
“Just Shannon,” she said, and I believed her.
I said, “Go text her. Tell her you got busted and she better get her butt in bed or I will call her mother.”
“Are you going to tell Duddy?” she asked, nervous.
“Of course. I tell your father everything,” I said, and this was almost, almost true. “But I’ll also tell him you and I had a good talk and that you won’t do it again. Because you won’t, right?” She nodded, but she still looked worried, so I gave her a line from The Princess Bride, our favorite movie. “‘Buttercup doesn’t get eaten by the eels at this time.’”
She grinned and kissed me, saying, “You are the best monster,” before running, light-footed, for the stairs.
I let the mass inside me sink and settle, unexamined. Just as I had three years ago, when Char came down with the flu while her husband was out of town. She had a fever over 102 even on Motrin, and she was sweaty and so shaky she could hardly stand. I moved into her house, minding teeny-tiny Ruby, keeping Char hydrated with juice and broth. When her fever finally broke, she grabbed my hand and said, “You’re my best friend. Isn’t that stupid to say out loud? We aren’t nine.”
I looked at our clasped hands, and I thought, Char, you have no idea what you are holding. The urge for confession was so strong—to be wholly seen by my dearest friend—that I felt it move through me like a cold and salty wave made of every unnameable feeling. I saw that moon, fat and full, centered in my mind’s eye. But it was not Charlotte’s job to forgive me.
All I said was, “We should make each other bracelets,” and we laughed.
The closest I ever came to letting it rise was almost five years back, when I went over to Davis’s house for dinner and found that Maddy was at a sleepover. We only spent time at his place when she was home, the three of us watching PG-13 movies, ordering pizza. Later he’d walk me out to my car. We’d been dating almost a year, but sex had only recently begun between us, and always in my studio apartment, lights off, blinds drawn. He never stayed the night. When Maddy woke up every morning, her dad was there alone, scrambling her eggs.
That night he made dinner for me. Oven-fried chicken, steamed green beans, salad, mashed potatoes. Davis cooked like a man who’d gone straight to Betty Crocker for advice after his wife had left him with a second-grader. Basic American meat and three, seasoned with salt and pepper. It wasn’t bad, but he pushed the food around on his plate like a TV actor pretending to have dinner.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He shook his head. Swallowed all the nothing in his mouth. He looked so grave, so sad, that if I hadn’t understood him so well, I would have assumed he was breaking up with me.
“I’m going to say yes. To you, to Mads, the whole package,” I told him, but he sat there staring down at his uneaten food. I added, quietly, “I’m not the kind who’ll ever leave you.”
He met my eyes then. Nodded. Still solemn, he pulled the small velvet box out of his pocket and slid it across the table to me. The ring was simple and elegant, a rose-gold band with a modest marquise-cut stone. His ex-wife’s was smaller and cut round. I’d seen it in the picture of her that Maddy kept in her room.
“Yes,” I said immediately, and then, blushing, “I mean, did you want to ask?”
He laughed. He came around the table and knelt to do it right. After that he relaxed and we had a nice meal. We cleared the dishes, I rinsed while he loaded, and then we went up the stairs to his bedroom for the first time. I drew the curtains, turned out all the lamps.
After, I lay wide awake in the arms of the man who would be my husband. Who would put his only daughter even more deeply in my care. He deserved to know what he was getting, this good man with his upright posture, his patient dedication to my orgasms, his 401(k). I ran my thumb over the ring. It fit. Of course it did. Davis did his homework. I rolled to be the inside spoon, and Davis turned with me, his hand spanning the small, soft rounding of my lower belly. I wondered if he could feel the ripples of old stretch marks, faint souvenirs from back in high school, when I was so heavy.
We whispered in the dark back and forth, talking late into the night in the way of new lovers. I already knew about his hardest time, when Maddy’s mom left. Laura was drinking every day by then. When they fought, she said bitter, drunken things that attacked the very roots of him. I knew that he drove her to rehab and that two days in she left the program. She never came back home.
That night he told me more. How he’d wept with Maddy, who was wild with rage and sorrow, but inside all he felt was relief. He confessed that the house without Laura in it had felt bigger, airier, like suddenly there was enough oxygen in all the rooms. He still hated his raw and secret joy in the face of his child’s abject misery. It felt so disloyal. The vicious blackout drunk was the remains of Laura, after all, and she had been his love. He’d once stood up with her in a church and made such promises. I held him, feeling a faint, whole-body tremor as he whispered to me about how he’d failed her.
I assured him he had not. He’d never made a vow to grocery-store box wine, and by the end Laura was lost in it. I told him he was good and dear and loyal.
If ever there was a time to let my past rise, show it to him, tell him everything, it was then. He had laid his failure down in front of me, asking if I could know his weakest moment and still love him. I’d promised him I could, and in the wake of it, in his peace, I wanted my own. What a relief it would be, to loose truth in the smallness of this room. To feel it in the air around us. To be fully seen. I could feel words rising. I could see a sky I had not seen in years.