Never Have I Ever(55)

The hours ate themselves. Roux did not check up on me, perhaps too busy with some wretched business of her own. Luca read the first two sections and passed the quizzes before Maddy got home. The two of them went bounding downstairs to “hang,” whatever that meant. Hopefully nothing horizontal.

I made sure that the basement door was open, and after half an hour I toted down Cokes and some disingenuous sliced apples. I was reassured to find them sitting innocently side by side at the computer, watching something goofy on YouTube. Luca was wholly absorbed by the screen, but Maddy was watching him watching. My girl was headed for a heartbreak, but hopefully a small one. So far it looked like an unrequited crush, and its object would be gone too fast to leave a large mark. I hoped. Meanwhile its object had me stuck inside my house.

I had to steal some time tomorrow. Roux hadn’t left me much room, but I thought I might find some at the starting edge of day.

While the kids were downstairs, I practiced lying in the master-bathroom mirror. To beat Roux I had to do more than lie with silence, more even than lying with my mouth. I needed whole-body dishonesty, deception folded into my smiles and the way I manually kept my shoulders loose and my hands still.

Over dinner I tried the lines I’d practiced, telling Davis and Maddy that I’d been asked to sub in on an early-morning dive class for a sick coworker. Not a boat trip, I told them, just a walk-in at the beach reef. I’d be home by nine, plenty of time for Davis to make his nine-thirty class and to meet Char for our walk. I even ate like a liar, as if I enjoyed the way my good meat loaf clumped, thick as clay, in my dry mouth.

They believed me. So easily it scared me.

I was good at this. Too good. At bedtime Davis had no questions about what was bothering me or the dive I’d purely invented. I lay awake for a long time after he fell asleep. I felt sick with guilt, and I was glad of it. Roux, in my position, would sleep as sweetly as Oliver. She was making me a better liar, but she couldn’t make me like it.

By four I was up, layering a light cotton dress over a flowery tankini, dressed as if I really were heading to a dive. Even my clothes were lies, and worse, I was sneaking out to meet Tig Simms. Again. The last time I’d done this, it had ended so, so poorly. That thought nearly shut me down.

Before the sun rose, I was close enough to Mobile Bay to smell the salt. I wished I could keep driving, straight in and under. Down where it was quiet and blue and no one knew my name. Seven years ago I’d started down this highway so many times. At first I couldn’t even make it out of Florida. As the weeks passed, I’d pushed closer, but I’d never once gotten past the Baldwin Beach exit. There had been a quarter century’s worth of shame blocking my way.

This time? I gunned it, racing toward Restoration Garage with my foot heavy on the gas, though I had no idea what I would find. I couldn’t let the complicated swamp of feelings that were choking me slow me down.

Restoration was on a quiet county road, a long, low building covered in green corrugated metal siding. There was a chain-link fence running all the way around it, with a roll of barbed wire at the top. It had a gate with a keypad, but I didn’t know the code, and it was dark inside.

Tig’s house was on the property, too. I remembered that from when I’d paid off his mortgage. It was a small, red brick ranch outside the fence. I followed a fork in the gravel drive down to it. An old Mustang was parked in front, a low-slung beast of a car, deep blue and gleaming. I parked behind it.

The house had no porch and no awning, just a concrete pad, and no lights were on. I crossed the lawn, wet with morning dew, and though the air was warm and humid, I was shivering. The back of my throat felt sour with remembered wine. I’d imagined coming to this very place so many times, but not under these circumstances. Never in this mood. The shame and sorrow I expected—deserved—were present, but laid over with a thousand other feelings.

I lifted a shaking hand to press the doorbell, and it chimed obligingly. I waited, but the house stayed dark and silent. The Tig I’d known was a night person, but how much of that Tig was left? As a kid he’d stayed up late, sometimes all night, especially if the moon was full. Those were the nights he’d come to ping rocks off my window, whisper-calling up, I need a pork chop. Right now the moon was a fat disk hung low in the lightening sky, barely on the wane. A sliver was missing from its edge. Did a moon this full still make him hungry, steal his rest? He could be out now, roaming.

I pressed it again. Twice. After thirty seconds I banged on the door itself, and a light came on. My hands dropped and began twisting together in front of me. I had to press them together to make them stop.

I thought, perhaps foolishly, that all I needed was to see him and I would know. A quarter of a century had passed, but there was no love like first love. I’d lost a thousand hours studying his face, tracing its planes and angles. I knew what every muted feeling looked like as it crossed his features. If he’d sent her, then his deep green eyes would narrow, the lids pulling up from the bottom. He would press his lips together. His thumbs would worry at his knuckles.

And if he hadn’t, what face would he make? What would he feel when he saw me on his porch?

This I could not imagine.

I could hear footsteps padding toward me. Closer and closer. I think I stopped breathing. The door swung open, creaking loud on its hinges.

He was still in the process of pulling on a shirt, and I caught a glimpse of a tattoo as the cloth dropped over his abdomen. It was a plain white tee, the kind of thing Davis would only wear under a button-down. Tig was still wire thin, so his ancient pajama bottoms rode low, hanging off his hip bones. They were banana-colored, covered in tiny cartoon monkeys, too silly for the occasion. His familiar face was creased with sleep. His hair was the same, a halo of crazy corkscrews shooting out in all directions. The light behind him caught the bronze, and I saw there was some silver in it now, too.