No One Will Miss Her(40)

I think sometimes, about whether I would have done it. Even with Pop’s words weighing heavy on me, I might have made that choice. But I didn’t get to, because back at Dwayne’s house, the same news was being reckoned with, and the preacher was doing what the preacher did. And in the end, it almost felt like it was meant to be. Like we were following a path laid out for us years before, by some puppet master with a taste for heavy-handed drama and a shitty sense of humor. It was early spring, not summer, and we weren’t children anymore, but the rest of it was very much the same: the preacher’s sedan pulled up, this time with Dwayne behind the wheel. He got out, he pushed a toe into the dirt, and he said the words his father had told him to say.

“I want to do right by you.”

I looked at him, my arms folded protectively over my chest. It would be a while yet before I started to show.

“Do you?” I said.

The boy, my boy, lifted his eyes and met my gaze.

“Yeah,” he said, and then, so quietly that I had to strain to hear him: “I want to marry you.”



Maybe he meant it. I don’t know. Maybe Dwayne had his own secret dreams about barbecues and babies, or maybe he just didn’t want to walk the path laid out for him. In Copper Falls, he was our hometown hero, the golden boy who threw a no-hitter and was bound for a glorious future. At the state university, he would have been a small fish in a big pond, not even a starting pitcher despite the athletic scholarship. Maybe he was afraid of what it would be like, not to be special anymore. But as far as the town was concerned, Dwayne had been derailed, and I was the scheming jezebel bitch who’d blown up his future with just a twitch of my evil ovaries.

“He had his whole life ahead of him,” they’d say. I mean, they did say it. At our wedding. Imagine hearing that on your way down the aisle, people talking about a guy marrying you like he’d been struck down in his prime by cancer. I was four months along then, still barely showing in my yellow dress, which only made it worse when I lost it. I know there are still people in town who think I made it all up, that I was never pregnant at all.

But I was. I made it all the way to November. It was wet and cold, colder than usual, and my belly was big enough by then to throw me off balance. I stepped out our door that morning and saw my breath, but not the ice. I went down hard, and they told me afterward that this was the beginning, the moment the placenta broke free, the moment my baby started dying. But I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. I stood back up, hurting but not bleeding, and thought everything was fine. It wasn’t until a week later that the nurse at the clinic went looking for a heartbeat and found only silence. They drugged me for the rest of it. I was grateful not to be awake for that part, and guilty for how grateful I felt.

And there it is. My sad story. There was more after that, of course, but it was just more of the same. Ten more years in Copper Falls. Ten years, which ended up being the rest of my life. And if you’re wondering why I stayed, then you don’t know what it’s like—to be eighteen, with a mortgage and a husband and aching breasts that won’t stop leaking for a baby who’s not there. You’ve never built a life to hold a family, only to end up caught inside a cage for two. It’s not what you imagined, but it’s what you know. It’s safe. You might as well live there. The truth is, Dwayne and I never even talked about splitting up, just like we never talked about the baby after he was gone. We were like two drowning people, alone in the middle of the ocean, clinging for dear life to the same shitty scrap of wood. Sure, you could always release your grip, let yourself sink all the way to the bottom. But if he’s not letting go, are you going to be the first?

And maybe I didn’t want to let go. Maybe I still loved him. I even imagined, back then, that Dwayne might have wanted the first pregnancy enough to want to try again. Everyone thought I’d trapped him, but there were plenty of things about our life, about me, that Dwayne liked—that any man could have liked. Growing up the way I did had taught me how to make the most of not-enough. I knew how to stretch a dollar. How to hunt and field dress a deer. How to make a house full of cheap secondhand shit look like something better than it was. I knew how to take care of a man who couldn’t take care of himself. When Dwayne had his accident, it was me who convinced the doctors not to just take the whole foot. When the workmen’s comp payout came, I was the one who negotiated a sweetheart deal for Doug Bwart’s business. When the oxycontin ran out and my husband was writhing on the bed, sweating and screaming, with stumps where his toes used to be, I found a way to stop the pain—even though it meant losing the best thing I had, and even though I knew full well that I was only kicking a pile of misery down the line. I’d promised to love, honor, comfort, and keep. And like Pop said, a promise is a promise.

That’s how it went. That’s how ten years passed. And it wasn’t as pathetic as you’re probably imagining. Even after everything, I found ways to be happy. Eventually, I made it to the community college, for a few classes if not the certification I’d hoped for. I had the part-time gig at the vet, while it lasted. I had the lake house, with its untapped potential. And unlike Pop, I had no loyalty to Teddy Reardon or the insular, dumbass traditions of Copper Falls, the people who still called me “whore” and “trash” behind my back, and sometimes when they passed me in the street. Being the jezebel junkyard girl meant I had nothing to lose by breaking the rules—and even Dwayne stopped complaining about renting to outsiders once he saw how much money it brought in.