This Close to Okay(26)

“Oh, you don’t have to do that. I have plenty of food. You don’t have to go out in this mess,” she said, motioning to the blurry, wet window. He leaned forward and opened his backpack, fiddled around in there, and held up money to show her. He handed her five twenties, explaining that it was for lunch and everything else earlier, putting the rest in his pocket.

“It’s the least I can do. If you’re okay with me borrowing your car? I’ll leave—” he trailed off, rooting around again in his bag. He pulled out a small box and opened it. Inside was a ring with a diamond chunk the size of a pencil eraser. “I’ll leave this ring here. So you know I’m not running off.”

“You don’t want me to come with you? I could drive if you insist on doing this,” she said. He slid the ring box across the table so it was closer to her.

“I’ll take care of it. Steak okay?” he asked, standing.

“Sure. Steak sounds great. Oh, and keys. My keys,” she said, remembering her purse on the kitchen counter. She got it, unclipped them, and let her fingertips graze his palm as she handed them over. His grab quieted the jingle.

“Be back in half an hour. Promise.”

“Do you want me to tell you where the grocery store is?”

“I’ll find it.”

He threw his backpack over his shoulder and headed toward the door.

There was no reason to believe him. The ring could be a fake; he could be going to the bridge to jump. He could run off with her car forever, and she’d have to explain to the police that she didn’t know him or if Emmett was even his real first name.

She was trusting him, completely.

A crinkle flattened inside of her.





EMMETT




Fake, scritchy-looking black spiders had their legs wrapped around the lit-up letters of the sign spelling MARKET. From the outside, it looked like they sold only pumpkins and chrysanthemums. Emmett sat in Tallie’s car in the parking lot, mindlessly scrolling through the news on his phone although he hated it. But if last night had happened how he wanted and they’d found him in the water, his face, his story would be splayed across the front pages. The news was so fucking depressing, and that was part of the reason he wanted to jump. How did anyone survive anything? Anxiety began itching at his neck, and his body ached with grief, a fact he’d gotten used to after years of living with it. “Grief hurts…physically,” his dad had warned him.

Before his vision turned grotesque, he saw Christine and Brenna separately, then together, safe with their eyes closed, pale and sleeping. Reliving it was a cold shock of light before utter darkness, the cage door of his heart left swinging. Emmett put his forehead against Tallie’s steering wheel, focused on deliberate, slow breaths in the engine-off coolness, looking up only when he heard a car pull next to him.

(A white car. A redhead, a black-and-white polka-dotted raincoat. A car seat. The dome light ticks off. A blanket hangs over the car-seat handle, protecting the baby from the rain. The blanket is white with yellow ducks on it. The ducks are smiling.)

*



Hitting the produce section first, Emmett picked up a small bag of red potatoes, put them in his basket. A woman stopped her cart beside him, swearing he looked familiar, that she’d seen him somewhere before. He kindly told her he was from out of town before turning away. Being out in the world heightened his desire for the comfort of Tallie’s warm, clean, good-smelling house. He grabbed two steaks, Irish butter, a bottle of red. Stock and cognac for the sauce. He zipped through the wide, smooth seasonal aisle with its masks and motion-detector skeletons jiggling and rattling on both sides of him. Beeped himself through the self-checkout and left without speaking to another human.

*



At Tallie’s, he promptly kicked her out of the kitchen.

“You’re probably always taking care of other people. I say probably because I don’t want to come off like a know-it-all, mansplaining your own life to you, but I know it’s true. Look at what you did for me. You didn’t have to do that. So let me do something for you,” he said.

As soon as he’d returned to her place, she’d handed Christine’s ring to him, and he’d put it into his backpack before bringing a big pot of water to a boil. Chopping the potatoes, dropping them in.

“It’s hard to admit how much I love you making dinner so I don’t have to think about it. I usually make little meals. Or just snack all day. Some days I get takeout. It’s still kind of weird cooking for one. I’m not good at letting people take care of me,” she said. She kept her toes out of the kitchen, had them lined up perfectly where the tile turned to hardwood.

Emmett let the gentle faucet water run over the steaks and patted them dry with paper towels before rubbing them with olive oil. Tallie leaned and watched. A small yellow meow from one of her cats floated across the kitchen air. Emmett turned on the stove, dropped a pale cube of cold butter into the skillet, and poured himself a glass of water as the butter warmed and sizzled.

“Yesterday, the bridge, did that have something to do with your marriage?” Tallie asked as he put both steaks in the skillet. Bloody. Browning. Searing.

“In a way, it did. In a way, it didn’t,” he said.

“That clears it up.”

He turned to her. Smiled. Tallie sat on the floor outside the kitchen and shook her head at him.