Tom felt like someone was banging a kettle drum in his guts. ‘Why?’ was all he could manage.
‘My mother wants me there.’
‘I want you here!’
She shrugged as if his desires were inconsequential and, with another pounding drum-roll of nausea, Tom realized there was no reason why she should think anything else. He’d fucked her, he’d failed her, he’d begged favours from her and he’d almost got her killed. Twice.
No, three times.
Jesus, no wonder she wanted to put the width of the continent between them. He had no right to ask her to stay, no right to burden her with his feelings.
‘I love you,’ he said anyway, hating his own selfishness even as he said it.
She looked away from him then, and Tom thought the absence of an ‘I love you’ back was the most painful sound he’d ever not heard.
‘My mother hates you, Tom.’
‘That’s what mothers are for. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘And I hardly know you.’
‘Bullshit! You know me!’
She sighed and tears welled in her eyes. ‘Only enough to know that you’d always find a way to fuck up, Tom. Always find a way to let me down. Always find a way to hurt me, even if you didn’t mean to.’
He wanted to yell that it wasn’t true, that she was wrong, that it wouldn’t be like that. But he’d just admitted to himself that she had no evidence to the contrary. And in matters of love, he was learning that actions spoke louder than words.
He wished he hadn’t wasted the words now. Without the actions to back them up, ‘I love you’ was just a cheap shot. A twenty-dollar bunch of dahlias wasn’t going to change that. He knew she was wrong, but he also knew she’d made the right decision based on what she’d seen of him. Frankly, he’d applaud her choice – if it had meant anything but him losing her.
His cracked whisper told her the best truth he could muster: ‘Then you should get to know me better.’
She nodded slowly.
He knew she understood.
But he also knew that it wasn’t enough.
*
He helped her pack. She took the things he’d thought she would – the photos, the clothes, the yearbook, the glass horses. She’d come out on Amtrak; they rented a U-Haul for her to drive home in. She didn’t care how long it took: she wasn’t flying.
It crossed Tom’s mind to offer to drive her back to Georgia. Days and nights on the road, he was sure he could change her mind.
But he wanted her to change her mind by herself.
He hoped it would happen while they were packing.
Then he hoped it would happen when he made love to her the night before she left. She sobbed in his arms for an hour afterwards and he hoped and hoped that she would turn to him and take his face in her hands and tell him she would stay with him.
She finally fell asleep without saying it.
He kept hoping, even as the U-Haul turned the corner and disappeared from his sight. He waited fifteen minutes for it to reappear.
It didn’t.
*
Tom sat and stared at Lucia’s dormant TV for about a day. Then he drove to Bellflower, turning off the boulevard to where the yards had low chain-link fences. The lawn had been cut since he was last there.
Halo’s Mustang dripped onto the asphalt, newly washed.
Tom took fifteen minutes to get out of the Buick, and another five standing on the porch, getting up the nerve to knock, before Vee came round the corner of the house, making him jump.
‘Tom!’ She threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek so hard he had to take a step backwards.
‘Hi,’ he mumbled.
‘Halo!’ she yelled at the house, as she pulled a piece of paper from her jeans and unfolded it. ‘This came this morning.’
It was from Air Maintenance Inc. Chris Stern had been exonerated in the loss of the Pride of Maine ; his pension and death benefits were being reinstated and backdated.
Despite his low mood, Tom smiled.
‘Thanks, Tom.’
He’d never heard so much feeling in just two words. He shrugged. ‘Thank Halo. He bullied the shit out of me.’
Halo peered through the fly screen with yellow paint on his face. ‘Hey,’ he said, a little warily. ‘What’s up?’
