“Good.”
“This thing with me and my mom, our history, it makes me crazy sometimes. She just knows how to get under my skin —”
“Lisa’s on her way, if she isn’t already there —”
“Lisa?”
Darren glanced back at the open curtains, heard again the water running in the other room. “You called… Lisa?”
“You called me a couple of times, making no sense, unable to answer basic questions. You were… very drunk, Darren. I felt you weren’t safe. I didn’t know if you’d try to drive somewhere or if you might actually hurt yourself in some way. And I had already left by then, flown… well, it doesn’t matter.”
So she was truly gone, he thought.
She sounded so, so tired.
“She was the only person I could think to call. I was too scared to call the sheriff’s department out there for a welfare check. Didn’t want them coming on a drunk black man, even one on his own property… I didn’t want you to get shot.”
“Lisa,” he repeated, trying it on.
“You’ll forgive me one day,” Randie said. “Or maybe you won’t.”
He caught a further meaning beneath her words: Maybe it won’t even matter.
“But you scared me, Darren. I had never heard you talk like that.”
“What did I say?”
There was a stretch of silence on the other end of the line. At least a stretch of Randie opting not to talk. Darren heard other voices, phones ringing, wondered if she was in an office somewhere. It unnerved him that he couldn’t guess where she would have gone after fleeing his home. He said her name as a question, a hope.
He heard her sigh, followed by “Darren, let’s not… not now, not just yet.”
“Randie —”
“I don’t know, Darren, I just, I just don’t understand what happened, why you sounded so hard, so cold all of a sudden, and the way you spoke to me —”
“My mother, Randie.”
This time, her sigh had a bark of impatience in it.
Also disappointment.
“Darren, I’ve had so many doubts about why we fell into each other, if it was right, or even real, if I was only seeing you through the lens of my grief over losing Michael. You as the hero figure who could somehow fix things, put my life back together. And maybe I didn’t consider that I was putting a kind of pressure on you.”
“No, Randie, I was drunk, that’s all this was —”
“And maybe that’s something I need to look at too. My part in that. The drinking.”
No, it’s my problem, he wanted to say. Bourbon was the culprit here. It had barbed his tongue. The liquor quelled his anxiety, his henny-penny sense that the world was falling apart, but it had made him mean to the one woman he did not want to hurt.
“Look, I picked up a couple of new gigs,” she said, speaking fast, not leaving any space between her words so as not to allow Darren to derail the direction she wanted this to go in. “I can’t really get into all of this right now or where this goes exactly.”
“Randie, don’t —”
“Bye, Darren.”
It was said so softly that he wasn’t sure he’d actually heard her say it until it was clear that she was no longer there. There was just the sound of a late-September wind through the trees and the sprightly whistle of sparrows, whose cheeriness ate at his nerves. He hung up the phone and waited for his ex-wife to come out of the bathroom.
The running water had been for him.
Lisa put him in a cool bath, leaving the bathroom door unlocked so she could pop in every few minutes or so to see that he hadn’t accidentally or on purpose slipped beneath the surface of the water. If either of them felt shy or awkward about Darren’s nakedness, they didn’t speak of it. They were mostly silent together. The water was a blessing on his skin. It didn’t sober him up so much as cool his fevered blood. The thumping pulse in his ears slowed, and his muscles felt solid again. His head still hurt, but he could at least foresee a future hour when it wouldn’t, could foresee that this hangover would not fell him completely. Lisa told him she was baking the salmon he’d bought for his week with Randie, that Darren needed a good meal, lots of protein and omega-3 fatty acids. “Did I say something? Was I talking when you came in the house?” he asked. It bothered him that he couldn’t remember the past two days, that he’d apparently been saying things that frightened Randie enough to call Lisa, who looked at him curiously now. She had expressed so little anger during their divorce as to raise indifference to an art form, a virtue. She had repeatedly told him she was not angry about what had happened, only the how. She was either sitting on a cliff’s edge of rage or she had never truly loved him at all. He’d spent their entire marriage in secret fear of the latter. But the look on her face now came closer to regret. She cocked her head and said, “You called me her name, and you asked me — her — if she liked the ring.”
He pulled his knees up to his chest, feeling wholly exposed now. He slipped the washcloth between his knees, felt around the cloudy, cool water for the sliver of soap.
“I saw it sitting out on your dresser, by the way,” she said.
She knelt down and reached for the washcloth to wash his back. “It’s pretty.”
He told her it had been his grandmother’s.
“Figured,” she said.
They both fell quiet again, the tinkle of bathwater hitting the side of the tub the only sound in the room. If she was at all gratified by the fact that the woman he’d left her for had now seemingly left him, the feeling couldn’t stand beneath the weight of her pity. Darren felt it as a presence in the room, a suffocating sadness in the air. He stood suddenly, splashing water over the lip of the tub. Unable to tolerate his nakedness for another second, he grabbed the folded towel she’d left on the toilet-seat lid and covered himself with it. The material scratched at his skin, which felt newly raw. Dripping as he walked, he stepped into the hallway. Lisa followed him toward his bedroom. “Darren.”
He didn’t want her in there.
He didn’t want her in this house.
She had never loved it the way he thought she should, had never shown an interest in the garden or asked to see the spot where his grandmother had washed their clothes in the old pond, would give him a stick and let him pretend to fish while she went about her work. Lisa had never sat on the back porch and shelled peas with him. But that had been one of his and Randie’s first dates on the land. She’d put on a Sugar Pie DeSanto record and let the soul sound drift out of the house, curl up and keep them company. This farmhouse, his past and his present, the years ahead of him he wanted to spend here, this dream belonged to him and Randie, if she would still have him.
