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I don’t say anything, because he’s not wrong and we both know it.
“So you finally let one close. That’s not a mistake. That’s the bravest thing I’ve watched you do since I’ve known you. But now you’re doing the other thing, where you go hunting for the crack so you can be the one who ends it first, before it can end on you.” He shrugs. “You saw a face. One second. Over a board game, in front of a kid. And you built a funeral out of it.”
“You didn’t see the face.”
“I don’t need to. I’ve watched you build endings for a decade.” He finally looks at me. “Here’s the only part that matters, and then I’ll leave you alone. Bo comes first. Always. That’s not up for debate, and if this woman can’t love that boy all the way, the hard days and all, then yeah, you end it, and it’ll hurt like nothing has, and you’ll do it anyway, because that’s the job. But you don’t know that yet. You’ve got a face and a comment from her friend. That’s not knowing, brother. That’s fear wearing knowing’s coat.”
He stands, claps a hand on my shoulder.
“So go find out. For real. Not on the phone. Sit her down and ask her the actual question. Can you love him forever.” He heads for the door. “Ask her, Baker. Before the not-knowing eats you. It’s already eating you. Ask Cap. Ask that floor you mopped twice.”
I get home a little after eight the next morning, running on no sleep and Wade’s voice in my head, and Bo’s at the kitchen table in his school clothes eating cereal, and the first thing out of his mouth is, “Is Olivia coming this weekend?”
“Maybe, bud. She’s got some things going on.”
“She said she’d help me with my volcano. For the science fair.” He points his spoon at me.
He goes back to his cereal, secure in a future that has Olivia in it, a volcano in it, the two of them at this table building the kind that erupts. He’s not hoping she’ll be around. He’s planning on it. He’s built her into the architecture of his week without asking anybody’s permission, because that’s what you do when you’re ten and you love somebody. You just assume they’ll be there.
That’s the whole thing, right there, in a bowl of cereal. That’s what I can’t afford to be wrong about.
Wade is right. I know he’s right. I’ve built endings before, I know the feeling of my own hands reaching for the crack. And I know the other part is true too, that Bo comes first and always will, and that I owe it to him to find out for real instead of circling it for another month.
So I decide. I’ll talk to her. Really talk, the way Wade said. In person. Not a thing I spring on her sideways over the phone. I’ll ask the real question and I’ll listen to her answer it.
I just want to do it right.
That’s what I tell myself over the next stretch of days, anyway. I want the right moment. Not a Monday when she’s got seven clients behind her and I’ve got a kid who needs a bath. Not rushed, not exhausted, not squeezed between the eight hundred things a week is made of. A real sit-down. The kind of conversation you don’t start unless you can finish it.
And the right moment doesn’t come, because it never does, and because things are good. That’s the part I keep tripping over. Every time I nearly bring it up, she does something that makes the worry look stupid. She shows up with soup. She FaceTimes Bo. She laughs at one of my jokes and puts her head on my shoulder during a movie, and I think, I’m an idiot, there’s nothing here, why would I take a good thing and go poking it for holes.
So I wait. A few days. Then a few more. I keep the question in my pocket and I keep not asking it, because asking it means maybe getting an answer I can’t live with, and everything’s too good to risk it yet.
I’ll ask her. Soon. When the moment’s right.
Chapter 29
Olivia
Luke’s on shift, so I go to church alone, and I’ve reached the point where that’s fine. I sit with Dottie in the third row while Bo does his class, I know the songs, and afterward I head to my life group the way I do every week, and none of it costs me anything anymore.
That’s what I’d tell you, if you asked how it’s going. It stopped costing me anything. I just go.
Natalie’s already there when I come in, which is normal, but she’s quiet, which isn’t. No coffee shoved into my hands. No download about her week before I’ve sat down. She’s in a chair near the back with both hands around a cup she isn’t drinking, and when I sit next to her she gives me a smile that doesn’t reach anywhere and says, “Hey,” and nothing else.
I clock it. I clock everything. But Brandon’s starting, so I decide to ask her after.
I don’t get the chance, because it comes out of her in class.
Prayer requests. Brandon goes around. The job, the grandmother, and then he gets to Natalie, and she opens her mouth to pass, I can see her about to say she’s good, and instead her face just comes apart.
“Can I actually,” she says, and stops, and her eyes fill, and the whole room leans in the way this room does. “It’s my mom. I need prayer for me and my mom.”
And then she tells the truth. Not the version from her feed. That every phone call ends with her feeling like she failed a test she was never handed the questions to. That her mom can turn any good news into a referendum on everything Natalie hasn’t done yet. That she drove home from that sushi dinner and sat in a parking garage and cried for twenty minutes. That she loves her mom so much it’s the biggest wound she has, and she’s tired of pretending that it’s simple when it is the least simple thing in her life.
Somebody scoots a chair closer. Brandon writes it down like it matters, because it does. A girl across the circle reaches over and puts a hand on Natalie’s knee. Nobody fixes her. Nobody performs concern. They just gather around the true thing she finally set down.
It’s beautiful, honestly. If I were in the chair I usually sit in, the professional one, I’d call it exactly what it is. A person being known. The whole point of a room like this.
