“I’m not beating you up,” he said. “I’m not threatening your family, but isn’t being with me diminishing you? They’re calling you a slut, Ryan. Because of me! And you’re pretending like it doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t, Harrison—don’t take responsibility for something that isn’t your fault!”
“Then whose responsibility is it?” he demanded.
“Sometimes things just are,” she said, but he wasn’t buying it. “Fine,” she continued, flush with bravery. “I’ll stop pretending. I’m falling in love with you. And I think you’re falling in love with me too.”
Her words echoed and re-echoed as if she were at the bottom of a well, dark and deep.
His face didn’t change, as if her confession didn’t even register. The words bounced off the stone rock face of him.
“Harrison?” she asked.
“This was a mistake we shouldn’t have tried to make right.”
She sucked in a furiously wounded breath. He was so persuasive, so believable as this cold, heartless man that she was scared he would believe it. He would convince himself.
And he would be lost to her. Totally lost.
Take it back, she thought. Take it back. You have to. We don’t stand a chance unless you take it back.
But he didn’t.
This is when sacrifice ceases to matter. Right here. Right now.
When he no longer cared that she would give him everything.
“Fuck you,” she breathed. “You want a divorce, come and find me.”
Chapter 26
Harrison conceded. He made his gracious speech. He thanked his staff, his voters. He promised that he wasn’t done, was far from done, that he would keep working for the people of the great state of Georgia. And he looked into all those faces and he was amazed that they believed him.
It wasn’t that he thought he was lying. Or telling the truth. He was just hollow. Words falling from his mouth without any meaning.
Staff left, and Jill was crying. Again. He patted her back, said some reassuring words, and she left, telling him she believed in him. Would work with him again once he was ready to come back.
Ashley left, back to Bishop. “Stop being such an idiot,” she said, through her driver’s-side window. “Stop pretending you like being a son of a bitch and get over yourself.”
“Take care of that man of yours,” he said, ignoring her insults.
“We take care of each other,” she said. “That’s the way love works.”
He watched her go until her taillights became just two of hundreds on the highway out of town.
“Ryan took your car,” Wallace said, coming up on his left. He smelled like champagne and defeat.
“What?”
“She took your car back to the condo, got her stuff, and left.”
“With my car and driver?”
Wallace nodded.
Harrison sagged. Would have fallen backward onto the pavement outside the Hilton if Wallace hadn’t been there with a friendly hand on his shoulder.
“You must have pissed her off good,” Wallace said.
“I told her I wanted a divorce.”
“Why the hell would you do that?”
“Because the whole thing was a bad idea. My life is all wrong for a woman like her.”
“Your life. God, man, you talk about being a Montgomery like that’s all you got.”
“It is.”
“Bullshit. Your feelings for her, it wasn’t an act. It was never an act. Every time the two of you walked into the room the place lit up, because it was obvious that you felt so much for each other. I know you, Harrison, and you can’t act that well. That’s why the whole world fell in love with her at the beginning, because they saw the truth of her. Sure, we gave her some things to say, put her in some fine clothes, but that was all just frosting. She’s real and honest and all the skeletons are out of the closet now. She’s perfect for you, jackass; you’re just being stupid.”
I’m falling in love with you and I think you’re falling in love with me.
“This whole proposal wasn’t fair for her. She had no idea who I was.”
“Yeah, and I think that’s why you married her. Come on, I’ll give you a ride,” he volunteered.
“Aren’t you drunk?”
“I stopped drinking hours ago.”
“Then … yeah, I’ll take a ride.”
They crossed the parking lot to a beat-up blue hatchback.
“Don’t I pay you better than this?” Harrison asked, staring at the rust that threatened to take over the tire well.
“Don’t speak ill of Denise—she’s fickle.”
“Maybe I lost this campaign because my manager is crazy.”
Wallace gathered up an armful of paper coffee cups and burrito wrappers from the front passenger seat and tossed them in the back.
Harrison sat on something squishy, but he didn’t care enough to investigate.
They drove in exhausted silence across town.
“Why do you wear such ugly ties?” Harrison asked, past the point of being polite.
“Slander. They’re not ugly.”
“They’re terrible.”
Wallace smiled. “My mom bought them for me, every year for my birthday since I was a baby. Most of the time she could only afford things from the thrift shops.”
“I know I pay you enough to buy new ties.”
“I don’t want new ties,” he said. “I want to remember where I came from. How my mom always prepared me for something better.”
Harrison looked out the window, the green of Atlanta rushing by.
He’d just pushed his only shot of something better right out of his life and then sealed the door, ensuring he’d suffocate. Alone.
Ryan had brought hope with her. Change. Laughter. Happiness.
Love.
Everything he’d never thought he’d have. Everything he’d never been prepared to receive. They were gifts left unused because he didn’t know what the hell to do with them.
Wallace came to a stop in front of his building. The windows of his condo were dark and he realized she wasn’t going to be up there. Her red cup, her suits, the blanket and laptop on the couch. Her sweet skin in his bed. Her hair tangled in his fingers.
That was all gone.
“You want to come up for a drink?” he asked, because he did not want to be alone in that condo with the ghost of her and the failure of his campaign.
Wallace squinted up through the windshield. “I want to come up and get blind drunk.”
Blind drunk sounded good. Sounded right.
I think I’ve made a mistake, he thought. I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.
“Let’s get to it, then,” he said, and led Wallace up to his condo.
Where every minute he felt worse and worse.
Dawn did the house no favors.
“This is it?” Dan, the driver, asked. Clearly he wasn’t all that impressed with 238 Belgrade Street. She couldn’t blame him. Dawn’s light had nothing to do with the chipped paint on the windowsills. The torn screen in the door. The broken cement steps. The whole house, the whole row of old houses, their plain brick fronts, just seemed to sag, exhausted and worn down.
The Burg had changed, fancy coffee shops and stores that sold throw pillows had crept in along the fringes, but the heart of it was the same. Working class. Working poor. Lots of Polish and American flags hanging limp from white metal railings.
“The old homestead,” she said. They’d split up the drive, she and Dan, but the twelve hours had been long and she was punchy with exhaustion and nerves. “You want to hear a joke?”
“No.”
She ignored him. “My girlfriend asked me to kiss her where it’s smelly, so I took her to Bridesburg.”
“That’s disgusting.”
It was. But she used to think it was funny.
“Is … anyone home?” he asked.
If I’m lucky, no.
She got out of th
e car and checked under the window air conditioner for the key they always kept taped there. It was a new air conditioner, but the key was still there.
Some things never change, she thought, both comforted and terrified by the thought.
“Go ahead and go. You must be beat,” she told Dan after she grabbed her bags from the trunk of the car.
“You sure?” he asked, looking up at the house like it meant to eat her. Maybe she shouldn’t have filled so many hours of that car ride telling him how much her sister hated her.
“Sure. Go. Get yourself a hotel room and some room service.” She opened her purse and started to give him some money.
“Stop, Ryan,” he said, putting his hand over her purse. “I’m not taking your money. Look, I want to say, all that shit that went down with Harrison? It’s bullshit. Don’t let that noise get to you.”
The distance from Atlanta and the election helped her understand that, but it wouldn’t change the fact that Harrison had just exiled her.
Man, wasn’t that a familiar story. Constantly getting kicked out of her own goddamned life.
Enough of that nonsense.
“Thank you, Dan,” she said, and kissed his cheek.
“I hope I’ll see you again,” he said. “You and Harrison, you guys made sense.”
She laughed out loud at that. “Nothing about us made sense,” she said. “Not one thing. But thank you.” She kissed his cheek and then stood on the curb, her beat-up duffel bag at her feet, and watched him drive away.
The house loomed behind her, full of all of her mistakes and memories.
And she was done being kept out of it. Done being ignored and pushed aside.
Key in hand, she opened the broken screen door, letting it rest against her back as she put the key into the lock, but before she could turn it the door opened.
Nora stood there in a bathrobe, a coffee cup steaming in her hand.
How was it possible in the six years that had passed since she’d seen her sister, Nora hadn’t changed at all? It was as if this house had some kind of magic hold over time.
She still looked just like Dad. White-blond hair, pin straight and cut off at her chin. She was square and sturdy, but small all the same. For years people made the mistake of underestimating Nora because she was cute. Her face was heart-shaped porcelain dominated by blue eyes and a wide pink mouth.
Her nickname in the neighborhood had been Kewpie for a while, until she got caught kissing Jason Marx behind the Gas ’N Go, and then she was called Gas ’N Go.
This neighborhood did not look away from your mistakes. Mistakes got poked at until the blood was all gone and you got numb to the pain. It was what everyone thought made them tough growing up here, but really all it did was make it harder to leave. Make it harder to fit in anywhere else.
And her sister—smart, beautiful, tough, and resilient—was the proof of that. She could have gone anywhere, been anything, but this neighborhood made you believe this was the only place you belonged.
“Nora.”
It was all she could say, because every single speech she’d concocted over the years felt stupid now. Being contrite didn’t work anymore, because she’d done her penance. Being belligerent didn’t work either, because she was too damn old to hold onto these grudges.
“Nice suit.” Nora jerked her chin out as her eyes took in the glittering sequins. The pearls. The fantastic shoes, none of which she’d taken the time to change out of after leaving the hotel.
“It’s too tight.” She pulled at the waistband and too late, she realized that she was drawing attention to the small bulge at her stomach. The last thing she wanted her sister to know was that she was showing up on her doorstep in a two-hundred-dollar suit, all her things in a duffel bag, and pregnant.
“Where’s your husband?”
“Atlanta.”
“He lost?”
Ryan nodded.
“Because of that bullshit with his parents?”
“Can I come in, or do you want to keep interrogating me out here?”
As an answer, Nora took a sip of her coffee and Ryan could smell it. Irish Cream. Nora’s favorite. She was going to make Ryan beg. Of course.
“You said I could come home.”
“And then I said you could go fuck yourself.”
“I can’t apologize to you any more than I have,” she said, taking sips of her own pride. “I have nowhere else to go and even if I did, I wouldn’t go there. I want to come home, Nora. I want to see Daddy and Olivia. I want …” A giant gulp of pride and courage. “I want my family back. It’s been six years. Isn’t that long enough?”
Nora didn’t say anything, her blue-gray eyes unreadable, her posture unforgiving.
Ryan had nothing left to cling to. No pride. No animosity. No hurt feelings. Nothing.
Just as she opened her mouth to say please, Nora stepped aside.
“Come on in,” she said.
And for the first time since that night when Paul had robbed her dad of all his hard-saved money, she stepped back into her home.
“Thank you,” she whispered, walking past her sister, unable to look at her because then the floodgates would open and she’d be a crying pregnant mess in sequins on the old beige carpet.
The house was the same and yet not. The same blankets were thrown over what looked like a new gray couch. The mantel over the fireplace still held the shrine to Mom, the candles and the wedding picture. The snapshots of Mom in the hospital, red-faced and beaming, holding each of them as babies. Nora’s high school graduation portrait was shoved in the back and in the front there was a new one of Olivia, sitting in a spotlight, bent over the keys of a grand piano—playing her heart out.
The television was new, but it sat on the same fake wood TV stand, the corner broken in from some wrestling match between Wes and one of the Sullivans down the street.
Dad’s recliner was still there. The stuffing coming out of a split at the arm.
The smell was the same. Coffee and Lysol.
Upstairs a shower came on and all the pipes throbbed and clanked at the pressure. Part of the soundtrack to her childhood.
She put her fingers to her lips and closed her eyes. Feeling in utterly equal measures the pain of having been gone, the relief at finally being back, and the strange and surprising gratitude that she’d managed to grow up and past the person she’d been when she lived here.
She’d thought for so long that this was her home. That part of her rootlessness was that she couldn’t come back here. But she realized the truth in this moment. It wasn’t really her home. Not anymore.
If Nora had let her come back after Paul, she might never have changed. Not really. Certainly she never would have met Harrison or gotten pregnant. But she would have stayed some version of the girl she’d been in these four walls.
Angry, mean, prideful.
Thank God, she thought, thank God I got away.
“How long do you need to stay?” Nora asked.
“I … I don’t know. A week, maybe.”
“Your room is still empty. You’ll have to move some boxes, but it’s yours.”
In every variation of her homecoming that she’d imagined over the years, this nonplussed, undemanding version of her sister never made an appearance.
“Why are you doing this?” Ryan asked. “Why now?”
Nora had always been good at bad news. Ryan remembered when Nora looked her right in the eye and said Mom wasn’t coming home from the hospital. That she would die in that room in Eastern, attached to the tubes and the machines. Nora had held Ryan while she cried in those stiff-backed hospital chairs. They weren’t even a year apart, but Nora handled grief as if it were Play-Doh. While everyone around her was wrecked with sadness, she was able to just roll hers up into smaller and smaller pieces until she could put it away.
“Because you’re here,” she said, point-blank. “And you weren’t before. It was easier to tell you to stay away when I wasn’t looking at your face. Yo
u look like shit, by the way.”
Ryan laughed, not that it was all that funny.
“And I missed you too.”
“Nora?” Dad yelled from the kitchen, and her heart dropped into her stomach. “Who you talking to?”
Nora lifted an eyebrow and stepped so close, Ryan felt the edge of her coffee cup in her sternum. “You do one thing, one thing to hurt that man, and you’ll never step foot inside this house again. I don’t care if you’re pregnant or not.”
Ryan sucked in a quick breath. “You saw the news?”
“No. I looked at you. I’m a nurse, Ryan. And you have always been a shitty liar.” She took a deep breath and walked to the kitchen doorway. “I’ve got a surprise for you, Daddy.” Her tone implied that the surprise was an Ebola infection.
The kitchen was bright, the sunlight from all the back windows a kind of beacon, and she followed that light to stand beside Nora in the doorway.
Daddy, in an old pair of work pants and a gray Eagles tee shirt probably as old as Ryan, sat at the head of the beat-up Formica table, the newspaper separated and opened around him in his complicated paper-reading ritual. He wore a pair of half-glasses, which, when she shuffled guilty and anxious into the room, he slid up onto the wild shock of white hair on his head.
Age had not been kind, and he looked a little like one of those wizened troll dolls with the crazy hair.
“Is that …” he whispered.
“Hey, Daddy.” At the sight of her father, the same but older, thinner, and more delicate somehow in that bright sunlight, the tears stormed the gates and she was overrun. So many years gone. Wasted. For what? “It’s me.”
Daddy glanced from Ryan to Nora.
“Don’t look at me,” Nora said, cutting across the kitchen to the coffeepot. “She just showed up at our door like a stray cat.”
His throat bobbed and his hands opened and closed into fists, and she would do anything—anything at all—to change the fact that the sight of her gave him any pain.
“I told her she could stay here,” Nora said.
“Really?” Daddy asked. “Will wonders never cease.”
“She paid off the mortgage,” Nora said with a shrug. “Started that fund for Olivia. The money she took has been paid back.”
Indecent Proposal (Boys of Bishop) Page 27