The Second Chance (Inferno Falls Book Three)

by Aubrey Parker

  “Not to each other,” Arthur clarifies.

  “Of course.”

  “Kurt did marry a gay guy, though.”

  I wonder if Arthur understands how homosexuality works. To my understanding, it’s not mix and match, but there’s no indication here that Kurt’s new husband also married a gay guy.

  “That’s great.”

  “Yep, yep. I’m okay with it.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Lots of gay people today. Anyone you know into it?”

  “Um … ”

  Charlotte has been fussing with Maya, who’s pretending to hear none of this. She reaches out and slaps Arthur on the shoulder.

  “What?”

  “Stop asking him that.”

  “I’m just curious. It’s all the rage these days.”

  “Arthur, check the coffee,” Charlotte says.

  “I’m okay with it, is what I’m saying,” Arthur tells me again.

  “Arthur!”

  He leaves. Charlotte turns to me, looks like she might say something then leaves without a word.

  Maya looks at me. I look at her. I’m so eager to tell her what I’ve been mulling all day, I don’t want to wait through dinner. I wonder how much time we have and if we’ll be able to get any privacy.

  I doubt it. But while I’m looking at Maya, wondering if she’s thinking any of the same things that I am, something makes me tingle. I look down to see her hand slide into mine. When I look back up, she’s smiling, a thousand unsaid words on her lips.

  “Mommy!” Mackenzie says from the couch, where she still has Carl on his back, rubbing his belly. “His purr box is running!”

  Maya smiles and walks over.

  I follow, knowing I could get used to this, and how truly great that would feel.

  CHAPTER 29

  Maya

  It’s amazing how comfortable this all is.

  It would be inaccurate to say dinner goes smoothly because these are my parents and they’re always saying or doing something that embarrasses me even when I’m here alone. But considering all the balls in play, it goes far smoother than it has any right to.

  Grady has been gone for Mackenzie’s entire life. I haven’t bothered Mac with the details of our past, of course, because it would only burden her, and it’s enough for her to think of Grady as an “old friend.” But my folks know it all. They know how we used to be. They know how we broke up, and how I hooked up with Tommy. Up until that point, I feigned virginity, and even after I pretended that I had no itches in desperate need of scratching. If my parents had their druthers, they’d still think I was snow white, but Tommy left me with evidence to the contrary. Grady might have come off as a saint compared to deviling, sex-mongering Tommy, but my parents still know Grady left me, and how angry I became. I think they shared a lot of that anger, and certainly helped me pull through. They know I was stressed when Grady returned. And if I force myself to think past their often-oblivious appearances, I’m sure they know deep down just how much I want him back.

  And yet nobody is showing a sign.

  Nothing is awkward.

  No one is walking on eggshells. Nobody is acting like they know secrets or like they suspect secrets being harbored against them. There are no signs of old grudges, old feelings left to molder in forgotten corners. My folks could be Grady’s parents, too, the way they keep henpecking him and weaseling his life’s details into the open for quiet, well-meaning judgment.

  Dad has thoughts on how to get maximum resale value out of the claptrap truck Grady used to tour the country, away from us.

  Mom wants to see photos of all the places he visited while I was sobbing into pillows, raging against Grady, Tommy, and the world.

  He accepts it all. I watch him absorb it and love him that much more. All the old feelings are coming back. Even if I wanted to stop them, I couldn’t. I feel myself warming from the bottom up, like a vessel filling with liquid. I start to smile and can’t keep a straight face even when I want to.

  I remember how we used to be. How, on two or three separate occasions, he came here with me, playing the good suitor despite his somewhat unfair bad boy reputation, and how afterward I climbed out my window to meet him at the creek, where we made love on the bank. I remember the innocent joy of those evenings — the way the air held the day’s heat, the smell of soil under our blanket, the moon shining its blue light between the branches overhead. I remember the feeling of promise: that there were only good things waiting and that everything would be all right.

  A lot has happened since I last felt this way, but it strikes me how curious it is, the way things have come full circle. There was a time of torment and tumult between Grady’s and my innocent days, but that time has passed. I’ve been pregnant and alone, but now I’m a seasoned mother with a family around me. I’ve been angry and frightened, but today I feel happy and (at this table with Grady beside me, at least) secure and content.

  We’re no longer seventeen. We no longer have quite as many years ahead of us, and in some important ways, our eyes have been opened to the world’s truths. But that doesn’t mean we can’t pick up where we left off. There’s no reason we can’t still have that future, albeit with a decade lost to time in between.

  I watch Mackenzie. She doesn’t know this man, yet she fits with him like the missing piece of a puzzle. And I watch Grady with her, and I see how he’d be as a father. How he could have been as a father. How he is being a father, right here and now.

  Yes. I could be happy here.

  All the day’s problems feel far away. I don’t want to send my mind out to the things that were bothering me so badly earlier, but in an intellectual way I know they’re there … and yet I don’t care. Whatever is wrong, I have my family. Whatever happens, it will all work out. Whatever goes wrong, Grady will make it right.

  I wonder if I’m being stupid all over again. I have no idea how Grady feels, other than the inkling I first got from his text and the impression that’s continued with our shared glances since. Maybe he could love me again. Maybe he never stopped, the way I suppose I never really stopped loving him. Or maybe I’m building a house of cards that could collapse at any time.

  It doesn’t matter. Maybe I’m wrong to feel this way. Maybe I’m being an idiot. I simply don’t care. For now, it feels good. For now, I’m happy.

  Maybe I’m setting myself up to get hurt all over again.

  But tonight it’s a chance I’m willing to take.

  CHAPTER 30

  Grady

  Arthur won’t hear of me staying in a hotel. When they ask about Ernie’s and the auction and I reveal the reason for bringing Carl along with me, Arthur tells me he’ll be offended if I don’t stay here until they’re done. I protest on principle, but Arthur repeats himself: “I’ll be offended if you don’t accept our offer to stay.”

  Charlotte is more direct. She tells me leaving would be stupid. She says the only decent places to stay in town “if I don’t want to wake up with a drug needle in my arm, or waste all my money” are the inn or one of the older bed and breakfasts. The house I’m in now, on the other hand, has a spare bedroom that will cost me nothing, all made up and ready.

  I still feel like I should protest — I have Ernie money on the way, and there’s nowhere near Old Town where “drug needles” are the rule — but then I feel Maya’s hand slide onto the top of my leg under the table. Mackenzie joins in, saying that we’ll have chocolate chip pancakes in the morning, but my hand has already slid atop Maya’s and is squeezing it. I’m convinced.

  After dinner, there’s more discussion over decaf coffee while Mackenzie plays with Carl, who seems to adore her. When Maya takes her to bed, Mackenzie runs over and hugs me as if she’s known me for a lifetime instead of a week. I even get a little kiss, then she’s running off while I sit in a daze, wondering why this was what I spent the last part of my life fleeing.

  There’s more banter after Mackenzie goes down, but Arthur and Charlotte, to thei
r immense credit, seem to understand how much baggage is hanging in the air between me and Maya. They retire discreetly, claiming to be overly tired. But it’s barely after nine, and I know they’re giving us space — the time alone that up until now, we haven’t had.

  I almost want to skip this part — to clip out our sticky middle like a scene chopped from a movie. But there are things that need discussing before the wound can close.

  We dance around the key topics for a while, sniffing the edges by discussing what is and has been rather than what went wrong: the life I’ve led in the interim, how things are with Maya at work, how Mackenzie gets along in school, and what she’s like. There’s a heavy feeling that we’re setting the foundation of something new but that the ground must be cleared of debris before we can build. But it’s okay. I want to move forward — to prune alternate paths from my future and focus on one that matters most.

  I glance up the stairs, sensing the sleeping girl beyond. Then I look at Maya: the girl right in front of me.

  “I shouldn’t have left.”

  Maya’s lips press together. She won’t say I was right to leave, but she’s giving me the dignity of cutting myself.

  “I thought about coming back all the time. Whenever I knew it was time to move on from one place to another. There were always two options: back home or farther away. It only took a few months before I didn’t even have a reason to stay away. Once I was eighteen and had saved up some money, I could live on my own, away from Ernie. It would have been in a shitty little apartment, but I could have done it. And I wanted to, Maya. I want you to know that I never stopped looking back. I wanted to return. I just … couldn’t.”

  She won’t ask why not. She knows.

  “I didn’t make it easy for you, the way we left things,” she tells me. The TV is off. Lights are dimmed. It’s after ten, and it’s possible the rest of the house is asleep. We could be the only two people in the world, like it used to feel when we were together all those years ago.

  “I was stubborn.”

  “I was.” She twirls a finger in her long hair. “Redhead pride. I didn’t like that you wouldn’t do what … well, what Tommy never would. But you have to believe me, Grady — I never wanted Tommy to do it. I never, ever wanted him more than you.”

  This is hard to hear, even given her tone of regret, but I know it must be even harder for her to say. We’ve never rationally discussed it. The last time any of this came up between us, there were horrible things said, mostly from me.

  But still, the old pain wants to resurface. As she says “I never, ever wanted him more than you,” my brain wants to counter by saying, With one hot and heavy exception.

  “I know.”

  “You had every right to be angry. But I never let you be mad. It was all about me. How we were broken up, and why we’d broken up. You have to understand. I love my parents, but … the guilt. You can’t know what it’s like to believe such horrible things about yourself, based on a mistake. I had to make that fight about you and what I imagined you did to … to ‘drive me to him.’ Because I couldn’t admit what it all said about me.”

  “It doesn’t say anything about you,” I say, knowing that part of me felt differently then and still, today, doesn’t really want to let go. Tommy Fucking Finch. To think that he touched her where only I was supposed to touch her. To think that he was inside her when my heart felt that she belonged to me. To think of the ways he must have made her feel that night, given how much I know she always secretly wanted him. Because that was always the worst of it all, the part that dogged me even after my common sense tried ordering me back to Inferno Falls: It never felt entirely like a mistake. I always felt sure it was something she’d always wanted to do, and therefore something she might do again.

  I can’t bear the thought of another man touching her, or of her wanting anyone but me, as naive and ridiculous as that sounds. It’s something I’ll need to get over if we’re to be together again because I’m not naive. I’ve had my own loves in the meantime. But I don’t want to think of it, hear about it, or worry about it ever again.

  “I was a stupid kid,” she says.

  I laugh. “Just you?”

  “I never acknowledged how much that hurt you. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry I hurt you, Grady.”

  I sigh. “I’m sorry, too. Not just because of what I did to you, but because of what … ” I push on, and say what I need to before losing my nerve. “What I did to us. To our future.”

  I feel my throat thickening. I was so numb these past ten years. I kept moving because I didn’t want to be forced to stop and think. I didn’t look back because once I did, I knew I’d have to face the regret. It feels like I’ve murdered something. Like my stubborn refusal to face the truth has slaughtered children I never had. All those moments. All that might have been. Gone, because I was a fool.

  She’s looking at me with those big green eyes. I can tell she doesn’t want to pry — that she feels this is a time for both of us to unburden on our own, to eviscerate ourselves without letting anyone else hold the knife. But she’s going to speak anyway because there’s something she needs to know. And if I can predict the future at all, I’m sure it’s the question I spent so many nights asking myself.

  “Why didn’t you call me, Grady? I would have called you if I knew where to find you.” Unspoken, there are accusations she doesn’t want to make but can’t help. For the first few years, I never stopped moving and was more or less impossible to pin down. But I never left the US, and in time I got a cell phone like the rest of the world. For most of the time I’ve been away, I’ve had the same number. I didn’t need to be brave for longer than a few seconds. One noncommittal text to say hello would have given her my number, and after that Maya, whose guilt looks pale next to mine, would have taken the first step.

  “I just … couldn’t.”

  “Why? I wasn’t angry for long. After the first few weeks, all I wanted was to have you back.”

  Her words are like an iron boot on my chest. I know they’re true, and above everything else, it’s what I’ve feared most. Not at first, when I was simply arrogant, self-centered, and blind — but later, after years had passed. By then, getting in touch didn’t feel like relief; it felt heavy with the burden of years away. Every one that passed made calling home harder. Not because I didn’t want to see her but because I felt sure she wanted to see me, and I didn’t want to face the lost time that my neglect, in never trying, had cost us.

  I can’t answer her Why. I won’t be able to force out the words. I shake my head. “I was stupid. So, so stupid. And now, when I look around this house and see the way everything worked out just fine and I missed it? When I look at your daughter?”

  I think Maya is going to speak. Instead, she touches my hair, then my cheek. I have no idea how she’s feeling. What are the nuances? She misses me. She wants me back. But does she hate me too? I’ve given my confession. Does it merely unburden me, or soothe the in-between?

  Maya leans closer.

  I lean to match her.

  And we kiss. It’s soft. Bittersweet. I taste lost years inside it. I can taste her guilt, her apology, my unfathomable regret. I hate myself, even as I feel something knitting between us. Maya had a moment of weakness, but for me, that moment dragged for a decade.

  Mistakes can be forgiven.

  But wasted time is gone forever.

  We come apart, and she blinks at me in the quiet.

  “Make love to me,” she whispers.

  But I can’t. I think I love her all over again, but my heart is too heavy with the weight of shattered dreams.

  “In time,” I say.

  CHAPTER 31

  Maya

  The sheets on my childhood bed are soft, but the space between me and nothing feels too large.

  In my teens, my parents upgraded me to a queen from a twin, and I’ve always enjoyed spreading out. In my own tiny house, I could only fit a queen in the slightly larger of the two tiny b
edrooms, but the few times I’ve traveled, I’ve slept in kings and told myself that one of these days, I’d get myself one. I love the space. I want to be all arms and legs, free to roam as I wander the landscape of my dreams.

  But right now, the queen, moved from its old home to my parents’ guest room, feels impossibly large. I have too much land to wander. Too many covers. I feel like a kid all over again, now huddled in one corner of a field. The empty space to my side mocks me. It needs to be filled. Someone should be here with me, in the dark, looking through the window at the stars.

  The house is quiet. My old bedroom, now with the twin bed for Mackenzie, is upstairs; right beside it is my parents’ room. I’m on the ground floor now. Away from the others, I feel so alone. I half want to go upstairs and climb into bed with my daughter, or carry her down here to sleep with me, the way we sometimes used to when she had bad dreams.

  But as it feels now, it’s like there’s no one else in the house, the town, the world. If I’d stayed on the couch as planned, I’d at least have the grandfather clock’s beating heart and the freezer ticking with freshly made ice. But once Grady realized I’d be staying too (kind of strange for me to go home and leave him here where there’s plenty of space), he insisted I take the guest room. Maybe because he was being chivalrous, or maybe he knew he’d be restless, pacing, unable to sleep for the heavy burden I inadvertently set atop his shoulders.

  We shouldn’t have talked. We should have kept lying to each other and ourselves, pretending everything was fine. My idea was to bring it all out into the open, but whereas I found I could face my guilt, neither of us was prepared for the breadth of Grady’s.