Page 96 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
“I’m not trying to choose the field of battle, Madelyn. I just want us to be warm.”
I can feel her hesitation, the way she takes temperature after temperature of the moment, wondering if this is a trap, if there’s some angle that she can’t see. Even though it hurts physically to do it, I make myself look at her. I give myself over to her searching green gaze.
“I meant what I told you months ago,” I say quietly. “I’ve got nothing to hide. If you want to ask me something, I’ll tell you the truth.”
“You did have something to hide, Bram,” she says, a sad kind of impatience in her voice. “Not that it makes much of a difference in the end. It was still never going to be... more.”
Her eyes rake over me one last time—making sure that I mean it when I say I’m not trying to strategize my way into winning, whatever that looks like here. And then she unbuckles her seat belt.
I get out of the truck, walk around the front, and open the door for her. I don’t think she’ll want me to hold her by the waist like I did earlier, but I do offer my hand, which she takes with a polite nod, and help her down. And then she retrieves the cactus from the floorboard and goes into the house.
In the fading daylight, I move the potting soil into the shed and the poinsettias into the greenhouse so I can keep them happy until I give them to Sara’s mom. I turn the truck back on and roll it into the shed, turning it off again and getting out. The creak and slam of the rust-eaten door is as familiar to me as my hometown; it’s the sound of high school, of my first job, of those early days with Fern driving all the way to Topeka and back to get her to fall asleep.
I wonder if my grandparents ever did that with me in this same truck. I wonder if my parents did before they died. I’ll never know, and by the time I was old enough to think of a question like that, I was old enough to know not to ask it. My grandparents didn’t like to talk about my parents, and they weren’t the sort to tell you stories about yourself when you were little. They didn’t allow night-lights, they didn’t read you books at bedtime, and hugs were brought out like the good dishes—on special occasions, and then handled so gingerly that the experience wasn’t all that enjoyable anyway.
The first person to hug me like hugs were things meant for sharing was Joey Fucking Kemp. In sixth grade, I spiked a crucial volleyball serve in gym class, winning the match, and he ran up and threw his arms around me like it was something people did all the time. Like it was nothing.
Maybe my parents would have hugged me like that if they’d still been alive.
I stare at the truck, allowing myself just a moment to ache for what I didn’t have then and for what I don’t have now. A moment of crawling loneliness so deep that it frosts over my bones.
And then I go inside to finish being broken up with.
MADDIE IS STANDINGin the middle of the kitchen holding her cactus, just a few feet away from where she told me to masturbate in a shaft of golden sunlight this morning. When she turns to face me, her lips are open and her eyes are blank, like she doesn’t know how she’s gotten there. Like she’s lost.
But then her eyes sharpen and her shoulders go back. Her chin lifts. She’s holding the cactus the way someone would hold a sacred artifact to ward off evil.
“We said sex and nothing else,” she starts before I can say anything at all.
“I know,” I say.
“This always had an expiration date.”
“Yes.”
“So this is it. The expiration date.” She says it not like a question but also not like a proscription, almost like the echo of a thought. Confirming to herself that something is true.
I take a breath. And then I take another. Draw the air past my aching throat into my lungs, into my alveoli, feel my body trade oxygen for carbon dioxide. Something scalding races down to my jaw. I exhale as I wipe my face.
I’m not ashamed of crying, but I don’t want to make this harder on her when she’s done everything right and I’m the one asking for more.
“Excuse me,” I murmur, and quickly walk to the downstairs bathroom with my head down, taking a moment inside to seal up the breach inside myself. I deadhead and prune. I pull all the sap out of my branches and go dormant.
The tears stop. There’s still a swelling at the base of my throat, but I can talk through it.
When I go back out to the kitchen, passing a dozing Hester Prynne stretched out over the vent and enjoying the heat, Maddie has set the cactus on the counter and is pacing, her head dipped in thought. It snaps up at my approach.
“I have less than two weeks left on my contract,” she says, getting right to the point. Which in a way, I can appreciate. It is what’s immediately necessary—figuring out the money and the logistics. The heartbreak can hollow me out in its own time.
“I’ll call the—” I start, but Maddie cuts in.
“No, I’d like to continue. I mean, if it’s all right for you. I think it’s best for the twins to have some consistency since they’re so young.” She pauses and then adds, with some reluctance, “And I still need to work as much as I can right now.”
I don’t know how I feel about this. I want as much of her as I can have, and the twins and Fern love her. And yet just looking at her hurts right now.
But I summon up my equanimity, my belief that we should do what’s categorically best for ourselves and the girls. “As you’d like,” I agree.
“Is that... okay with you? Me staying on with the girls for the last two weeks?”
