Page 13 of Rune’s Solace

“Men sound like a hundred things they aren’t,” Lucy said. But even she said it soft, because I think all three of us had heard it, that thing in the tone of his voice through the phone, and none of us knew what to do with a liar who sounded like he was telling the truth.

I remembered that. I’d gotten pretty good at remembering the little things that didn’t make sense. He sounded hurt. Really hurt. It didn’t fit with everything I’d been told about Tom Montgomery, and I didn’t know what to do with that yet, so I didn’t.

“Right.” Brenda took a breath, and let go of the phone, and when she looked up something had come back into her face that had been gone since the trees. “Right. Somebody was gonna buy me lunch.”

Lucy came off the dresser like a shot. “Now you’re talking!”

“The green blouse,” Brenda told me, already swinging her legs out of the bed. “In the closet. Not the dark one. The one that makes me look like money.”

Lucy whooped loud enough to wake the dead.

* * *

We took her to a place by the water and made an afternoon of it, a good place with the tables outside, where Lucy ordered Brenda the expensive fish and a glass of white wine at three in the afternoon and dared her with a look to say a word about it. She told a story about Spinner getting his boot hung in a stirrup at a run two counties over and hopping around a field on one leg cussing while his bike idled without him, and she did all the voices, and Brenda laughed, mascara safe this time, the sound of it turning heads two tables over.

That was the thing I hadn’t understood about Lucy until that afternoon. The loud was real, but the loud was also a job she did on purpose. She’d walked into that depressing room and made herself into a wall of noise and nonsense for one reason, which was that Brenda couldn’t sink while somebody was making that much racket right next to her. You can’t drown next to a woman doing bird calls. It’s just not possible. Lucy knew it, and she’d done it on purpose, and I loved her for it in a way I hadn’t expected to when she blew that door open.

By the time we split something chocolate three ways, Brenda was Brenda again. Still hurting. But back. Sitting up in her green blouse looking like money, telling Lucy she was going to hell for the stirrup story.

* * *

It was on the bridge going home that she went silent, watching the water do its pink-gold thing the way it did in that hour, and she said, mostly to the glass, “He really did sound like he meant it.”

“I know,” I said, from the back seat.

“That’s the part I can’t set down.” She wasn’t crying. She was past that, at least for today. Just turning it over, honest and tired. “If a man’s just cold about it, you can hate him and go on. Hate’s easy, hate does half the work of gettin’ over somebody for free. But one that sounds like that — ” she shook her head slow — “that’s the kind you have to do all the work yourself.”

And I sat in the back seat and watched the back of her head, this strong wrecked wonderful woman who’d just closed a door on a man without getting to say a single true word about why, who’d swallowed the real thing and hung up the phone anyway because she had to. And I thought about a garden behind a cabin I hadn’t let myself look at in months, and a man who’d kissed me like I was the only woman he could see and then walked away with somebody else, and I understood her better than I wanted to.

I had my own true thing I never got to say. My own door I kept shut with my back against it.

I’d gotten so good at closing it I used to not even feel it anymore.

I was starting to feel it. That was the trouble. Somewhere in the last few weeks, watching Brenda, the door had gotten heavy in my hands, and every time I shut it now it wanted to swing back open, and I didn’t know what I was going to do about that.

Lucy turned the radio up and sang the wrong words at full volume, Brenda snorted and told her to hush, the compound came up in the windshield big and familiar, and I put it all away again where I kept it.

It was just getting harder to close. That was all. I kept telling myself that was all.

CHAPTER SIX

SABLE’S PORCH LIGHT was burning in the middle of the afternoon, the way it always was, and I sat in the car a second and let myself look at it before I went in.

She’d had it on since the day they moved in. I never asked why. I figured if Sable wanted me to know, someday she’d tell me.

Then the front door banged open and a small person shot out onto the porch yelling my name, and I didn’t have time to look at anything, because I was getting tackled around the knees.

“You came!” Zara said into my leg, like she was surprised even though I’d told her three times I was coming. Five years old and she did everything at about a hundred miles an hour now, talking included, and somehow she seemed louder every time I saw her.

“I said I would.” I got down to her level and let her catch me up on everything I’d apparently missed: a scab on her knee, a picture she drew, and the very important news that she could count all the way to twenty now and I needed to listen. Over her head, Malik stayed back in the doorway like he usually did. Ten years old and suddenly way too cool to come running over like his sister. He gave me a casual, “Hey, Amy,” then lasted maybe thirty seconds before coming over to show me the tooth he’d lost. Apparently being too cool for me didn’t include missing teeth.

“She’s been watching for you since lunch,” Sable said from the doorway, drying her hands on a dish towel. Then she looked at me, and I looked at her, and for a second we both just stood there being weird because apparently neither of us knew what to do when we missed somebody this much.

She looked good. Really good. Like she was sleeping again. “Nope,” she said when my eyes started burning. “Don’t you dare. If you start, I’m starting, and I look terrible when I cry.” She opened her arms. “Get over here.”

I laughed and went, and she wrapped me up in a hug that Zara immediately shoved herself into the middle of, because apparently hugs involving her mom required her personal supervision.

* * *