Page 83 of Denied

“What if he’s not there?”

“He’s there. Chase took him. If Chase took him, he’s still there.”

“What if he walks out when I walk in?”

“Then you’ll have walked in, which is more than I’ve done in a year, and you can come sit in this car with me and we’ll drink something and I’ll tell you what a year of pretending costs.” Addi took the turn onto Main without slowing. “Stop it. You’re doing it again. You’ve decided he’ll walk out. You don’t know. Go in there and find out, and whatever it is, it’ll be his to say, and that’s the whole job tonight. That’s all you’ve got to do. Let the man answer you.”

She parked across two spaces outside Harvey’s, because she was from Boston, and turned the engine off, and looked at Sunny with her sister’s eyes.

“Go on,” she said. “I’ll be at the back. I won’t say a word. I’ve been practicing.”

Harvey’s was full, the way it was on a band night, and the band was three songs in, and she stood inside the door with a taped box in her arms and her hair down and Remi’s boots on, and the room saw her.

It went around the way things went around in that room. A head, and another, and the Wainwright table, and Earl at the end of the bar, and Pearl, who’d come out for a band night for the first time since her mother died, sitting at a table with Marge and a glass of something, and Pearl’s hand came up an inch off the table and went down, which was Pearl saying go on.

He was at the rail.

Chase on one side of him and Jett on the other, and Dean beside Jett with a beer he wasn’t drinking, and Jace, and Mason, all of them in a row with their backs to the room, and he had his hat on and his elbows on the rail and he hadn’t turned around, because he was the one man in Harvey’s who hadn’t looked at the door, on purpose, for three weeks.

Chase turned around. He looked at her, and at the box, and he put his beer down and took his hat off and stepped away from the rail, one step, and Jett saw him do it and did the same, and Dean, and it opened up, a gap at the rail with a man in it who still hadn’t turned.

She crossed the floor.

She crossed it the way she’d watched them cross floors since July, Dean to Lara, Remi to a beer trough, John to his second son in a yard, straight, not fast, through people who moved, with a box in her arms, and the band got to the end of the line it was on and didn’t start the next one, and nobody had asked it not to. The fiddle player looked at Harvey. Harvey looked at the beer he was pulling. The room went quiet the way a room does when it’s been waiting all summer for a thing and the thing’s walked in the door.

She put the box on the bar beside his elbow.

He looked at it. Then he turned around.

He was close enough that she could smell him, the way she had at a fridge in June, and every part of her that had spent three weeks being told it didn’t love him stood up at once and called her a liar in front of the whole bar. She put her hands behind her and held the edge of the bar to keep them there.

He’d been in Harvey’s an hour and he hadn’t had a drink; she could see that. He looked at her with his hat on and his face doing nothing, on purpose, the way she did, and she stood there in front of him with her hands empty now and the whole county at her back, and opened her mouth.

“No,” he said.

She shut it.

“You had your say. At a door, with your shoes off, in a voice I couldn’t hear the lie in. You had all of it, and I stood there and took it, and I asked twice and you went down the hall.” He hadn’t raised his voice. He didn’t need to; Harvey’s had stopped breathing. “So you’ll hear mine first. I’ve had three weeks. I’ve had three weeks of you six feet off, and I’ve had a plate in a warmer every night that I ate standing up so I wouldn’t sit at a table with you and say something. I bought the Hardwick place on Friday. Two sections. Cash. I did it so I could stand here and not be a man who stayed because he had nowhere else. I’m in this county, Sunny. I’ve got ground in it. Whether or not you’ll have me. You’re going to hear that before you say one word, because the last time you spoke first I never got to answer.”

She stood there. She took it, standing, in front of Pearl and Earl and the Wainwright table, with her chin level and her hands at her sides, and didn’t look away from him, and when he stopped she waited a second to be sure he’d stopped.

“Are you done?”

“I’m done.”

“Then it’s mine.”

She didn’t look at the room. She looked at him.

“I lied to you.” She said it plainly, at volume, in the voice she used for a hundred and twenty people on a chart, so the back of the room would have it. “At a door, two weeks ago. I told you I didn’t love you and I told you it was the summer and the house and the county and it was never you, and I said it in the voice you trust because it was the only one you’d believe, and every word of it was a lie. I’m saying so here, in front of the people who watched me dance with you, because I let them think it was true and it wasn’t, and they should hear it from me the way you should.”

Nobody moved.

“I did it because a man knelt in your father’s yard because of me. I did it because I stood on that porch with a rifle in your hand and counted every one of you, and I decided I was the thing that had done it, and I decided you’d be better off with me gone. I decided it.” Her voice held. She’d have said it wouldn’t, and it held. “I decided what you could take. I decided what you could survive. I decided it on my own, on a porch, and I never once asked you, and I had no right. You’re a grown man in your father’s county with a rifle you knew was empty and two sections of your own ground, and I stood at your door and decided for you because I was frightened, and I called it kind. It wasn’t kind. I was scared, and I dressed it up.”

Somewhere behind her, Addi Baxter said, “Oh, God,” very quietly, and Lauren said, “Shh.”

“So here’s the true thing.” She took a breath. “I love you. I’ve never said it out loud to anybody in my life and I’m saying it in a bar. I’ve loved you since a fridge and I’ve known it since a porch and I put your hand on my back on a dance floor in July because I couldn’t stand another minute of it not being there, and I told you at a door it was never you, and it was only ever you. It was you every time. The tire iron. The plate. Max in that hallway, and you looking at me over his head, and I stood there and understood what I’d thrown away and I’ve been sick with it for eight days.” She stopped. “That’s the true thing. Out loud. In front of everybody. You can do what you like with it.”