“You’re leaving?” He didn’t have to wonder how he’d feel about her good-bye.
“Yes. I have to.”
Her leaving was best, no matter that it felt like she was reaching into his chest and ripping out his heart all over again. “When?”
She shrugged and walked to the door. “I don’t know. Soon.” She looked over her shoulder one last time and said, “Good-bye, Mick. Have a good life.” Then she was gone and he was left with the scent of her skin in the air and a big emptiness in his chest. The red sweater she’d worn the night she’d come into his office wearing a white halter dress still hung on a hook behind the door. He knew that it still smelled like strawberries.
He sat in his chair and leaned his head back. He thought of old drunk Reuben Sawyer spending three decades sitting on a barstool, sad and pathetic and unable to move beyond the pain of losing his wife. Mick wasn’t that pathetic, but he understood old Reuben in a way that he never had before he’d loved Maddie Jones. He hadn’t picked up the bottle. He owned two bars and knew where that path led, but he had gotten into a fight or two. A few days before he’d seen Maddie in the park, he’d kicked the Finley boys out of Mort’s. Usually he called the cops to deal with assorted assholes and numb nuts, but that night he’d taken on both Scoot and Wes. No one had ever accused the Finley boys of being smart, but they were fighters, and it had taken both Mick and his bartender to shove them out into the alley, where a knock-down free-for-all had ensued. The kind Mick hadn’t enjoyed since high school.
Mick raked his fingers through the sides of his hair and sat forward. Since the night he’d found out who Maddie really was, he’d been in hell and he didn’t know how to get out. His life seemed to be one miserable day after another. He thought things would get better, but his life wasn’t heading in the direction of better, and he didn’t know what to do about it. Maddie was who she was, and he was Mick Hennessy, and no matter how much he loved her, real life wasn’t a made-for-TV movie on that women’s channel Meg liked to watch.
He leaned forward and pulled the Xerox box toward him. He took off the top and looked inside at the orange disk and a stack of paper. In big type across the first page was written:
Till Death Us Do Part.
Maddie said this was the only copy. Why would she give it to him? Why go to so much trouble and spend so much time doing something, only to give it to him when she was through?
He didn’t want to read it. He didn’t want to get sucked back in time. He didn’t want to read about his unfaithful father and his sick mother and the night she’d gone over the edge. He didn’t want to see the photographs or read the police reports. He’d lived through it once and didn’t feel like revisiting the past, but as he picked up the lid to replace it on the box, the first sentence caught his eye.
“I promise it’s going to be different this time, baby.” Alice Jones glanced at her young daughter, then returned her gaze to the road. “You’re going to like Truly. It’s a little like heaven, and it’s about damn time Jesus drop-kicked us into a better life.”
Baby didn’t say anything. She’d heard it before….
Maddie plugged Snowball’s DVD into the player and sat her on the cat bed in front of the television. It wasn’t even ten a.m., and she’d had enough of Snowball. “If you don’t behave, I’m going to throw you in your carrier and toss you into the trunk of my car.”
“Meow.”
“I mean it.” Snowball was going through some sort of passive-aggressive phase. She meowed to go out. Meowed to come in, but when Maddie opened the door, she’d run the opposite way. You’d think the cat would be more grateful.
She pointed at her kitten’s nose. “I’m warning you. You’ve just gotten on my last nerve.” She rose and tiptoed away. Snowball didn’t follow, for the moment transfixed by the parakeets chirping on the screen.
The doorbell rang and Maddie moved to the front of the house and looked through the peephole. Last night when she’d said good-bye to Mick, she hadn’t expected to see him again. Now here he was, looking a bit rough. The lower half of his face was covered in stubble like all the times they’d stayed up late making love. She opened the door and saw the Xerox box in his hand. Her heart dropped. All that work and he hadn’t read it.
“Are you going to invite me in?”
She opened the door wider and shut it behind him. He wore a black North Face fleece jacket and, beneath the black stubble, his cheeks were pink from the cold morning chill. He followed her into the living room, bringing the scent of October air and of him into her house. She loved the way he smelled and had missed it.
“Is your cat watching television?” His voice was kind of rough too.
“For the moment.”
He set the box on her coffee table. “I read your book.”
She glanced at the clock above the television just to make sure of the time. She’d given it to him to read and destroy because she loved him, and he’d probably skimmed it. “That was fast.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Some people are just fast readers.”
He smiled, but it didn’t reach his blue eyes or bring out his dimples. “No. I’m sorry for what my mother did to yours. I don’t believe anyone in my family has ever apologized to you. We were all too wrapped up in what it did to us to even stop and think about what it did to you.”
She blinked and managed a stunned, “Oh. You don’t have to apologize. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
He laughed without humor. “Don’t let me off the hook, Maddie. I’ve done a lot of things wrong.” He unzipped his jacket, and he wore the same Mort’s polo shirt he’d had on the night before. The man must have dozens of them. “Believing that just because I don’t think about what had happened in the past meant it doesn’t bother or affect me was not only wrong, it was stupid. If I’d truly gotten over it, who you are wouldn’t have mattered to me. It would have surprised me, maybe even shocked the shit out of me, but it wouldn’t matter.”
But it had mattered to him. So much so that he’d cut her out of his life.
“I’ve been up all night reading your book. At first I didn’t want to read it because I thought it would be a long laundry list of the things my parents had done, complete with grisly photos. But it wasn’t.”
She wanted to reach out and touch him. To run her hands up his chest and bury her face in his neck. “I tried to be fair.”
“You were surprisingly fair. If your mother had shot mine, I don’t know if I would have been as fair. I felt a kind of weird connection to my parents. To my life as a kid, and I understand how everything went so wrong. And I understand that you don’t always get a second chance to do it right.”
She wanted him to reach out and touch her. To put his hands on the sides of her face and lower his mouth to hers. Instead he stuck his fingers in the front pocket of his Levi’s.
“When I saw you in the park, I said I didn’t know you, but that was a lie. I know you. I know that you’re funny and smart and that you’re freezing when it’s seventy degrees outside. I know that you crave cheesecake but settle for cake-scented lotion instead. I know you have a problem with people telling you what to do. And I know that you want everyone to think you’re a hard-ass, but that you take in a bucktoothed cat and give her a home. Everything I know about you makes me want to know more.”
Her chest got that familiar ache, and she looked down at her feet, not trusting the emotion expanding in her chest.
“Since I moved back to Truly,” he said, “I’ve felt as if I were standing in one place, unable to move. But I wasn’t standing still. I was waiting. I think I was waiting for you.”