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Veronica looked at me with her mouth agape. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and I shrugged.
“We’d come to a kind of…agreement. After years of dog fights. Hank let us stay in the cabin for as long as I worked for him. But once I started moving up and making real money I left him there. And…we never talked. Or saw each other. And then he had the stroke in a bar in Dusty Creek. Some drinking buddy of his got him to the hospital. When I got there…it was done. Over. He was gone. And Dale was there. And he was sweet and kind. He…could play chess. Inexplicably, he liked me.”
“That must have been so hard,” she said.
“You’re not listening if you think that.”
“No. I’m listening. And I hear you. You still had all these bad memories and after his stroke you were the only one who had them. “
She was right. So right it hurt. “Those aren’t memories anyone needs.”
“When my mom died, Bea was too young to really remember her. And Dad, I don’t know if it was just easier for him to pretend like he didn’t remember, or that…Mom never existed at all, but he didn’t talk about it. So I was all alone with those memories, and it got to the point that I started to wonder if what I remembered was real. Or if it was something I’d made up to feel better. Like…a bedtime story.”
Veronica’s words rang a distant bell for me. A long-hidden and never-thought-about-if-I-could-help-it truth. About memory and what could be built on top of it.
“No part of my childhood was a bedtime story. A nightmare, maybe.”
I turned away or tried to; Veronica wouldn’t let me. She grabbed my shoulders and held me still. “You should have told me.”
“Maybe,” I said, which was really as much as I could give her.
“No. You should have told me.”
I shook my head.
“Stop. You should have told me.”
“About what?” I finally asked. “What part of this do you want to know about? On which date do I tell you the shitty story about my dad shooting my dog? Or the time he broke my eardrum and I had to walk five miles to the hospital?”
The memories were coming up out of nowhere. A geyser of shit I’d tried to forget about.
“I loved you, Clayton.”
I shook my head. That was somehow worse than talking about my father and Dale.
“Stop.”
“Do you think I’m lying?” she asked, and when I looked at her I saw the truth she was trying to tell me.
“No,” I said. “But you loved what I showed you. And I never showed you that. Since I was sixteen I’ve been burying that life. That person. Who I am now is built on the grave of who I was.”
She sucked in a breath. “I did that, too,” she whispered. “I built a whole new life on top of the girl I’d been.”
I stepped back like I’d been slapped. I’d done to her what my father did to me. Forced her underground. To hide and rebuild into something else. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know.”
This was why she would never love me. And why I could never ask her to.
“Bea thinks I’m crazy for even thinking about marrying you,” she said.
“Bea’s probably right.”
“But the more I know about you…the more I want to know. The more I want. Period.”
These words crackled inside of me. Embers catching fire. “More.”
“Yeah,” she said and stepped forward. “More truth. Fewer secrets. More you. Less…the you that you want me to see. More reality. Less lies. If we’re going to stand a chance, you have to tell me these things. The good and the bad.”
It should have been easy. For any other man standing in front of the woman he loved, it should have been a goddamn relief to put down the show. The pretense.
But there was part of me that believed that all I was was the pretense. All I was was the show. The scaffolding and walls I’d set up around the boy I’d been. I wasn’t sure who I was inside this shell.
It was easier when she touched me. That day on her couch, playing strip conversation, that had felt good. Right. I’d been closer to…me…than I’d been in years.
And now, with her fury like smoke in the air, she was standing so close I could feel her body breathe. She was standing so close I could smell her. Roses and dogs and Texas wind.
Ronnie.
It was easy to kiss her. She put up no fight. It was easy to pull off our clothes. She helped, her fingers making short work of my belt. My zipper. She pushed my shirt up over my head. It was easy to walk her back to my bedroom, to lay her out across my mattress.
She was beautiful. In my bed. My life. Now that she was here, I couldn’t imagine losing her again.
