Chapter Thirty

It was one thing when Lacy told her friends she didn’t want to talk about Daniel. But when she stopped spending time with them, opting instead to hide inside her trailer like a woodland animal barricading itself in a burrow whenever she wasn’t at Jitters, they decided they had to do something.

More specifically, Rose decided she had to do something.

If she’d called Lacy and said, I want you to come to my house so I can force you to talk to Daniel, Lacy would have balked. So instead, she told Lacy that she needed help painting the baby’s room.

Lacy resisted, claiming first that she was too busy, then that she had to work. Finally, she admitted that she was just too damned sad to leave the trailer. Rose, who was committed to her plan, put as much stress into her voice as she could muster, complaining that Will was sick, and the baby was going to come any day, and she had nothing ready. What was she supposed to do? Did Lacy want her to do it all herself? Was she expected to get on a ladder in her compromised state, possibly falling off and risking the lives of both the baby and herself? Was that what Lacy wanted?

At last, Lacy had agreed to drag herself out of the Airstream and come to Rose’s house.

What she didn’t know was that the nursery was already painted, and had been for more than a week. She also didn’t know that Will had called Daniel with pretty much the same story, minus the bit about falling off a ladder.

And that was how it came to pass that Lacy walked in the front door of Rose’s house at ten a.m. on a Tuesday to find Rose with a smug look on her face, and Daniel just looking confused.

 

“What’s going on?” Lacy looked at Rose accusingly, and then at Daniel. He was standing there looking awkward as hell, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, carefully avoiding eye contact.

“What’s going on is I lied to you to get you here so you could work things out. Deal with it,” Rose said.

“Ah, jeez,” Daniel groaned.

Lacy turned and started to walk toward the door, but Rose, moving faster than one would expect given her girth, blocked the door with her body.

“You’re not going anywhere, so you might as well sit down,” she said.

“I don’t want to sit down.” Lacy sounded, even to herself, like a petulant child refusing to clean her room. She turned to Daniel. “Was this your idea?”

He raised his hands in helpless surrender. “I had nothing to do with it. I thought I was here to help paint.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Though, now that we’re here, I wouldn’t mind talking.”

“There you go,” Rose said encouragingly.

“This is pointless,” Lacy said, crossing her arms over her chest and glaring at Rose.

“Well, that might be. But you’re at least going to try to sort things out.” Rose sounded surprisingly cheerful, though she looked tired, as though she hadn’t slept well. “I’ve got pizza, wine, and premium ice cream. You’re welcome to any and all of it, as long as you talk to each other.”

“It’s ten in the morning,” Daniel pointed out.

“So what? That’s never stopped me,” Rose said.

Daniel, apparently clinging to the fiction under which he’d been brought there, said, “Where the hell is Will?”

“He’s teaching a class,” Rose said.

“That son of a bitch lied to me,” Daniel grumbled.

“Yeah, but it was for a good cause,” Rose replied.

Rose told them she was going to her room so they could have some privacy to talk about whatever needed to be talked about. She acknowledged that there would be nothing to keep them from leaving, but she let it be known that anyone who was too pigheaded to at least try to work things out would be permanently stained by shame and disgrace.

“Well, I don’t want to be stained by shame and disgrace,” Daniel said when Rose was gone. “You want the pizza or the ice cream?”

Lacy glared at him. “What kind of ice cream?”

Daniel went into the kitchen and peeked into the freezer. “Chunky Monkey.”

Lacy rolled her eyes. Rose was playing dirty.

“Hand it over,” Lacy said.

Daniel brought her the carton and a spoon.

Lacy took the lid off the carton and took a spoonful of ice cream, partly because she couldn’t resist Chunky Monkey—as Rose well knew—and partly because it allowed her to avoid looking at Daniel.

Daniel took a slice of pizza from a box on the kitchen counter, wondering aloud where she’d managed to get pizza at this time of the morning. He put the slice on a plate that Rose had left beside the box.

“Look,” he said. “Rose went to a lot of trouble here. We might as well … you know.” He gestured toward the kitchen table, and Lacy reluctantly sat down.

Lacy was aware that she might be overreacting, given the relative magnitude of Daniel’s offense. He hadn’t cheated on her. He hadn’t emotionally abused her. He wasn’t hiding a secret drug addiction, nor had he turned out to be into deal-breaking kinky sex practices.

He just hadn’t trusted her, and he hadn’t said he loved her.

It was possible that her stubborn refusal to forgive him was more about her being hurt than it was about any flaw in Daniel so big that it would make any ongoing relationship impossible.

Still, he’d hurt her feelings, and she wasn’t quite ready to stop being mad about it.

“I miss you,” he said, as a way of kicking things off. “Zzyzx misses you. He keeps whining and standing at the front door, like he’s waiting for you. He carries your sweatshirt around. It’s kinda pathetic, actually.”

“You don’t get to do that,” Lacy said, pointing her ice cream spoon at him accusingly.

“Do what?”

“You don’t get to use the dog to make me feel bad. It’s … it’s underhanded.”

“Fine.” He shoved his plate aside and leaned his elbows on the table. “I miss you. Lacy, if we could just—”

“You didn’t trust me.”

“Well, but—”

“The first time someone spread a rumor around town that I was seeing somebody else, you just … you just believed it. That hurt, Daniel.” She stabbed her spoon into the ice cream and took another angry bite, as though she were somehow trying to kill the ice cream rather than eat it.

“I know, but I—”

“And then, you refused to even talk to me. You wouldn’t even take my calls. Do you know how that felt? To think that I could just be dismissed like I didn’t even matter?” She felt the hot pressure of tears building in her eyes, and she squeezed them shut to clear it away.

“You matter,” he said under his breath, looking at the tabletop rather than at her.

“What?”

“I said, you matter.” His voice was louder, clearer this time. He raised his gaze to meet hers. “You matter a lot. It’s just …”

“It’s just what? What, Daniel?”

He took a deep breath and straightened in his chair. “I don’t think I ever really believed that you could go for a guy like me. And then when people started talking about you and Brandon … Well. It seemed like I’d been right.”

Lacy gaped at him in disbelief.

“What do you mean, a guy like you? What does that even mean?”

He shrugged. “Just ask your mom. I don’t have a steady job. My income is inconsistent. I don’t have a pension, I don’t have paid vacation. I don’t have a damned 401K …”

“Those are my mother’s priorities! They aren’t mine!”

“And,” he continued, “I’m not some hot GQ model, some guy who looks like a movie star.…”

Neither was Brandon, so she wasn’t sure what the hell he was even talking about.

And then, suddenly, she did know what he was talking about, and it made her so angry she wanted to stab him with the handle of her spoon.

“This is about looks?” She stared at him in disbelief.

“Wait, Lacy, I—”

“You believe that because I look the way I look, it must mean that I’m so shallow, so vapid, that I couldn’t possibly have feelings for you unless you look like Brad fucking Pitt?”

“Now, wait, Lacy, I never said—”

“You know what?” Lacy stood up, the ice cream carton in one hand and the spoon in the other, holding them at the ready, as though she were going to repeat the muffin incident and hurl one or both of them at his goddamned face. “I have fucking had it with people who judge me by how I look. I have a pretty face and a body that’s maybe above average, so I’ve got to be stupid, I’ve got to be shallow, I’ve got to be an object, right, Daniel? If that’s what you think, then you’re no better than that guy in the bar at Eden who tried to haul me off with him like I wasn’t even a person!”

She slammed the ice cream carton and the spoon onto the table and turned toward the door.

“Where are you going?” he said.

“I’m done here.”

“No, you’re not. We’re not done. Lacy, just let me—”

“Guys?”

Rose was standing in the bedroom door, looking pale.

“You tried, Rose, but I’m done,” Lacy said. “I’m leaving.”

“Uh, okay,” Rose said, her voice weak and tremulous. “But … if you’re going, could you maybe take me to the hospital?”

They both turned to look at Rose, who was holding her massive belly, her face lined with pain.