LAUREN WAS SUPPOSED to be selecting edited photos from the festival to use in the various articles and pieces she hoped to sell, but what she was really doing was looking at the same photos over and over, the ones of Alex. There was something luxurious about this. In person she couldn’t stare at him constantly, but here, in the privacy of her van, under her soft bedcovers with her mattress heater on, there was no one to see and judge her. It was like eating a whole box of chocolate truffles in private.
Alex, talking and laughing, amber eyes crinkled at the corners, smiling his full-on, all-out smile, the wind teasing a few black strands loose from his ponytail.
Alex at his carpenter’s bench, planing a board, stretched out, body leaning deep into the cut. Big loose curls of pale wood spilling through the little opening in the plane. A look of absorbed contentment on his face.
Alex standing, backlit by the afternoon sun, jacket off, waistcoat and collar open, sleeves rolled up. One leg straight, the other slightly bent at hip and knee, both of them sharp and clear against the western sky. Carbine held low across the tops of his thighs. Face in almost a full profile, with that sad, sober expression. Every line of him radiating confidence and strength, from the set of his head to the curve of his spine.
A knock at her door made her jump. “Hey, you in there?”
It was Alex’s voice. Just like before, he’d shown up at her place while she was gazing at his image on her computer screen, and just like before, she closed the window and folded down the screen.
“I’m here. Come in.”
He slid open the door, and the gray cat came darting inside and leaped onto Lauren’s lap.
“Oh, sorry,” Alex said. “I didn’t even see him. You want me to pitch him out?”
“No, he’s fine.” Lauren ran her hand along the cat’s spine and down his kinked tail. “It’s cold out there, isn’t it, Chester? Of course, you want to be in the nice warm van.”
Alex followed the cat inside. “Chester, huh? How ’bout that, buddy? You got a name now. You’re moving up in the world.”
“Yeah, he looks like a Chester. And he’s just so darned friendly, I had to call him something. Look at him doing the Contented Cat Face.”
“Yep, that’s the Contented Cat Face, all right. It’s a good look for him.”
“You want a drink?”
“Sure. Got any of that kalucha?”
“Kombucha. In the fridge.”
He handed her a plastic grocery bag. “Got something for you. I stopped by the house, and Dalia gave me your mail.”
“Anything good?”
“Maybe. There’s a big hand-addressed manila envelope from a Peter Longwood. Dalia said that’s your dad. It looked promising. I wasn’t rooting through your mail or anything. I just saw it lying there before Dalia put it in the bag.”
“No worries.”
She found the big envelope and tore it open. Then her stomach dropped away.
“Oh. My divorce is final.”
Alex froze in the act of sitting in the driver’s seat. “Your what is what?”
“My divorce is final. This is the final decree.”
“I didn’t know you were married.”
“Well, I’m not, now. And I wasn’t for long. I wonder why my dad sent me this. He usually keeps all my important mail at his house, so it doesn’t get lost. Oh, here’s a sticky note. ‘Sweetie, Mike just received this and sent it on to me. Be sure to read it through carefully and make sure everything is correct. Then mail it back to me for safekeeping. Love you. Dad.’ Wow. Is he considerate or what? Look, he even sent a self-addressed stamped envelope.”
“Who’s Mike?”
“His attorney. They’ve been friends since college.”
The thought of her dad going to his old friend and asking him to handle his daughter’s divorce was faintly nauseating. He was probably still getting congratulated on her marriage.
“I’m sorry. I had no idea. I saw the big envelope and thought it might be a nice surprise.”
“It actually is a surprise—well, sort of. I mean, it isn’t exactly a bolt from the blue, but I am a little surprised that Evan actually followed through.”
“Why? He didn’t want the divorce?”
“No, he’s just lazy. He wanted the divorce, more or less, but he doesn’t have a whole lot of perseverance for anything in the nature of a process. Married, divorced—to him it wouldn’t make much difference either way. It sure didn’t stop him from shacking up with someone else. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say his new girlfriend was the driving force here. Well, that won’t last. He’ll get tired of her, too, and slither out somehow like the snake that he is.”
Alex looked distressed. “That’s awful. How did you ever end up with this guy in the first place?”
“Oh, I was stupid, I admit it. But he was charming enough in the beginning. Like out-of-this-world charming. He couldn’t get enough of me. Completely swept me off my feet. I thought something amazing was happening. I didn’t know then that that’s just how he is. Whatever he’s into at the moment, he’s into it with his whole being. It just doesn’t ever last. And I didn’t know him well enough to realize it. And that’s on me, marrying someone I didn’t really know.”
Alex twisted the lid off his kombucha bottle. “How long ago was all this?”
“Well, let’s see. I was staying in Venice Beach back in July—the one in Florida, not the one in California. There was this music festival going on, and Evan’s band was playing. He really is an excellent musician. I guess that’s the exception to the rule, the one thing he’s actually been able to stick with long-term. We met at the festival, and then we had this incredible whirlwind courtship. I wasn’t imagining it. He really did pursue me, like, hard. I’d never had a guy that into me before. It was...exhilarating. Intoxicating.”
For some reason it was important to her that Alex understand this. She’d been a fool, yes, but not a complete fool. A woman would have to be a pretty hardened cynic to resist the treatment Evan had given her.
“Next thing I know, we’re getting married on the beach with his bass player officiating. I wore this terrific dress I found in a little boutique, and we were both barefoot, and the weather was perfect, and the gulf was this pure clear aquamarine, and my dad flew in from Pennsylvania, and about a dozen strangers showed up, and someone had made an enormous sandcastle that we ended up having in the background. It was like everything came together to make a perfect day for us, and I was going to spend the rest of my life with this beautiful, brilliant, spectacular man who made me feel like a queen.”
She looked out the window at the overcast sky. “And then the moment passed. Evan’s band split up, or he split from the band, or something—I never did get a straight story on what happened there. The way he told it, they were completely in the wrong, envious of him, trying to keep him down and practically forcing him out of the band out of petty malice. But in hindsight, I wonder if it was just Evan being a diva. So he left the band, and we left Venice Beach, and for a while things were still good. It was kind of nice having him to myself, without random women hitting on him all the time. There was another music festival at Clearwater Beach, and so we went there. Evan made a lot of new friends right away, and I was happy for him at first because he was doing what he loved and people were finally recognizing his talent the way he deserved. But then he started staying out later and later, and one night he didn’t come home at all. And even then I was willing to make excuses for him—he’d lost track of time, spent all night composing new songs, whatever. I thought he’d come back and talk to me for hours, like he used to, about what he’d been doing. But when he did come back, it was only for a change of clothes, and he barely spoke to me and didn’t give a straight answer about where he’d been. And he didn’t come back the next night, either. And finally he came, and looked at me with this hollow-eyed tragic expression like some haunted poet, and I just felt sick inside.”
She felt sick now, talking about it, but less so than when she’d broken the news to her dad. Even in the beginning, even in those rosy days of their early courtship, she’d had a feeling, a darkness in the back of her mind, that it couldn’t last, wasn’t real. She could acknowledge that now, and there was a kind of relief in it.
Alex didn’t say anything, but his face was wrung with sympathy.
“He tried to give it a good spin,” Lauren said, “like this was all about who he was as a musician and who he was destined to become and all that, but I knew there was someone else at the back of it, and I said so. He denied it at first—well, kind of. He wasn’t self-aware enough to even lie about it in a convincing way—this woman just kept coming up in all his talk about the music, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out the rest. And once I pointed it out, he acted all surprised, like he hadn’t realized it until right then when he was talking to me, but now he knew and he had to follow his destiny.”
She didn’t tell him how she’d groveled, begging Evan to stay, basically offering to do anything he wanted, be anything he wanted, to make their marriage work. It made her ashamed now to think how desperate she’d been, how little self-respect she’d shown—and this in spite of her absolute certainty that Evan had already slept with the other woman.
“Wow,” Alex said. “And how long was this after the wedding?”
“Two weeks, I kid you not. Two lousy weeks. So he left. Took his guitars and his clothes and his toothbrush and walked out of my life. And for a long time that was it. No contact. For weeks it was like he just dropped into a void. It was...rough.”
She couldn’t possibly express—didn’t want to express—the utter misery of that time. It was like a physical illness, or poison, or something heavy pressing on her constantly. Every few days she’d generate fresh content for Instagram or her travel blog—nature and local-interest stuff that didn’t have Evan in it. She felt like a fraud—a transparent, pathetic fraud—trying to carry on like nothing was wrong. But acknowledging what had happened would have been worse.
She took a deep breath. “And then, about a month later...he came back.”
“No way!”
“Yep. It was August. I was camped at a Dark Sky Park at Kissimmee Prairie for the Perseids meteor shower. Evan saw a post I made about it on Instagram and just showed up unannounced. And the sight of him framed in the door of my van with his guitar slung on his back just hit a giant reset button in me. I forgot what a self-centered jerk he was, forgot all the pain and suffering he’d put me through. I just saw him with that look in his eyes and fell as hard as ever. Harder.”
“How long did he come back for?”
“One weekend.” One glorious, blissful weekend, in which they’d scarcely gotten out of bed. “And then...he left again. He got a call, and he went outside to take it, and I couldn’t make out the words but I could understand the tone. Near as I can guess, he’d had a falling out with his band or his girlfriend or both, and came running back to me to get his ego stroked. And then whoever it was made up with him...and he left again, after giving me a whole new set of speeches to justify his actions. It was the same sort of high-flown language he’d used when he was pursuing me, and when he’d left before. And for the first time I saw how empty it all was, how shallow he was and always had been. Only difference was, this time he actually filed for a no-fault divorce, which in Florida apparently takes four to five weeks to go through if uncontested. No-fault! There was plenty of fault, all on his end. Adultery for sure, and lack of good faith. Dalia said I should get an annulment for fraud.”
“Dalia knew?”
“Oh, yeah. Not when he left the first time—I was still in denial at that point—but after he left the second time I called and told her everything. You can imagine how mad she was. If she’d been in the same room with him I’m pretty sure she’d have throttled him with her bare hands. It was comforting. I needed someone to say, ‘you’re right, he’s a terrible person.’ I kind of liked the idea of the annulment—compared to the divorce, anyway. Seemed like the closest I could come to just undoing the whole thing. But it turns out that proving fraud is a lot more complicated than you might suppose. And in the end, I signed the divorce papers. What else could I do?”
“Then what?”
“Then I came here. Dalia told me right away that I should come, but it took me a while to actually pack up and make the drive.” Eight weeks, to be exact. Long enough for her to finally feel silly pretending not to notice how late her period was and take a pregnancy test. She’d been in denial in more ways than one.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I’m so sorry all that happened. I know how painful it is to deal with a narcissist.”
“You mean your dad?”
The words slipped out before she could stop them.
“Sorry. Tony told me about him, and Claudia, a little. I hope that’s okay.”
He shrugged. “It’s not like it’s a secret. Whole town knows what he’s done, and half of them have been burned by him themselves. He’s just one of those toxic human beings who trample your heart and then show no remorse whatsoever, no awareness of what they’ve done.”
“That’s the worst of it. You feel so angry, and you know you’re right, but they twist things around until you can’t see straight. They somehow make it sound like they’re the ones you should feel sorry for.”
“Yes! Exactly! That’s just how it was with what happened with my truck.”
“Rosie?”
“No, Amelia. Rosie is my grandfather’s truck—or she was.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah. See, I used to drive this 1960 Chevy stepside—that’s Amelia. I got her for a song because she was just sitting in this dude’s garage for decades, collecting dust. I spent years restoring her. Did all the work myself.”
“I can totally see you driving a vintage Chevy stepside.”
“Yeah, she was a great vehicle. Still is, but—well, you’ll see. So one night last October, I was working late at the garage. Manny lets me come in odd hours to work around my other job. So I lock up and go out to my truck, and these two guys are waiting for me, and one of them is holding a baby sledgehammer. And I’m thinking they’re gonna rob the garage. And then the one with the sledgehammer says, ‘Hello, Alex.’”
“Ooh. That’s ominous.”
“Yeah, no kidding. So then he proceeds to smash my headlights, my taillights, the windshield, the door windows including the vent glass and the little back glass. Knocks the side mirrors clean off. One after another, all calm and slow and methodical. And I’m just standing there in shock. And when he’s done the guy turns to me and says, ‘I don’t like doing this, because it’s bad for business. But if I need to do it and I don’t do it, then that’s bad for business, too. You tell your daddy I want my money. And if he’s late again, next time it’ll be your fingers and kneecaps.’ And then they both just walk away.”
“Whoa! Oh, Alex, how awful.”
“Yeah. I didn’t even know we had loan sharks in Limestone Springs—though I guess they weren’t local, because I didn’t recognize them, and they didn’t seem concerned about me seeing their faces.”
“Wow. Wow. What did you do then?”
“Swept up the broken glass, taped some clear plastic over the openings and drove home.”
“You didn’t call the cops?”
“Nah. What was the point? What could the cops do other than file a report so I could make an insurance claim? And if I did make a claim and the insurance company paid out, that would mean higher premiums, which I couldn’t afford. In the long run it was better to bite the bullet and do the work myself.”
“Yeah, but still. Those thugs vandalized your vehicle, and threatened you with physical harm. Technically that’s assault.”
“I guess so. But the only reason it happened was because my father is an irresponsible jackass who doesn’t care. It’s just... It’s humiliating.”
Pride and self-sufficiency. Lauren could admire that, though she wasn’t sure he was right.
“Did you tell your dad what happened?”
“Oh, yeah. And you know what he said to me? That it was all my grandfather’s fault for not lending him the money to begin with. He was forced to go to a loan shark, see, because his own father was such a mean old skinflint. And then he said for me to tell my grandfather what happened with my truck, because if I asked, if I was the one being pressured and threatened, he’d pay the loan shark back. He’s making out like he’s the victim, and I’m the favorite child who gets preferential treatment for no reason.”
Lauren shook her head. “Classic narcissist.”
“Yeah. Everything is about him.”
“So what did you say to him?”
“I said heck no. You’re the one who borrowed the money, you’re the one who created this mess, so handle your own business and leave my grandfather out of it. But he must have gone to my grandfather, anyway, and told him all about it, because the next morning my grandfather went to town and made a big withdrawal from his bank account. I know, because I was on the account, too, and I could see its history. And the day after that is when he died. I came out to the ranch early to help with the haying, and I found him. Massive stroke while he was making morning coffee. And on the passenger seat of his truck, he’d left the paperwork for a gift deed, turning the truck over to me. I think maybe he knew he didn’t have much longer, and he wanted to do something for me.”
Privately, Lauren thought it would have been a lot more useful if the grandfather had left Alex the ranch. Yes, it was his own property, and it was his right to dispose of it as he saw fit, even if that meant giving it to his wastrel of a son. But it was a mistake. Anyone could see that.
“And you’ve been driving Rosie ever since?”
“Yep.”
“What happened to Amelia?”
“For now she’s sitting at the ranch under a tarp, waiting. Replacing the windshield and back glass wasn’t too bad, but door glass is a major pain. You’ve got to open the interior-door panel and get every last bit of broken glass out, and reassemble the new glass just so, with the seals and the felt and everything. A lot of people opt to replace the entire door rather than deal with the hassle of installing new glass. But Amelia still has her original paint, so I can’t just stick a couple of different-colored doors on there. And whatever I end up doing about it is gonna take a hefty chunk of time and money, neither of which I have a lot of right at the moment.”
They went on trading stories about his father and her ex-husband. It was weirdly comforting, talking to someone who really understood.
“You want to go get a beer?” Alex asked suddenly. “I’m actually off work today, so I have time. We could go to Tito’s and drown our sorrows over the narcissists who’ve done us wrong. Or you could drown your sorrows, and I could stay sober and drive you home after. Wait, that doesn’t sound right. Maybe we could just get a twelve-pack and bring it back to your place. Wait, that doesn’t sound right, either.”
I would love to go on talking with you. But not over alcohol, because I’m pregnant.
The words were right there in her mouth, ready to be said, but she held them back, and switched them out with completely different ones.
“As appealing as that sounds, I’d better get back to work. It was fun commiserating with you, though.”
“You, too. Be strong, okay? You’ll get through this.”
“Thanks.”
She stared at the door a long time after he left. Why hadn’t she told him? At some point she would have to tell him, because it would be weird not to. She couldn’t expect her stomach to stay flat for much longer. Sooner or later, he’d know.
But she was just here for the winter. Not even the whole winter, necessarily. Just long enough to regroup and get her head on straight and figure out where to go next.
She signed the divorce decree and stuck it in its envelope.