The Way You Dance
Renee Asher Pickup
You’ve been gone a year now. Twelve months. Every so often I catch myself missing you, and that’s kind of funny considering how many times I wished you’d die.
I’m moving on. I have moved on.
Abe is nothing like you. I knew the only way through the grief was through someone else, but I couldn’t stomach being with someone who had eyes the same color blue as yours, the same bad habits. I couldn’t be with a man who called me “baby doll” or who only ever drank on the weekends.
Abe’s eyes are the color of fresh turned soil and his dark hair often hangs in his face. He is slender, but loud, while you were always the strong, silent type. He likes a stiff drink, but only one, at the end of each day. My friends like him, but they can’t understand how we ended up together. They thought I liked men with broad shoulders and light hair. Men with a dignified air, who never said much but took care of business. They would have liked us together. It would have made sense to them.
Abe doesn’t really do pet names. I’m “babe,” the last girl was “babe,” and I’m sure the girl before her was “babe,” too. I know it can’t possibly be true, but it always felt like I was the only woman you called “baby doll.” I felt like the only woman in the world when I was with you. I thought no one else existed in your eyes. With Abe, I never feel that way. The world turns with us, not around us. The earth doesn’t move—it’s stable beneath our feet.
That’s not a bad thing, you know. I used to think it was. I used to think passion and love were the same thing. But with Abe my eyes are open, and with you, they were only ever closed. Dreaming. Abe is happy in a smallish house in the center of town where we hire a teenager to cut our grass. He’s happy in that house with me. This house would have never done for you. Then, I didn’t really do for you, either.
Abe likes sturdy, stable things more than he likes flashy things. That’s another way the two of you are different. He starts every morning with black coffee in the same chipped mug, and he ends each day with a little bourbon in a glass he picked up somewhere you’d never shop. Your scotch glasses were crystal, weren’t they? When I say something silly or out of character, Abe looks at me over his drink and arches an eyebrow, waiting for me to catch what I said so we can both laugh about it.
With you, I guess I could have said anything. I thought that meant you loved me for who I am but I’m beginning to think it was because I was incidental. The night you died, I was at your house. I watched you dance with her, I watched you brush her hair out of her face with your thumb. I watched as you did all the things that made me feel special with her. And it’s funny, because from the outside looking in, it was so much easier to tell it was all about you. Not me. Not her.
When I told Abe how I really knew you, how I really knew who he was, he got up from the couch and poured a second glass of bourbon. “I guess that means we need to talk.”
I forget that you knew Abe. I forget that he was the pharmaceutical rep for your office, a regular member of your Wednesday night poker game. I forget that he knew Ellie and loved her peach cobbler. I can be forgiven for all of that, though, because that was your fault. I was never allowed to experience that part of your life. If I had been, maybe I would have met Abe at one of your cookouts. He might have smiled at me, thought about coming over to say hello, but I wouldn’t have smiled back. I would have been watching your arm around her waist. Your lips on her cheek. If I had seen all of that then, would I have been smart enough to see you were only ever dancing with yourself?
The fucked up thing is, I met Abe at your funeral. I knew who he was. I knew what he’d done. He stood in the back with me. He said it was because he “hated these damn things” but felt obligated to come. If I hadn’t been so nervous, if I hadn’t felt like anyone in that room could have looked at me and seen a big, red “A” emblazoned across my chest, I may have realized he was standing in the back for the same reason I was. Guilt.
Knowing who he was didn’t stop the tension between us from growing and shaking in the air. Grief didn’t stop me from noticing the way he kept looking at the cleavage showing from the neckline of my black dress. I found myself standing closer to him than social conventions allowed for two strangers, but he didn’t seem to mind. When he trailed his fingers up the back of my arm, respect for you didn’t stop me from leading him out of the funeral parlor to taste his mouth.
If I’m being honest, knowing what I knew may have made it better.
When we got in his car, I think the idea was to find somewhere to go. We were being ridiculous, but not so ridiculous that we honestly planned on putting the seat back and fucking in the parking garage at your funeral. The problem was, talking between mouthfuls of each other, the windows fogged, and the parking garage was so quiet anyway. And Abe liked the simple things, like I said. So simply lifting the skirt of my mourning dress was enough. Simply fucking him in the front seat of his sedan was enough. We went at it like a couple of teenagers and showed up to your wake slick with sweat and flushed in afterglow.
Abe sat down so calmly with that second glass of bourbon, I thought maybe he hadn’t heard what I said.
“I said…I saw you do it. I know you killed him.”
“I heard you.”
“We were having an affair.”
“I figured,” he said, taking a mouthful of the whiskey.
“How?”
The corner of his mouth turned up in the knowing smirk I’ve come to love. “You were hiding at the back of the funeral parlor, like me. Like someone who had done something to be ashamed of. You said you knew Ellie, but when you shook her hand, she didn’t know who the hell you were.”
Abe’s more perceptive than you ever were, too. If you’d been a little more like him, maybe he wouldn’t have gotten the drop on you.
He put the glass down on the table and leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees. “So why now? Why bring this up tonight if you’ve known all along?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Isn’t that silly? I think if I told this story to Abe, he’d raise his eyebrow, and I’d laugh at myself. If I told it to you, you probably wouldn’t listen. You’re a better listener now that you’re dead. I bet you’re a better husband, too.
“I just don’t like having it hanging between us.”
Silence built between us, filling the space that sexual tension had less than a year before.
I took his drink from the table and sucked down a gulp of whiskey, hoping the burn down my throat would hit my stomach and bloom into courage. “I thought about turning you in for a long time.” I said it knowing I was admitting those first few months we were together, when we couldn’t get enough of each other, when the only time we weren’t talking or texting is when we were tangled and sweating together in my bed—that whole time I was thinking about ruining his life.
I could have never hurt you the way I hurt him in that moment. You never trusted me with anything. Abe had trusted me with almost everything.
He stared at the table. “And now?”
I shook my head. “I couldn’t.”
That was the truth. As soon as I decided I wasn’t going to do it, as soon as I decided I was with Abe for the long haul and loving him was better than anything that could come from giving you justice—I had nightmares that I’d be making dinner and he’d be sitting on the couch with his bourbon in hand, and I’d see red and blue lights flashing from the picture window. I wouldn’t have time to ask what was going on before I heard the pounding on the door, and a man saying, “POLICE, OPEN UP.” I had that dream twelve times before it stopped.
“I just don’t understand why you did it.” My heart pounded, still aching from the knowledge that I had crushed some part of him when I said I was thinking of ruining him even as he fell in love with me.
“Ellie paid me to do it.”
I wasn’t expecting that.
“Ellie? Why?”
He laughed. “Turns out it was you.”
That’s the truth, isn’t it? It was me.
I hung back in your bushes that night, I watched you dance with her, I watched you make her feel like she was the only woman in the world. When she left the room, I watched Abe sneak in behind you.
Sitting with Abe in our living room, for the first time, I realized that Abe didn’t kill you. I did.
I killed you that first night at the hotel. I killed you every time you told Ellie you had a business trip but spent the weekend between the sheets with me at a cheap hotel. I killed you every time I refused to delete a picture of us together. Oh, I didn’t fill the syringe and jam it in your neck, I didn’t pull a trigger, or slit your throat, but I did it. Every time you told me you weren’t going to leave her, but I begged you to keep seeing me—I killed you.
“Abe, I love you,” I said, my throat dry, and tight. “And this whole time, I’ve known the worst thing you’ve ever done.”
“And what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” He relaxed now, smirked again. “Or was it fucking me at his funeral?”
He didn’t ask me what I was doing there the night he killed you, even though he had to know that the only way I could have seen into your study was to be lurking in your back yard. He didn’t ask how often I did it, or if I did it before you broke things off with me. Instead, he moved closer to me and took my hand. He shook his head and laughed softly, and I leaned in for a kiss.
I didn’t wonder, the way I often did with you, if he was only staying with me because I could ruin him.