Chapter 17

The next morning Gabe was pretty quiet, while Elizabeth looked over her notebook plotting out where they would go next. As they drove west, the landscape of North Central Texas took on a remarkable clarity: white clouds hung against an achingly blue sky, a red barn blazing before dun-colored fields, Hereford cattle slouched against a backdrop of green pasture. She could smell the change, too, the air becoming thinner, more arid, hinting at the desert to come. Just past Dallas, she’d had Gabe get off the interstate and onto a narrow, two-lane state road that shot arrow-straight toward a low blue line of hills at the horizon.

“Where’re we headed?” Gabe asked.

“A place called Ned’s Landing.”

“What’s that?”

“An airplane museum. Luke stopped there and bought something.”

Occasionally a semi traveling in the opposite direction would blow past them, sending a shudder through the small pickup, and now and then, the road funneled them through dusty, single-stoplight towns with bleak main streets that looked right out of Depression-era Hopper.

As they inched closer to New Mexico, Elizabeth was conscious of a tension growing in her, a vague unease in her stomach. It had to do with what lay ahead, she guessed. She tried to picture, really for the first time, what Marrizozo would look like, feel like. Would its stark ordinariness surprise her? Would it appear as clear and sharp as everything else now? She tried to conjure an image in her mind of the place, but all that came was an unforgiving landscape of cacti and tumbleweed, a land ruled by rattlesnake and scorpion and blistering heat. She recalled then what she’d read in the Bible that night in the motel room in Virginia; something about a desert, about a child growing up, waxing strong in spirit. She also wondered what she would feel when she saw the spot in the desert where her son had died. Would it be anything like what George Doucette had felt when he visited his wife’s descanso? Would she feel closer to him there? Would she be granted her own resting place, a moment to recover her own strength? Or would it prove to be just a colossal let-down, the sort of empty sensation she felt when she went to Luke’s grave?

“How long before we get to Marrizozo?” Elizabeth asked.

“I figure tomorrow afternoon some time,” Gabe replied. Then, as if he’d been reading her thoughts, he said, “Try not to build it up too much.”

“Build what up?”

“What you expect to happen out there? Just don’t let your expectations run wild.”

“I’m not really expecting much of anything,” she said. But of course she was. She was expecting the world. That was the problem. Though she was too hard-headed to believe in all that supernatural stuff, she nonetheless expected the mystery and ambiguity of her son’s death to be suddenly and irrefutably revealed, for clouds to part and bolts of ethereal light to descend, along with the singing of heavenly choirs, chubby little angels hovering about like in some painting by Raphael.

“Let me tell you a story,” Gabe said.

“Does this one have a moral?”

“Just shut up and listen. About a year after Abby left me, she called out of the blue,” Gabe began. “Said she wanted to meet. That she had something to tell me but she had to say it in person. So we agreed to meet at a restaurant halfway between where we lived. I got dressed up, shaved, put on cologne. All the way there, I kept telling myself that she was having second thoughts, that things with old Stu weren’t working out and she wanted to try again to patch things up between us. I even practiced telling her I was sorry, that it was all my fault, that I loved her and would do anything to make it right, whatever she wanted. By the time I got there I had myself convinced that I’d have my wife and family back.”

He paused dramatically to take a puff on his cigarette.

“And?” Elizabeth asked impatiently.

He chuckled cynically. “She wanted to tell me she was pregnant.”

“Pregnant?”

“Ah huh. She didn’t want me to find out through the grapevine that she and the proctologist were having a bambino together.”

“So what’s your point?”

“Well, my point is, you’re better off keeping a lid on your expectations.”

“Thanks for the words of wisdom.”

“Do you always have to be such a wiseass?”

Around one o’clock they found the place called Ned’s Landing. It was just south of Lubbock, way out in the middle of nowhere, an old airbase with an enormous metal hangar. Elizabeth and Gabe got out and headed inside. They found themselves in a small café and gift shop. Standing behind the counter was an old woman with a pinched face and silver hair done up in a bun.

“Would y’all care for tickets to the museum?” she asked.

“No,” Elizabeth said, which seemed to disappoint the woman. “I spoke to a man a few days ago. About my son.”

“That would probably be my husband. He’s out in the museum now. I’ll go get him.”

The old woman headed out through a door at the back which had a sign over the window that said, MUSEUM ENTRANCE. Gabe followed her to the door and cupping his hands stared into the museum out back. Elizabeth glanced around the place. He was here, she thought. Right here. Not twenty-four hours before he died. She went over to the gift shop in one corner of the room. It offered shirts and caps and wind-breakers that had Ned’s Landing printed on them. On one shelf were a number of tiny die-cast metal planes, like the one that Luke had bought. Elizabeth couldn’t help but be reminded of that gift shop in Wales, where Luke had wandered off, enticed by that small British Spitfire.

When Gabe returned, he said to Elizabeth, “You should see what they got out back. All these cool World War II bombers and fighters. Your son was into planes?”

“When he was a little boy he collected them.”

“My thing was cars. I used to have a nice collection of model cars.”

After a while the woman returned accompanied by a thin old man, with rheumy blue eyes and one hand that trembled uncontrollably.

“Howdy,” he said.

“I believe I spoke to you on the phone,” Elizabeth began. “About my son. He stopped here and bought a model plane.”

The man at first shook his head, his blue eyes looking confusedly at his wife. So Elizabeth got out her phone and showed both him and his wife the picture of Luke.

“Can’t say I recall him,” the husband said.

“Sure, you do, honey,” she said. “Tall, good-looking young feller.”

The man looked at his wife, his eyes clouded, still nothing registering. The wife smiled at Elizabeth and said, “He sometimes has trouble remembering things.”

“I do not,” he complained.

To her husband, the woman added, “Remember, the two of you talked about the P-51D we got out back.”

Elizabeth reached into her pocketbook and took out Luke’s model plane.

“Is this what you talked about?”

Suddenly, a light went off in those pale blue eyes. He reached out with his trembling hand and took hold of the plane. Grinning a yellow-toothed grin, he said to Elizabeth, “That was your boy?”

“Yes.”

“He knew his planes. I flew a Mustang in the Pacific Theater and he wanted to know all about it.”

“Do you recall anything else about him?” Elizabeth asked.

The man looked to his wife again for help.

“Remember how polite he was, dear?” offered the wife.

“Oh, yes. That’s true. He was a very a polite young man.”

“Sometimes nowadays young people aren’t so polite,” his wife explained. “But your boy was a real gentleman.”

Elizabeth had never heard Luke referred to as a gentleman before.

“Where you folks from?” the wife asked.

“Connecticut,” replied Elizabeth.

“Is your boy here?” asked the old man, glancing over Elizabeth’s shoulder, as if Luke were waiting in the car. She didn’t want to bring up such sad news.

“No, he didn’t come with us,” she said, trading glances with Gabe. “Well, thank you so much.”

“You sure you don’t want to see the museum?” the old man asked. “We have some great planes.”

“We have a long ways to drive,” Gabe explained.

“Well, y’all take care,” the wife said. “And come back and see us.”

“Say hello to that boy of yours,” the old man called after them.

* * *

About an hour before nightfall, they saw a sign along the road that said, “Welcome to New Mexico, Land of Enchantment.” The landscape hardly looked enchanted, and it certainly didn’t look like desert, at least not the sort Elizabeth had been expecting. More just rolling fields of dried grass with a few stunted cholla cactus cropping up here and there. Gabe told her that according to his GPS they were still more than two hundred miles from Marrizozo.

“Do you want to try making it?” Elizabeth asked.

Gabe looked over at her and shrugged. “If we’re going to stop somewhere we’d better do it soon,” he suggested. “There might not be a whole lot once it gets dark.”

“Sounds good to me,” Elizabeth replied.

“Roswell’s an hour’s drive. We can probably find something there.”

“Okay.” Then it dawned on her. “Isn’t that the place—”

“Yeah, where all that alien stuff is,” Gabe replied, rolling his eyes.

Roswell turned out to be equal to its reputation. It had a busy main drag and everywhere the UFO cottage industry was readily apparent. Places had names like the “Intergalactic Diner” or “Alien Realty” or “Lunar Laundromat.” In most of the storefront windows the same scrawny, lime-green, big-headed, bug-eyed creature stared out at them, and all of the street lamps had the same creature’s face painted on them. The Arby’s and Wal-Mart had “Aliens Welcome” signs out front, and various businesses showed aliens promoting some sort of merchandise or other—aliens wearing cowboy hats or boots, playing a musical instrument, or in the Sleepy’s, a green alien manikin dozing comfortably on a bed. Gabe and Elizabeth tried three different motels only to be told there were no vacancies. The clerk at the last one informed them that the town was in the midst of its annual UFO convention. Evidently alien nutjobs and conspiracy theorists, Star Trekkers and UFO aficionados from all over the country assembled there. Gabe and Elizabeth kept looking until they found a vacancy sign at a place called “The Star Ship Motel,” a squat, adobe-style building whose outside walls were painted a matte black and overlaid with stars and planets and flying saucers of every shape and form.

After they checked in, they agreed to meet in half an hour for dinner. Later, as they walked along the main drag, the town buzzed with activity, the streets swarming with tourists in town for the convention. Elizabeth felt it was a cross between Halloween and Mardi Gras, with adults dressed up as Jedi Knights or Darth Vader or Chewbacca, others with their faces painted green or black or silver, some with bobbing antennae sticking out of their heads, others with Spock-like ears. They were laughing and some were drinking from bottles in paper bags.

“We forgot our costumes,” Gabe said.

“It’s kind of creepy.”

“But fun, too.”

“I suppose.”

“Oh, just loosen up and enjoy it.”

They stopped at a couple of restaurants only to be told it would be an hour or more wait. Along a side street, they happened upon a place called, “Casa de los Masciano,” which had a sign out front with an alien wearing a sombrero and holding a margarita. Even this place was full. They had to settle for a table over near the kitchen doors. Their waitress, a tiny woman with sharp Native-American features, spoke such poor English Elizabeth resorted to speaking to her in Spanish. The woman reminded Elizabeth a little of Fabiana, and she made a note to herself to call the shelter and see how she was doing.

“A Jack Daniels y Coca-Cola para mi amigo y una Coca-Cola light para mí, por favor,” Elizabeth said.

“Sí, senora.”

Elizabeth got a salad and a steak, while Gabe got the burrito grande with the works.

After a while the waitress brought their drinks over, along with a bowl of nachos and salsa. In the corner a jukebox was playing a Carrie Underwood song. A middle-aged couple danced in front of the jukebox, the only ones. Both were overweight but they seemed to know what they were doing, and were surprisingly light on their feet. The man spun the woman about in tight, skillful circles, and the two glided effortlessly across the dance floor as if they were skaters on ice.

“You like to dance?” Gabe asked.

“Not so much.”

“I thought all women liked to dance. Abby loved to dance. She had all the moves, too. How about your husband?”

“More than I do.”

“What’s your husband’s name again?”

“Zack.”

“First thing you do when you get back is go out dancing with him.”

“You think so?” Elizabeth said.

“It’s fun. I wasn’t much of a dancer but I loved being out there with Abby. Every guy in the place watching her.”

As Elizabeth sipped her Coke, she eyed the two on the dance floor. There was an intimacy to the way they moved she found both erotic and yet vulnerable. She tried to remember the last time she’d danced with Zack. It was years ago, at some bar they’d both gotten a little drunk at. Zack asked her to dance but she refused, so he took her hand and pulled her out on the floor. There he put one arm on her back, with the other he took her hand and twirled her in slow circles. She remembered loving the feeling of being in his arms, slightly dizzy, slightly drunk. That night she could remember they went home and made love.

“Does the proctologist like to dance?” she asked.

“How the hell would I know?” Gabe said, batting the thought away with a flick of his hand. He polished off the rest of his drink. After a while the waitress came over with their food.

“Another one of these, por favor,” Gabe said to the waitress, holding up his empty glass.

Elizabeth’s steak was a bit tough. At one point she looked across at Gabe. He had his head down, eating with a single-mindedness of purpose, scooping up a forkful of burrito, then some beans and rice and guacamole, and washing it all down with gulps of Jack and Coke. She could imagine him eating like this when he was married and both his girls were alive, and he would come home from a long day of work, his wife and daughters around him at the dinner table, a regular, happy family. Like Zack and Luke and she had been. Before everything changed. Before the world turned dark and menacing. She was staring at him when he happened to look up.

“What?” he asked, wiping his mouth.

Instead of saying what she’d been thinking, she said, “Remember I told you the night my son died, I was away at a conference?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know why I didn’t tell you before but I was with that man. Peter.”

Gabe stopped chewing for a moment. “Oh, boy.”

“Anyway, I didn’t take Luke’s call because I was with him,” she explained.

Gabe raised his eyebrows. “Talk about bad timing.”

“Actually, I was telling him it was over. That I couldn’t see him anymore. That I loved my husband.”

“So that was a good thing.”

“Not so much a good thing as trying to make up for a bad thing.”

“So let me guess—you blame yourself for your son’s death?”

“Not his death exactly. But for not being there when he needed me.”

“You know what your problem is, Elizabeth? You’re way too hard on yourself.”

“I was sleeping with another man when my son was killed.”

“All right, I admit it was an unusual circumstance.” Gabe put his fork down and stared at Elizabeth. “But number one,” he said, counting on his fingers, “you couldn’t possibly know it was your son calling. Number two, how were you supposed to know that he had something important to tell you? And three, and most importantly, how in God’s name could you possibly know he’d get killed that night?” He held up three fingers in front of her, as if to prove his point. “I mean that’s just bad karma.”

“I thought bad karma comes from doing bad things.”

“Listen, you need to let it go.”

“I’ve tried.”

“Try harder. I thought that’s what this trip is all about? Letting things go. Getting some closure.”

“The funny thing is, the last few days I’ve never thought more about Luke. Or that night. Or all the ways I failed him.”

“Would you stop it? Guilt is easy,” Gabe said.

“How do you figure that?”

“We just wallow in it like a pig in shit. We don’t have to take responsibility. Do anything. Make changes. That’s the hard part.”

“And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Aren’t you wallowing in your own guilt?”

“Maybe I am a little. But the thing is, I don’t have to make changes. Nobody’s counting on me for anything.”

“What about Jo?”

“Hell, she doesn’t need me now.”

“Sure she does. No matter how old a girl is, she always needs her dad. I still miss my father and he’s been dead for almost twenty years.”

He took another bite of his burrito and followed it with a big gulp of his drink.

“So tell me some more about this kid of yours.”

“What would you like to know?”

“What sort of person was he?”

Elizabeth shrugged. “I guess he was like most twenty-one year-olds.”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit?”

“He was your kid and that means he wasn’t like any other kid that ever walked God’s green earth. And if he was anything like you, he must’ve been pretty special.”

The question stumped her for a moment. After all, she’d never really had to describe her son to someone else. How many parents ever had to do such an exercise, define who their child was, to characterize what kind of human being he was? Not where he went to school or what grades he got or who his friends were or whether he played the guitar or was on the lacrosse team or who he dated, but to portray who he was, what made him tick, to describe his essence. What it was that made him different or unique from the billions of other children who had lived. To Elizabeth, her son had always been simply Luke. Her Lukey. It must have been similar to what Gabe had had to do when he sketched his family—to look at them objectively, carefully, their arms and hands, their mouths, those expressive eyes of theirs, and then to render them as truthfully as he could, not just the physical traits but who they were. And the more she thought about Gabe’s question, the more she realized it was perhaps why people put up roadside crosses to mark where their children had died. Why they brought toys and keepsakes, pictures and baseball gloves and heaped them there. So as to define and remember who they were, as much for themselves as for the rest of the world.

“In most ways, at least the good ways, he took after my husband. He had an engineer’s mind. He was good in math. He liked playing guitar,” she said.

“Was he any good?”

“He was all right. I don’t think he took it too seriously.”

“That’s not a bad thing necessarily. Too many kids are pushed too hard by their parents these days.”

“I guess I was one of those pushy parents. Luke thought I was hard to please. That I was demanding.”

“It was just because you wanted the best for him. Am I right?”

“That’s what I told myself anyway.”

“What else about your boy?”

“He liked to read. Always had his nose in a book. And he had this really incredible memory, too. He could recite things. Dialogue from movies. Songs. Lines of poetry. Used to write them down in his diary.”

“And how would you know that?” Gabe said, grinning.

“I peeked sometimes. One time he wrote this line by Camus. I forget how it goes but something about how it’s better to live your life as if there was a god and die and find out there wasn’t rather than to live your life as if there wasn’t only to die and find out there was.”

“That’s pretty deep.”

She thought of that term Luke had written in his diary: duc in altum. She told him other things, too, about Luke. Things she’d almost forgotten. Things she couldn’t say she’d ever really remembered in the first place. A funny thing began to happen as she spoke. The more she talked about her son, the more she seemed to remember about him. One memory conjured up another and another and so on. In some ways, it was like watching a film develop in a photographer’s dark room—seeing Luke’s features emerge from the blank paper, his nose and mouth and eyes take shape, arise out of the vagueness of her memory. She talked about how he had been a nervous child, anxious, easily upset by change. How he’d gone through a stage right after they’d moved to their lake house when he used to wet the bed for a while. She also told him how kind and generous and compassionate he could be. How even as a little boy, he always thought of the underdog, the downtrodden, the needy. How every night he’d insist that she read him the same story about the pig named Hamilton. Or how he liked collecting model planes. This led her to tell Gabe about the time they’d nearly lost him in Wales.

“The little stinker wandered off and scared us half to death,” she said, laughing. “It was awful. Zack and I were running around crazy looking for him.”

“Been there, done that,” Gabe replied. “I remember Kelly pulling that stunt on us at the state fair once over in Nashville. Scared the living daylights out of us. What about that one girlfriend of his?”

“What about her?”

“Were they serious?”

She took a sip of her Coke. She thought again of what TJ had told her. Elizabeth felt that if she was trying to describe who her son really was, not who she wanted him to be or wanted others to believe him to be, wasn’t that part of him, too? She felt she needed to be as faithful to Luke’s memory as she could. Only in this way could she fully know her son.

“They broke up the fall before he died,” she began.

“That’s too bad. Why?”

“She thought . . . well, I don’t really know how to say this. That Luke wasn’t interested in women.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean? That he was gay?”

“She wasn’t sure.”

“Jesus. Why on earth would she tell you that?”

“It was sort of my fault. I called to ask why they’d split up. She didn’t want to say it but I keep pushing her for an answer. And finally she told me it was because she thought he wasn’t interested in women any more.”

“Do you believe her?” Gabe asked.

Elizabeth shrugged. “I don’t see why she would lie. She was always a good kid. And the thing is, I’m sure she really loved him.”

“What do you think about your son? Do you think he was gay?”

“I frankly don’t know. I guess there was always something about him, a part of him I didn’t really know. Maybe didn’t want to know. Or that he didn’t want me to know. The funny thing is, after his girlfriend told me that, I began to wonder if that was what he wanted to tell me the night he died.”

“That he was gay?”

“Or something.”

“But why would he wait till he was halfway across the country to tell you that?”

“Maybe because he felt he couldn’t tell me face to face. I guess I can be pretty intimidating.”

“You?” Gabe said straight-faced.

“I think Luke felt I was too much of a perfectionist. That I expected him to be a certain way. Maybe that’s what he wanted to tell me.”

“Then again, maybe it was nothing important. Or maybe he just wanted to tell you he was thinking about you. That he loved you. Ever think of that?”

“You’re sweet for saying that.”

From his shirt pocket Gabe took out his little appointment book and a pen. “I just realized I don’t even have a number where I could reach your husband. Just in case.”

“Just in case what? Now you’re creeping me out, Gabe.”

“Relax.”

She went ahead and gave him Zack’s cell phone. From his address book he removed a card and slid it across the table. “Here’s my card,” he said. On it was written, Gabe Tidrow, Towing and General Auto Repair. Free Estimates.

“Now why would I need this?” she said.

“In case you’re ever driving through Tennessee again and you run into a deer.”

It had only been a couple of days but it seemed as if she’d known him much longer. Maybe it was the fact that they’d driven halfway across the country together, that they’d bonded during the long days on the road. Or that she’d shared so much with him, about her son, her husband, her private life, told him things she’d not told anyone before. Not Zack. Not George. Not anyone. Or maybe it was simply that they both shared the loss of children.

* * *

After dinner, they walked back to their motel. It was dark out now, decidedly cooler in the high desert night, making Elizabeth wish she’d brought along her sweatshirt. She felt goosebumps rippling the backs of her arms. The sky in the west was a lustrous Egyptian blue while straight overhead a million stars were scattered like grains of salt over a black canvas. They passed closed stores with more aliens staring out at them with their bug eyes. Across the street was a UFO museum with a marquee out front that suggested it had once been a movie theater.

“Look, it’s still open,” Gabe said. “Wanna go in?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, come on. It’ll be fun.”

Gabe paid and they went in and wandered around the place. It wasn’t so much a museum, Elizabeth realized, as a carnival sideshow. The exhibits were all about supposed alien contact, with old, yellowed newspaper clippings on the walls from the 1950s about spaceship sightings, life on other planets, clandestine research facilities out in the desert, close encounters, hazy pictures of UFOs in the desert sky, and everywhere, little green men. In one exhibit, a sort of diorama, several mannequin doctors dressed up in white lab coats and masks were performing what appeared to be an autopsy on a green creature laid out on an operating table. The caption over the diorama said, “Proof positive of government cover-ups.”

“That certainly convinces me,” Gabe said.

Elizabeth laughed but felt a strange sensation in the pit of her stomach. Then she realized what it was. The dead alien reminded her a little of the time in the back room of Weldon’s Funeral Home, seeing her son’s body on the table. How his “remains” didn’t look quite real, quite human. She turned and quickly left the room and headed out into the street.

“You okay?” Gabe asked when he’d caught up with her.

“Fine,” she said.

As they headed back toward their motel, they passed a group of tipsy revelers dressed up as various figures from Star Wars—white-suited droids, an R2D2, a C3PO, Wookiees, Ewoks. They were yelling and laughing, sharing a bottle in a paper bag. Gabe stopped to stare at them while Elizabeth continued walking.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” Gabe asked, grabbing her shoulder and stopping her.

“Just thinking.”

“About what?”

“Luke.”

“You mean about how he wasn’t interested in women?”

“Not just that. Everything.”

“You know, from all that you’ve told me, he seemed like a pretty neat kid.”

“Yes, he was,” she replied. “It’s just that sometimes I feel I missed the boat with him.”

“In what way?”

“Sometimes I don’t feel that I really knew him. Who was he?”

“What parent knows everything about their kids? Hell, my Jo doesn’t tell me or her mother half the shit she’s up to. Otherwise we’d probably kill her.” He laughed then, and Elizabeth followed suit. “But the important thing is you loved him, right?”

“I just hope he knew it.”

“Of course, he did. Kids feel things even if they don’t say anything.”

Elizabeth looked at Gabe and shivered in the cool night air.

“You want my jacket?” he asked.

She tried to object but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He removed his coat—his ex-wife’s husband’s ex-coat—and draped it around her shoulders. They continued walking toward their motel.

“Gabe?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you miss most about your daughter?” Elizabeth asked.

He didn’t reply for a while. Then he said, “This is going to sound weird. Her feet.”

“Her feet?”

“When she danced she used to get these really bad cramps in her feet. She’d like me to rub them, ’cause I have strong hands. I remember we’d be watching TV and I’d have her feet in my lap and I’d be rubbing her toes really hard. She’d squeal bloody murder sometimes, so I’d stop. But she’d always say, ‘Do it some more, Dad. Please.’ That’s what I remember the most.”

By then they’d reached the motel.

“Thanks for listening,” Elizabeth said.

“You, too.” As she turned toward her room, Gabe called after her, “You might want to give that husband of yours a call. He’s probably worrying about you.”

“You think so?”

“I would be.”

Later, after she brushed her teeth and washed her face, she crawled into bed and called Zack.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi. Where are you now?”

“New Mexico.”

“How far are you away from Marrizozo?”

“We should get there tomorrow.” A slip of the tongue.

“We?”

She didn’t want to have to get into what would be a long and convoluted explanation. She could do that later, in person. “I’m just so used to saying we.”

“I know what you mean,” he replied.

Neither said anything for a few seconds. Finally Elizabeth asked, “What do you think, Zack?”

“About what?” he asked. She could see he wasn’t going to make it easy for her.

“About what I told you last night. I wouldn’t blame you for leaving me.”

“Is that what you want, Elizabeth?”

“No. No, I want us to stay married. I love you. I’m just saying I couldn’t blame you.”

“We can talk about it when you get home.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we can talk about it then. I have to be honest though. I’m hurt by what you did.”

“I would be, too.”

“What hurts even more is that you didn’t tell me afterwards.”

“I wanted to. I don’t know why I didn’t. I just want us to try again.”

“I can’t promise that. We’ll just have to see.”

“That’s all I can expect.”

“Goodnight, Elizabeth.”