Duke followed me. “I can’t help having a reaction, Cass. I’m human. In a relationship with you. And the Andrew thing—I never would have expected you to do something like that. It took me way off guard.”
My throat closed, and I tried to edge past him, the narrow kitchen feeling too small with both of us crowding the sink. “Well, I thought nothing you could say would make me feel shittier than I already do. Guess I was wrong.”
Duke exhaled, his hand sliding to mine. “This isn’t coming out right. Look, I’m sorry we fought, okay? I love you.”
The words were so close to what I wanted to hear, though still fundamentally off. They clattered through me like a pinball hitting every edge, leaving tiny dents. He might be sorry we’d fought, but he didn’t see me, or my actions, any differently today than he had in Enid. And maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe any decent person wouldn’t. But his I love you sounded like he’d realized an item he’d bought was defective and decided, after lengthy consideration, to keep it after all.
“Okay . . .” I trailed off, deflated. “Well, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. Or at all.”
Duke smiled, relief etched all over his face. “It’s okay.”
A decision clicked into place. I stepped closer to him, so we were chest to chest. “I’m ready now, though. Anything you want to know, just ask me.”
Duke roped his arms around my waist. “Cass, I told you. I don’t need a list of everything that’s ever happened to you in order to know you. To love you.”
A small hollow opened deep in my sternum. Lore had said something similar, hadn’t she? That Andres hadn’t needed to know she was a mother, for example, to know her essential motherness. I thought she was wrong about that.
I felt exposed, soft and raw, unprotected and easily punctured. “Why do you love me?” I asked quietly.
Duke frowned. “Seriously?”
“Yes. Why do you love me?”
The question felt petulant, almost childish, and though my body pulsed with shame, I needed to hear his answer.
“Why do you think?” He leaned down, ready to draw me close for a kiss. I resisted the pull. “You’re smart and beautiful. You’ve always supported my dreams. You get along so well with my family—I think they like you more than me now,” he said with a small laugh.
The hollowness inside me expanded, cold. Maybe it was an impossible question, the reasons for love as unquantifiable as love itself. But still. Was that really what had held us together these five years? What he expected to hold us together for a lifetime?
The first weekend Duke had taken me to the farm, we’d bathed Ole Molasses, the horse that had tossed Duke when he was twelve, splitting his chin wide open on a rock. Duke had never given up on her. She was old now, and he’d murmured to her as we soaped her with huge half-moon yellow sponges. I was awed by the muscle of her chest and the heat of her breath, the shine in her onyx eyes, Duke’s steadfastness to an animal that had hurt him.
“I hope this doesn’t scare you,” he’d said, as warm soapy water dripped down our arms. “But I’m in love with you, Cassie.”
Ole Molasses had snuffled toward me, hot air from wide velvety nostrils. I leaned into her snout to hide the sheen of tears in my eyes. “It doesn’t,” I said, though of course it did. It terrified me.
I’d looked at Duke then, his tousled hair and flannel shirt, and what I’d felt were his mother’s warm, strong hands on mine as she’d taught me how to milk a cow that morning, the udders warm and swollen and sweat-slick beneath my palms. I’d seen Duke’s father in the maple of his eyes. I’d heard his sister Allie’s whoop as she coached me into a trot on her own horse earlier that day and seen the easy way Stephie slumped her body against her father on the living room couch. I’d heard Kyle’s surprisingly baritone voice singing Luke Bryan as he helped his mother mend a fence, and I’d seen Dylan kissing his wife, helping their kids collect eggs from the henhouse. Duke said he’d fallen in love with me, and I thought I’d fallen in love with his family, and I was terrified of losing them.
The air between us crackled with a hurt I knew Duke didn’t completely understand. I pressed my thumb into the prongs of my ring, wanting the skin to break.
“Cassie?” Duke covered my hands with his. “Are we okay?”
“Of course—” I started to say, but I stopped. I was ready to be honest. With him, with myself. “I don’t know.” Tears snaked up my throat. “No. I don’t think so.”
Duke stared at me.
“Duke, I can’t come to the farm with you,” I said.
“What? Why not?”
“I have an interview with Fabian.”
Duke gave a short, relieved laugh. “Jesus. Okay. For a second I thought—never mind. When is it? Just come after.”
I wanted to. I longed for Caroline’s warm, lavender-scented embrace, for Allie to pull me aside and say, “Okay, why are you two being weird?” On Christmas Eve we’d all drink eggnog and exchange goofy but oddly useful Secret Santa gifts. We’d let the kids wake us on Christmas Day, though Caroline would have been up for hours, the house smelling like coffee and blackberry pie. Duke’s family had made space for me within its fold. I ached to rejoin it.
But I was aware of a gulf opening inside me, a messy depth of wanting I didn’t think Duke could fill, didn’t think he wanted to fill, and fuck Lore’s eighty-twenty rule, I didn’t want to find myself trying to satisfy it somewhere else down the line.
“I’m sorry.” I twisted the band around my finger. “I don’t know why I said the interview thing. I can’t come with you at all. Duke . . .” I felt dizzy, nauseous, almost worse than I had in my father’s kitchen. “I don’t think we should get married.”
Duke went rigid. He dropped my hands. “Cass. You’re kidding, right? Because of what happened in Enid? Because I didn’t react right?”
“No.”
Duke rubbed a hand over his face, then looked back at me as if I were a mirage, flickering in and out of view. He reached for me, as if he could keep me solid. “Cass, this is crazy. We had a fight. It happens.”
“It’s not the fight,” I said. “It’s just—it’s us.”
Duke’s mouth turned downward, a sorrowful expression better suited to an older man standing at the grave of someone he loved. I could hardly bear to know I’d put it there.
“You can’t mean this,” he said.
The room went wavy through my tears as I slipped the ring from my finger. “I do,” I whispered.
Lore, 1986
The bank has that end-of-day rustle as Lore enters the lobby: customers making their final transactions, new-accounts reps tidying their desks, dust covers pulled over typewriters. Lore walks to her office and shuts the door, dropping her heavy purse onto the desk. She has just seen the envelope when Oscar knocks.
“Hey.” He peers inside. “?Tienes un minuto?”
Cramps grip her lower belly, twisting all the way to her back. “Actually, I’m not feeling well, so—”
Oscar steps inside, smelling like he just smoked a cigarette. He gestures to the envelope. “You had a visitor.”
Lore looks down. Panic scissors up her throat. She would recognize Andres’s handwriting anywhere—the deep slant of it, like a motorcycle leaning toward the road.
“He was here twice today looking for you,” Oscar says coolly. “He said he was your husband.”
Lore forces a laugh. “My husband? Well, he was obviously looking for someone else.”
“That’s what I told him.” Oscar doesn’t move.
“Okay.” Lore’s thumbs rest on the corners of the envelope, nearly trembling with restraint. “Oscar, I’m not feeling well, so—”
“But then he showed me a picture.”
“A picture.” Lore’s brain is working too slowly. All she can do is repeat things, buy time while she scrambles for purchase. But she’s falling.
“Of the two of you,” Oscar says. “You were in a white dress. He said it was your wedding day. What the fuck, Lore?”