“Boner, you okay?”
“Yeah.” I picked up a bag of spongy bath toys that had fallen on the floor and put it back on the shelf with the others. “It’s fun between me and Jill. No pressure. Plus, she’s thinking about what she wants to do with her life. She’s had to deal with a lot of shit from her past, and that sucks. We know how that feels, and I don’t want that for her. I just…”
“What?”
“I just wonder if she sees me as one of her new possibilities or if I’m just good enough for now.”
Grace didn’t say a word. We both stood still, right there in the middle of baby car seats, her hands gripping my jacket.
We both knew too well the cost of tiny hopes and the pang of wanting to feel those hopes grow and survive, but not sure if they ever would. For years Grace and I both yearned to live that other life that was always just beyond our fingertips. Convinced we weren’t worthy, we rarely—if ever—reached toward it. We had avoided it, surrounding ourselves in the bland, the tasteless, the dull, the stale. But, there came a time when you recognized it, and wanted it more than your next breath, when you’d do anything—just fucking anything—to taste it, to have it for yourself.
And you reached.
Grace and Lock had finally reached, and they had it now.
Grace let go of my jacket and wiped at her eyes. Her gaze snagged on something over my shoulder.
“Oh, nice.” She moved toward a row of plush rocking chairs beckoning to her from across the aisle. She glided her hands over the deep back cushion of an oak-stained one, a small smile blooming on her face.
Something shifted in my chest.
Grace was smiling over baby furniture.
I crossed the aisle and joined her. She sat in the chair and smiled again as she rocked. Fuck, this was a hell of a difference from over seventeen years ago—when she had been lying in a hospital bed, wanting to end her life, after she’d lost her first love and their unborn baby and had been told she’d never be able to carry another one after the emergency surgery she had to have.
Grace had begged me for a way to end it, so I brought her the pills. I didn’t want her to suffer anymore. I only wanted to give her what she wanted. Grace was the one who held us together, and I’d never seen her like that before—no anchor, tossed on the sea, blind, drowning, no will to lift her head up, to even take her next breath.
I was tempted to end it with her that black night of a hundred horrors. She took the pills I’d brought her, and she made me leave.
Butler’s wife, who ended up staying with her that night, figured it out though. The doctors pumped Grace’s stomach, and thank God, she made it.
It was her choice, but I’d made it happen for her. And the unsuccessful attempt only made her more miserable than before, if that were at all possible. I hated myself for it even more, and we could barely face each other after that night.
A month later, without a word, she left South Dakota and all of us behind. All I knew was, with Dig dead, their baby lost, and Grace gone, too, I’d lost everything that meant something to me all over again. Yeah, I still had the club, my brothers, but the meaning of it had been ripped away, broken.
Just like it had been in the aftermath of Hurricane Inès.
Months had gone by after Grace had left without a word, but I had to know, I had to see her, and I was real determined. I’d kept tabs on her sister and stolen her mail a couple of times. I’d finally found a card from a post office box in Dallas under their mother’s name.
I went down there and waited for Grace. One day, she showed up to check her mail—thin, spooked, blank. I followed her home to this tiny studio apartment, and I broke in, not wanting to take a chance that she wouldn’t open the door if I rang the bell like a normal visitor. She was actually glad to see me once she’d gotten over the shock. We got wasted, strung out on booze, weed, and regret—talking, talking, talking—and we ended up kissing. We stopped it and fell asleep on the sofa, holding on to each other.
When I woke up the next morning, she was gone.
I was destroyed, stranded. Again.
But I knew she was right for leaving. We’d only called the ghosts back up that night. It hadn’t been comforting. It had been haunting, and it’d sliced deep and hurt in new, fresh ways.
It had been dangerous to see each other again.
If I brought her back to Meager or stayed with her, we would have only clung to each other, making us something we weren’t, something we weren’t meant to be, and it would have been out of our pain and loneliness, not something whole but something made up of missing.
She had been right to cut us off and cut us up into pieces, but it sucked all the same. It hurt deep.
At some point though, I had to crawl out from under the grief. We both did.