They’d spent the morning shooting rifles off at a range Hawley had set up deep in the forest. Lily had been quiet, drinking hot coffee from a thermos as he shot off his .387, handling a gun only when he put one in her hands. He’d hoped a round or two would help her blow off some steam, but Lily shot wide and soon gave up trying. She could load and reload now as fast as he could, but her aim hadn’t improved any, no matter how many hours he’d spent trying to teach her. She’d get caught up in the details instead of feeling her way through, and Hawley wasn’t sure how to fix this.
For the past week she had been cleaning their apartment, preparing for her mother’s arrival. Every surface had been scoured, the windows washed, flowers planted in the window boxes, curtains bought and hung. Hawley got up one night at three in the morning and found Lily kneeling in the bathtub, scrubbing the tile with a toothbrush.
“What do you think she’s going to see?” he’d asked.
“Everything,” Lily answered.
—
THEY DROVE DOWN a side street, then into a small lot that marked the entrance to the trailhead. The place was empty and littered with gravel and potholes. Hawley parked under a cluster of pine trees. The sound of the rain eased as they pulled under the canopy. He turned off the engine. The dashboard went dark.
“Right now,” said Lily, “I’m glad you don’t have any parents.”
“Me, too,” said Hawley. But he was lying. There’d been plenty of times over the past six months when he’d wished he had someone to show Lily off to.
It was too wet to shoot, so they sat together in the car, listening to the storm. Every once in a while the branches of a tree would bend and hit the windshield. Hawley reached over and took Lily’s hand. He was always taking her hand. He felt better about things, just by holding her fingers.
“Your mother can’t be that terrible,” he said.
“She isn’t. But when I’m around her, I don’t feel like Me anymore. I feel like Old Me.”
“One of these days I’d like to meet Old You.”
“Trust me. You don’t.”
Lily’s Old Me was a lot like her father’s Drunk Gus. She hadn’t told Hawley too many details but it was enough. Alcohol poisoning. DWIs. Bridges burned with friends. She couldn’t make it through college. She got fired from work. Growing up, she’d thought she was better than everyone else in her hometown, but when it came down to it, Lily said, they didn’t want to be around her, either. At least not when she was Old Me.
Mabel Ridge had done her best to help. She’d brought Lily to the hospital and had her stomach pumped. She’d paid for her daughter to dry out at a fancy rehab clinic. When that didn’t work she tried to have her committed to a mental hospital. And when that didn’t work she had her daughter arrested. Eventually she dropped the charges, and Lily started going to AA. But things were never the same between them.
It was hard, at first, being with someone who was sober. Especially when Hawley had used whiskey to keep himself warm for so many years. But once he’d let it go, he found that drinking was a habit more than a need, a habit he was willing to break for Lily. She was better company than any bottle. And he wanted so much not to disappoint her.
“I might have to go to a meeting tonight,” Lily said.
“I’ll go with you,” said Hawley. “If you want.”
Instead of answering him Lily sneezed. And sneezed again. And again. She’d warned Hawley about these attacks when they first got together. Like hiccups, she said, but with her nose. Sometimes she’d sneeze twenty or thirty times in a row before it stopped. The whole thing embarrassed her, but Hawley didn’t mind. When she was finished her face was blotchy and her eyes were wet. It was the closest he’d ever seen her come to crying.
Hawley turned the key in the ignition and the dashboard lit. Heat radiated from the vents. The air blasted their faces. Lily pulled a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose.
“When’s the next train?” she asked.
“Three o’clock.”
Lily unzipped her coat, shrugged it off her shoulders and climbed onto his lap. She smelled smoky and tart and cold. Her skin was damp and her hair fell in clumps around her ears. Hawley unbuttoned his jacket and wrapped it around them both, pulling her against him. He could feel her thin arms thread up the length of his back. Hawley hoped that Mabel Ridge would never come. They could spend all afternoon in the car like this, tangled up in each other and listening to the rain.
“Sometimes I feel like I could kill her.”
“You’d probably miss the shot.”
Lily rested her face against his neck. He could feel her eyelashes against his chin. “Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done.”
“Marrying you,” said Hawley.
“Very funny.”
—
IT HAD BEEN like stumbling into someone else’s life.
After Lily had dragged Hawley into the snowplow, after they’d crossed state lines, after she’d lied to the clinic in South Carolina about accidentally dropping her father’s favorite shotgun at his funeral, waving Gus’s prayer card and crossing herself and shouting Our Fathers and Hail Marys at the small-town doctor until he agreed not to report it to the police, and after Hawley had gotten patched up, they had stopped at another diner, one that sold cake instead of pie, and had split another milkshake and fallen in love. It was that easy. They talked until the diner closed. They paid their bill and tipped the waitress. Then they got a room at the motel across the street.
She’d taken his hand in the parking lot. He would remember that moment more than the sex they had that night. How he’d stared down at Lily’s fingers latched together with his, hardly believing the change in his luck.
They spent a week together in that motel. Reading the paper in the morning, ordering takeout for meals, sharing stories, playing cards and making love until they were tired enough to sleep. Lily changed the bandages and kept the wound in his leg clean, and once the sun set Hawley hobbled out to the pool and watched her swimming through the blue lights in her underwear. Her legs were long and powerful, her back flexing with muscle, her face a blur as she snatched a breath between each stroke.
When she was through swimming, Lily pulled herself from the water in one fluid motion, then walked dripping toward him across the cement. He held out a towel and wrapped her in it and felt the chill of her body through the fabric.
“What’re you doing here with me?” he asked.
She pressed her cold lips against his skin.
She said, “Warming up.”
At the end of the week they drove north until they hit Maryland, got a license and went to city hall. Hawley in a new shirt and Lily in her dress from the funeral, with daisies picked from the side of the road threaded through the veil of her little black hat.