He stopped then. I threw myself to my knees beside the car. He got out, and both of us looked.
That poor fucking kitten. I couldn’t stop staring at it. My mom was standing against the door, crying like she was the one he’d run into, while I watched the kitten try to breathe with its chest crushed.
I thought we were united. I thought he was looking at the kitten the way I was, trying to breathe for it, soaked in remorse and confusion and a desperate, unraveling kind of hope for its rescue.
I kept thinking that. Right up until he hauled off and kicked it.
It wasn’t even dead, but he kicked it hard enough to send it sailing on a low arc, inches above the ground. It rolled through the gap in the neighbor’s trellis, coming to a stop underneath, too far underneath the trailer for me to reach.
It would rot there. I didn’t know that yet.
“Quit crying,” he said. “It’s just a fucking cat.”
When he got in the low-slung car, pulled the door handle shut, and drove away, I didn’t hate him. I blamed my mom for all of it—the argument, his anger, the kitten.
I didn’t hate him, but I understood for the first time that he and I aren’t the same.
He’s the kind of man who would kick a kitten.
I’m not.
My mom doesn’t seem to get that. This morning she sent me a text that said, Happy Valentine’s Day to the love of my life!
I held the phone in a tight grip. It was either that or fling it across the room.
The love of her life.
When she’s with my dad, she calls him that. Wyatt Leavitt, the love of her life. Her sweet man. Her wanderer.
“There’s nothing like passion,” she told me last time she took him back. “You wouldn’t understand, Westie, you’re too young, but passion is what we’re made for. Without it …” She shrugged, cast her eyes at the ceiling, searching for the right words. “Without it, we’re just animals.”
This about a man who’s gut-punched her. A man who split my lip when I tried to protect her because he was smacking her around, calling her names, slapping her silly while she cried and begged him not to, not to hurt her so bad, “Please, honey, don’t.”
The love of her life.
And I look just exactly fucking like him.
The hostess, Jessica, sticks her head through the door. “Sixteen’s ready for the check, eight’s stacked the menus up by the edge of the table, and I took a dessert order for you on twelve. If you don’t get back out there, I’m telling Sheila to fire you.”
“Coming.”
I open the outside door, drop the half-finished cigarette on the concrete step, and grind it out under my shoe.
Jessica waits until she actually sees me moving before she heads for the front.
I take the check to table sixteen, get table eight’s order, deliver dessert to twelve. Then I check on my other tables. The whole time, my mother’s words are drilling a hole between my eyebrows.
The love of my life.
I’ve dedicated almost ten years to trying to be the man my father should have been but isn’t. A man who will put the family first, no matter what. Keep them safe, keep them fed, keep them happy.
I never wanted to be her love. Her kind of love—it makes you weak. It drags you under.
But tonight, more than any of the past twenty-two nights I’ve spent without Caroline, I can’t help thinking there’s more than one way to drown.
Another waiter passes me and says, “Jessica just gave you six.”
“Thanks.”
When I take the water pitcher over, I find my econ teacher at the table. A plump woman, she once brought along four kids and a bag of powdered-sugar doughnuts to a study session and let them go to town. She’s with her husband tonight, dressed up nice. She shows me off a little. “One of my best students last semester,” she calls me, and she says she hopes to have me in her seminar next year.
I take their order and wish them a happy Valentine’s Day.
I like her, so I make an effort to uncurl my lip when I say it.
Back in the kitchen, I put the order in and pick up appetizers for another table, a four-top. I push through the kitchen door with a plate in each hand, two more balanced on my forearms, thinking about another dinner with another woman old enough to be my mother.
Two years ago on Valentine’s Day was the first time I ever set foot in the Tomlinson house. Mrs. Tomlinson had a candlelight dinner prepared at the resort kitchen, and she said she’d pay me two hundred bucks if I played waiter for a couple of hours.
I served the food and stood in the corner where she’d told me to stand, watching them eat—this man who’d taken me under his wing and the woman he married. His love.
This man I wanted so badly to be like, because he had everything I wanted. Respect, money, security, skill.
Mrs. T wore a black dress cut low in the front, her tits half hanging out, diamonds dripping from her ears, down into her cleavage, sparkling on her fingers. She cooed at her husband, talking about their wedding day.
“The happiest day of my life,” she said.
The next week, I fucked her in his bed. She wanted me to take her from behind. I climbed on top of her, did her until she scratched at the sheets, arched her back, came with a yowl like a cat.
I remember holding her hips, pushing into her. A mindless pistoning piece of meat.
No better than an animal.
My mother’s love is a disaster, but I wasn’t doing any better for myself until I met Caroline.
I came to Putnam thinking love was a weakness and sex was a tool. Maybe I was right. I think, with the life I’ve had, I’d have to be some kind of dumb-fuck not to be at least a little afraid of the way I feel about Caroline.
I’ve been worried that deeper is an undertow that will take away my control and leave me as helpless and deluded as my mom. I’ve thought if I let that happen—if I let myself get distracted by Caroline, broke the rules, said fuck it to my common sense—then I couldn’t respect myself, because I’d be no better than my father. No smarter than my mom.
But here I am, hustling steaks and salads and quinoa cakes to one couple after another, smiling and being charming even though I fucking hate this, I hate all of it, I hate everything when I’m not with Caroline, and I’m thinking the whole time, What’s it going to take, a mallet to the head? A neon fucking sign?
I love Caroline. I want her. I want everything she’ll give me, and it’s not going to stop. It’s never going to stop.
And I’m not my father.
I look just like him, but I’m not him. I’ve known that for a long time.
What I need to get through my head, maybe, is that I’m not my mother, either.
I’m not in love with a woman who doesn’t deserve me. I’m not throwing myself at passion like it’s a drug and I need a hit, begging it to take me in, shoot me up, wreck me if it has to.
I waited more than a year to even kiss Caroline, and I had plenty of time before then to learn what she’s all about.
She’s good. She’s smart. She’s fucking fierce.
Honestly, I’m glad she told me off. I was being a dick, and she called me on it. The woman I’m in love with is strong enough to insist I treat her the way she deserves.
I haven’t. I haven’t told her anything about me, my life, my family, my people, because I’ve been afraid she’d use it against me. Pick me apart. Break me open.
But why would she do that? She’s not my father. Not my enemy.
She’s Caroline.
Three weeks without her has taught me the same thing I should have figured out in the eighteen months since I met her: That she’s amazing. That I’m in love with her. That passion feels fantastic.
Loving Caroline hasn’t thrown me off a cliff.
I’m still me. Not my father. Not my mother.
If I get called home, I’m going, because I have to. It’s not negotiable.
I don’t know what’s going to happen before then—not with Caroline and me or with anything, really. I could have to leave tomorrow. I could get bite it in a convenience store holdup. We could all die from fucking bird flu.
But tonight, it’s Valentine’s Day.
If the world ends in the morning, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure it ends with Caroline in my bed, her hair on my pillow, my hands on her ass.
And I mean that in the most romantic possible way.
I’m at her door, a dozen cheap gas-station roses clutched in my hand. I smell like sweat and dishwasher steam, and she’s in her pajamas, her eyes slitted against the brightness of the hallway.
I woke her up.
I woke Bridget up.
If I stand here long enough, I’ll probably wake up half the hall, and I don’t give a fuck.
“What do you want to know?”
“What?” Her voice is thick with sleep.
“Tell me what you want to know. Ask me a question, I’ll answer it. I’m an open book.”
Her hair’s all snarled at the crown of her head. I want to smooth it down, kiss her, take her in my arms.
Too soon. Too soon, even if this works out. And if it doesn’t … I can’t think about that.
“You’re an open book,” she repeats. She must be waking up, because she injects some skepticism into the words.
“Anything you want to know.”
“Let’s start with why you’re here at—what time is it?”
“Eleven thirty-five.”
“At eleven thirty-five at night on Valentine’s Day”—and here she kind of eye-rolls at the bouquet in my hand—“when you haven’t called me or texted me or given the least sign you remember I’m alive in almost a month.”
“Twenty-two days.”
“You’re counting?”
“I can tell you how many hours if you want.”
“Because …”
“Because when it comes to you, I’m a fucking moron. More than you know. Probably in a bunch of ways you don’t have a clue about.”
That almost makes her smile. I can see her lips twitch. She decides not to allow it, but lip twitching is a good sign, so I barrel on. “Look, I didn’t mean to wake you up. I would’ve come sooner, but I was on at the restaurant, and there was this couple who came in right before ten and stayed for fucking ever, so this was the soonest I could get here. I guess I should have come tomorrow, but …”
… but I couldn’t stand it anymore.
… but I needed to see you.
… but once I made up my mind, I didn’t want to wait even four seconds longer than I had to.
“I brought you roses.” I hold them out, the only gift I’ve ever given her, blood red and, I hope, so cheesy she has to like them.
“I see that.”
I wait for her to say something more, give me a clue how I’m doing here. She scrubs her hands over her face—something I’ve seen her do a hundred times at the bakery to wake herself up.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay, Mr. All-of-a-Sudden-I’m-an-Open-Book. Where are you from?”
“Oregon.”
“What town, idiot.”
“Silt.”
“You’re from a place called Silt?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it like there?”
“It’s close to Coos Bay, which is on the ocean. Coos is pretty—they get tourists. Silt is farther inland. It’s kind of …” A shithole. “There’s not much to it.”
“So do you have parents, or are you, like, the product of spontaneous generation?”
She’s teasing, but not really. My family’s a sore spot between us, and she’s pushing right into it. “Everyone has parents, Caro.”
Bridget says from somewhere in the darkness, “Don’t forget, you can slam the door on his foot.”