She wrote my name in a grocery list this morning.
Thought about what I wanted on a sandwich.
Planned to come home and make something with fancy mustard, and now she’s in a drawer at the county coroner’s office and I’m standing in our kitchen reading her handwriting andthe fancy mustard is still in the cart, unbought, because she died before she got to the store.
I pick up the mug. Her lipstick is still tacky.
I put it back down very carefully, like it’s the last grenade on earth and I’ve just pulled the pin.
“Lee.” Shadow’s voice from the doorway. “What do you need?”
I shake my head.
There isn’t a word for what I need.
The English language, for all its stolen words and borrowed phrases, never bothered to name the thing a man becomes when the other half of him is scraped off a Texas highway.
“I’ll stay,” he says. Not a question.
He sleeps on the couch.
I don’t sleep at all. I sit on the edge of our bed with her pillow in my lap and I breathe in lavender and vanilla and I listen to the rain hit the roof the same way it hit the wreckage of her car, and I think: I should have driven her. I’m the Road Captain. Routes and roads are my whole goddamn job.
If I’d driven her, she’d be alive.
If I hadn’t answered the phone, maybe she wouldn’t have been distracted.
If I’d said don’t go, stay home, skip dinner, come to the clubhouse instead?—
If. If. If.
The ifs will eat me alive for the next few years.
I don’t know that yet.
Right now I think this is the worst it will get.
I’m wrong about that, too.
Earl arrives in the morning.
Rose’s father. The man who raised her alone after her mother died young.
Tough old Texas rancher with hands like saddle leather and a spine made of fence wire.
He walks through my front door and he looks at me and I watch the last piece of him that was still standing collapse.
The sound he makes is not a word.
It’s older than language—a father’s grief, raw and primal, and it comes from somewhere so deep inside him that his whole body bows under the weight of it.
He grabs the doorframe to stay on his feet.
I catch him.
We hold each other up in the hallway of the house where his daughter lived and loved and left her boots by the door, and we stay there until the sun clears the tree line.
Bex arrives an hour later.
