Until Cap smacks me with his cane, reminding me where I am.
“Anson Burns,” he whisper-shouts.
“Um.” The tour group looks at me eagerly, stepping slightly to the side so there’s a clear path between where I’m standing and Nash. I grip the handles of the wheelchair. “I was wondering if—” Cap gives me another jab with his cane, mouthingAnson Burns. “If you knew anything about Anson Burns.”
The group looks from me to him.
“Anson Burns?” Nash chuckles, taking one step toward me, eyes moving around the crowd. “For those of y’all who don’t know that name, Burns was a Confederate soldier from outside of Florence, South Carolina and believed by some to be part of a wagon train robbery of gold headed to Richmond, Virginia in the summer of 1865 following the war—the War of Northern Aggression as they liked to call it in the South.” There’s a chorus of soft laughs as he takes another step. “Nobody was ever able to prove he was part of it, but legend goes that the clues were in a cryptic letter to his wife—whom he hadn’t seen in years?—”
Nash pauses; it feels intentional. He looks at Cap. As his gaze works its way back to me, it catches on my overalls, but as fast as he’s looking at me, his attention is back on the crowd.
He continues. “The letter explains the details of a life he had planned for them in Charleston. Problem is, they were poor farmers. It never added up that he would have had enough money for what he detailed, especially after the war. We’ll never know. They both died before they ever got a chance to live here.”
He shrugs, taking another step. And another. Finally, he’s right in front of us. “History has a way of pulling people apart just when it’s starting to get good, doesn’t it?”
We stand there, looking at each other, his dark eyes on my sunglasses with an intensity that might melt them off.
“You ever read a story like that?” he asks me directly. “Where the ending doesn’t quite match the beginning?”
The fact he’s talking to me without knowing who I am is implausible. Because:How?How does he not know it’s me? It’s juvenile, but I want him to realize it for the reaction alone. I want him as rattled as I am.
Taking a line from the first day we met, I say, “Every time I pick up a Tijuana bible, actually.”
“Tijuana bible?” His brows pinch and his lips twist; he’s puzzled.Puzzled?“I’m not sure I’m familiar with those. Care toelaborate?” He gestures to the group at hand. “I’m sure these fine folks would love to learn about something new as much as I would.”
What?
That can’t be right. It was our inside joke.For three months eight years ago,Rue. He’s forgotten, and there’s not enough time to feel as sad as I want to. I need to hit rewind and a redo.
“Uh.” Every single person on the tour stares at me—a few of them nodding—and heat races up my neck. I can’t do this. Talk to him—and them—about out-of-date cartoon porn like he’s not him and I’m not me while he says he’s married and I don’t know what that means even though I’m the one he’s married to. I grip the handles of the wheelchair and wish a bus would hit me. “They are—uh?—”
“You think the treasure’s real?” a man calls from the crowd, stealing Nash’s attention and saving me from myself. “And in Charleston?”
Nash takes one backward step before spinning on his heel—which I now notice is in an impractically chosen leather flip-flop—and returns to his position at the head of the group. “Gold was really taken. Anson Burns really existed and died in Charleston.” He slips the sunglasses from his shirt and onto his face. “Who am I to say what happened? People’ve done all kinds of things throughout history that I can’t explain.”
He looks at me one more time and it forces my own gaze to the top of Cap’s hat-covered head.
Nash’s next words are a peppy, “Our next stop will give you a taste of fresh-squeezed mint lemonade and the best pralines in the city.”
For the rest of the tour, he doesn’t miss a beat. I give him a wide berth, but just like the first day I met him in Old Vines, I know where he is. Feel him without seeing him.
We stay in the back; he doesn’t pay us any attention.
He doesn’t know it’s me. He can’t. He can’t possibly know the woman he’s married to is in this crowd and act so cool.
And it pisses me the hell off. Who doesn’t recognize their own wife even if she’s trying to disguise herself? Even if it’s been years? I can’t have changed that much. Sure, I look like a drowned rat, but notthatdrowned. Not so drowned he shouldn’t think,“Hey, I know you. We spent a whole summer screwing ourselves stupid all over vineyards, the bed of a truck you bought me, and in public bathrooms. Oh, and we got married.”
I’m here to divorce him—this little stroll only confirms how right that decision was—but to not know who I am? It’s rude. Rude I felt the shift in the atmosphere the second I walked into the office for the tour and we started breathing the same air, but he’s—what—unaffected? Blind? A fucking idiot? Who else would bring the inside joke of pre-1960s comic strip porn into a conversation with a stranger? Nobody, that’s who. That happens once in a lifetime unless it’s with the same person who is trying to say that they’re the same person who did it the first time.
And—and—he acted like he didn’t even know what I was talking about. Like he forgot we ever existed. Even though we’re married. Maybehehas a brain tumor.
If it wouldn’t draw attention, I’d scream. At him. Maybe even louder than I did on the boat.
Cap feeds off my growing frustration because he’s annoyingly chipper for the rest of the tour, a stark contrast to the brute I met mere hours ago who could only grunt like a caveman. Heoohsandahhsover the buildings like a damn tourist. When Nash mentions a park and the burial site of a pirate named Stede Bonnet, Cap chuckles. “That’s where I was digging when they busted me.”
I don’t have the energy to ask questions about his treasure quest. I’m irritated. By this whole damn city.
The bachelorette party also chips in on the universe’s plot to send me into a tailspin because I swear they’ve ramped up their attentiveness to Nash’s every word. Swear he starts paying them even more attention. I glare at them at a bar as we sample a sweet tea vodka cocktail and buttered biscuit while they pose for pictures with him.Myhusband.
