“One day she’ll wake up and it won’t hurt as bad. Remember what the preacher would say when Faye would make us all go to church together? ‘This too shall pass.’ I tell myself that every day—not for me, but for Faye. I pray every day that she’ll stop hurting over me, because I’ve already accepted my fate,” he mutters, staring off into Beatrice’s backyard. “Lovie has you in her heart now, and that’s gotta be enough for you. You doing the right thing.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
LOVIE
Teddy’s back.
His haunting voice sneaks under Ms. Vera’s bathroom door along with a skunky smoke smell, but he isn’t musing about being beaten down by love today, though. Today he just wants to know how to mend a broken heart, and I get it because I want to know too.
Ms. Vera’s tabby, Ginger, rubs her back against my numb legs dangling from the side of the bathtub. I brush my hands against her soft fur, reveling in her low purring.
“Lovie…” Aunt Faye rasps, coughing and knocking on the door.
“Ma’am?”
“When you finish up in the bathroom, get the towels out the dryer.” She clears her throat as if she has more to say, but instead of saying it, she shuffles away from the door.
I’ve been waiting for a lecture or even an “I told you so” since Sunday, but so far there’s been nothing but a painful quietness that lingers between us when we’re alone together. I can’t even remember the drive home from Lucky’s on Sunday or how Imade it from the car to inside the house. All I remember is crawling into my bed where I fell into a torturous sleep that finally ended this morning.
Her and Uncle Kenny are fighting again, and I don’t know if they’ll make up this time. Their strained voices crawled under my bedroom door on Sunday night and Monday morning until they finally fizzled out on Tuesday evening when he went back to work. They yelled back and forth about me, that NDA, and Rich, of course. Uncle Kenny wanted to know why I couldn’t just sign the NDA and why Aunt Faye couldn’t just let Rich go. He wasn’t her son, and AJ wasn’t my fiancé anymore. Both choices should be easy for us.
“We can all just move on,” he said.
When Aunt Faye didn’t agree, he finally blurted out what I think he’s been wanting to say since me and him sat in his truck outside of H-E-B. This is all too much for him—Aunt Faye and all of her problems she brought with her from the Bottoms are just too much.
Ms. Vera says some of it is Aunt Faye’s fault.
“You’ve been carrying another man and his problems in your heart for twenty years,” she said while I eavesdropped outside the sunroom. “The cracks in you and Kenny’s relationship were gonna appear eventually whether Lovie showed up and shook things up or not. The brain can’t override the heart. You can’t train yourself to love someone else. That isn’t how love works, Faye.”
It really isn’t.
And now I think I know what Aunt Faye wanted to say before she walked off from me at the park on Family Fun Day. Those Lovelace men aren’t made for casual flings because they’re meant to be experienced for a lifetime. It’s why she can’t tear her heart from Senior’s.
I swipe a stray tear from my cheek and stare at Paco’s chubby baby face on my phone.
This waiting game I’m playing is silly—futile even. There’s no call coming from Rich, and all of my calls to him go unanswered. The endless rings linger in my head while I try to run from the sadness in Aunt Faye’s eyes when she looks at me.
I tried to hate him to make this easier. I tried to put myself in his backyard on the day that he did what he did to Jamari. I tried to feel what Jamari probably felt before everything went black. I tried to tell myself that even though Rich doesn’t have Tony’s eyes, he still has a part of him—maybe even the worst part. But none of it matters because all I keep hearing is him begging me to turn around and look at him.
“I should’ve looked at you, Rich. God, I should’ve looked at you…” I murmur, reaching into my shirt and fingering his necklace that I tied around my neck when I finally got the strength to pull myself out of bed this morning.
It’s the only solace I have—the only physical reminder I have of our short time together. The rough grooves of the diamonds dig into my skin, and sometimes I stare into them hoping to catch a glimpse of his reflection.
“God, why?” I suck in a deep breath, dropping the pendant and running my hand across my face.
That bone-chilling feeling I brought from New York is back. It slithered its way back around my limbs, and it’s so heavy that it steals my breath throughout the day.
Another soft knock on the door makes me gasp and straighten my back.
“Lovie—the towels,” Aunt Faye says. “You know what, I’ll just get?—”
“No. I…I didn’t forget. I just needed to make a call.”
My words get lost somewhere between the music playing and Ms. Vera’s coughs, and Aunt Faye’s shadow disappears from the crack under the door. I don’t think she even heard what I said.
I sigh, glancing down at my phone and unlocking it. I go to its contact list where only three people exist—Rich, Aunt Faye, and Yessenia. My finger hovers over “Rich.”
