“I told you when I gave them to you.” He sounds miffed.
“No, I know. I’m sorry.” God, I do know. He bought them from a friend from college, a guy who sells jewelry at farmers’ markets, art walks, and festivals. He even sells them in gift shops, too, especially around Glacier and Yellowstone. They have a Native American, Western flair.
It was a nice gesture on Wallace’s part, and I don’t know why I asked. My quizzing him about where he bought them was about as callous and insensitive as when I abruptly parachuted out of the relationship. No notice and, I realized later, no care or concern for his feelings. I acted like we were teenagers instead of in our late twenties. Back then, I chalked it up to all the baggage surrounding his sister, Sophie.
Now? Well, I chalk it up to the strangeness of the conversation, of me trying to ignore the cold pit pooling in my stomach and the vertiginous sensation that things have suddenly tilted off-kilter.
And Jess. I need to get back into the kitchen.
“I got them from Kerry,” he says. “They’re not from a department store. They’re not mass-produced.”
“But they’re sold in gift shops near the national parks, where millions of tourists come through?”
“True.”
“And I’m guessing no one has a patent on feather-shaped jewelry.”
“I guess.” He sighs loudly.
“Plus, this sketch, it’s black and white. You can’t tell if those circles in the center are beads or gems or—”
“Yeah, but Crosbie, it’s weird, okay?”
“I’ll admit that. But really, it’s not me. And I need to go.” I tell Wallace I’ll get back to him later and grab the dustpan.
Jess sweeps up glass.
“Here, I’ll do that.” I grab the broom from her and start funneling the shards into the pan.
She sits down at the table and locks onto her phone again.
“Jess,” I say. “Put that away. It’s not me, okay?”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I’m a nobody from Montana.”
ButamI sure?
Yes. I may have stuff—big, ugly stuff—shoved deep into a dark closet, but that doesn’t mean it’s me. My “things”—the bruised, ugly truths I take to bed with me each night and wake up with every morning—are vague and amorphous, like messy Etch A Sketches with wayward lines. And even though one of those truths could land me in jail, there’s only one person who knows about it, and there’s no way he’d say anything to anyone. Ever.
“And I’m not even in the public eye like you,” I add.
Her lower lip pouts.
“Look, Jess, I promise. It’s not me. It’s coincidence. Let’s just have a nice dinner with Sam. We’ll deal with this later. Okay?”
When I get a nod from her, I ask her to grab me a trash bag and a vacuum so we can get any remaining minuscule fragments. But when I turn back to sweeping, I do it slowly, methodically, as if something tells me I should hold on to this mundane chore for a moment longer, as if my subconscious already knows that I should fight for this last normal instant before my life suddenly changes.
Chapter 5
Sam’s excited to tell us about his day while we eat, how he and his friend Oliver gathered tomatoes from Oliver’s mother’s garden and dropped them into her yard from high up in his tree house simply to watch them splat.
I’m happy to have him take my mind off the sketch. I smile at the image of the tomatoes in a mushy pile and the boys giggling uncontrollably.
Jess asks Sam if he got permission from Oliver’s mom for the tomato mess. When he says they didn’t, she scolds him, then turns to me because I’m still grinning.
“You’re encouraging him,” she says.
