“Thank you,” she said, sheepishly.
“You’re welcome.” I sat back down. Micah was watching the whole thing, delighted.
It took me a while to stop taking it as an insult. Because that’s what it felt like to me a lot of the time. Like she was telling me, eight bags and one bowl at a time, that she didn’t trust me to hold a single thing. It took me a while to see I wasn’t even in it. She wasn’t refusingme.She just didn’t have the reflex that lets you set a thing down in somebody else’s hands. That had been worn out of her long before me.
I was learning how to manage around it. Like knowing she’d gone to the store and simply being there when she pulled in, bags out of the car before she’d unclipped her seatbelt. I was just there, hands already full. Nothing to ask me for, nothing to fight.
Maybe two weeks after that, my phone buzzed.
ALYSSA
Went to the store. Pulling in ten. You around?
I’d started to think we were turning a corner on it. But it was one thing to refuse my hands. It was something else to make sure I never saw the load.
“There’s a tenants’meeting tomorrow night in Franklin Terrace,” she said over dinner, like it was nothing. “Over in Ironwood. Black mold, no heat, the usual slumlord special. I’m going to hear them out and walk them through their rights.”
My fork paused midway to my mouth. “Ironwood.”
“Seven o’clock. Runs maybe till nine, nine-thirty, if a lot of people want to speak.”
“You’re not driving out there yourself.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s not a good area that time of night. I can have Gerald take you and bring you back.”
She laughed. “It’s a community meeting, Julian, not a back-alley deal. I’ve been doing meetings like this for years. InJersey,no less. I think I can handle the country.”
“Small-town South doesn’t make the risk smaller. Sometimes it makes it worse. It’s Franklin Terrace, inIronwood, after dark. You don’t know that area like I do. You’ll take Gerald.”
“I don’t need a babysitter.”
“A driver isn’t a babysitter. It’s basic safety and convenience. And it’s not whether you have survival skills. It’s that I’d spend the whole night worried about it.”
She stabbed her food. “Fine. But he doesn’t hover.”
The next night,Gerald’s text hit at 9:30pm:
GERALD
Ms. Carter dismissed me for the night. Said her meeting is running long. Tried to stay but she insisted she’d call a ride share later. Sorry, sir.
My heart dropped and my vision went red at the edges. I knew Ironwood. Knew exactly which corners turn a woman alone into a story people tell later. And she’d sent her coverage home. We hadtalkedabout it. She’d sat at that table andagreed, and then the second a man might have to wait in his own car an extra hour, she’d undone the one thing I asked, and told herself she was being considerate while she did it.
Half the lot lights were dead and the rest were flickering. Men hung out along the front of the building, more between the cars. I parked close, engine running, eyes on the door.
Alyssa came out at 11:14 with her phone up and her head down and didn’t see the two men off to the side turn and clock her. I dialed her.
“Hello?”
“Look left.”
Her head whipped around. When she saw my Range Rover her shoulders dropped, the guilt flooding her expression. She ended the call and crossed the lot fast.
I got out without a word and opened her door. She slid in and buckled like nothing was wrong, like she hadn’t just sent away the coverage I’d arranged for her. I got back in, locked the doors, and put both hands on the wheel.
I didn’t pull off. Didn’t look at her because if I did, I didn’t trust what would come out.
