​TWENTY

Elena

Music's up, windows down. Gloria Estefan is blasting through the GrandAm's speakers, and I don't even go to change it. I'm in that good of a mood.

I sleep better without drinking, that I've known for a long time. But I also slept better after last night, underneath Mitch's body, relearning what we've already learned. I know there are splintered parts of him that love me—the physical kind of love—and I think maybe I can glue them back together, slowly but surely, and maybe somewhere down the line, I'll be the only woman, person, he needs to love.

Maybe.

“What's in it?” Sela asks. I picked her up from Trudy's, from “girl's night” as Ronnie kept saying with so much saccharine, it nearly rotted my teeth. But God bless her for trying and being my friend even through the worst of my storms. She also gave me a box of clothes she no longer needs and that she thought might cheer me up. So, God bless her again.

And now Sela's strapped in with Mitch's lunch cooler on her lap because Jimmy had to take the truck home and lay a whooping on Brent, his eldest, for smoking a joint in the woods behind their house. I'm sure Pam's called on Jesus more times than she can count today. Oh, Pam.

We pull in, get out. I slam my door shut and then bump Sela's with my hip when it won't close all the way.

“Mitch?” I call out but no answer. I think about yelling out again but don't want to startle him.

“Here,” I say to Sela, handing her the cooler. “Stay here, and I'll bring him down.” She stands at the pillar with the penny and holds Mitch's lunch in one hand and scratches at poor Abe's face with a free finger. She's like a mini-version of her father.

The ladder's at the side of the church, and I make my way up. It reminds me of when we moved to town, Jimmy not quite on our heels and Mitch needing a little extra help with his very first job. It was the funeral home over on Pyle Drive, and the woman who ran it reminded me of a fox with her thick, red ponytail. It was my first time up on a ladder, and Mitch showed me how to patch the roof, and it was kind of nice. Just the two of us and a long strip of sun-streaked sky.

I'm thinking about that day because the sun is glowing much the same way. And when I reach the top, his hands are at his side, and he's looking up at the sky, too. But it's not Mitch.

Oh no.

He turns, and his face is broken—that look when something awful has happened, and your body is finally accepting it.

“I didn't mean to,” he says. “I didn't. It was—you just have to understand.” Aaron's whispering now, and my body plays catch up, and I think my legs will go loose on the ladder. I think I'm going to vomit.

“I'm so sorry,” he cries, his face now shielded with his hands.

“I'm sorry” echoes inside of my head. What Mitch said last night, face and breath warm in my hair.

Aaron creeps towards me from near the steeple, and there’s a bird trapped in my chest. I think about yelling down to Sela, but I don’t want to scare her, and I don’t want to scare myself. He takes my shoulders, and he’s heavy with sadness, and I want him off me. I want my husband. I want Mitch.

Aaron dry heaves and cries, and there's snot on my shoulder. He's noise and force and weight, and then suddenly he’s movement, his arms pressing hard into my shoulders, and my new sandals Ronnie gave me sliding against the metal ladder.

It’s true, you know—that card trick of moments that flicks at you right before it ends. I see Mitch and his hands and my thighs and the razors and my daughter the time I told her to hurry it up because I needed to get my hair trimmed and soiled diapers, soiled panties, soiled hands, and the taste of bleach, of booze, of kisses, my lips in Sela’s hair, her heart in my ears.

And then the white spaces between each card, the lost moments I spent denying myself the pleasure of feeling any of it.

I don’t even think of my TV.​