Then, when half the chips were gone and Natalie hadn’t shown up yet, I decided that it was my right as the person waiting for the other person to eat all the chips if I wanted. It was a good spot. The chips were made in house. It’s easy to tell.
Natalie pulled up outside, I saw her truck, and she strode in like she hated every step she took. She looked around the city like she hated everything about it.
I’ll talk trash on Kansas City, and city life in general, as much as anyone else, but damn I’ll defend it to the death against someone who just thinks we’re all soft because there are buildings taller than the trees.
But it did my heart a little bit of good to see her. That dangerous kind of good, where I had no idea if it was actually hurting me or helping me. Emily and Natalie, they weren’t the spitting image of each other or nothing like that—Natalie was shorter, more wiry. A sharper face, darker hair. But they had the same eyes, the same smile. They were two of the toughest people I’d ever met, and they were tough in a pretty similar way. Emily though, Emily’s tough was tempered with kindness. Natalie’s wasn’t tempered too much at all.
Nice thing about someone as forthright as Natalie, though, is that when she smiled for a half second when she saw me after walking through the door, I know she meant it. She didn’t do much just for the sake of keeping up appearances, or keeping her dead sister’s husband happy.
She sat down, looked at the menu for less than a minute before putting it back down.
The waiter appeared, like magic. Natalie ordered in Spanish, but I knew enough Spanish to know she’d gotten tacos carne asada. Mostly because those are Spanish words already. I got a burrito.
“What’s up?”
“I know you don’t like coming into the city,” I said. “So, first of all, thank you.”
“It’s alright,” she said. She turned and looked out the window. “I don’t know what you get out of it, though. There’s people, everywhere you look. And the buildings? The buildings—”
“Are taller than the trees,” I said. “Yeah, I know.”
“I don’t think we’re meant to live like this, is all,” Natalie said.
“I like both,” I said. “I like seeing people walking down the street. I like seeing people happy or pissed off or sad, I like seeing little kids with that look on their face like they know they’re alive and they just can’t get over how amazing that is. I even, God help me, I like seeing couples. I hated it for awhile, but I like it, because I like to know that someone, somewhere, is happy.”
“I get all of that when they come to the rodeo,” Natalie said. “And you say you want both, but it just means you’re not really getting either. Living in the city then coming out to the country like you’re a damn tourist.”
“All right,” I said. I wasn’t trying to fight. And we’d heard it all from each other before. Last time we’d gone down that route, I’d told her she was trying to have it both ways too, that she liked people just as much as me. And that she needed folks like me to go see those rodeos, and we weren’t a bunch of rubes, either. That we had our own reasons to put down roots in the city.
“What’s with the guitar?” she asked.
Her beer came, Dos Equis, and she poured it into a glass and started it down.
“A box of letters showed up on my doorstep, one year after she died.”
She put down her glass, looked at me closer.
“No postage or nothing. Just a box on my porch. I opened it up, there were nine letters inside. Nine letters to me from Emily. Each one has given me an instruction. Something to get my life back together.”
I couldn’t read Natalie, how she was reacting. “Like what?”
“Like, get a dog. Clean my house. Volunteer. Stuff like that. Simple stuff, practical stuff. She’s not trying to hold my hand through the emotional bits of it, not really. She’s actually just keeping me on the right track.”
“All right,” Natalie said.
I almost told her I’d called her because Emily had told me to, but that kind of honesty wasn’t going to do either of us any good.
“Here’s letter number seven,” I said, and I handed it to her.
She opened it up, started to read. I knew every word of it by heart, already.
“You remember that night, our first anniversary, when we finally got our honeymoon? I remember how you were so convinced you had to get your guitar strapped to that poor horse, until we’d given up and bought you a backpack case so you could carry it yourself. I’d thought you were being silly, that it was just a week and there was plenty we could get up to without you needing to practice your guitar.”
She’d actually even laughed at me, but she’d had such a sweet way of doing it that it felt good.
“That first night, though, we were out on the porch and it was cold out there but we had the stars. And you played for me. Not your silly love songs, either, just country. You do a mean outlaw country cover of pop country. When you sang that stuff it got right into my heart and it lifted me up and that’s one of the nights I’m going to remember until the day that I...well, it’s something that’s stayed with me. So here I am thinking about that night, and I’m thinking that music is to share. Share your music, Luke. Get your friends about as tenth as happy as I was that night and they’ll love you for it.”
Natalie folded up the letter, as reverent with it as I had been. She put it back in the envelope and handed it back to me.
“You should play an open mic night,” she said. “Those are the kind of things you’ve got in the city, right? Go play an open mic night, invite your friends.”
“I’m on my way to do that right after dinner,” I told her.
“That’s good,” she said.
Our food came, then, and I went at it with a hunger I hadn’t felt in awhile. We were silent for a bit as we devoured our food, and it was weirdly comfortable eating with her. I knew she didn’t like me all that much. The feeling was mutual. But the way in which we didn’t like one another was the way in which siblings don’t always like each other. There was something to that marriage thing. Something to being family. Something to putting up with someone just because your wife is their sister. Something to a shared source of grief.
“You should come,” I said.
“What?”
“After dinner. It’s a spot just down the way, I was going to walk. Some people there are pretty good. Most of them aren’t, but it’s nice either way. You should come.”
“Nah,” she said. “Thank you, but I don’t think that’s really my scene.”
The sun was setting, its light caught in the glass of a nearby tall building and bounced all around the street. There are things worth being in the city for. Little things.
“That’s not why you called, though,” Natalie said. “You didn’t call me in the middle of the night because you were hoping I’d come see you sing.”
“I miss her,” I said. My eyes were dry, as I said it. “Every damn day, I wake up and the first thing I notice is that she’s not there.”
“I dream about her,” Natalie said. “Not every night, but three, four times a month I dream about her so hard that I wake up and I’m just ruined. I dream about her sometimes where she’s alive, and we’re just doing the most mundane stuff together but in those dreams I know she’s supposed to be dead. The fact that she’s not is this miracle that kind of forces meaning into every damn thing we’re doing. Like, we’ll be hosing down port-o-potties and I’ll be thinking ‘Emily’s alive. Holy mother of shit, Emily’s alive.’“
I stared at her, listening.
“Then there are dreams where she’s dead, or she’s in the hospital, and those are just the run-of-the-mill kind of heartbreaking. I told you I’d drive in to see you today because when you called, you woke me up from this dream I was having. In that dream, Emily was dead, and I was sitting at my desk in the middle of this winter cornfield, all dead stalks all around me, buried under snow and ice, and I was at my desk writing Emily a lett
er.
“It turned into a stress dream, where I was trying to figure out if the postal service still had service up to heaven, or if maybe I had to take it to church and get the pastor to do it, or maybe there was some reason why it just wasn’t done anymore and it was some massive faux pas that I was going to mail her a letter.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“So I was dreaming about writing her letters, but there she was writing you letters.” The words caught in Natalie’s throat. I pretended not to notice the water in her eyes.
“I miss the mundane stuff too,” I said. “I miss it maybe the most.”
“Emily managed to make everything a game,” Natalie said.
“Yeah.”
She leaned forward, warming to the subject, light coming back into her eyes like I hadn’t seen in too long. “You’d never get bored, doing chores with her. When she was little, she went through these phases where everything was a ‘quest.’ Mom gave us something to do, and she’d snap to attention and say ‘yes ma’am, it will be done,’ or something like that.”
“She held onto that, I think,” I said. “Not the quest thing, not specifically, but the idea that every little thing you did, that was part of life and life was beautiful, so clearly every little thing you did was meaningful.”
“I bet that’s why she wrote you those letters,” Natalie said. “So you could see that with your own eyes, that life is made out of little steps. Clean your house. Get a dog. Little things that you do that together make up a life.”
She finished off her beer all of a sudden, in one long swallow.
“That’s why she sent the letters to you,” she said. “She sent them to you because you need that. The last days of her life, that’s what she was doing I guess, was writing you letters. Was fixing you. The rest of us, she loved just as much. We just didn’t need it.”
“She loved you all so much,” I said.
“Yeah, well, she stayed in the city with you.”
“We were talking, sometimes, about maybe moving out of the city.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “Maybe you were talking it, but it was bullshit. You weren’t going to do it. Least of all were you going to get a nice trailer, hitch it to your truck, and live life like we grew up. Because that wouldn’t work for you. And Emily, she always would do whatever worked for Luke Cawley.”
“She was happy.”
“I’m not saying she wasn’t. I think she even liked that about you. All cultured and big city. She just, shit. She could have done better in life. It’s not on you. There’s nothing in the world that could have changed you into someone you’re not. You’re a city boy. Born that way, and you’re going to die that way. And it’s not what I’d wanted for her. She deserved a better life than you could have given her. Not that you gave her much. You just took.” Her voice had gone bitter. There was the Natalie I remembered.
I stared at my half-full glass, numb.
I was out of fight, the same as I was out of tears. Natalie had her truth. Nothing she said was a lie. It was mean, it was downright rude, but none of it was a lie. Emily had left something of herself at the doorway of our house.
But so had I.
That’s what a marriage is. Two people figure out where they overlap, and where they don’t. Collectively, they weigh what they get and what they leave behind, and they decide if it’s worth it. Never for a single moment had I ever regretted marrying Emily, not even when she was sick, not even when she was dead and I was a wreck. Yeah, Emily had given up a lot to help me get to my dreams faster, but I’d put down my dreams so I could be with her, so I could support her. Because my dreams shifted. I didn’t want to just be a contractor—or a baseball player, or a rock star—I wanted to be a man who took care of my family. Of my wife, and one day, my kids.
Never for a moment had Emily doubted she’d made the right decision. Yeah, I was a wreck sometimes. Yeah, I wasn’t perfect. Emily had given me a lot. But she’d done it of her own free will. She’d done it because she’d wanted to. Always.
Natalie didn’t need to hear any of that, and it wouldn’t do me any good to tell her. She’d get it, someday. Maybe. But most important, I wasn’t there to fight.
“Emily loved you,” I said. Because I thought that was what was really happening. Natalie was jealous, I figured. “It wasn’t a small thing, for her to be away from you. It broke her heart to be so far away. I think it broke her heart how much you didn’t like coming to see us. But even when she was all broken up about it, there was never any doubt. She told me she loved you, but more than that, I heard it in her voice every time she talked about you. And I understand why.”
Natalie was stunned. The waiter came and took our plates, left a check. I pulled a few bills from my wallet, paid for the meal.
“There aren’t many people in this world who miss her as much as you must, but I’m one of them. If you want to talk about her, I’m down. Anytime. Sixty years from now, I’m still down to talk to you about Emily. Anytime you need to, you can call me.”
“You don’t take nothing lying down, do you,” Natalie said.
“No ma’am, I do not.”
She lifted her eyes and looked at me then, straight on, more clear-eyed than she’d been walking in. “I don’t think I was wrong about you, Luke, but maybe I wasn’t right about you either.”
I nodded. “Ain’t much of a compliment, girl, but I’ll take it.”
Coulda been wrong, but I’d’ve sworn that made her smile. Maybe one day we’d get right, after all.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Every cafe I’ve ever been to is a little bit different and little bit the same. This one, the Blue Moon, was a little bit bigger than some, with a little stage up in the far end. They swear the place wasn’t named after the beer, but everything was blue and brown and I don’t know, it just reminded me of a bottle of Blue Moon.
Blue Moon ain’t my favorite, but I’ll drink it with no complaints out of my lips. Which is more or less what I thought about the cafe. Not the place I’m likely to make a ton of friends, just not really my scene, but it’s down to earth and cheap. They ran an open mic night because they were the kind of masochistic bastards who didn’t mind when some college kid read his self-involved poetry he’d written right before he took the stage. They were the kind of masochistic bastards who didn’t mind when a poor slob with an acoustic guitar like me played his heart out.
Dave and Damon and Holger were there already, glued to their seats with a pitcher of beer, like they just kind of lived at places like that. Holger’s wife Lindsey was with them, too, and Holger was clearly on his best behavior. I could tell because when I walked up, he was in the middle of doing a dirty Arnold Schwarzenegger impression.
“I can’t take you all anywhere,” I said, pulling up another chair to the table.
Damon clapped me on the shoulder. “Buy you a drink?”
“I’ll just take a glass of whatever you’re drinking,” I said. Damon nodded, approving, and poured me a glass.
No one had started yet, and I went and signed my name on the list. They went by random order, to keep people around. That was fine, except I had no real way to prepare myself for stage fright. Just had to live it as a little demon alternated between my shoulder—telling me I wasn’t all that good and no one wanted to listen—and my gut, where it told me that my stomach hurt.
I’d invited Rae, too. Because why only have a little bit to be nervous about when you can have a lot to be nervous about? I hadn’t seen her since her party, but I’d been thinking about her a lot. And I was thinking there’d been enough time for everyone to cool down. Least, I hoped.
I smelled pie, kind of all of a sudden, and I suddenly wasn’t as full as I thought I was. Seemed like a pretty good way to quell the demon in my stomach, and maybe that would shut it up on my shoulder, too. Or I’d just get some pie out of the deal.
I went to the counter and bought the whole thing, brought it to the table.
“We were going to clap
for you anyway,” Dave said. “You didn’t need to bribe us.”
“I appreciate the bribe,” Lindsey said.
“Hey Luke,” Damon said, all casual. I looked up from my plate. “You still seeing that girl from your work I seen you with sometimes?”
“Maggie?” I asked. “No, I’m done with that.”
Damon shrugged. “That’s good, because, uh, here she comes. With Lance.”
I turned around and saw the two of them come in the door, him holding the door open for her all formal and gentlemanly. A lot of things went through my mind, all quickly, all contradictory.
First, I was jealous. Which was insane, because I’d not only broken up with Maggie, I’d never been her boyfriend. I’d also invited Rae.
Then I was mad at Lance, for stepping in on...on what? On my territory? That made even less sense than jealousy.
Then I was mad at Maggie. I figured she went for Lance because he looked like me. As if she knew I didn’t like him much, and she was doing it to get at me. This made the least sense of all. Maggie had a type. Physically, I was her type. If I was her type, then so was Lance. And hell, maybe they’d actually be alright for each other.
Also, Maggie hadn’t really met my friends, so the idea that this was some elaborate ploy, well...hormones make people come to stupid conclusions. Me at least as much as the next person. They came over and joined us at the table, and I just went back to enjoying the pie. It was apple. I love apple pie.
“Hey everyone, this is Maggie,” Lance said. He did introductions.
“We’ve met,” I said, at my turn. I was smiling, and it was genuine. I think Maggie picked up on that, and she relaxed. Good.
See, Lance had brought her around to meet his friends on probably their first date.
I’d slept with her for months and never done her that basic courtesy.
Sometimes you hate people because the things that are shitty about them remind you of things that are shitty about you. Sometimes, you hate people like Lance because the things that are good about them remind you of the things that are shitty about you.
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