The Lost Husband (21 page)

His pace slowed, and he stopped a few feet away. I saw his gaze slide down my body and settle on the ground.

“Hi, O’Connor,” I said.

“Hi,” he said to the grass. “Jean asked me to pick up some hay bales and take them over.”

“Okay,” I said. Then, “Do you need some help?”

“No,” he said. Then, after a pause, he looked up. “That’s quite a dress.”

Another breeze swept across the yard, and the hem of my dress fluttered against my calves. I felt a swell of appreciation for party dresses, breezes, and womanhood in general.

“Too fancy,” I said, like an apology. “Abby picked it out.”

“No,” O’Connor said, shaking his head. “You—”

But at that moment, the kids came around the house from behind us.

“I found a present for Jean!” Tank shouted with all his lungs. I turned to see him coming toward me at a full gallop, dangling something from his fingers. “I named him Lizardie!”

Abby was right behind him, shouting, too. “I told him Jean won’t want a dead lizard,” she said. “But he doesn’t care.”

They stopped in front of me.

“Jean loves lizards,” Tank said, making his case.

“Not dead ones, Tankster,” Abby said. “Not lizard corpses.”

“You never know with Jean,” I said, but when I turned to share the joke with O’Connor, he was already halfway back to the barn.

“Where’s O’Connor going?” Tank asked.

“He’s helping Jean,” I said as we all watched him go. “We’ll see him at the party.”

Chapter 17
 

We didn’t see O’Connor at the party.

We saw just about everyone else in town, but not O’Connor. I hate to confess that I was looking for him. But I confess. I was looking for him.

To my relief, I was not the only one in a dress. Most of the women were either in skirts, dresses, or little 1950s-style crinoline hoedown outfits. The men wore bolo ties and checked button-downs. It was clear that these folks knew how to put the dance hall to use. The lights were all on, bright and cheery, and at one end folks sat around tables eating barbecue and coleslaw. At the other end, up on a stage, a band played country music—and every single person who was not eating was already dancing.

I’d been to plenty of parties in my life, and usually the band was something people ignored—at least until they’d had enough drinks to lose their inhibitions. But these people didn’t have inhibitions. Not on the dance floor, anyway.

As soon as we stepped through the doors, the kids made a run
for the playground out back and Russ grabbed Jean’s hand to hit the dance floor. When the crowd broke into applause for her, she did a little curtsy. Normally I would have joined the group of nondancers standing awkwardly by, but there were none. I wasn’t quite sure what to do or where to go, and I was still hesitating when Sunshine showed up at my side in a black skirt and black tank top. She should have been far more out of place than I was. But she wasn’t.

She leaned in close like a middle-school girl and whispered, “He’s here.”

“Where?” I asked, feeling a little stomach-flutter.

“He’s out on the porch,” Sunshine said, “and he looks completely gorgeous. He got a haircut.”

“I know,” I said. “I gave him that haircut.”

Sunshine frowned. “You gave Tyler a haircut?”

I shook my head. “Who’s Tyler?”

“My ex-boyfriend,” Sunshine said. “The guy I just dumped.”

“Oh,” I said. “No. Sorry. I gave O’Connor a haircut.”

“Thank God!” Sunshine said. “He was going feral.” She glanced around. “Come and say hello to Tyler.”

“Nope,” I said. “Bad idea.”

“You’ve never met him!”

“You just dumped him.”

“We can still be friendly.”

I shook my head. “You can’t be friendly,” I said, “because you are moving on. Tyler is a distant memory.”

Sunshine crossed her arms in a pout, but she didn’t argue. I took the opportunity to look around for O’Connor again, and Sunshine took the same opportunity to look me over.

“You’re gorgeous, by the way,” she said.

I wrinkled my nose at the compliment. “Thank you.”

“But you seem miserable.”

“I’m not a big-parties person,” I said. “Or a square dancer.”

“Join the club,” Sunshine said.

“I’m just dreading standing around all night alone.”

“You’re not alone,” Sunshine said. “You’ve got me.”

“You’re not going to go square-dance?”

“Hell, no,” she said. “My life is sad, but not that sad.”

As she spoke, a young guy in a T-shirt with an octopus on it came up to us, his eyes on Sunshine like she was the only person there.

“Hey,” Sunshine said, when she noticed him.

“Hey,” he said. “Thanks for the help at the feed store the other day.”

“No problem,” she said.

“You won’t get in trouble, will you?” he asked.

“Not if you don’t tell on me,” she said.

He shook his head. “I won’t.”

Just as I was wondering if this guy was the infamous Tyler, Sunshine said, “I forgot your name.”

“It’s Marshall,” the guy said.

“I’m Sunshine,” Sunshine said.

“I remember,” Marshall said.

Sunshine turned to me. “This is Russ’s best friend’s cousin’s grandson.”

“Wow,” I said.

“We used to go skinny-dipping at the spring,” Sunshine said.

“As kids,” Marshall added. “But then I moved away.”

“Now he’s come back to town,” Sunshine said, looking him over.

“Welcome back,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me. Sunshine had all his attention.

They ran out of things to say just as the band’s song wound down, and the awkward pause that followed seemed extra awkward with ambient noise in the background. Then, as a new song started up, Marshall took a breath and said, “Dance with me?”

“Square-dance?” Sunshine said, as if there might be another choice.

Marshall nodded and held out his hand.

She gave me a what-the-hell glance, took his hand, and told him, “You talked me into it.”

Before I knew it, they were gone.

With no one else to talk to, I looked around for O’Connor again. He wasn’t there. I glanced at the door to the playground, where the kids were, then looked over at Jean and Russ. I watched them for a few minutes and came to admire their technique. This wasn’t beginner’s square dancing. This was expert level. I couldn’t have joined in even if I’d wanted to. The caller gave them instruction after instruction that left things like “swing your partner” and “do-si-do” in the dust. They never missed a beat as the caller had them “cut the diamond,” “spin the gears,” “explode the wave,” and “acey deucey.” Jean and Russ were square-dancing ninjas. Who knew?

I watched for a while before starting to feel self-conscious about standing on the sidelines alone. So, just to have something to do, I headed to the far end of the room where the food was and piled myself up a plate. But then, turning toward the tables, I wasn’t quite sure where to sit. I didn’t know any of the few people eating well enough to join them, and so I wound up making my way to an empty table, sitting down with my plate of food, and poking at it with my plastic fork.

I kept thinking that the table would fill up, that someone would come and join me, but no one did. Maybe it was being surrounded
by so many people paired off and having fun. Maybe it was the fact that I’d gone to the trouble of dressing up—and trying to look pretty for the first time in so, so long. But sitting alone at that empty table in that big room, I felt as lonely as I’d been since I came here.

Finally I took my untouched plate to the trash can and dropped it in. I decided to walk to the back door and check on the kids, but as I did, the announcer took the microphone and spoke to the crowd.

“Okay, lucky dogs,” he said. “It’s time to tear up the dance floor. Find a partner, pronto! I want every single person in this room dancing.”

The crowd obeyed. Everybody—and I mean everybody—partnered up. People came in from the porch and left their half-eaten dinners, and the whole room settled into positions, waiting for the music to start. The whole room, that is, except for me.

And as the entire town of Atwater launched into one big hoedown together, I felt a gaze resting on me in that inexplicable way that makes you turn your head. When I turned, there was O’Connor, up on the stage, perched on a stool with chicken bones in his hands. He’d been there all along. His eyes crinkled up, and he gave me a wink.

I raised my hand in a little wave, but the spark of happiness I felt at seeing him was promptly eclipsed by the idea not only that I was completely alone in that moment but also that O’Connor was witnessing my aloneness. That made it a thousand times worse.

I turned toward the back door and stepped out to stand by the playground. The night air was chilly, and the stars were out. The kids were digging in the sandbox with full dedication—Tank totally
unself-conscious in his dragon costume. I watched them until my eyes filled up with tears, and then I had to look up to the night sky to keep them from spilling over. I took a deep breath. What was it with me? Why couldn’t I ever, ever feel like I belonged anywhere?

And then I heard O’Connor’s voice right behind me. “Who have you been looking for all night, anyway? Santa Claus?”

He caught me by surprise, but I held still. “Nothing,” I said. “Nobody.”

“You’ve been craning your neck around the room all night long,” he said. He wasn’t wrong, of course. He had me on that, and he’d probably guessed I’d been looking for him. But the fact that he’d seen me also meant that he’d been watching me, too. I wasn’t sure if he’d meant to confess that or not.

“And then you ate dinner all by yourself. Or failed to eat. Why didn’t you sit with somebody?”

I had no idea how to answer that question. I didn’t even know the answer myself.

He was standing very close.

I didn’t look at him.

“You’re not crying, are you?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said. “I’m looking at the stars.”

“ ’Cause that would be a stupid thing to cry over. Not getting picked at a dance.”

“I’m not crying.”

“You know why nobody picked you, right?” he asked. I could feel the cold pearl snaps of his western shirt against my elbow.

“Because everybody in this entire town has somebody but me?” I said. It sounded even worse out loud.

O’Connor shifted his weight. “It’s that dress you’ve got on,” he said. “You just look too good.”

I gave a little laugh and shook my head. “I’m always having that problem.”

“It’s true,” he said.

“It’s not true,” I said. “But that’s nice of you.” I lowered my eyes to meet his gaze. And, as predicted, the tears spilled over. I wiped them away.

“Come on,” O’Connor said, hooking an arm around my waist to lead me back inside.

“Why?” I said.

“So we can square-dance,” he said.

“I don’t want to square-dance,” I said, drying my face again with my sleeve.

“Yes, you do,” he said. “It’s genuinely fun.”

“I don’t feel like having fun,” I said, glancing over at the kids.

His arm was still around me, and he moved us toward the door. “Fine, then. We won’t have fun. We’ll be the worst ones out there. We’ll suck.”

I studied his face. “I bet you’re a really good square dancer.”

He smiled at me as we crossed the threshold of the door and stepped into the bright room. “I am a fantastic square dancer,” he said, giving my waist a little squeeze. “But I’ll hide it.”

Chapter 18
 

That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed in my nightgown in the dark for hours. I tried my stomach, my back, my side. I watched the fan blades spin in the night shadows. I made lists of things to do in my head. I blinked my eyes a hundred times.

On the drive home from the party, where we had stayed too late, Abby had picked a ridiculous fight with her brother—giving him a marble she’d found in the sandbox and then, meanly, taking it back a minute later. When he cried, she called him a baby. When he grabbed for it, she punched him in the chest. All the while, I was in the front seat, trying to reason with them and drive, too, saying, “Hey, we’ve had such a great night! Let’s not spoil it!” and then, “Guys, knock it off,” and finally, as the situation devolved, “No more fighting! Stop it!” None of which was heeded.