The Lost Husband (32 page)

“The marshmallows you’re holding?” he said, gesturing at them.

I looked down again, feeling all the misery and injustice and self-pity that I’d just foresworn taking back over.

“Take them!” I said, but I threw them on the ground. And before they even landed, I was striding back through the yard toward my car.

O’Connor followed me—to his credit, without stopping to pick up the marshmallows.

“Hey!” he said, catching up. “What’s that about?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere,” I said. “I’m going nowhere.”

And it was literally true. Because when I got to my car, O’Connor’s truck, with its Airstream trailer still attached, was blocking it.

But that wasn’t stopping me. I turned around without breaking stride.

He was right on my heels. “You’re mad at me because I wanted your marshmallows?”

So literal. “No,” I said.

“Keep them!” he said. “I don’t care.”

“This is not about marshmallows,” I said. I knew where I was going now. The forest trail to Jean’s house was on the other side of the clearing. If I couldn’t drive away, then I’d walk.

“Then what
is
it about?” he demanded.

If he didn’t know, then I couldn’t tell him. And the fact that he didn’t know—that he hadn’t known all along—absolutely enveloped me with rage. Right about the time that this feeling hit, O’Connor caught up with me, grabbed my arm, and spun me around.

“You’re not going into the woods,” he said, his face determined.

“Yes, I am.”

“I’m not asking,” he said. “I’m telling. You are not going into the woods.”

“You can’t tell me what to do,” I said, sounding like a four-year-old even to my own ears.

“You want to go in there in the pitch black and stumble down an unlit and unmarked path for half a mile downhill past brambles and poison ivy?”

“Yes!” I said. “That’s exactly what I want to do.”

O’Connor seemed at a loss. “What about the panther?” he said at last.

“The panther?” I said, like he was totally crazy. “Fuck the panther!”

I turned to keep going.

But there was his hand on my elbow again pulling me back, and this time, he didn’t let go. He put his face right in mine. “Libby!” he said. “What the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know!” I said. “You tell me. You show up at Jean’s in the middle of the night falling-down drunk and drag me out into the yard, and then you march into Abby’s school like a vigilante, and then you disappear with your crazy trailer and Jean won’t even tell me where you’ve gone, and then you show up out of nowhere and ask me for marshmallows! You tell
me
what’s going on! Because I sure as hell have no idea.”

He was a little out of breath from the chase and the arguing. He let go of my arm, and his voice got quieter. “I
have
been acting kind of bananas, huh?”

“Damn straight,” I said, a little quieter myself.

“I think,” he said then, studying my face, “if I’m really honest … I think it’s because I’m in love with you.”

Everything went quiet. We were both a little out of breath.

“You can’t be,” I said at last.

“I can’t be?”

“What about Erin?”

“I was in love with Erin,” he said, nodding, “when we were married. But when she cheated on me and then divorced me, that kind of killed it.”

“She cheated on you?”

He nodded. “She did.”

“And then you got divorced?”

“That’s right.”

“But you took care of her anyway.”

He nodded, and he reminded me so much of Abby when he said, “Somebody had to.”

“And now her sister’s back,” I said.

“Yes. In Austin.”

“Is that where you went?”

“Yes. To check on her and to see the setup.”

“And you’ve moved to Austin, too.”

O’Connor frowned. “Who told you that?”

“Sunshine,” I said.

He shook his head.

“Didn’t you get a dream job?” I asked. “In the Austin Fire Department?”

“I got an
interview
for a dream job,” he corrected. “But I didn’t go.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

“Because Abby got hurt that day, and I went with you instead.”

“You ditched your job interview to come with me?”

O’Connor nodded.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it was time to open up a can of whup-ass on PeePants Gaveski,” he said with a grin. “And because, like I said, I’m in love with you.”

“You can’t be,” I said. “I’ve been throwing myself at you for months and you’ve been totally uninterested.”

O’Connor blinked. “You haven’t been throwing yourself at me.”

“Yes, I have.”

“No,” he said. “You’ve been having séances to contact your dead husband.”

He had me there. “But those weren’t real.”

“Sunshine thought they were real. She told me all about it. She
was going to get him to come to you every night in your dreams. Because you’d never gotten over him and you never planned to.”

“I did get over him,” I said. “A while ago.”

“Sunshine doesn’t think so.”

“Why does Sunshine get to be the expert?”

I had him there. “She sounded really certain.”

“She’s an actress.”

“She was pretending?”

“She was just wrapped up in the whole story of it,” I said, “and the romance of a lost husband who returns from the dead. So was I, a little, at first. But then we kind of moved on.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Because we had more fun drinking beer and goofing around. The séance stuff wasn’t very interesting.”

He looked at me like my answer was vitally important. “Why not?”

I thought about it. “Partly because it was pointless. And partly …” Despite everything he’d just confessed and the breathless way he was looking at me, I couldn’t quite say out loud the words that were in my head.

Instead, I reached out to him and pulled the hem of his T-shirt until he stepped closer. But once he was there, I couldn’t bring myself to look up. I twisted his shirt around my fingers.

He was waiting for an answer—even though, really, he already had it.

I thought about him, and me, and the human race in general—how brave and resilient and hopeless we all are. I felt so sorry for us, all broken and disheartened, but I admired us, too. We muddled through. We didn’t give up. We found wisps of happiness snagged on brambles. We made all those ridiculous mistakes humans
are so famous for. I’d tried so hard to make a perfect, untouchable life for myself. But trouble finds you. Tragedy finds you. And we keep trying anyway. We hope for the best. We believe we can make something for ourselves—something good that will last—even though, at the exact same time, we know we can’t.

And there was O’Connor, living a life he’d never expected. And there I was, exactly the same. Both of us still alive, and both of us still trying to do the right thing. And I knew it was time to stop wasting time. Because all of this—everything around us—was slipping away, even as it happened.

His hands were on me now. They were warm and callused, and they’d found my hips under my shirt, just there above my jeans. He leaned in so close that I could feel his breath in my hair. I let my hands copy his and find their way under his T-shirt, too. It was time to be brave and confess.

But, before I could do it, he brought his head down to lean his forehead against mine. His hands left my hips as he brought them up to my face. He nudged my chin up, and I met his eyes, and when I did, he pressed his mouth against mine. A kiss different from any I’d ever had. Sadder. And more determined. We weren’t some perfect picture book, I thought, and for the first time I understood the way that imperfection can make things better. Our lives hadn’t played out the way we’d expected. Things we’d counted on had slipped away, and were still slipping away—which made this little kiss and whatever it might lead to that much more of a blessing. I didn’t know what troubles waited ahead, but I knew that we’d found each other for now.

I tightened my hold on him at the same time the rest of me started to melt.

“Partly what?” he asked then, again, barely letting go of the kiss. “What’s the second ‘partly’?”

“I forgot what we were talking about,” I said.

“No, you didn’t,” he said, and kissed me some more. “You said, ‘Partly …’ ”

And so before we made our way back to the Airstream, and before we stumbled sideways up the steps, still kissing and fumbling for the bed, and before I could give myself over to the blissful relief of not being alone, and before O’Connor could make a barefoot midnight stumble out to the bonfire embers to retrieve that bag of marshmallows, I had to earn it all with the truth.

I put my hands up behind his neck, pulled his ear down close, and took a breath. “Partly,” I said, “because of you.”

Chapter 25
 

By lunch the next day, when Jean and the kids got back, O’Connor and I had spent a long morning tangled in the sheets in his Airstream, made it back home to milk some annoyed goats, and done a morning’s worth of farm chores. As Russ’s Mercedes rattled up the gravel drive, we posed ourselves on the front porch as innocently as we could manage.

The kids disappeared in the garden after a quick hello, but Jean stayed on the porch untangling the fishing poles while Russ unpacked the car. She eyed us over and over, and when Russ showed up to announce he was so dirty he’d need three showers in a row, Jean gestured at us and said to him, “You owe me fifty bucks.”

“Why?” Russ said.

“Libby and O’Connor,” she said, waving her hand at the two of us. “It worked.”

“Oh,” Russ said. “It did?”

“Can’t you tell?” Jean said. “Look at them.”

And it was easy to see that Russ could tell once he looked. Some things, like being happy, are hard to hide.

“What do you mean?” I asked then.

“We had a bet about you guys,” Russ said. “Jean thought you were meant for each other, and we bet fifty bucks on it.”

“You bet against her?” O’Connor asked.

I gave Russ a look. “Does that mean you didn’t think we were meant for each other?”

“Actually,” Russ said, “I thought you were meant for each other, too. But Jean likes me to antagonize her, so I try to oblige when I can.”

I flipped back through all the times Jean had forced O’Connor to drive with me to the farmers’ market. “Was it all a setup?” I asked. “All those Saturdays?”

“Not all of it,” Jean said, looking pleased with herself. “The broken fridge door? You can’t buy a setup like that.”

“But,” I said, “you
were
setting us up?”

“As often as possible,” she said with a little nod.

I looked at O’Connor in disbelief, and he started to laugh.

“Can you blame me?” Jean asked.

Russ was counting bills out of his wallet. “Fifty bucks,” he said to Jean. “You can buy me a steak.”

There was nothing left to do then but give up and go sit close to O’Connor.

He put his arm around me as Jean took Russ back to his car to say goodbye, and they walked out arm in arm with the goats at their heels. As I shifted my gaze to the kids on the tire swings, then both packs of dogs lounging near them, then one of the kittens chasing after Dubbie the rooster, and then the long grass waving in the wind, my mind pulled back to see it all from a great distance. It seemed so clear now—the way we were all connected,
the way
together
and
apart
pushed and pulled on each other, the way you had to lose one thing to find another. I couldn’t help but think about Danny and the way losing him had led us here. And I knew there was no place I’d rather be.

Maybe it wouldn’t last. Maybe things wouldn’t always be exactly the same. Maybe O’Connor and I were meant for each other, or maybe we weren’t. Maybe Tank would grow up to run the goat farm, and maybe Abby would grow up to run the country. Maybe Sunshine and Marshall would grow up, too, and stay together, and have ten little goth children in skull T-shirts. Maybe PeePants Gaveski would learn to regret all his meanness, or maybe he’d spend his whole life wondering what was wrong with everybody else, just like my mother.

And maybe Jean would live to be a hundred and we’d wind up with many more years together than we’d spent apart. Maybe she’d write a bestselling beef-and-butter cookbook and go on the
Today
show in her overalls. Or, more likely, maybe we’d never really make up all the years we’d lost.

Anything was possible. Everything was uncertain. But I knew one thing for sure: I’d bounced back before, and I would do it again and again and again. Because that’s the only choice there is. And as many things as I still had to lose, I had just as many more left to find.

For my sweet children,
Anna and Thomas,
who have given me
a whole new understanding
of love.

Acknowledgments