9 Letters (18 page)

“You can take me out, if
you’re paying, and you find a place that does steak how I like
it.”

“How do you like it?”
I asked.

“You don’t remember?”

All the girls I’d ever been
with, their memories clouded my brain, and I couldn’t figure
out which one belonged to Emily.

“No,” I said.

The dream drifted out into
strangeness from there, into emotion and sound and sorrow. There were
short snippets, of us dancing, of how I’d learned to dance so
much better since I’d left her. How glad she was that I’d
left her, gotten to learn so much. But all I’d wanted was to be
with her. My whole life, all I’d wanted was her.

You wake up from a dream like
that, there’s no getting back to sleep. There’s just
sorrow. Loss and sorrow.

I had dreams like that a lot.
Probably would have them the rest of my life.

The sun came up, eventually,
because the damn thing always does. I got myself out of bed. I stared
at the shower, but I couldn’t really will myself to get in. If
I did, who knows how long I would have just stayed under the water.

I went downstairs, put coffee in
me, and went for the door.

King walked down the stairs,
staring at me and the door.

“Not today,” I said.
“You stay here.”

He looked away, sad. Well, he was
a bloodhound. He kind of always looked sad. But I knew he was as like
as not going to tear my place apart while I was gone, and for some
reason I didn’t care. It’s just stuff. And I didn’t
have it in me to look after him all day. Not that day.

I drove to the Habitat office and
was waiting there at 7am when Morris walked up.

“Didn’t expect you
till next week,” Morris said.

“I ain’t got nothing
else going on today,” I said. My next shift at the bar wasn’t
till Saturday. “Figured I’d do some extra work.”

“Alright,” Morris
said. We loaded up his truck. Kansas City was a convenient place to
get supplies and a convenient place to have an office, but most of
the volunteers were local to the job site. It was always only us,
commuting up there.

We headed out. Country music and
wind, they should have done my soul some good. That’s why I was
there. But King wasn’t sticking his face in the wind, and even
that wouldn’t have been enough. I don’t know. I was just
in a mood. Had been ever since I’d got home from Rae’s
party. Something just didn’t sit right with me, I guess.

One of the homeless-looking guys,
Nathan, was there with Judy and Georgia. He wasn’t much good
with the tools, wasn’t really good for a hell of a lot.

I started trying to map out
electric conduit, but I couldn’t get my head together. Usually,
I’d look at something and it would remind me of Emily and I’d
fall into a dark place for a minute. But I didn’t need anything
to remind me of Emily, not that day.

Being alive was enough.

Then I figured it out. I figured
out why I was alive. It was my punishment for letting her die. For
being too stupid, too selfish, to see what’d been going on with
her. To notice the stomach aches. To notice when she’d gone
quiet. She’d been my wife. We’d been in one another’s
charge. I’d been responsible for her, the same as she’d
been responsible for me. She’d held up her end of the bargain.

She’d worked two jobs,
sometimes. At the library for awhile, shelving books, and then she
ended up working nights at El Jeffe’s tacos, the truck that had
fed our wedding. All that money she brought in, it’d gone
towards tools, towards keeping my damn truck running. I’d been
working too, I’d never lived off of her. But she’d put
every extra dime to seeing my dream realized. To build up capital.

Then, when I started making
enough for us to get by, I was the one who’d told her not to
work. Told her I’d take care of us. She’d agreed quickly
enough, but it’d been my idea.

Which meant there wasn’t
enough money to go for insurance.

What do you need health insurance
for when you’re twenty? We had all the time in the world to
build up to that.

She shouldn’t have died for
me being stupid. There wasn’t much I was smart enough to know,
but I was smart enough to know that. I should be dead and she should
be alive. She’d been better than me at most everything.

Hell, I just played at being a
country boy, but I grew up in the city. She’d grown up in the
rodeo. She’d been everything. She’d been my better half.

That’s what was going
through my head when I was staring at a piece of paper trying to map
out conduits, so I wasn’t doing much good at that.

Looked up, saw Nathan putting in
conduit boxes in the wrong places. Three of them already.

“Hey,” I yelled. I
stood up. Nathan looked up at me. “Are you stupid or something?
That’s not where those go.”

“Alright,” Nathan
said, then turned away like he was afraid of me. He started fumbling
with the box he was holding, not sure how to fix the problem.

“What the hell are you
doing?” I asked.

“Luke, what the hell are
you
doing?” Morris walked up, looked down at the empty page in
front of me. “You need to cool it.”

He was right.

I was angry for no goddamned
reason except that my continued existence was literally punishment
for my sins.

So I went back to knocking nails,
framing timber. Lucky for me, Georgia had the nail gun, and I got to
line them up and drive them home. Started putting up some of the
interior walls.

Wasn’t paying a damn bit
more attention to that than I’d been to the conduits.

“You know what 90 degrees
is?” Morris said, walking up to me.

“What?”

“Besides a balmy day.
Ninety degrees is what one wall should be from the other. This one
here, this one’s body temperature at least. Maybe even has a
fever.”

The wall wasn’t straight.
Not by a decent bit.

“Why don’t you go
home,” Morris said. “Take a break.”

“Whatever,” I said.
“I don’t need this.”

“Alright.” He put his
hands in his pockets, rocked back on his heels, and took a long look
at me. “Maybe it’s best then if you don’t come back
at all.”

Georgia drove me home. Said she
was heading into the city anyway, and didn’t mind doing only a
half-day’s work.

I sat shotgun in her Volvo while
the cornfields ran past the window, and she didn’t say a word
to me. She just let the preacher on the radio do the talking.

I tuned him out. Watched the
farms, instead.

Should have been born a farmer.

Should have been born anyone
else, anyone but me.

King hadn’t eaten the place
up, but when I opened the door he ran up to me and jumped up and
forgave me for leaving him there half the day. He probably forgave me
because dogs are morons. Also because he had to piss and he needed me
to take him outside.

I got the harness and leash on
him, grabbed a beer, and took him for a walk around the block.

The walk helped us both, but I
decided he needed more than that. Decided I needed more than that. So
he loaded up into the passenger seat and I took off for north Kansas
City, to the dog park.

It’s not like I was looking
for Rae. Though I wasn’t really
not
looking for her either. As soon as I got to the park, I let King off
the leash. And I started staring at every female stranger I saw,
hoping it was her.

I made it to our bench, in the
back corner, sat down alone. She wasn’t there. There’s no
reason she would be. It was around noon, and I knew she sometimes
came at noon. That was all I was going on.

Then I remembered Derek, and I
figured, no matter how bad I got, I wouldn’t be that bad. I
might hope to run into Rae, but if she told me I was out of her life,
or that she needed space, or anything like that, I’d be out.
There’s no way I’d do something like he’d done.

I felt like I understood Derek,
though, in a way. He disgusted me, but the things he said? That he
loved Rae, that there wasn’t no one else in the world but her?
That’s how I’d felt about Emily. It’s just that
Emily had felt that way about me too. Derek was like the poisonous,
fake version of what I’d had.

And me, it’s not like I
could go calling Emily or crashing her birthday party. There was no
way I could see her at all without some drastic measures that I knew
I didn’t have in me. In a twisted way, I was a luckier man than
Derek. Because I had to learn to let Emily alone, and he had to learn
to let Rae alone, but it wasn’t possible for me to slip up.

Rae wasn’t anything like
Emily. I don’t know that Rae would know the front end of a
horse from the back end. And Emily, from that first day, she’d
been open. She’d let me in. She’d helped me open up to
let her in. If she was mad, you knew it. If she was happy, you knew
it. If she loved you, there wasn’t any doubt in the world.
Emily wore her heart right there on her sleeve.

Hell, I’d talked her out of
getting a horse heart tattooed on her bicep on her eighteenth
birthday. She wanted it because she loved horses, she figured that
was her way of wearing her heart on her sleeve. I didn’t talk
her out of it because it was a bad tattoo, but because my brother had
talked me out of getting a tattoo on my eighteenth birthday and I’d
figured that’s just what you do when you love someone. You
convince them to wait until they’re twenty. Worked on me, I’d
never gotten one at all.

Except Emily should have gotten
it anyway, because I’d told her that tattoos last forever but
that just isn’t true. They only last until you die. Scarcely
even a few years, in her case.

Every way that Emily was open, it
seemed like Rae was closed off. Maybe that’s just how it was.
If she wasn’t going to let me in, I wasn’t going to pry.

I heard King growling, just then.
This asshole German Shepherd—any dog that messes with my dog is
an asshole, that’s just how it works—was nipping at King,
and it looked like there was going to be fight. Owner wasn’t
anywhere around. Which was probably good, because the mood I was in,
I might have started a fight myself.

Instead, I strode towards the
dogs, stared that asshole Shepherd down, and he backed off. King came
running up to me.

“I ain’t always going
to be around to protect you like that,” I said. “You’re
going to have to look out for yourself.”

King just looked up at me with
his dumb handsome doggy eyes.

“Ah, I know you had it
handled,” I said.

He licked my hand.

“And I’ll always be
around.”

If Rae was going to push me away,
then maybe that was okay. I mean, she was smart as hell. She had a
good heart, knew how to handle herself and other people, and was
funny in a dumb way that I loved that no one else seemed to, which
made her twice the catch. And she was pretty, for what that was
worth. She turned heads. But maybe all those weren’t enough.
Because at the end of the day, there was nobody else in the whole
world like Emily.

Maybe I just had to accept that.

Maybe I was just a widower now.
Forever more.

I gave up on hoping Rae would
show up, because let’s be honest that’s why I was at the
park, and King and I headed back home. Almost stopped at the grocery
store for produce. Almost.

Got home and made a sandwich.
That wasn’t enough, so I cooked up some bacon, ate it right out
of the pan. Gave half of it to King.

If I worked it right, I knew I
could probably spend the whole damn afternoon and evening lying on my
ass on that couch. Maybe noodle on the guitar, probably watch some
bad movie on Netflix. I had a lot of experience doing that.

I gave it my best shot, too. But
after a half an hour, I was antsy. Got up, paced. I’ve never
paced. My dad always paced.

I wasn’t turning into my
dad, though. I knew that much.

My dad was happy. And married.

I started to clean, obsessively.
Scrubbing at spots that weren’t there, washing clothes straight
out of my drawers, anything to keep busy. When I’d cleaned the
house before, it’d felt good. It’d been purging, it’d
been getting my life on track.

This was just one of my mom’s
neuroses.

But I wasn’t turning into
my mom, any more than I was turning into my dad. My mom, after all,
was also happily married.

I gave up while I was halfway
through scrubbing the inside of the fridge, and I threw all the
groceries haphazardly back in. Honestly, that left the damn thing
more cluttered than when I’d started.

I looked over at the table. Nine
letters. I’d opened six. Hadn’t done the last one. Hadn’t
called Natalie. And there it was, still hanging over me this whole
time.

I took out my phone, opened the
contacts. I had about three numbers saved for Natalie after all these
years, and didn’t know which one she was using. Sure, I could
scroll through my recent calls until I found the last number she’d
contacted me from. But then I’d have to sit and listen to the
ringtone, let the anxiety wash over me, that and the knowledge that I
was about to get an earful from someone who basically hated me, who
still blamed me for her sister’s death. That’s what was
in store if I tried to talk to Natalie. She’d never given me a
break, and I’d never given her a reason to. This’d be no
different. And the truth is, I blamed myself for Emily being gone
just as much as Natalie did. Maybe it’d always be that way.

“Screw this,” I said.

I grabbed my coat, put on my hat,
and went out.

The real bar was just down the
street from Warren’s. It was called Lou’s. A sports bar.
Didn’t serve nothing for food that wasn’t breaded and
fried, and the beer out of the tap tasted like beer.

Not that I wanted beer.

Dave, my best friend from high
school, was sitting at our booth with Damon and a couple of guys we’d
picked up into our crew after graduation. There was Holger, a German
guy who moved to the States to play college baseball but had found
himself happier raising twins with his wife, and there was Lance. I
didn’t really like Lance that much, but probably because he
looked a little bit too much like me and had actually played ball in
college.