Page 67 of Wall

“Hey!” It’s been a long day. I nudge him off. He doesn’t need to be near my feet. I change quickly. Good thing the sweatpants have a drawstring. I have to roll them up at the ankles, and it still looks like I’m wearing a huge, black sack.

“Ready?” He’s got his keys, and he’s holding out a brown, fur-lined jacket.

“Where are we going?”

“Little tour. Don’t worry. We ain’t gonna run into anyone.”

I have no clue what he’s up to, but I’m beyond emotionally drained, way too wired to sleep, and all I want to do is go along with John.

Sometime in the past half hour or so, he became yet another man to me. Or I became another me?

Anyway, I go along as he leads me to his truck, helps me up, and buckles me in. He digs a pair of leather mittens out of the glove box. They smell like pine sap.

“Put these on until the cab warms up.”

He turns the key, and we sit in silence as he lets the engine warm up. The sky has cleared, and there’s a smattering of stars, far away, but still pretty. Eventually, we can’t see our breath anymore, and John pulls off toward town.

“We’re going to Petty’s Mill?” I guess I figured he was driving us home.

“Yup.”

Petty’s Mill is an older town than Shady Gap. Shady Gap has the county’s big box stores and the community college, but Petty’s Mill has the historic downtown and riverfront development.

That seems to be where we’re heading. John drives the speed limit past rehabbed Victorians and brand-new boutiques. There are still rough looking streets, but the closer you get to the river, the more you see that money is being invested in this town.

John parks in a public lot at the Promenade. The Promenade is all new. There are restaurants where the lettuce is “locally sourced,” so the sandwiches cost double. A bunch of stores that sell candles and watercolors of waterfowl.

I wait for him; he helps me down. His truck’s a good foot and a half off the ground, and it’s icy. There’s a bitter wind coming off the river. The stars are nice, but the cold is brutal. My teeth start chattering.

“It ain’t too far. I’ll get you warmed back up real soon.”

He leads me to a dock built for people strolling the Promenade. There are benches and fancy streetlights made to look like gas lamps. It’s paved with bricks, the kind you can buy and have inscribed with your name.

John’s scanning the ground, looking for something. “Here,” he says. He points down.

There’s a brick that readsPeanut, Jellybean, and Lemon.

“I bought that for a thousand bucks at auction.”

He searches my face. He’s drawn himself up, bracing for my reaction. The wind ruffles his hair, and it strikes me again how crazy it is that this enormous man can be so intent on plain ol’ me.

I glance down at the brick.

It hurts, but also…it’s good. There should be a marker. There should be a place.

“My dad used to bring us down here to fish. Before they renovated the waterfront. There used to be a concrete dock here. In the summer, the ice cream truck would come by. The old guys would cuss out the ice cream man for scaring off the fish. Us kids loved it.”

I should have thought of doing something like this. Guilt shoots straight through my chest, an arrow with jagged edges.

“What is that baby? What’s that look?”

“I don’t know.” I jam my gloved hands into my pockets. “I’ve never—I—never mind.”

“You can tell me. Anything. I can take it, baby. I can carry anything for you.”

My eyes burn, but there are no tears left. I take my hand out of my pocket, wind my arm through John’s, and tuck it back in.

“I just feel so guilty sometimes. Like I did something wrong, and I’m such an emotional coward that all I did was put everything in a box in the garage. Maybe I would have a made a shitty mother. Maybe that’s why it played out the way it did.”

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