Page 73 of No Kind of Hero
“Right. You were confused. Too confused to say, ‘I love Evan, and he asked me to marry him tonight. I want to stop sneaking around, and he wants to come home with us so we can tell you our plans.’ Funny how I didn’t hear any of that. Nothing but a little girl minding her parents. I don’t need a little girl. I need a woman who’s got the guts to say what she wants. To saywhoshe wants.”
“But . . .” She didn’t know how to go on. “I do love you. But I can’t think about getting married now. Law school and . . .”
“Yeah. Law school. That’s all I’ve heard all summer. They’re called priorities. I know what mine are. And now I guess I know what yours are, too.”
“But we can’t just . . . break up. Because I won’t marry you? People don’t . . . people taketime.”
“I don’t,” he said. “I know what I want. So do you. Too bad it’s not the same thing. Too bad life sucks.”
“Evan, please.”
“No,” he said. “No.” And he hung up.
Evan was still walking. They had to, or Beth was going to freeze. The spectacular sunset was fading at last, the reds and oranges, the rose and gold darkening moment by moment, losing their glow. They’d left the marina behind, were headed around the curve and toward the Resort in the distance. Leaving the old and heading toward the new.
Beth said, “I’ve blamed myself over and over for what I did that night. For the way I didn’t fight for you, or for us. It’s hurt so much worse because I knew I couldn’t blame anyone else for it. I did it to myself, and I did it to you. I’ve made this . . . this coating in my heart around that pain, like an oyster. Except there’s no pearl. Just this hard little knot.”
Boy, did she have a way with words. The best he could come up with was, “Me too.”
“But you know,” she said, looking up at the sky, pulling her hair back with one hand and sighing, “I’m not sure, looking back, that itwasall my fault. I might have gotten a different idea tonight. And if we’re going to chip that hard spot away, I need to tell you about it.”
“Right,” he said. “I’m here listening.” Not that he’d be thrilled to hear it, but she needed to tell him, so that was that.
“You didn’t talk to me,” she said after a minute. “After Riley died. You just drew yourself in tight. I knew how hurt you were, how hard it hit you, but you wouldn’t talk about it.”
“If you knew,” he said, “why would I have to tell you?”
She stared at him a second, then she hadbothhands in her hair. “I can’t. I can’t even. Ofcourseyou have to. You can’t just bottle it up and expect me to know what you’re feeling, that you need my love, you need my support, you need my commitment. Instead, I got nothing at all except that you needed sex—and yeah, Ididget that, becausethat,you communicated. And then all of a sudden, I heard that I should marry you and stay in Idaho, even if it meant my parents cut me off. That I should change my whole plan, my wholelife.Out of the blue.”
It was a long time back. Unfortunately, he could remember it pretty much exactly, and also unfortunately, that probablywashow it had gone down. He said, “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
She laughed, although her voice still sounded too tight. “Yeah. I could tell. So all right, then my parents caught us, which is stupid, because how do you ‘catch’ a twenty-one-year-old woman who’s doing nothing worse than having sex with her boyfriend? But I wasn’t acting like an adult. You were right about that. I acted like a scared teenager, and I let you down.”
“Yeah. You did.” Time to say that, too, he guessed. Time to say it, and let it go.
She went on. “Maybe you were right to break up with me, too. But then—when you’re a full-grown man who’s been through so much disappointment and hurt and rebuilding in your life, and you’re with a girl who hasn’t had to grow up, a girl who’s been a princess her whole life, maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that she can’t do that growing up on command. That she can’t walk away from all that privilege, all that . . . cushion. At least I couldn’t.”
“You’re right again. I shouldn’t have expected more. I just wanted it. I shouldn’t have expected to get it just because I wanted it.”
“Oh, Evan.” She turned to him, there on the path, and stopped, so he did too. She wrapped her arms around him, put her head on his chest, and said, “You should have been able to expect that. I’m sorry you didn’t get what you deserved, then or ever. I’m sorry I let you down.”
He had one hand on the handle of Gracie’s stroller, the other one wrapped around her, and he was rocking her from side to side, kissing her hair. “You could be right,” he said, “about the talking.”
She laughed against his chest. “No. Iamright. And you’re sosure,always. I’ve always loved that about you. Whereas me—I’m never sure, and at that time in my life? ‘Sure’ was the very last thing I was. I wanted to talk things over, but we didn’t do that. It was like if I wasn’t sure, I was wrong.”
“I may have mentioned,” he said, “that I could have done that better.”
She stood back a bit, but she kept her arms around him, and she was smiling. “I don’t think you did mention that. This would be a great time.”
“All right.” He sighed and went for it. “I didn’t do any of that great back then. You were young, but so was I. I wasn’t too good at compromising. I sure wasn’t good at understanding somebody different from me. And yeah. I was wrong. Then, and tonight. Especially tonight. I’m not young now, and I didn’t stand with you. I should have.”
Theboomtook him by surprise. He was grabbing her, grabbing the stroller harder, all but diving for the bushes as the night lit up.
Beth had jumped too, but now, she laughed. “That apology was so momentous, the angels wept. Look.”
He’d figured out what it was before he turned. Friday-night fireworks at the Resort. Right now, a streak of silver was crossing the sky, followed by hundreds of tiny pops as the shower of sparks ignited and fell into the blackness of the lake.
He stood and held her, and they watched. A patriotic display of red, white, and blue. A crisscrossing pattern of green and gold. A shower of white. On and on, the explosions, the spectacle. And then, at the end, the grand finale, the same as every Friday night. A reckless, extravagant, over-the-top display, starbursts of red and gold fanning across the night sky. Portland Devils colors. Blake Orbison being larger than life, giving the people what they’d come for.
