Page 22 of Brutal for It
I put the voicemail on speaker and set the phone by the sink.
Silence. Then breath.
Then, in a voice like dirty velvet: “You smell like lemons and laundry soap. Blue tank. White shoes. Saw you at the eggs. Missed a crack. You always were careless.”
The call cuts. The room hums.
I grip the edge of the counter until my knuckles show. The world goes tight around the edges, white as the rim of a plate.
And then—I do nothing.
I don’t call Tommy. I don’t call Jenni. I don’t run. I stand in my kitchen and breathe because I refuse to let a ghost phone turn me back into a person who lives through a peephole.
“This is my house,” I say out loud, to the lemon cleaner beside the sink, to the crooked lampshade Tommy won’t fix because I love it even though I think it drives him crazy, to the coffee mug that says Sober is Sexy because Jenni has no chill. “You don’t get to be in here.”
I turn the phone off and slide it in the drawer with the potholders.
Then I put on music and start a sauce that takes three hours because it makes the house smell like something that gets better the longer it goes.
If the past wants a war, it can wait its turn.
Tommy comes home sweaty and happy, with dust on his forearms and a look that says he convinced a client to stop asking stupid questions and let him build the thing right. I meet him at the door, kiss him long enough he forgets whatever punchline he came in with, and shove a spoon of sauce into his mouth when he tries to talk.
“Holy—” He blinks. “Marry me.”
“Language,” I admonish. When I first got out of rehab, talking about the future scared me. Words like marry sent me into a spiral. I was living day to day, sometimes minute by minute to beat back cravings. I couldn’t think ahead. So it has become our joke that future talks are worse than cuss words.
He laughs and tucks me under his arm and for ten whole minutes I don’t think about a voice that knows where my tattoo sits. We eat on the back steps again. He tells me we should go north this weekend, and I pretend to consider like it isn’t already my favorite direction.
“I’ll pack a bag,” I tease. “You bring the bacon.”
“Impossible to?—”
“—overbuy it,” I finish with him, and he grins like this is our vow.
Night slides in easy. The phone stays off in a drawer. The world contracts to this: his hand on my knee, my head on his shoulder, the crickets yelling at each other in the hedges like they’re arguing about sports. When we go to bed, I’m tired in the good way again.
And still—when the house goes dark, the room goes quieter than the day ever does, a little voice scrapes its way up my throat. Tell him.
It isn’t the mean voice. It’s the one that’s saved me more times than I know by making me use my words before my brain convinces me to shut up to be small.
I roll toward him. “Tommy?”
“Mm?” He’s half-asleep already; it’s his superpower.
The words park behind my teeth, engines idling. I picture the calls. The eggs. The way he will go still and quiet and then burn so hot he’ll melt the phone tower. I picture Virginia, the way his eyes shine when he says north, the way he’s been vibrating around me like he ate a secret. I picture our weekend of quiet together and decide to wait to share with him what’s happening.
“Do you want the green duffel or the black one?” I ask instead, being both coward and strategist in the same breath.
He smiles into the pillow. “Green,” he mumbles. “Matches your eyes.”
I watch him sleep. I promise myself if there’s another call—one more, just one—I’ll tell him. I’ll put the whole stupid mess on the table and let him help me.
I fall asleep to the sound of his breath, steady, indifferent to ghosts. My last thought before the dark takes me is an old one, from rehab, from the porch with Crunch, from Doc Kelly’s waiting room and Head Case’s breathing exercises:
You’re allowed to choose when to fight. You’re allowed to choose how.
Tomorrow I’ll choose again.
