The Fiance Who Never Came

And the one man who stood to gain the most, the one who had put a ring on my hand and promised in front of God and both our mothers to have me and hold me in sickness, that one man stood at the edge of it with his coat on and his phone out, waiting to see if I was worth the trouble.

I had spent two years thinking Brett was the sure thing and the town was just the scenery. I had it exactly backwards. The scenery saved my life. The sure thing was waiting to collect.

I did not call him and scream. I want to be honest that part of me wanted to, that there is a version of this where I said terrible true things into a phone and felt good for a day and bad for a year. But my head was still healing and loud emotion cost me more than I had to spend, and besides, I did not want it to be a fight between the two of us where it would be my word about his tone against his word about mine. Cold deserves cold. I wanted it plain, and I wanted it in the daylight, in front of the people who had actually shown up, because those were the only people whose opinion I had come to care about.

The chance came at the end of March.

I was healing faster than they had guessed. I was out of the chair and onto the walker, and then onto a cane, and Marcy had started letting me come in and sit on a stool at the register and run the till a few hours a day, not because she needed me yet but because she knew I needed to come back to myself. On the last Saturday in March the diner was full, the way it gets on a Saturday after church lets out, Earl and his wife in their booth, half the co-op, Jenny up visiting, my mother, Dawn even, who had driven over to see the place I was always talking about. It was not a party. It just happened to be everyone.

And Brett walked in.

He had heard, through the town the way things travel, that I was up and around, and he had decided, I think, that the weather had held at last, that the investment had come good, and that it was time to be the devoted fiance again before anyone noticed how long he had been gone. He came in smiling with a grocery-store bouquet, bigger than the gas-station one, and he came across that full diner toward the register where I sat, and he said, loud enough for the booths, “There she is. There’s my girl. You scared me half to death, you know that?”

The room went quiet the way a room does.

I looked at him for a long moment. He was handsome and warm and open-collared and he had tears starting in his eyes right on cue, and I understood for the first time that the tears were real, they were always real, he could cry at will because a part of him believed every version of himself while he was performing it. He was not lying to me. He was lying to us both. That was almost the worst part.