The Last Thing He Told Me, Laura Dave [graded readers txt] 📗

The FBI isn’t going to ask nicely for long.”

My head starts to spin, thinking about how unkindly the FBI has been asking already.

“Are you still there?” he says.

“I’m here.”

“Just… try to stay calm. You know more than you think you do. You know how to get through this.”

It’s enough to make me cry, the way he says it—sweetly, assuredly—Jake’s version of a deep kindness.

“But in the future,” he says, “don’t say someone is innocent, okay? Say he’s not guilty, if you have to say something. But saying someone’s innocent makes you sound like an idiot. Especially when most people are guilty as fuck.”

And then there’s that.

Six Weeks Ago

“We should take a vacation,” Owen said. “We’re overdue.”

It was midnight. We were lying in bed, his hand cupping mine. He was resting it on his chest, on his heart.

“You should come with me to Austin,” I said. “Or would that not count?”

“Austin?” he said.

“I have the woodturners symposium I told you about. We could turn it into a getaway. Spend a couple of days in Texas Hill Country…”

“It’s in Austin? You didn’t tell me it was in Austin…”

Then he nodded, like he was considering it, considering joining me—except I felt something shift in him. I felt something shut down in his body.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Nothing,” he said.

But he let go of my hand and started to play with his wedding band, turning it around and around his finger. I made him that wedding band. I made it to match mine, exactly: Two slim bands that, from a distance, looked like any other shiny, platinum ring. But I made ours out of brushed steel, a thick white oak. Rustic and elegant at once. I’d used my smallest lathe. Owen had sat on the floor beside me while I worked.

“Bailey also has that school trip to Sacramento coming up,” he said. “We could hightail it to New Mexico, just the two of us, get lost in the white rock.”

“I’d love that,” I said. “I haven’t been to New Mexico in a long time.”

“Me neither. Not since back when I was in college. We drove up to Taos, spent a week on the mountain.”

“You drove all the way from New Jersey?” I asked.

He kept twirling his ring, absentmindedly. “What?”

“You drove all the way from New Jersey to New Mexico? That must have taken you forever.”

That stopped him, his fingers leaving his ring. “It wasn’t during college.”

“Owen! You just said you went to Taos during college.”

“I don’t know. It was a mountain somewhere. Maybe it was Vermont. All I remember was that the air was too thin.”

I laughed. “What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing. It just…”

I look at him, trying to follow what he isn’t saying.

“It just brings back a weird part of my life.”

“College?”

“College. After college.” He shook his head. “Being stuck on a mountain I don’t remember.”

“Okay… so that’s maybe the weirdest thing I think you’ve ever said to me.”

“I know.”

He sat up and turned on the light. “Shit,” he said. “I really need that vacation.”

“Let’s take it,” I said.

“Okay. Let’s take it.”

He lay down, again, put his hand on my stomach. And I could feel him relax again. I could feel him come back to me. So I didn’t want to press him. I didn’t want to press him right then on what he’d almost chosen to share.

“And we don’t have to get into it now, but just for the record?” I said. “I spent most of college playing guitar in a Joni Mitchell cover band, attending poetry slams, and dating a philosophy grad student who was working on a manifesto about how television was the government’s attempt to control a revolution.”

“Not sure he was exactly wrong about that,” he said.

“Maybe not, but the point is, there’s not a whole lot you could tell me about who you used to be that would change anything, at least not between us.”

“Well,” he whispered. “Thank God for that.”

Bailey’s No Good Very Bad Day

When Bailey gets back from school, she looks miserable.

I’m sitting on the bench, drinking a glass of red wine, a blanket covering my legs. I try to go back over the day—a day that began and will end without Owen, as impossible as that feels. As angry and sad and stressed and alone as that makes me feel.

She weaves down the docks, keeping her head down, until she gets to the house. Then she stops in front of me, right in front of the bench, and stands there. Eyes blazing.

“I’m not going back there tomorrow,” she says. “I’m not going back to school.”

I take in her eyes, her fear. There we are—mirror images of each other—the last way I wanted us to get here.

“They pretend they’re not talking about it,” she says. “About my dad. About me. It’s worse than if they just said it to my face. Like I can’t hear them whisper about it all day anyway.”

“What were they saying?”

“Which part do you want to hear?” she says. “How Brian Padura asked Bobby after chemistry if my father was a criminal? Or when Bobby punched him in the mouth for it?”

“Bobby did that?”

“Yep…”

I nod, a little impressed with Bobby.

“It gets worse from there,” she says.

I move down the bench slightly, making room for her. She sits down, but on the edge, as if she may change her mind and get up at any moment.

“Why don’t you skip tomorrow?”

She looks at me, surprised. “Really?” she says. “You’re not even going to fight me on that?”

“Would it help?”

“No.”

“As far as I’m concerned, you’re off the hook for school tomorrow. If your day was anything like mine, you deserve to be.”

She nods, starts biting on her nails. “Thank you,” she says.

I want to reach out and take her hand away from her mouth, hold it. I want to tell her it is going to be okay, that it will all get easier—one way or another. But even if it would comfort her to hear it,