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

hide how alone she feels. And I know something then, brushing up against Bailey in that kind of pain. I will do anything I can to make it go away. To help her. I’ll do anything to make her feel okay again.

“Can we talk about something else?” she says. Then she puts her hand up. “You know what? I take that back. Can we talk about nothing? What I want is to talk about nothing at all.”

“Bailey…” I say.

“No,” she says. “Can you just leave me alone?”

Then she leans back, waiting for her pizza and for me to go away, in whichever order she can make those things happen.

What Don’t You Want to Remember?

I go inside, honoring Bailey and her request to be left alone. I have no desire to push her. I have no desire to demand she come inside. She is confused and angry, wondering if her father is who she thinks he is—wondering if she can still trust in the person she has always known him to be. Stable, generous, hers. She is angry that she has to question that—angry at him, angry at herself. It is a feeling I can relate to.

Protect her.

But from what? From what Owen was involved in at The Shop? From what he let happen there? Or does Owen want Bailey protected from something else? Something I can’t see yet? Something I don’t want to see yet?

I pace back and forth in my bedroom. I don’t want to antagonize Bailey, but I feel an urgent need to pull at any thread I can find. It’s all I can think to do—to reconsider (to ask her to consider) our foggy, gentle memories of Owen. To juxtapose them against these last twenty-four hours. Where do they meet?

Suddenly, one way they meet comes firing back. Austin. Something else I know about Austin and Owen. Shortly before I moved to Sausalito, I was offered a job there. A movie star who lived there was redoing her house, a ranch house on Westlake Drive, hugging Lake Austin.

She wanted help getting rid of her ex-husband’s aura. Her ex-husband had loved everything modern and hated anything rustic. Her interior designer had suggested my woodturning pieces. But she wanted to be involved, which meant I needed to go to Austin for two weeks and go through the process with her.

I asked Owen to come with me, and he shut the idea down. He was upset that I’d want to go anywhere that would delay my move to Sausalito—that would delay us beginning our lives together in the real way that we had been planning for.

I was anxious to get to California too—and less-than-anxious to work side by side with the increasingly demanding client. So I turned down the job. I clocked his strange behavior though. It was out of character for Owen to react that way—needy, controlling. When I raised it with him, he apologized for reacting badly. He said the move was just making him nervous. He was nervous about how Bailey would adjust to having me in her home. It always came down to Bailey for Owen. Any changes that upended her were going to upend him. I understood the anxiety. I let it go.

But I think about the other Austin red flag. When I asked him to come with me to Austin for my woodturners symposium, he went dark for a minute. He didn’t balk at the suggestion, but he pivoted. He did pivot. So maybe it wasn’t just about Bailey. Maybe it had something to do with Austin itself. Something he didn’t want me to run into there. Something he had run from.

I reach for my phone and call Jake, a diehard football fan: college, the NFL, classic games on YouTube at eight in the morning.

“It’s late where I am,” he says, instead of hello.

“What can you tell me about the Austin football stadium?” I say.

“I can tell you it’s not called that,” he says.

“Do you know anything about their football team?”

“The Longhorns? What do you want to know?”

“Their colors?”

“Why?”

I wait.

He sighs. “Orange and white,” he says.

“You positive?”

“Yes, burnt orange and white. Uniforms, mascot. Goalposts. The end zone. The entire stadium. It’s midnight. It’s after midnight. I’m sleeping. Why are you asking?”

I can’t seem to tell him the truth, which sounds crazy. The U.S. marshal who showed up at our house is based out of there. Bailey remembers being there. Maybe. And Owen got weird about the idea of us going there, two different times. Two different times I can now recall.

I don’t want to tell him that Austin is all I have.

I think of my grandfather. If he were alive, and sitting here with me, I could tell him. He wouldn’t think I was crazy. He’d just sit there and help me go through it all until I figured out what I needed to do. That’s why he was good at his job—at helping me understand what my job was. The first lesson he ever taught me was that it wasn’t just about shaping a block of wood into what you wanted it to be. That it was also a peeling back, to seeing what was inside the wood, what the wood had been before. It was the first step to creating something beautiful. The first step to making something out of nothing.

If Owen were here, he would understand that too. I could tell him too. He would look at me and shrug. What do you have to lose? He would look at me, and see it—what I’d already decided.

Protect her.

“Jake? I’ll call you back,” I say.

“Tomorrow!” he says. “Call me back tomorrow.”

I hang up, and I go back outside. I find Bailey where I left her, staring out at the bay, sipping on my glass of wine, like it belongs to her.

“What are you doing?” I say.

The glass is almost empty. It was full when I left it. Now it is almost empty. The wine covers her lips, the