Chapter 2
The sound of Mabel’s door closing stayed with me all the way back to town.
I had heard doors slam before.
Boardroom doors. Hotel doors. The door of my father’s study when I was a teenager and he was finished arguing. The heavy walnut door of my first Houston office after I had signed the deal that made me wealthy enough to stop counting the cost of ordinary things.
None of them sounded like that one.
Mabel had not slammed it in anger.
She had closed it because she was done expecting anything from me.
That was worse.
I drove without seeing much of the road.
The Texas afternoon had burned down into a copper-colored evening, and the fields on either side of the highway stretched toward the horizon beneath a sky too large for the thoughts in my head.
Three years old.
The child was three.
Her name, I still did not know.
But I knew her eyes.
My mother, Evelyn Vance, had possessed eyes so green strangers commented on them. My sister Lydia had inherited a faded version of the color. Mine were hazel, but when sunlight struck them the right way, the green showed through.
That little girl had looked at me with Evelyn Vance’s eyes.
I pulled onto the shoulder.
For several minutes, I sat behind the wheel with both hands resting uselessly in my lap.
Four years earlier, I had come home for Uncle Raymond’s funeral.
I had not planned to see Mabel.
That was the lie I had told myself then.
The truth was that the moment I crossed the county line, I had begun wondering whether she was still here.
I remembered the tavern. Rain tapping against the windows. Mabel sitting two stools away from me, older but immediately familiar. The way neither of us had known whether to laugh or cry when our eyes met.
We talked until closing.
She told me about her career.
I told her about Houston.
Neither of us mentioned that I had once promised to come back for her until almost midnight.
Then she said quietly, “I waited longer than I should have.”
I had no answer.
Later, we ended up in the small room above the tavern that the owner sometimes rented to travelers during county events.
There had been no grand declaration.
No attempt to pretend we were eighteen again.
Just two people discovering that twenty-two years had not erased everything.
Morning frightened me.
That was the simplest truth.
I woke before Mabel.
I looked at her sleeping beside me and felt all the old promises gathering around the bed.
So I ran.
Again.
May you like
At forty.
I had told myself it was kinder than making promises I could not keep.
