Chapter Twenty-Eight
Allie
After the disaster that was dinner, it was a relief to get home, heat up a bowl of clam chowder (the lasagna having apparently already been eaten) and sit down with the final chapters of Goblet of Fire. River could sense I was agitated and pressed his nose up against me, trying to comfort me. That’s why I could never understood the people who said cats were cold and unfeeling; at times, I got the uncanny sense that mine truly loved me.
I pulled him closer and started petting him as I read the chapter with the wand battle in the graveyard. Then Phoenix slunk over to the end of the bed, looking jealous, and I scratched her behind the ears. In the drama of the last couple of days, I had been neglecting my Twitter account, and I was already starting to shed followers, so I took a picture of River in the sink, tweeted it with a funny caption, and was getting ready to take another one when I heard a knock on the door.
There were only two people it could have been. Mrs. Savery had texted me the night before to invite me to a party they were having on Saturday. Curtis had texted me a couple of times, and every time I had picked up my phone to respond, I realized I couldn’t think of anything to say, and set it down again. I promised myself I would come back to it later, but I never did.
I should have known that would come back later to bite me in the ass. And now here he was at the door.
He was standing on the lowest step with his hat in his hands, a sheepish expression on his face. “Hey,” he said when I opened the door.
“Well, hey, stranger,” I said, taking a strange sort of pity on him. “You wanna come in?”
I could tell from the smell of his breath that he had been drinking, but he walked up the stairs and into the house without any problems. In the kitchen area, I brewed him a cup of coffee and warmed up some red beans and rice that his mother had brought me.
“Always did love red beans and rice,” he said in his throaty voice as he sat in the recliner. “Anyway, look: I just wanted to say I’m sorry for how I acted.”
“And?” I was sure there was more to it, that once he had finished, he was going to expect me to apologize or explain how he hadn’t really done anything wrong.
“That’s it,” he said. “I shouldn’t’ve got out of hand, shouldn’t’ve said those things, should’ve listened to you more. It kills me to think of what I nearly threw away with my damn-fool stubbornness. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you.”
Given the circumstances, it was probably the best apology I could have expected. There was a tone of humility in his voice that hadn’t been there before. He sounded grave and contrite, like a man who had just looked death in the face and realized what really mattered in life. I nodded in response, trying not to show on my face how moved I was.
After he’d finished his rice, he came and lay down next to me on the couch. I took his head in my lap and stroked his back with my long nails, and he lay there for a time not saying anything.
“Well, I have had a day, let me tell you,” I said after a while. “This morning we got a labradoodle in, couldn’t’ve been more than two years old, and she had a cancerous tumor. We ended up having to put her down, and it was one of the hardest things I’ve done since I got that job.”
I decided it was best not to tell him about my failed date with my boss, which was only the second worst thing that had happened that day.
He listened quietly while I told him what else I had been up to since the night of the storm: how I had spent the night at Lindsay’s a couple nights, how she and Zach seemed to be getting on and how she wasn’t taking the news of his re-deployment well. At some point, he started mumbling to himself, and I realized he was falling asleep. But instead of moving him into a more comfortable position, I let him lay there for a few minutes longer.
Finally, after another ten or fifteen minutes had passed, I tried moving him out of my lap and laying his head on a proper pillow. His eyes opened, and he grinned at me in that mysterious way of his.
“I reckon we’d both better get to bed,” he said. “Got a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”
“Big day,” I said. “I guess it’s a good thing we made up tonight, or you’d be reading about Zach’s party on Facebook.”
Curtis half-rose off the couch. “Yeah, what was the deal with that? If it came down to a choice between me and you, they were gonna go with you.”
I shrugged. “I guess your family’s got good priorities.”
Curtis laughed bitterly. “Girl, if we ever get married,” he said, “I’m gonna be in a world of trouble. They will side with you over me every time.”
He lay back down, heedless of the effect his words had had on me. It was the first time either of us had even breathed a word of marriage since we started dating. And he had said it so casually, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like of course we would get married. Why wouldn’t we?
It was uncomfortably hot in the tiny house, and I felt chills crawling up and down my back as I thought about it. But as I watched him sleep, the possibility seemed real to me, too, in a way it hadn’t before. Even before the fight, he had always seemed like a man of impeccable character, and his apology had reaffirmed that.
When we had first met, I sometimes felt like I would be marrying down if we ever got married. Only now was I beginning to realize just how lucky I would be.