All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

Wavy started putting on her clothes, but she did it like a backwards strip show, smiling at me while she pulled her panties up.

“No cops this time,” she said.

I couldn’t even manage a smile to answer that, because maybe the cops weren’t going to show up, but Beth stood there in the doorway, glaring at us.

“Get out. And I want your key,” she said.

While Wavy buttoned up her dress, I took the apartment key off my ring. After I gave it to Beth, Wavy and I went down the stairs and out into the street.

“Where’s your car parked?” I said.

“My roommate dropped me off.” Her voice just about killed me. Grown up, but still quiet. And happy, the way I’d dreamed about.

When she took my hand, I let her. We walked down the block to my truck, swinging our hands between us. She smiled at me, sure everything was going to be okay, when I knew it wasn’t. I held her hand until I had to let go to toss my duffel in the back and open the door for her.

“Nineteen sixty-nine,” she said as she stepped up on the running board. I didn’t have no secrets from her. She knew exactly why I was driving that truck. For love. For good luck. Because that was the year she was born.

Sitting in the truck, holding her hand again, I thought about all the things I wanted to tell her. I’d spent all those years in a cell thinking about talking to her, but now there was only one thing I needed to say to her.

“Wavy, I can’t see you. I’m breaking the conditions of my parole right now, just sitting next to you, talking to you. I can’t have any contact with you.”

She looked at me hard, not even asking a question. Pissed off and hurt, and I didn’t blame her. I deserved that look, but she could be as mad at me as she wanted. It didn’t change a damn thing.

“Tell me where to take you and I’ll drop you off and—and that has to be that. I can’t see you again. Do you understand?”

After that she wouldn’t look at me and I couldn’t look away. Probably it’d be the last time I got to see her. I’d thought that before, when I was arrested, so seeing her one more time was a gift. I woulda counted the last hour as a gift, too, except this was how it was gonna end. It shoulda been our wedding night, and instead it was just good-bye. She sat up straight, her shoulders square, looking out the windshield. Her hair was cut short, with little curls teasing at her bare neck. Like that birthday night when she’d worn it up.

“My deposition,” she said.

“Yeah, I read your deposition. You were brave to do that. To keep me from getting framed for something a lot worse. They really wanted to pin your mama’s murder on me.” I sometimes wondered if it coulda gone differently. Maybe I coulda pled to a lesser charge, if she’d told the truth.

“It was a message to say I love you.” She looked at me and there were tears running down her cheeks. I had to look away.

“My parole says no contact. I can’t see you, talk to you, touch you. I’m not supposed to be within a hundred feet of you.”

“You were in me.”

I was skidding on loose gravel, about to wreck my life again. Wreck hers again.

“Wavy, you know I love you—”

“Beth.”

“No. Beth ain’t nobody to me. We can’t do this. I can’t do this. I’m always gonna love you, but they won’t ever let me have contact with you, because of what I did to you.”

For once I was all out of words and that was scary as hell. Wavy nodded. I thought she was ready to say something, but she opened the door and stepped out. I scrambled outta the cab and stopped her before she crossed the street.

“Let me take you home,” I said. It was dangerous, but I thought I could know where she lived and be strong enough not to go see her.

She caught my wrist and turned my arm to where there was blank space on the inside. I’d always planned to get her name tattooed there after we got married. Standing there in the street with traffic going by, she reached into her purse and took out a Magic Marker.

She wrote three numbers on my arm, the first part of a phone number.

“Do you remember that, Wavy? Me writing on your arm when I wrecked the bike?” Stupid thing to ask. After all that time, she’d come there and still wanted me. She remembered everything. Before she could write the rest of the number, I pulled away from her. The marker left a long black stripe down my arm.

“I can’t,” I said. “You know I can’t. My parole says no contact.”

She let go of me and crossed the street. Didn’t even put her marker away, just tossed it on the ground and kept walking. She didn’t stop when I called her name, so I went after her and caught her by the arm.

“No, you cannot walk around down here. It’s not safe. This neighborhood is full of ex-cons and sex offenders. Folks worse than me.”

She jerked her arm away from me, but I grabbed her wrist tight enough she couldn’t get loose. For a full minute, we glared at each other, her trying to pull her arm back and me squeezing it hard enough to feel the bones in her wrist.

“I’m not messing around, Wavy. Now tell me where to take you.”

“The college library,” she said.

It was a fifteen-minute drive over to the university, but we didn’t say a word on the way there. As soon as I came to a stop in the library parking lot, Wavy opened the door and swung her legs out.

“Wait. Wait,” I said.

With one foot on the ground, one foot on the running board, she looked back at me.