JUNE 2008
bryants 3p tmrw
what did i do this time?
GISELLE DIDN’T BOTHER to answer that. It was enough to know Knox knew he was in trouble.
She and Bryce were sitting at a table waiting for Knox when he walked in, and waited longer while he got in line to get his food.
Eventually, he approached with his tray, threw himself in the chair, and immediately shoved French fries in his mouth. “Well, I’m early and you’re here already and you’re both pissed. Are you going to make me guess?”
“The guy I saw at your house at BYU?” Giselle snarled.
To her utter rage, he grinned. “Finally!” he crowed, then looked at Bryce. “A memory you lost in the fire?”
Bryce nodded. “We had a … stressful moment that triggered it.”
“Why do you have to make everything so fucking hard?” Giselle demanded of her cousin, stabbing her brisket.
“Look, I do the best I can with the information I’ve got.” He pointed his fork at Bryce. “Fifteen years ago, you were not in any emotional or familial position to dump your wife and go after her.” He pointed his fork at Giselle. “And your self-esteem would never have accepted that he wanted to see you naked.”
He shoved meat in his mouth with a benign smile of great satisfaction when neither she nor Bryce could refute that. She sighed in resignation and picked at her food.
“You,” he directed at Bryce, “needed to grow up and you,” he directed at Giselle, “needed to glow up. Not for each other. For yourselves. If you—” Bryce again. “—hadn’t chased me off when that cunt gave you a completely unbelievable story, this could have been solved seven years ago because I have been trying to figure out how to get you together as soon as she died and Giselle started wearing bikinis.”
Giselle was shocked. “Really?”
“Really. I sat there at my kitchen table that night and watched him take one look at you and his heart broke. That was fucking painful. It occurred to me that you might do well together, but there was way too much in the way, not the least being his wife. The best I could do was keep him away from you. If I’d known you’d been pining for him for the last fifteen years, it just would have complicated everything even more. When you told me about that, it shocked the hell out of me.”
“Why didn’t you say anything then?”
“What for?” he asked as if she were stupid. Maybe she was. “Obviously, you didn’t recognize him because it’d been fifteen years and a house fire and he was out of context, but I already knew he didn’t remember it at all. I thought once you were aware of each other, it’d be fine and I wouldn’t be part of your equation anymore. But nooooooo. I was pissed at both of you that it had been a year and a half since your first meeting and I still had to step in after all that because you wouldn’t talk to each other.
“You—” Bryce “—fucked up at Leah’s funeral by not talking to me, then again at Hale’s when she practically begged you to ask her out because you were pissed at her because you made stupid assumptions and you—” Giselle “—fucked up when you pulled a gun on him to turn down dinner and then kept running from him because you were afraid of getting your wittow feewings hurt.”
He stuffed more food in his mouth and talked around it. “I made it happen. And then the vasectomy got in the way so I had to put my two cents in for the third time. Either you’d remember BYU or not, but by that time, it was irrelevant because I had to keep squirting SuperGlue all over you. You’re welcome.”
Giselle felt Bryce sigh when she did.
“Well,” Giselle muttered, “you might have had to do it a fourth time.”
He looked confused.
“I’m pregnant.”
Knox stopped chewing immediately and looked at Bryce. “You didn’t,” he growled.
“I did not think she cheated,” he said solidly, but sighed again and lifted his hands in helplessness. “But … I was pissed. What I did think … It’s stupid. I thought … she just wished so hard she made it happen.”
Knox’s jaw dropped.
“My vasectomy failed.”
“Clearly.”
“Tell him,” Giselle snarled at her husband.
Bryce took a breath and muttered, “That procedure was new at the time and turns out, it had an eighty percent failure rate. I knew that. Made a lot of money off it. It was irrelevant for so long and I had put that company out of business a long time ago and I forgot, then I didn’t want to think about it, so … I didn’t do anything at all.”
Knox pursed his lips. “What am I supposed to do with this information? Because this genie has granted you your three wishes. This is not my problem. You’re adults. Not stepping in again.”
“She … ” Bryce gestured to Giselle. “Gave me an ultimatum. Therapy or divorce, so, therapy it is.”
Knox nodded in approval and started eating again. “I have lots of traumatized people in and out of my office, and about half of them are women with abusive men they can’t or won’t get away from. Husband, boyfriend, father, brother, uncle, son, whatever. Often it’s sexual. Even if they could afford therapy, it wouldn’t start working for years, but they can’t. Afford it, I mean.
“Your dad really put you through the wringer—and remember, I was there—and then you put up with Meryl for eleven years, then your fire, the coma, jail, your criminal trial, the lawsuits … A lesser man would have broken a quarter of the way through the marriage, but of course, you didn’t because that’s who you are. I mean, if I knew then what I know now, I’d have told you to go see somebody the week after we moved into the dorm.
“The only abused men I get in my office are ones whose woman accused them and the cops just went with it and they tell me their story. Men are never gonna step up and say, ‘Hey, I need some help here,’ because they know they’ll lose everything because the system’s stacked against us. But after Eric, I do not take a woman’s word for it and if I could, I’d throw the book at accusers who are lying. I’m thinking about writing some statutes and taking them to Jeff City. But you know, I don’t believe the men, either.
“Anyway. It’s because of you that I can spot when a man’s got an abusive woman he doesn’t know how to get rid of without losing everything he owns and his kids in the process. You were angry when I met you and you’ve only gotten worse. You have the worst case of PTSD I have ever seen. You’ve been through hell, you’ve never had a support system, you don’t know what to do with people who actually love you except push them away—” Giselle sighed. “—and I don’t blame her for demanding therapy. No kid deserves a shellshocked dad and you don’t deserve to go through life alone. It’s not a punishment, so don’t get pissy.”
There was silence but for the diners around them.
“Did you ever get therapy?” Giselle asked Knox suddenly.
His eyebrows rose. “Sort out my trauma with a mandated reporter? Fuck no.”
“Oh. Right.”
“That’s what you’re for.”
“I was there.”
“Not for the important parts. So … are we all square? Giselle gets her romance-novel hero and a child with him. Bryce gets the love of his youth and his shit off-loaded.”
“Yes,” Giselle and Bryce grumbled in unison.
BRYCE DIDN’T SPEAK for the rest of the day.
When they got home from Bryant’s, he changed clothes immediately and went out to mix concrete. He had no projects. He’d just mix concrete until he worked out whatever was troubling him, then let it dry so he would have something to sledgehammer when he got angry.
Giselle didn’t take his silence personally; he got quiet sometimes, went somewhere far away in his head, and only now she realized it was because he’d never had anyone to talk to.
Did no one in his family love him?
not that i could tell – he had me, that’s it, then he kicked my ass and i don’t know if he had anybody else but i doubt it
No wonder he’s having a hard time with us. Does he feel as if he doesn’t deserve love?
i think he doesn’t expect anyone to think of him at all, just goes through life bearing other people’s burdens because he thinks it’s what he’s supposed to do
Who took care of his estate when he was in a coma? It should have been a wreck, but it wasn’t, and the church never checked on him at all.
She waited for long minutes, but got no answer, which meant he knew, but he wasn’t going to tell her. If, as she suspected, Knox had taken care of him, he couldn’t have done it alone. There would be too many strings to pull and favors to call to keep a comatose millionaire’s estate together and functioning for one person to be able to do it. But Knox never ’fessed up to his charitable acts and no amount of hounding him about it would make him tell her who or how.
The afternoon deepened into evening, and Bryce had not finished. She didn’t really ever know if he preferred she keep him company when he was mixing concrete or not; she’d never asked, figuring he’d tell her if he didn’t want her there.
But would he?
She went outside, but he was nowhere in sight. The concrete pile was where it usually was when he left it to dry. Maybe he was in the garage. Nope. She didn’t call out. He was trying to obtain some peace and a shout would shatter it.
She found him in back of the garage sitting on the ground with his back to it, his knees crooked, his forearms draped over them, his head bowed. She said nothing as she sat beside him, not touching. Yet.
The sky darkened. The fireflies were out, so the mosquitoes and chiggers probably were too.
“Come inside,” she said softly as she arose and left him there.
Twenty minutes later, he appeared in their bathroom, surprised at what she’d done. The tub was full of steaming water. Candles were everywhere. Sting’s voice was barely audible. He started when she ran her hands up his back, digging her fingernails in, massaging. He dropped his head back and heaved a weary sigh. She knelt to undo the laces of his boots, took them off one by one, tugged his socks off, then rose to divest him of his shorts. Once he was naked, she led him to the tub. He followed, again, wearily, and got in, sliding down into the steaming water with a hiss.
He closed his eyes and let his hand drop over his face.
Giselle decided to leave him alone again in case he needed to break down in private, but she wouldn’t be staying away long.
She hopped in her car and sped to the nearest convenience store she knew carried ice-cold Mexican Coke, bought a few bottles, and ran back home. He was still sitting there with his face in his hand, but when he looked at her, his eyebrow rose when he saw what she had. She popped the top and offered it to him. He took it slowly, warily. She nodded, so he shot the entire twelve ounces down his throat in one gulp.
She produced another one, which he took with something she thought might be gratitude, and savored that one a little more. She pulled a chair up to the back of the tub and began to work the knots in his shoulders out.
Maybe they were knots. Maybe they were scars. Maybe they were boulders. She didn’t know, but they were hard as fuck.
He was Sisyphus. Alone. Forgotten. Cursed to do a thankless, dirty, difficult task over and over again as punishment for … something. She didn’t know. It was a wonder he could function as well as he could.
Knox was right: A lesser man would have broken long before now, and even now, Bryce hadn’t broken.
Yet.
It was coming. She could feel it.
It was hard, even for her, to have any faith in the Lord when she delved into why this magnificent, honorable, brilliant warrior had been left alone to navigate a loveless childhood, adolescence, marriage until he almost died in a fire that killed his children, why the church hadn’t stepped up, hadn’t remembered he existed, his only friend one he’d tossed out of his life because he thought that was what he was supposed to do.
She fetched him some Tylenol PM, which he chased down with a third bottle of Coke. At some point, he hauled himself out of the tub, dried off, and dropped into bed. Even with all that caffeine, he was asleep in no time.
HE DIDN’T SPEAK for the rest of the weekend. Giselle gave him room to brood, but it was easy when she was busy preparing a public rebuke her ward and stake would never forget.
★