Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 6 of 60

Eduardo woke before the sun. He pulled the boards off the second window and set them in the yard. Then he sat on the porch step with a cup of black coffee and watched the light come up over the sagging roof. The house looked the way he felt. Cracked walls. A door that did not quite close. He drank the coffee slow and let a memory come that he had kept away for a long time. He saw Kiersten at the kitchen table in their old place. She was small in the chair. Her hair was down. She was waiting for him to answer a question he did not want to answer. He had come in late again. He had lost again. He knew where the money went. She knew too. But she had asked him plain, and he had turned it around on her. He had asked her who she had been with. He had asked her why the dishes were still in the sink. He had watched her face go from tired to blank. He set the coffee down. He made himself see the next part. He saw the week after. He saw her packing a bag by the bed. He had stood in the doorway and told her she was overreacting. She had said, "I can't keep proving I'm not the thing you say I am." She had said it with no heat. Then she had left. He saw the month after that. He had gone to her sister's porch. He had said the words he thought would work. She had let him in. She had believed him again, because she loved him. And inside a week he had done it again. A new woman he swore was nothing. A pocket she found empty. A question he answered with another question. Each time she took him back he made her small again. Each time she asked, he made her prove she was not what he called her. He put his face in his hands. He said her name into his palms. He understood, now, what he had done. He had put her on a wheel and turned it. He had made her audition for her own life beside him. She had loved him, and he had used that love as the rope. He stayed on the step until his hands stopped shaking. Then he stood up. He walked to the yard and picked up the boards he had pulled off the window. He carried them to the burn pile behind the house. He did not need them anymore. He would measure for glass today, like he had promised the night before. He would not go find her. He would not write another letter. She had told him not to come back, and for the first time he understood exactly why. He owed her the one thing he had never given her. He owed her his absence.