Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 8 of 60

Eduardo woke before the sun and lay still, listening to his house settle. The measurements for the glass were folded in his shirt pocket where he had left them. He sat up and pulled his boots on. Then a sentence came at him whole, in her voice, the way her voice used to sound in the kitchen when she was done being patient. Go home, Eduardo. He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees. That last night. He had been drunk on the porch of the little stone house with the green shutters. He had come without warning again. He had wanted to be let in. She had come out in bare feet. She had closed the door behind her so the light stayed inside. "I am not doing this," she had said. "Doing what." "Enabling you." He had laughed at the word. He remembered the laugh. It had been the same ugly laugh he used on her at the balcony door months later. "God told me," she had said. "Plain. That I have to stop." "God told you." "Yes." "To leave me." "To stop covering for you. You will not see what you have done until you lose me. Until you sit in it." He had tried to touch her arm. She had stepped back. "I keep hurting myself to keep you," she had said. "I can't do it anymore." "So this is on God now." "This is on me. Go home, Eduardo." He had stood on her walk a long time. He had wanted to yell. He had wanted to beg. He had done neither. He had gotten in his truck and driven to a card room and lost eight hundred dollars by dawn to prove she was wrong about him. Eduardo sat in his own bedroom now with the memory finished. He waited for the old heat to come up his neck. It did not. What came instead was a quiet sickness in his stomach, and under that, something steadier. She had told him the exact truth on that porch. She had named it. He had called it cruelty for eight years. He stood up. He walked through the hall to the front room and looked at the bare window frame. The receipt with the numbers was still in his pocket. He took it out and smoothed it on the sill. He said it out loud, once, to the empty room. "You were right." His voice did not crack. He did not cry. He did not owe the sentence anything more than saying it. He pulled his cap on and picked up his keys. He would drive to the hardware for the glass. He would set it in the frame today. He would eat, and sleep, and get up tomorrow and do another small thing. He had sat in the consequences long enough to hear her. That was the part she had been waiting on. She would not know he had heard it. That was not the point anymore.