Chapter 54

Three weeks is a long time. Forever is a hell of a lot longer.

The night I left, he carried my eight pound overnight bag into the house for me because he's a gentleman, and that's what he does. If we were to last, and if I wanted him to, he'd open every door for me between here and the end of time. He's reliable that way.

But that's what you've been saying all along, isn't it? He's that kind of man, and he needs a good, devoted woman. This may come as a surprise, but I get it now. I do.

There are trade-offs in life. That's been your take.

Walt Longmire is nothing if not committed. He's chivalrous and faithful and strong, and he has great hair and long legs, and he's amazing in bed. I added that part, but take my word for it. So what if he gets a little wrapped up in himself and his image of himself, and makes some disturbingly bad choices? He gets his priorities screwed up sometimes, but who doesn't?

We all make sacrifices, and you've known all along what sacrifices you'd be willing to make. I'm woman enough to admit I admire that degree of self-awareness. You want to see him with a woman who thinks the way you do, who's willing to make similar sacrifices. The right woman, in your eyes, won't need him to have already worked through the grief and the guilt; she'll accept that the past takes priority over her wants and needs.

Lizzy knew the score, and she would have been willing to play it that way if he'd let her.

But that's just not me.

It didn't help that we couldn't kiss when we said goodbye.

There's a certain intimacy to kissing. Intercourse, sex, that's as physically close as two people can be, but it's not like sealing your lips to another person's, feeling his mouth as if it were your own, inhaling his carbon dioxide. There's nothing like the cloud-headed buzz of a real, deep, wet, slow kiss.

That was part of the problem. The other part, I guess, was that he was overwhelmed and I was tired.

"Nothing needs to be decided right now," I said, and immediately that suspicious curtain-wall slammed shut behind his eyes.

"What do you mean?" he asked, but he didn't want to know what I meant.

"You made a choice."

It might have sounded a tad more ultimate than I intended, but I know him well enough at this point to know it didn't matter what it sounded like. He wasn't hearing it anyway.

"I have obligations, Vic," he said, kind of loud.

His eyes were fixed just slightly off to the side of mine, and color spread into his cheeks.

"You have your priorities," I said.

"Maybe you wouldn't understand that."

Sanctimonious asshole.

"Sure I would. But mine are two thousand miles from here."

It was only a productive conversation in that it produced resentment and uncertainty in spades. But we came by it honestly. We come by all our turbulence honestly.

Remember that ill-fated trip Sean and I took to Jackson? Foreigner and the curvy road? Hair-metal probably could have brought it on all by itself, but I always have been prone to motion sickness. After six years of marriage, that's something you know about your spouse. Or it's something you should know.

When I told Sean I wasn't feeling so hot, though, he saw it as an attempt to thwart his plans, to cause a problem where no problem was necessary. Our marriage was a long string of these little battles interspersed with far fewer big ones. I would express a feeling, emotional or otherwise, and his knee-jerk response was to question that feeling, to view the expression of that feeling as a stick in the spokes.

That in itself didn't lead us to divorce. It's what it represents that's the poison. At no point, not that day and not any of the hundreds of other similar days, did I say to him, I expect my feelings to be taken seriously. I never once got out of the metaphoric car and said, This isn't okay. I would like to feel comfortable and safe in my life with you.

Would Walt pull over without argument? Absolutely he would, immediately, no question. In fact, it wouldn't occur to him to question my feelings. If I said I felt it, he'd believe it. The concept of purposely trying to annoy a loved one is completely foreign to him, and there's a lot to be said for that. That's a boundary I should have had all along, but for some reason I didn't think I had the right to decide how my life was going to go, how I was going to be treated.

In the first two and a half weeks, I talked to Walt twice.

The first time he called I had to force myself to answer. I didn't feel like dealing with it. The conversation was brief and stiff: He asked me how Philly was, and I said cold and trafficky. I asked him how work was, and he said settling down. There were no endearing declarations or promises, no apologies, no plans for the future.

The second time he called, I was at a bar with my cousin Vince, and I'd had a few. I went outside onto the heat-lamped patio with the smokers where it wasn't quite as loud.

He was different this time, softer. Then again, I was drunker.

"How are you, Vic?" he asked, and his voice was so deep and so warm.

"I'm good."

"One more week." He was trying to sound nonchalant, but I could hear the control, the tempering.

"What are you wearing?" I said.

"What am I wearing?"

I leaned my head against the brick wall behind a decorative potted tree strung with white lights.

"Yeah. Do you have your boots on?"

"No. I'm home."

"Belt?"

There was a pause, and a couple of guys on my end started arguing about the authenticity of Cheez Whiz on cheesesteak. For a second I thought he'd hung up.

"No," he said.

"Shirt?"

"I was changing."

"Oh my God."

"Vic," he said, even softer, followed by another signature long pause. "I miss you."

"Well I'll be back in a week."

It took me nearly that long to work up the nerve to get out to the gravesite. My mom offered to go with me, but it was something I needed to do alone.

I braved the city's public transportation system as far as it would get me and walked the last two miles in wind and light rain. Before even looking for the grave, I went into the chapel and I lit a prayer candle and I sat in one of the pews staring up at Jesus on the cross. You might call it praying, I don't know. Whatever it was, I brought it all out, not everything negative that's ever crossed my path, but the negativity I'm determined to put behind me. I looked at it closely, and I thought about it and the role it's all played, and I felt the remorse and the regret one last time, and after all of it, when I got up to go find Aunt Maria, I left it all there.

That night, he called for the last time, and I was exhausted, lying on my old twin bed, staring up at the ceiling.

I told him what I'd done.

"You made it right," he said.

"I made it a lot better. I think she forgives me."

"Of course she forgives you, Vic."

"I'm not letting something like that build up in me again," I said.

I imagined I could hear the creaking of the wood floor under his sock feet.

"It was wrong of me, Vic."

"What was?" I asked even though I knew.

"I should have stayed with you. I should have told Cady it was our night and I wouldn't be able to make it."

"Why?"

"Because that's the way it should be now," he said.

The Jeopardy theme drifted up through the floor from the living room.

"I should have told you it wasn't okay with me," I said. "I should have told you what I wanted."

"What did you want?"

"To be with you."