A Thread So Thin (30 page)

I
heard footsteps on the stairs and I knew they were Garrett’s.

I didn’t get up. I just sat on the floor, waiting. I’d left the door unlocked. He opened it and called me. “Liza?”

He saw me sitting on the floor and smiled. He’d left his anger outside on the street, somewhere down the block and around the corner. His old face was back, the one I loved.

“Hi.”

He sat down opposite me with his legs crossed and took my hands in both of his, like we were playing one of those mind-reading games you played at parties when you were in junior high. Except this wasn’t a game. And I couldn’t read his mind.

“Hi.”

“I’m sorry I yelled at you. And I’m really sorry I didn’t listen. If it counts for anything, I thought I was. Guess I need more practice. I’m going to do better from here on out. Okay?”

“Okay,” I whispered, feeling a small swell of hope. If he was talking about how he was going to do things from here on out, then that must mean he thought we had a future together.

“You know,” I said, “on the scale of who screwed up worse than who, my side of the seesaw is definitely the one bumping the ground. If anybody should be apologizing, it’s me. So here goes.”

I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Garrett. I really am. I should have talked to you the second Professor Williams offered me the job. I should have been straight with you and trusted you about so many things. Maybe you didn’t listen as well as you could have, but I didn’t exactly make that easy for you. That was as much my fault as yours, probably more.”

Being a Burgess, apologizing doesn’t come naturally to me. I had been looking at Garrett’s hands the whole time. But now I looked up at him from under my lashes.

“And I’m sorry I yelled, too. That wasn’t fair. I wish I could promise I’ll never yell again, but I know how I am and—well, if I promised that, I’d be lying, so I won’t. But I promise I’ll try. And I’ll try to do a better job of talking things out and letting you know what I’m thinking and feeling. I know I can do better. From here on out, I will.”

I waited.

“Okay,” Garrett said simply.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Still holding my hands in his, he rocked forward and gave me a quick kiss on the lips.

The swell of relief became a flood. Everything was going to be okay. We were going to be okay. I couldn’t keep from grinning.

“Hey! We just had our first fight—and lived through it. Pretty good, huh?”

“Pretty good,” he said. “But I came awful close to punching a hole in your wall. For a minute I thought you were going to lose your deposit.”

“You have amazing powers of self-control.”

Now it was me who rocked forward to kiss him on the lips, but my kiss was not a quick one. I left my lips on his for a long time, opened them a little and then a little more, inviting his tongue to explore my mouth, extending mine into his, taking my time, running the tip of my tongue over the ridge of his perfect teeth before rising to my knees while putting my hands on his muscled arms, urging him to rise with me, wanting to feel the length of his body pressing against mine and know that all was forgiven and forgotten and that we would go on from here as though none of this had happened.

But when I tried to pull him up to me, he pulled back, put his arms on my shoulders, and pushed me away. I was sitting back on the floor again, close to Garrett but not close enough, breathing heavily.

“Whoa! Liza,” Garrett said from his side of the floor, taking in a deep whoosh of air and then letting it out quickly, as if trying to catch his breath.

I frowned, feeling rejected and a little confused. “What? What’s the point of fighting if you don’t get to make up? That’s the best part.” I smiled, trying to tease him out of his serious mood, but it didn’t work.

“But,” he said, “we’re not done fighting yet. I mean, we’re done
fighting,
at least for today. But there are still a lot of things we need to talk about, things we need to figure out. All right?”

“All right,” I said, but I said it with a pout. Personally, I could think of a lot better things to do than fight or even talk about fighting. But I had just promised I would be better about talking things out, so I was pretty well stuck.

Garrett scooted backward a little, increasing the distance between us by a couple of inches. Feeling chilled, I wrapped my arms protectively around my waist.

“Liza, when I was out walking, I came up with about a million questions I wanted to ask you. But after a while I realized it really comes down to one, the question I should have asked in the first place. What do you want? Out of life, I mean. Tell me. This time, I promise I’ll listen.”

I pressed my lips together. While Garrett was out walking, I’d prepared myself to answer any number of questions that might serve to explain my inexplicable behavior, but this wasn’t one of them. Twisting the diamond on my engagement ring from the front to the back of my hand and back again, I realized how much that said. It wasn’t the answers that explained me; it was the questions.

I looked up. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe that’s the problem. Until five months ago, that question hadn’t even crossed my mind. And when it finally did, on the night you proposed, it caught me completely by surprise.”

Garrett frowned, struggling and failing to understand how that was possible. “But you’ve always known you were going to graduate someday. Didn’t you ever stop to think about what came after?”

“Not really. I know that sounds crazy, but it just seemed like everything would go on more or less like it always had. I would paint and live…somewhere.” I shrugged. “I never thought about my options after school because it never crossed my mind that I really had any options, you know? It isn’t like the Fortune 500 organizes recruiting fairs competing to snap up the most promising studio art majors. I figured I’d do what everyone else was going to do: find a job that would pay the bills so I could spend my free time painting. Knowing that I had a place to live and a job at the quilt shop waiting for me when I went back to New Bern made it even easier for me. I never had to think about my future. Not until New Year’s Eve.”

Garrett raised his eyebrows. “When I ruined everything by asking you to marry me?”

“Don’t say that. You didn’t ruin anything. You just surprised me, that’s all.”

“And you don’t like surprises.” There was no question in his voice; it was a statement of fact. I didn’t try to deny it.

“Liza, I don’t understand. You really were caught by surprise? That night, with the flowers and the car, the dinner and dancing—you didn’t know I was going to propose?”

I shook my head.

“But didn’t you know how I felt about you?”

“I knew you cared about me, even loved me, and I felt the same way about you, at least I thought I did….” I tipped my head back, resting it against the wall, and looked at the ceiling. When I lowered my head, Garrett was staring at me and his expression was blank, as though steeling himself for some terrible disappointment.

I reached out and grabbed his hands. “Oh! Garrett, don’t look at me like that! I’m not saying I didn’t love you. I did love you! I do love you! But back then, I wasn’t thinking about love the same way you were. I wasn’t thinking love as in ‘love and marriage.’ I wasn’t
not
thinking about it, either. I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just living. Doing what I’d always done. Assuming everything would go on like it always had. Back then, if someone had asked me if I hoped you and I would get married, I’d have thought for a moment and said, ‘Well, yes. Sure. Someday.’ It never crossed my mind that you’d ask so soon. It just was so…so sudden. I wasn’t expecting it.

“I felt like I’d been jolted awake in the middle of a dream. I didn’t quite know where I was or what I was doing there. Suddenly, I had to start thinking about my future, and it just terrified me!”

Garrett was trying to keep his face neutral, but I could tell by the look in his eyes that he didn’t really understand. How could I explain it to him?

“One of the great things about painting is that if I don’t like how a canvas turns out, I can just paint over it and start again. Quilting is the same way. If the colors are ugly or the seams are crooked or the corners don’t meet, you can just rip out the stitches and take another run at it. But life isn’t like that. You’ve only got one chance to get it right. And that scares me, Garrett, because I want to get it right. I really do!”

I paused to give Garrett a chance to say something, but he didn’t. He was listening, really listening, making no judgments, offering no solutions, just hearing me out.

“Next thing I knew, there were all these other decisions that had to be made, and they were all important too. Or at least they seemed like they were. After a while I couldn’t tell the difference between the important choices and the trivial ones. Before long, deciding whether I should take the job offer in Chicago seemed just as overwhelming as trying to decide where we should go on a honeymoon. I was so afraid of getting it wrong! And it wasn’t just the choices I had to make that were bothering me, but the things I was passing up. I told you that I don’t know what I want, but that isn’t quite right. I know what I want—everything! I want all of it! All the time! But,” I said, “it doesn’t work that way, does it?”

Garrett moved his head ever so slightly from side to side.

I sighed. “Yeah. I get it. It took me a while, but I get it. Eventually, you’ve got to choose. If you don’t, then circumstances just choose for you. While you were outside thinking things through, I was sitting here trying to do the same. I didn’t come to many conclusions.

“I still don’t know if I want to go to a big city and be a world-famous museum curator or stay in sleepy little New Bern and be an obscure and underappreciated artist. Heck, I still don’t even know where I want to go on my honeymoon. But, Garrett, wherever I go on my honeymoon, I want you to be there too. I don’t know much, but I know that. For sure. I love you, Garrett. I always will.”

He leaned down and bent his head over my hand, his lips so smooth that they felt like the caress of a soft sable brush. He looked up at me, still holding my hand in his, cupping his palms around it as though he were cradling a fragile blossom. And in that moment, seeing myself in the mirror of his eyes, I felt like exactly that: a cherished flower, beautiful and entirely loved.

“And when I go on my honeymoon,” he said, “wherever it is…and whenever it is, I want you to be there too. There’s no one else for me, Liza. There never will be.”

My heart lurched.

Whenever it is? What’s he saying?

I looked into his eyes and knew.

“Liza, don’t! Don’t cry! It’s not what you think. I’m not breaking up with you. But we’re not getting married. Maybe someday, but not next week. You’re not ready. We’re not ready.”

I started to tell him he was wrong; I
was
ready. Maybe before I hadn’t been, but now I
was
.

But I couldn’t say any of that. When I tried to speak, nothing came out—not words, not sobs, nothing. Two tears traced a line from the corners of my eyes down my cheeks. Garrett reached out his hand, caught them on the bend of his knuckle.

“Liza, listen to me. This isn’t an end to anything. If anything, it’s a beginning. We’re going to go back and do this again. Do it right. The way we should have from the first. We’re going to take our time and give you time, time to find out who you are and what you want out of life, to realize a little bit of your own power, time to try things, succeed at some, fail at others, and
know
that it’s not the end of the world! You need time to know how capable you are, and to learn how to choose, and fight, and tell people what you need. Time. Liza, you just need more time.”

“You…” I sniffed and closed my eyes for a moment before trying my voice again. “You want to go back? I don’t understand. You want a do-over?”

“Yeah,” he said. “A do-over. Nothing has happened that can’t be fixed. We were just rushing things. I was rushing things. Until today, I didn’t realize it. It’s my fault. I’m sorry, baby. You tried to tell me that you weren’t ready. I didn’t hear you. All I knew was that I wanted to marry you. As soon as possible.”

He smiled. “On New Year’s Eve, if somebody had told me the headwaiter moonlighted as a justice of the peace, I’d have tried to talk you into marrying me right on the dance floor. Sitting here looking at you, how beautiful you are, even with your eyes red and your nose running, I almost can’t blame myself. But I should have listened better, been better, and stopped to think more about what you needed.

“I want to marry you so much, Liza. There are only two things I want more: for you to be happy, and for our marriage to last from ‘I do’ until death. And if pulling back and taking another run at this will make that happen, then I can wait. And if it never happens—if you’re never ready—well, that’s a chance I’ll have to take. I don’t want to, but I can and I will. You’re worth waiting for, Liza.”

The sun was streaming through the curtainless window, making my engagement ring blink a bright beam of light. The room was quiet. So quiet.

“Do you want this back?” I asked softly, nodding toward the ring.

“Do you want me to take it back?”

I bit my lower lip, thinking. “Maybe you could hold on to it for a while.”

“I can do that.”

“For how long?”

“Until you tell me that you’re ready to take it back and keep it, forever.”

I started to pull off the ring, but even though my fingers were thinner than they’d been when he first gave it to me, it caught on my knuckle. “What if I told you I was ready now?”

He raised his eyebrows, asking me to ask myself if that was really true, knowing I already knew the answer. The ring was a symbol of my love for Garrett and his for me, but in my mind, it had become something else as well, a safety net. As long as I was wearing the ring, a part of me would doubt that I could manage on my own, or take care of myself. I thought about everything that had happened today, about sitting alone on the floor, looking at my shiny new diploma, feeling as clueless and helpless as always. I thought about my resolve to quit being clueless or helpless, and to finally grow up. I brushed my finger across the angled edge of the diamond and knew what I had to do. I love Garrett, but it’s time to be responsible for myself, and at least for now, that means working without a net.