I made a weird sound, like I was testing to see if I was still breathing. I was.
“Is there more?” he asked.
“More what?” I made the sound again.
“Is there more that you need to tell me?” he asked, and I could see on his face that he was thinking, I know there is more that you need to tell me. This is a test, Frankie.
And of course there was. There was Zeke, and there was everything that happened that summer, all the details that were going to freak him out. There was more, of course there was.
“There is more,” I told him, “but I can’t handle it right now. I mean, I can tell you more, and I will tell you more, but I need some time to figure this out.”
“On your own,” he said, growing angry. “All by yourself.”
“Kind of?” I replied. “You keep something a secret this long, it takes a little while to untangle it. I just need you to be patient with me.”
“You’re not leaving us, are you?” he asked, and it looked like he might start crying. “You’re not going to go somewhere else and never come back?”
“No, god no. Aaron, no. You and Junie are the only things that I care about.”
“The poster,” he said.
“You and Junie are the only people I care about,” I corrected. “I will never, ever, ever leave you.”
“Okay,” he finally said, taking a deep breath.
“But I am going to go away for, like, a little while.”
“Frankie, Jeeeee-sus Christ,” he said.
“I need to clear up some things. I have to go back to Coalfield, you know? I have to tell my mom. I have to talk to this writer lady and make sure she gets all the details right.”
“Okay,” he said again. He looked so defeated.
This was the thing. I had kind of fucked up, but I had admitted it. And now, if he wanted to keep me, if he wanted to keep our life as it was, he would have to let me fuck things up a little more. But, like, this was marriage, right? This was love? I hoped it was.
I didn’t want to think about what came next, honestly. I had always depended on the fact that Aaron thought I was good. I was a good mother and a good partner and a good person. And if he didn’t think that, I wasn’t sure what I’d do.
And this is when it hit me, the rest of our lives. I wanted to be with him for the rest of my life, not just right now, but forever. Days would go by sometimes when he was the only adult I talked to in real life, and I realized that part of why I didn’t care about the rest of the world was because he gave me what I needed. And maybe I had ruined it. But I had to do this. I had to let the story reach the end, and then I’d come back and I’d hope that I could tell other stories.
“Junie is going to be home in, like, five minutes. Bea texted a while back,” I told him.
“Don’t tell her yet,” he said.
“She wouldn’t understand one bit of it,” I said.
“I want you to act like it’s all fine,” he said. “I want you to sleep in our bed, okay? I don’t want you to go to the guest room and be dramatic and make everything worse. I said it was okay for now, so you have to be normal. You have to be good for us.”
“I wasn’t going to go sleep in the guest room,” I said.
“Well, I’m not going to sleep in the guest room.”
“It’s not a great bed,” I admitted.
“Do you love me?” he asked.
“I do,” I said, without hesitation, and it was nice to answer a question that didn’t require constant adjustment to my brain. “I do, and you know I do.”
“Okay,” he said. “I believe you.” But then he paused for a few seconds and I wondered if he was doubting me. I was just about to say something when he held up his hand.
“I’m trying to remember the phrase,” he said. “I’m trying to remember the exact phrase.”
“The edge is—”
“No,” he said, “I don’t want you to say it. Just . . . okay, yeah, the edge is a sh—” and then he was just mouthing the rest of the words, nodding, like it was a spell, which it was.
He looked up at me. “You made that up?” he said.
“I did.”
“Your teenage brain did that?” he asked.
“It did,” I admitted.
And when Junie burst into the room, holding a half-full box of Milk Duds, absolutely zooted on sugar and instantly explaining the plot of the movie they just saw, I thought, Oh, thank god. The chaos of our daughter, so lovely and beautiful, I would always be grateful for it, how she required us to keep living, to keep moving forward, just so she didn’t leave us in her dust. I listened to her explain the movie, not a single word of it making the slightest bit of sense, but I listened as hard as I could, like if I tried hard enough, I would truly understand.