He Asked Me To Wait, I Asked For A Divorce novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Bag

Nolan carries her bag out, Jo gives her a couch, and Broderick's beautiful apology nearly works until he moves his flight and dares her to say it to his face.

Nolan Fitch was waiting at the bottom of the front steps with my sea-green duffel already in his hand.

I had not asked him to carry it.

I had come out of the kitchen with nothing but my purse and my keys, and somebody had gone back for the rest.

"Your toothbrush is in the side pocket," he said. "Your good boots are in there too."

"Did Broderick send you to bring me back?"

"He did."

He said it plainly, the way some men state the weather.

"And?"

"I told him I wasn't a leash."

Nolan was Broderick's friend, the quiet one.

He had stood at the back of the courthouse in dress uniform and signed the book without a word.

I had barely noticed him then.

I noticed him now, because he was the first person all morning who had not tried to tell me what I felt.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"I don't know yet."

"Then I'll drive you there."

His truck was parked crooked at the curb, with a squadron sticker on the glass and a paperback on the dashboard.

I got in because I had nowhere to stand.

He did not turn on the radio.

We crossed the bridge in a silence that was not uncomfortable, and I told him Jo's address when I could trust my voice.

He nodded once.

At a red light he reached into his jacket and held something out on his open palm.

It was my ring.

"The Captain asked me to give it back," he said. "He said you'd want to decide for yourself in the morning."

"I've decided."

"Then keep it in a pocket and decide again later. Nobody has to know what you do with it."

I took it from him without touching his hand.

I put it in my purse next to my keys, where it felt like a stone.

Jo lived on the second floor of a stucco building with a broken buzzer.

She was on the landing before we reached it, in scrubs and a bathrobe.

Her red hair was a haystack, because I had texted her from the bridge.

She looked at Nolan.

She looked at the duffel.

"Is he the husband?" she asked.

"The friend."

"Huh." She took the bag from him with both hands. "Thanks, friend. You can go."

"I'll go," Nolan said.

He did not leave right away.

He stood on the landing and looked at me as though he wanted to say one more thing and had decided against it.

"Call if you need a ride anywhere," he said.

Then he went down the steps, and his truck started, and he was gone.

Jo shut the door and leaned against it.

"Tell me everything," she said, "and don't leave out the pastry."

So I told her.

I told her about the orders and the date and the blue signature and the shore duty he had promised me in the dark.

She poured two glasses of the cheap red she kept for emergencies and did not say one word until I was done.

Then she said, "I'm going to be so rude about him."

"Please."

She was. For an hour she was magnificent.

By evening I had a couch made up with her second-best blanket.

I had a plate of toast I did not eat.

My phone kept lighting up face down on the cushion.

Eleven texts from Broderick.

I didn't open the first ten.

The eleventh was long.

It came in at nine, one block of text, and the preview alone made my throat close.

"Read it," Jo said. "Out loud. If it's garbage I'm going to throw the phone."

So I read it.

He said he had been a coward, and that he knew it.

He said fear had made him small.

He said he had grabbed the first plan that did not mean losing me, and it was the wrong one.

He said he lay awake thinking of me in his sweatshirt in a kitchen full of boxes.

He wrote, "I don't know how to be a husband yet. I only know that I want you to be the reason I come home."

Jo took a long drink of her wine.

"Okay," she said slowly. "That's good."

"It's good."

"It's annoyingly good. Hannah. Does it sound like him?"

I looked at the screen.

It sounded like the letters. It sounded like the man at the end of the world who had written me about fog.

It sounded nothing like the man in the kitchen.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know which one's real."

Jo put her glass down.

"Then don't answer tonight."

I didn't.

I put the phone face down on the arm of the couch and lay looking at the water stain on her ceiling until midnight.

At twelve-ten it buzzed again, one short message this time.

"My flight got moved to Friday. If you mean it, come say it to my face at the hangar."

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