Page 38 of Open Road

Devil negotiated it like a diplomat.

Roam was at the workshop when we left. He looked up when I came out in a clean shirt and my hair down. He looked at me the way he’s been looking at me since yesterday evening on theporch, the same way he looked right after the kiss, as if there’s nothing in his field of vision he’d rather have there.

It does something to my breathing even now, sitting in Devil’s truck heading north on a Jacksonville surface road with Lucy offering opinions about the coffee situation at the compound.

I look out the window until we arrive and walk in.

The mall is large, bright, and smells of air conditioning and something artificial baking from the direction of the food court. Devil moves through it with purpose. She has a list in her head, no physical paper, the organized certainty of a woman who shops with intent. Lucy drifts alongside her, picking up things, putting them down, maintaining a running commentary on everything she touches that is somehow both critical and affectionate.

I follow.

The clothes here are normal. Standing in the entrance of the first shop, the realization is strange. There are racks and racks of things in colors and cuts I have spent two years avoiding. Craig’s voice starts its inventory automatically. ‘Too tight. Too much. Who do you think you’re dressing for?’

With effort, I silence it and move to the racks.

My hands find something dark and oversized, a kind of tunic in a soft gray that would cover everything it needs to cover and make no claims. The fabric is good. It would wash well. It would last.

“No.”

Devil’s hand, arriving from my left, removes it from my grip with the calm authority of someone correcting a reflex rather than making a point. She puts it back on the rack without looking at it.

“Devil—”

“No.” Devil is already moving down the rail. Her fingers walk through the hangers with practiced efficiency, not browsing butsearching. She knows what she’s looking for and passes over seven things before she stops.

What she pulls out is a deep-burgundy color. It’s a wrap style that ties at the side, made of soft fabric with a slight drape to it. She holds it up against me without asking, tilts her head, and decides. “Try it.”

“It’s not really my—”

“It’s exactly yours.” Devil says it the way she says things that are simply true, no argument scaffolded around it, no cushioning. “That color is your color. The cut is your cut.” She puts it over my arm. “Try it.”

Lucy materializes on my other side with a pair of dark jeans and the look of a woman who has been waiting for her cue. “Both,” she says.

The fitting rooms are at the back of the shop, a row of doors with mirrors lit from above in a particular way that is either very forgiving or very brutal, depending on the day and your starting point.

Today it is brutal.

I close the door and stand in the small space with the burgundy dress over my arm and the jeans folded over the hook, and look at myself in the mirror in my own clothes, which is probably a mistake, but unavoidable. Craig’s voice doesn’t wait.

‘You’ve let yourself go.’The old one, the early one, the one he started using when Rose was four months old, and I was running on no sleep and the version of my body that had grown and fed a human being was not the version he had signed up for. ‘Cover that up. You think anyone else would want this?’

Not loud. It never needed to be loud. Volume was never the mechanism. The mechanism was repetition, precision, and the particular intimacy of someone who knew exactly which words found the places you were already uncertain about and made them permanent. My upper arms, the soft belly, and the fullnessof my hips that Rose left behind in stretch marks I can’t see right now but know are there.

I know they’re there.

My hands are still.

I reach for the gray tunic out of instinct, the one I picked up off the rack before Devil took it from me.

It’s not there.

Right. Devil has it.

The burgundy dress is on my arm.

In a sense, the dress wins by default, so I put it on.

I tie the wrap, smooth the fabric, and turn toward the mirror.