Page 54 of A Song for Another Woman

My throat tightens, so I reach for the next song and let the steel guitar fill the space I can't. Not Cade. Not Melody.

While the song plays, I stare through the glass at the dark shape of Pop moving around the booth. Beyond him, beyond the station, beyond Main Street and the sleeping diner and the pharmacy where Mrs. Jameson is probably telling her husband everything, there's a cabin on Mill Creek Road.

I close my eyes. No. This show isn't for him. It was mine before him, and it's mine after him. I didn't crawl back into my own voice so I could aim it at the man who forgot to hear me when I was standing in the same room.

By Wednesday, everyone knows Cade buys his own groceries.

He bought groceries at Rayburn's.

He held the door for Mrs. Tandy at the gas station.

He asked Mr. Hanley where to get a decent radio antenna.

And now, I look around the diner when I step in, half expecting to see him sitting in there, waiting on me.

I sit down in the nearest booth because the room tilts, just a little. June is beside me instantly.

"Food?" she asks.

"Air first."

She slides into the seat across from me, blocking me from the rest of the diner. She looks around. "Doctor appointment next week?"

I nod.

"You want me to come?"

Another thing I imagined Cade doing: sitting beside me in a waiting room, knee bouncing, filling out forms too aggressively, asking questions from whatever book he panic-read at three in the morning, his big hand covering mine when the nurse called my name.

The ache is so sudden I have to look away. "I want him to know," I whisper.

June goes still.

I press my fist to the center of my chest. "I don't want to tell him. Not yet. I know why I can't. I know it. But I want him to know. I keep thinking about what he'd say."

June's eyes shine, but she lets me keep talking.

"He'd cry," I say, and my laugh breaks in the middle. "He'd try not to, because he'd want to be steady for me, but he'd cryanyway. Then he'd say something ridiculous about names. He always liked Laurel for a girl because of the mountain laurel by the Whip."

"And for a boy?"

"Cash," I say, and roll my eyes before the tenderness can kill me. "Obviously."

June smiles through her worry. "Naturally."

"He'd put his hand on my stomach." I press my palm low, where there's still nothing much to feel. "And he'd talk to the baby like it could hear him already."

My throat closes. For a moment, the diner falls away. I'm in a kitchen that doesn't exist, in a life that didn't fracture, with Cade kneeling in front of me and laughing against my stomach while I run my fingers through his hair. I can feel the warmth of him as clearly as if wanting could open a door.

Then a chair scrapes near the counter, and the day comes back. I remove my hand.

"It doesn't change anything," I say. "It doesn't change those words, those god awful words."

Because as soon as I start to imagine all the things he would say to me, all the sweet nothings that might come out of his mouth, I hear those words…

And wonder if he'd rather say the sweet nothings to Melody instead of me.

Chapter Thirteen