Lethal Control, page 25
part #3 of The DuPage Parish Mysteries Series
“Are you having a good Thanksgiving?” Eli asked, which was such an un-Eli question that it made me feel like a deputy all over again.
“Well, I found out on top of being manipulative, scheming, way too sex positive, and all-around interfering, my mom is also a terrible liar.”
Eli laughed softly. Then he started to cry.
In the actual moment, I couldn’t even be mad at him. I put my arm around his shoulders. At the end of the block, there was a bench with a peeling ad for PAIGE BALDRIDGE, ATTORNEY AT LAW and then a photo that had to be taken in the ’90s of a woman in a teal plaid blazer and King Kong-sized shoulder pads. We sat.
“If you need to go, Eli, you can go. I know—well, I don’t know, I guess. But it’s been years of this, years of you wanting to leave. So, if you need to leave, that’s ok. If you need money, or if you need time to figure out where you’re going to go—”
He raised his head to stare at me. “What?”
“I found the credit card. And the suitcase. And I knew this was coming; I mean, I’ve known for a long time that you were going to leave. So, you know, you don’t have to tell me, or anything. I already know. Just—I mean, if I can help you—”
“If you can help me run away from our relationship without even having the decency to tell you.”
“Well—”
“Including giving me money or, I don’t know, letting me hang around until I’ve figured out my next step.”
He was starting to sound a lot more like Eli.
“This is a problem,” he said. “You realize that, right? I thought we were over this when you started throwing shoes and shouting at me. I was really into the shouting. Do you understand how great you are? Do you understand that you are literally a perfect human being and you deserve the absolute best in the world? And I guess that’s why you can sit here, telling me you knew this was coming and you don’t hold it against me and no hard feelings.”
“Hey,” I said.
That was as far as I got.
Eli raised his eyebrows.
“I’m not perfect,” I said. “I didn’t even build that shed my mom wanted.”
That startled a laugh out of him, and then he started to cry. He cried into my shoulder for a long time. The evening gloom gathered in the trees, between the houses, down the streets. We had chosen a crossroad again, I realized as I stroked Eli’s blowout hair. Maybe that made sense. Crossroads were all about choosing, about which way you were going to go. Crossroads were where your paths split.
“Come on,” I said after a while. “Let’s go back. You don’t have to say goodbye to my parents or anything; I won’t tell them.”
He reared back, his face tear streaked, his eyes puffy. “Oh yeah? I don’t have to say goodbye to them?”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“What else? Can I take your ATM card?”
I closed my hands carefully. I wanted to get them into my pockets, but I thought I’d fumble it somehow, and then I’d look twice as dumb.
“Or maybe we’ll just go to the bank together, and you can pull it out in cash and give it to me yourself?”
“You’re being unkind.”
“Big surprise. You know everything about me, about how I was always going to run away. You must have known I was one colossal walking fuck, right? Or did that somehow slip past you?”
“I don’t like you talking to me like this.” I took a few deep breaths, but they didn’t feel all that deep, and then I was talking again. “And you know what? Sorry, E. Sorry I thought I knew what was happening. The suitcase. The new credit card. Am I supposed to pretend to be stupid?”
He didn’t say anything.
“You’ve been lying to me. You don’t even have the decency to do it well. So, what is it? You’re not leaving. Ok. Are you fucking somebody else?”
“What if I am?”
“Then good luck to him.”
“Are you going to help me move into his place? Can we borrow your truck?”
“I don’t appreciate you being such a shit when I’m trying to help—”
Eli dashed at his eyes. “Can you not be so—so fucking helpful for one minute?”
“I’m trying to be helpful because I love you! I don’t want you to leave. I don’t want you to be with somebody else. But I love you more than anything else in the whole world, and I want you to be happy, and if that means helping you find a way to be happy somewhere else, with someone else, then I’m going to do that. What is so gosh darn hard for you to understand about that?”
The shout roared off into the darkness. Eli shrank down, wiping his face faster now. In a tiny voice, he said, “I love you too.”
“Then what the heck is going on?”
Crying again, he worked something out of his pocket. It was a small box in black velvet. I started to say something, I have no idea what. It’s hard to think—and harder to talk—when it feels like somebody just shoved a fist down your throat. Then Eli opened the box.
The ring was a simple band of gold.
Eli was making gulping noises, and his nose was running, and he kept wiping his eyes and getting nowhere with it.
I looked back at the ring. I looked at him.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “Are you the only person in the whole universe who leads up to this by picking a fight?”
“Well, I’m feeling really vulnerable right now!” It was half a shout, and the gloom chased the echoes back to us. Then Eli smiled, a lopsided thing, and pulled his shirt up to wipe his eyes. In a calmer voice, he said, “I am, you know. Feeling vulnerable I mean. It’s been—I mean, I bought this ring, which was the whole point of that new credit card, by the way, and literally since the minute I walked out of the jeweler’s, I’ve felt like I’ve been going crazy. I know you’re going to say no. And then I’m going to die, because I honestly cannot live the rest of my life without you. And instead of waiting for you to say no, instead of realizing that I’ve—I’ve been so awful that you don’t want anything to do with me, I start thinking that I should go. I should just go before you even have a chance to tell me no.”
“Yeah, I saw the suitcase.”
He shook his head. “I know you won’t believe this, but I promise you, Dag, I wasn’t going to run. Not this time. The suitcase—I was hiding the ring, and you almost caught me. That’s all, swear to God. I thought if I could wait a little longer, if I could do a little better, really show you what you mean to me—” He drew a long breath. “And then your mom said maybe I should just ask you, rather than having a nervous breakdown every day for the foreseeable future, and let you decide. So, I tried to—to do the right thing, only I messed it up, and now we’re here, and I ruined it, Dag. I fucking ruined it. This is classic Eli. I mean, I shouted at you. I was so mean to you. Again. I’m going to go borrow your mom’s blender and stick my face in it, and then I’ll be a swamp man and probably marry Pascal or let him eat me, whatever, so just let me drag my sorry ass out of your life—”
I caught his arm and pulled him back onto the bench. We sat like that for a while. He was still crying, of course. Once, we’d been in the art museum, and he’d seen a lady crying, and he’d sat and talked to her for twenty-five minutes, and when she left, she’d been smiling. And when we’d gone to a barbeque at my buddy’s house, all the kids had been glued to Eli—he’d pretended not to like them, and they’d eaten it up. Over the last few weeks, after the Alliteration Gang had some kind of falling out, he’d taken Charlie Crawford to two movies (with his parents’ permission), and he’d smacked me in the face with a pillow when I’d asked about the Big Brothers program. He’d faced down a monster—more than one, actually. He’d stood between me and death—more than once, actually. He didn’t cut his toenails sometimes, and they slashed my legs to hell in bed. He broke all the rings on my binder because he wanted attention. He didn’t know the first thing about whales, no matter how many times I dragged him to the aquarium. He was my mom’s best friend, and my dad thought he was a perfect ten, and I was pretty sure the three of them were going to gang up on me for the rest of my life.
“Are you going to ask me?”
He shivered. His hand tightened once around the box. “Does that mean you’d say yes?”
“Oh no. You’ve got to ask me.”
“Dag!”
I shook my head.
“But, like, you want me to ask you?” Eli said in a thready voice.
“If you’re going to ask me, then ask me. I’m not giving you an answer in advance.”
“I’m trying to be ok with making myself vulnerable, and you know that’s really hard for me, so if you could just, you know, smile or something—”
“Eli Prescott Martins.”
His lip trembled. He slid off the bench, and for a moment, I thought he’d passed out or had a stroke, but he was only kneeling. His hand was shaking so badly I thought the ring was going to fall out of the box.
“Dagobert LeBlanc, will you marry me?”
“You’re asking me right here?” I said and jerked a thumb at the tattered bench ad. “With Paige Baldridge staring at us?”
Eli’s mouth made an O. He scrambled to his feet. “You are so mean!”
“Yes.”
“I’m about to have a heart attack over here, and you’re making jokes!”
“Yeah, I’ll marry you.”
“I’m going to cut up all your Tulane clothes, and I’m—I’m going to make mops out of them.”
“Hey, dummy: yes. The answer is yes.”
Eli kissed me. Then he pulled my hair hard enough to make me yell.
He slid the ring on my finger, and then we kissed some more.
It was dark, but not so dark that when he pulled back, I couldn’t see our breaths steaming in the November air.
“I got a second job,” Eli whispered. “To pay for the ring.”
“Yeah. I figured that out.”
He punched me, but not too hard, and I kissed him a few more times. Then I took his hand, and I said, “Come on. When my parents find out, they’re going to be unbearable, so we’ll probably have to lie low in Mexico for a few years. We can still catch a flight tonight.”
He fit real nice under my arm. He smelled like my Eli, and like pumpkin and cinnamon and spice. We left the intersection and the bench and Paige Baldridge behind us, and we walked slower than we had to, and all around us, the night was full of the sound of houses and dishes and running water and the breeze and branches lifting like a great wave was raising them up.
When we came to the next cross street, I stopped. A mini whirlwind spun leaves at the center of the intersection, filling the air with their dry, dusty scent. “My parents are literally going to die of happiness.”
“You know they’re going to get us sex toys for our wedding.”
“Oh my God.”
“They’ll probably get us that swing. The one your dad showed us about a million pictures of.”
I couldn’t help it; I sounded a little more despairing this time. “Oh my God.”
Eli laughed into my shoulder.
“I know I have to tell them sometime. Eventually, I mean. Maybe after we’ve been married four or five years.” I sighed and cracked my neck and said, “Come on; let’s get it over with.”
But neither of us moved. The wind died down, and for a moment, the world was so soft that I could hear the leaves landing one by one.
“How about—” Eli tugged on my hand, and we cut across the intersection together, which was technically jaywalking but I didn’t say anything. “—we take the long way?”
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks go out to:
Cheryl Oakley, for helping me with typos and punctuation (so many em-dashes), for making me reconsider, among other things, how Eli and Dag could see into the right, and for asking me to think more about that conversation between Eli and Dag’s mom—and making the ending so much better.
Dianne Thies, for keeping track of empty glasses and dirty shirts, for gently correcting (with generous questions) my typos, and for coon-ass, instead of coonass.
Mark Wallace, who (with such a short turnaround) helped me with 0 for o, so many other typos, and for lending his readerly brain to help make the ending stronger.
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Gregory Ashe, Lethal Control
