Connie sat with her backpack between her feet and her duffel bag on the seat beside her, the zipper pulled shut but the shape of it still bulging in ways that suggested she’d packed in a hurry. Through the windshield, the road stretched out ahead of them, two lanes of cracked asphalt cutting through fields of brown grass and the occasional cluster of concrete houses with laundry lines strung between windows.
Hector drove with both hands on the wheel. His left hand at ten o’clock, his right at two, his thumbs resting against the leather. The truck was old and rattled at anything above forty miles an hour and the air conditioning only worked when it felt like it, which, today, it didn’t.
“You did good work,” Hector said. He didn’t look at her when he said it. His eyes stayed on the road, "You worked more than everybody."
“It wasn’t that much,” Connie said.
“It was enough.” He glanced at her. Then back at the road. “Maybe one day you have your own church. You never know.”
Connie laughed. “I don’t think so."
“¿Por qué no?"
“I don’t know. I’m not—” She stopped. Looked out the passenger window. A woman was hanging laundry on a line strung between two trees, her arms reaching up, a sheet billowing in the wind like a sail. "I don’t know if that’s for me."
Hector was quiet for a moment. The truck hit a pothole. The whole frame shuddered. Connie’s backpack shifted between her feet.
“You know how I start?” Hector asked.
She looked at him.
"I was working for a church. Not like this. Not like pastor. Like work. Trabajador. Clean floors. Fix things."
Connie shifted in her seat. The vinyl stuck to the back of her thighs.
“I had many jobs,” Hector continued. "I liked that one. Hard but good."
“How old were you when you started at the church?”
"Right before Gustavo,” he nodded. “I work there for maybe one year. Then I leave. Then I come back. Then I leave again. La vida era así.”
He paused. The truck slowed as they approached a curve. Hector downshifted. The engine groaned. The road straightened. Hector accelerated. The truck’s engine climbed through its gears, each one louder than the last.
“Ten years later,” he said, “I go to school. Escuela de teología. The pastor. He told me to go so I went. I study. I work. I come back to the church. Pastor de niños."
He said it like the words still surprised him.
“Ten more years,” he said. “And then I have my own church. This church. The one you help paint.”
Connie looked at him. She tried to picture him at seventeen. Standing outside Rosa’s door. Telling her mother he was going to take care of her. She tried to picture him at twenty-seven, sitting in a classroom. She tried to picture him at thirty-seven, standing in front of his own congregation for the first time.
The pictures wouldn’t come together. They kept breaking apart into pieces that didn’t fit.
“That’s a long time,” she said.
“Sí,” he laughed. “Long time.”
The truck hit another pothole. Connie’s head bumped against the window. She rubbed the spot with her fingers.
“Was it hard?” she asked. “Raising a family that young. With nothing.”
Hector didn’t answer right away. His hands adjusted on the wheel. His right thumb moved in a slow circle against the leather.
“Muy difícil,” he said. “Very hard. Many nights I don’t sleep. Many days I don’t eat so they can eat. Rosa the same. We both—” He tilted his head from side to side. “Hicimos lo que teníamos que hacer."
He was quiet for a moment. The road stretched out ahead of them, empty except for a single car coming the other way. It passed them with a brief rush of wind that rocked the truck sideways.
“Did you ever regret it?” Connie asked.
Hector didn’t understand her. She scrambled to her phone and it didn’t take long to find the app. It was the last app she had used. It was always the last app she had used.
"¿Arrepentirse??"
He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that Connie started to think she had pronounced it wrong.
Then he spoke.
“Sometimes,” he said. "When it was hard. When we were hungry. You don’t want to see kid hungry. Wife hungry. A veces me pregunto qué hubiera sido si hubiera esperado. Si hubiera tenido más tiempo. Más dinero. Más—”
He stopped. Shook his head.
“But Rosa,” he said. “I chose Rosa, you know. I had Rosa. This is what I wanted. So, no. Nunca me arrepiento de ello."
…
Tom laid on his back with one arm behind his head, the other resting on his stomach, his breathing already back to normal. Britney sat beside him with the sheet pulled up to her waist, her knees drawn up, her back against the headboard.
She hadn’t stopped talking.
“It’s not that I disagree with it,” she was saying. “Obviously this isn’t what I want. I didn’t ask for this."
Tom didn’t say anything. He was looking at the ceiling.
“But come on,” Britney continued. “We all know what this is. We all know how this has to end. And how it can’t end."
Tom’s thumb moved in a slow circle against his stomach.
“If I drop this to involuntary, I’m done,” Britney said. “I might as well just end the fucking campaign right then and there."
She pulled her knees tighter against her chest. The sheet shifted.
“It’s not like I want her to get life. If it was up to me, I’d—”
She stopped and turned to Tom. "Oh! Did you know that Brice wrote a letter?"
Tom looked up. "A letter."
"Yeah, they’re submitting these impact statements from like her family and stuff. Her teachers at St. Joe’s. Friends. My inbox is flooded with them from her lawyer. Brice is in there. Surprised the shit out of me."
"Me too," Tom let out a dry chuckle, sitting up, "I didn’t know about that. I saw him last week. He didn’t mention it."
“Oh," Britney nodded.
Tom reached for the glass of water on the nightstand and took a drink. Set it back down.
“Would it help?” he asked.
Britney looked at him. “Would what help?”
“If Liz and I wrote one too.”
The room went quiet.
“If we push for leniency, as a family,” Tom continued, “That gives you cover. Politically. You can point to it. Say the family’s wishes were a factor. That you took their perspective into account. Obviously, I doubt the Hayes would do the same but one out of two ain’t bad. You can say you were conflicted. Settled somewhere in the middle.”
Britney let the silence sit for a moment. Then she laughed.
“If I didn’t know any better,” she said, “I’d say that was your version of getting me flowers.”
Tom’s mouth twitched. “Maybe it is.”
“You’re trying to woo me, Tom Colton.”
“Maybe I am.”
…
Brice had his notebook open. Mel had hers. Neither of them had written anything in the last twenty minutes.
She was working through a problem set she'd already finished once, just checking her work, and he was doing something similar with his notes. Reading them, mostly. Absorbing nothing. They'd been here long enough that all that was left of her refresher was melted ice and his coffee had gone.
"Can I show you something?" Brice said.
Mel looked up.
He pulled out a folded piece of paper from the back pocket of his notebook. He set it on the table between them and didn't say anything else. Mel looked at it, then at him.
"What is it?"
"Just read it."
She unfolded it. Smoothed it against the table. Started reading.
Brice watched her face. After a moment her brow shifted. He couldn't tell what that meant. Then something around her mouth changed, and he definitely couldn't tell what that meant either. He looked down at his notebook. Looked back up. She was still reading.
It wasn't that long of a letter.
When she finished she folded it back along the same creases and set it down. She didn't say anything for a moment.
"Did you mean it?" she asked.
"I guess," Brice said."I mean yes. I did."
Mel nodded once. She slid the letter back across the table and picked up her pencil.
They went back to their work.
A few minutes passed. Maybe more. The laptop fan cycled down. Someone near the window packed up and left.
"There's a thing," Brice said, "in a few weeks. For Jimmy."
He turned his pen over in his hand. "My parents are doing a small gathering. At their house. In South Bend." He paused. "Which is like four hours from here, so."
Mel waited.
"You don't have to come. No pressure. Really. It's far and I know you've got stuff, and I'm not going to be weird about it either way." He set the pen down. "But I'd want you there. If you wanted to come."
Mel was quiet for a moment. "Would Serena be okay with that?"
"Yeah," he said. "She's fine with it."
Mel looked at him for a second longer than usual. Then she looked back down at her notebook.
"Okay," she said.
Brice nodded. He picked his pen back up.
