think she had the wrong idea about my job. And I didn’t know what growing up with money like hers meant. Full-time staff in the house, mommy and daddy never saying no. She was nice, really, but she had no idea how entitled she was. She was great when I was in Garland—that’s Dallas, basically. Then they moved me to El Paso. She didn’t like El Paso. Anyway, when they told me I was coming here she said no way, it was her or Weslaco.”
“And here you are.” She wondered if he’d try to kiss her tonight. She wondered what she’d do if she did.
“Here I am.” What might have been a smile crossed his face. “I shouldn’t joke about it. Divorce stinks, and divorce with kids stinks worse, but she’s a good mom and a good person and we didn’t fight about custody. And she’s decent about it; she lets me take my vacation with them, and I was always too into the job to be the dad I should have been. This way I don’t resent them, I value the time I have with them.”
Rebecca’s stomach knotted. Resent? Did she resent Kira and Tony?
“You’re looking at me like I’m the world’s biggest jerk,” Taylor said.
“Or maybe you’re just being honest.”
He coughed into his hand. “I should go,” he said a few seconds later. “Long day ahead.” She realized afterward that the word honest had triggered him, that he wasn’t comfortable doing whatever it was they were doing.
She spent the entire drive home on Sunday doing what she’d sworn she’d never do, comparing Brian and Taylor. Taylor wasn’t clever or ironic. He was dogged and quiet, genuinely furious that he had failed to catch the Bandit. He wasn’t perfect. Sometimes he showed an unthinking acceptance of the disparities in wealth and power that cut through the borderlands like barbed wire. I don’t make the laws, I just catch people who break them. On the other hand, Rebecca was sure if he did sniff out the Bandit he would follow the trail just as hard whether it ended in a slum or the King Ranch.
* * *
The next time she came to town he didn’t ask her to dinner, and she couldn’t help feeling like the whole trip had been a waste. The lack of progress on the Bandit didn’t help. If the guy had left any patterns, she couldn’t see them. He’d been quiet for almost a year now, too. Too long.
Back home Brian had gone mostly mute. He took the kids to school, cleaned the house. Like he was practicing for life without her. Only in the bedroom did he expose his feelings. He seemed to know he was losing her, because more and more often he turned savage, slapping and biting her, fucking her like she was a toy, until the pain turned into pleasure and the pleasure turned to orgasms and the orgasms turned back to pain. She didn’t try to stop him. She didn’t say No, don’t—though sometimes she found her mind drifting, not so much to Todd Taylor but to the border itself, the unforgiving land that had swallowed those women.
Not then or ever did they talk about what she was doing, much less why.
She wondered what he knew, what he’d guessed. If she should even feel guilty.
* * *
Their tenth anniversary was coming. A Saturday, a Weslaco weekend. She would make the right choice. She would stay in Houston. She would have an anniversary dinner with her husband, the father of her children. Her life partner. She made a reservation for two at the sushi place that the Chronicle said was the best in town. And she told Brian, get ready, we’re going out to dinner like husband and wife. Alrighty then, he said.
But even before they sat down, she knew she’d made a mistake. The place was wrong for them, too fancy, too expensive. The lights were low, the room was round and windowless. When the host whispered, “Reservation?” Brian whispered back, even more softly, “Yessss.” Rebecca knew the pretension infuriated him. Maybe intimidated him too, though he’d never say so.
They fell back on the last refuge of the sinking couple, sneering at everyone else. The room had ripe targets, jowly sixty-year-old men and their thirty-year-old wives. The cattiness was no substitute for real intimacy. Suddenly she felt the void in her life, in their lives, of the way she’d thrown everything into the job.
“Brian.” She reached across the table. “I’m sorry.