Free What You Have Left by Will Allison

me feel like a fool. “Well?” I say. “Did you get your joyous reunion?”
    That gets the faucets going, a whole river of tears, but it turns out I’m not the reason she’s crying. In between sobs, Holly asks me to drive her to the police station. “I have to turn myself in,” she says. “I think I hit somebody.” It takes her a minute to calm down enough to tell me what happened, then the words whoosh out of her like air from a slit tire. She says she finally tracked her father to a garage in Camden, only the other mechanic told her Wylie hadn’t been showing up for work. That could have been the truth, or it could have been a story, and she was still trying to decide if she should stay or go as she put the truck in gear. She didn’t see the mechanic stepping from between the pumps until it was too late. She swerved. There was a thump. “Maybe it wasn’t him,” she says. “Maybe it was just the curb.” What she doesn’t mention, of course, is that she was too plastered to know what happened. She’d probably been there since dawn, sitting in her pickup sipping Lord Calvert as she waited for the garage to open, working up the courage to look her old man in the eye for the first time in fifteen years.
    â€œYou think he got your license plate?”
    She shrugs, wipes her eyes.
    â€œWas anybody else around?”
    She shrugs again, and that’s when I realize she doesn’t really want to turn herself in. But she wants it to be
my
decision not to go to the police—my problem—and patheticas it sounds, that’s all right by me. At least I’m still the one she turns to when she’s in trouble.
    â€œRelax. He probably didn’t even see you,” I say, “on account of your being invisible.”
    I’ve been feeling invisible myself ever since I proposed to Holly. After a week of seeing the engagement ring atop the dresser, untouched, I concluded that she didn’t want to get married but wouldn’t come out and say so because she wasn’t ready to lose me altogether. When I tried to reassure her—when I told her that, married or not, I wasn’t going anywhere—she asked why, then, had I bothered proposing?
    I’d been saving for the ring all summer. I was working for Cal, fixing up the farmhouse Holly would inherit, the one she hasn’t set foot in since the day we put her grandfather in the ground. Last fall, when he realized he was sick, he hired me to get the place in shape for her. She’d just started her sophomore year at Carolina and was living on campus, but she moved back to the farm in the spring, after Cal was diagnosed. Like his father, his uncle, and his grandfather, he had Alzheimer’s, but unlike them, he wasn’t willing to sit around waiting for his brain to go soft. Two days after we finished painting the house—the last of our projects—he took the pills. Holly had seen it coming and thought she’d talked him out of it, but then, just like that, Cal was gone.
    This was in late September, and after the funeral, I proposed. She was only twenty, and I didn’t want to rush things, but I wanted her to know I was there for her. We were out on the bluff, watching the sun go down. She slipped the ring on her finger and inspected it in the twilight.
    â€œDoes it fit?”
    â€œDid you know,” she said, “that half of all marriages end in divorce?”
    â€œBut that means the other half don’t.”
    She put the ring back in the box and stared off across the soybean field Cal had turned into a driving range after he retired, the same field where her mother mastered a McCormick Farmall tractor at the age of fourteen. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “that I’d like to find my father.”
    â€œI’m asking you to marry me,” I said.
    â€œI know.”
    Holly’s passed out on my bed and I want to be