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It’s the truck in the parking lot that makes her think of it. The day is so akin to those of that summer sixteen years ago that if Betty sticks her tongue out, she can taste it. She can taste the heat in the air and the sweat on her lip and the unapologetic grease from cheap diner food.
Fleetingly, just for a moment, she wonders what he drives now. Perhaps he’s upgraded the truck like he’s upgraded the trailer home.
Things change over the years.
As she passes the old F-150, sandals clacking on the asphalt, Betty remembers that girl in the front seat all of those years ago: in love and hopeful, naive more than anything, apologetic on returning home (sorry mom) but not meaning it.
“Good morning,” the receptionist says, recognising her now after all of these weeks.
“Good morning.” She doesn’t mean that either.
There’s the faint smell of cigarette smoke lingering in the hospital atrium and inexplicably, Betty’s mouth waters. She pictures her teenage bedroom, her teenage boyfriend clambering up a ladder to kiss her goodnight, the smile on her teenage face in the mirror when he’d gone home after saying I fucking love you, Betty Cooper.
She wonders what that girl would make of all of this, having believed that with the coming of adulthood everything would be so much less complicated.
Ironic really then, that the simplest period of her life was when she ran away to some nowhere town with Jughead Jones.
-
The song on the radio takes him back. Even after he’s killed the engine and the clouds of dry dust are swirling around the truck’s tyres in miniature tornadoes, he sits and listens.
How did you know?
It’s what I’ve always wanted
There had been no music playing at the time of course, but if ever there was a melody that could transport him back to that river when his then-girlfriend was stripping off her sundress in front of him, it would be this.
Can we settle down, please?
The smudge-brown drapes of his father’s trailer are closed and Jughead pulls the key out of the ignition, taking the song along with it.
The steps leading to the door are rickety, the wood groaning under his weight which doesn’t say much for their longevity, and he knocks, feeling sweat dampen the hair at the back of his neck.
There’s no answer. Figures.
He still has his boyhood key of course. Moving out on that icy Wednesday in early February had been miserable only in relation to the weather and the fact that his father, who had patted him on the back the night before with proud-sad eyes, had been too drunk to lend a hand with the boxes.
Toni had stitched him some drapes until he’d had enough cash to buy proper blinds that blocked out the street lamp, and Cheryl, with a ring on her left hand, had brought with her a house plant that he’d accidentally killed in less than a month despite the label stating something along the lines of easy maintenance . He’d eaten alone at Pop’s in the same booth that’s now Luca’s favourite and FP had finally called round five days later, bowing his head and clutching a raggedy stuffed animal which had lived on Jughead’s pillow until he was ten.
He lets himself in, recoiling at the heat which instantly crawls along his skin and clings to it. “Dad,” he says gently. “You need to let some air in here.”
FP waves the suggestion away although it’s half-hearted and easy to ignore. He sets about cracking the windows and even though he knows it will do little good in terms of lowering the temperature, Jughead aims for the air to be slightly less repressive.
“Did you shop?”
“Couple of days ago,” FP says.
The refrigerator doesn’t confirm as such, but there’s an empty box of Extra Gold by the trash can so he guesses it’s the truth.
“A 30-pack?”
“Don’t start boy,” his father warns, and Jughead takes in the yellowing of his eyes and the bloating around his stomach and nods. He’ll buy groceries and then he’s done.
He refuses to watch him waste a second liver.
As he leaves he thinks again of Betty Cooper (she was Cooper then, not Jones) and wonders, just briefly, how she ever stayed in that trailer without complaining.
He’s embarrassed all over again.
(He needs to stop thinking about her too)
-
She’s been going home to an empty house for months now, all of those rooms vastly quiet and intimidating in their emptiness. Even when the girls return home from school it’s an eerie kind of sound: they play without the level of noise Betty had always prepared herself for when having children and she thinks back to that much-smaller house in Lexington - the one she’d preferred - and wishes they’d bought that instead.
Today though, going home is different. Christopher isn’t just in the hospital. He isn’t coming back.
The door to her husband’s office is open and Betty can see the large mahogany desk which dominates the room. It’s now devoid of the papers that have so often cluttered its surface and appears to be being sliced into thin sections by the rays of sunlight cut by the window shutters. She closes the door with one hand and curls her nails into the palm of the other.
There had been a period of time when she didn’t do this - didn’t use physical pain to express what she was feeling inside - but now Christopher is dead and she hasn’t cried and this is the only thing she can think of to do so that she doesn’t seem like such a terrible person.
She is a widow at thirty-three.
Despite everything, she wants to laugh. (She wants to run)
“Mama’s home,” Amelie’s tiny voice announces from the back yard. She comes running, wearing only a sundress and bare feet, the soles of which are green from the wet grass by the sprinkler.
She leaves little footprints on the hardwood floor but Betty doesn’t say anything. “Hi baby.”
Ella, joining them slowly, pigtail plaits tied at the ends with lilac ribbons, is more hesitant. More aware of what her mom’s coming home early means.
“Mom, is daddy in Heaven?” she asks.
Betty rests on her knees, offering her open arms for her eldest daughter to cuddle into. Amelie lifts her face, wide blue-grey eyes innocent and awaiting her answer. “Yes,” she says gently. “Daddy’s in Heaven now.”
Only Hannah, the sixteen-year-old babysitter whose parents own the house next door cries, wiping quickly at her eyes as she watches from the open patio doors.
“I’m so sorry Mrs Jones,” she says.
Betty nods.
Later, when Hannah has left and Betty is cooking mac and cheese from the box, Ella asks, “Is it true that daddy can see us from Heaven?”
She turns, giving up on stirring the lumps out of the sauce. “That’s what I believe.”
“Do you think he’ll be mad at Amelie for leaving dirty footprints on the rug?”
Betty looks at where her daughter is pointing and sees the collection of light-green marks on the cream wool.
“No,” she decides aloud. “I don’t think he’ll mind at all.”
-
When it wants to be, Riverdale is a small town. Jughead does not expect to see Betty at the park on Elm Street, but see her he does. The last time they’d met here, she’d been pushing her little girl on the swing. This time, she’s sitting at the bench by the newly-installed splash pad, watching as her two daughters shriek when the fountains erupt around them.
They have not kept in touch since the ten-year reunion. They hadn’t shared their phone numbers, email addresses, actual home addresses or anything to do with social media. (He doesn’t have it and he refuses to be that guy)
Still, he’s not sure whether he’s relieved or a little sad about their lack of communication.
He’s nostalgic, he decides silently. Nostalgic. That’s all.
“Jones,” he says on a lilt, employing the same tone he’d used so many times when they were seventeen and he’d say Cooper .
Betty jumps, practically lifting up off of the bench, the hem of her dress flapping in the hot breeze. “Jughead!”
Her hand is covering her heart, Luca runs off to play in the fountains and he apologises. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
She slides a little along the painted wood even though there was already plenty of room for him to sit. “He’s grown so much,” she says in reference to Jughead’s son who is relishing in covering one of the fountains with his foot before allowing the water to surge upwards on a wave of pressure. “He looks even more like you.”
“And you have two now,” he replies, “You were pregnant when I last saw you.”
It seems like such a long time ago.
It is, he supposes.
“Christopher died,” Betty says so bluntly that Jughead thinks he must have misheard. “Before you ask me how he is.”
His mouth, he realises, is simulating a fish underwater. “Shit, Betty, I-”
“Please don’t say you’re sorry.” Her voice is almost a whisper. “I can’t bear it.”
“When?” he finally manages to ask.
“Two weeks ago. He uh…” she presses her fingers into her palms and Jughead is reminded of when she used to do the same back in high school. He never asked her about it. “He had cancer - in his brain. They… the doctors… they found it late.”
Betty sniffs and when he looks at her, he expects to see her crying. She’s not.
“How are your girls?”
She sighs and indicates their laughing in the water. “Accepting.”
Jughead swallows and chances, “And you?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long are you here for?”
The three children begin a game of tag and Betty’s answer takes a while to come. “I don’t know.”
-
For the first time since the first semester of her second year of college, Betty makes plans with Jughead. She texts the number he’d given her at the park the previous day and they agree to meet at Pop’s.
He’s already waiting when she arrives and she feels guilty. (Feels even more guilty than she already did because it’s been two weeks and her husband has died and she still hasn’t cried - and now here she is feeling guilty again because she’d meant to get here first but Alice had been hovering and asking questions and just wouldn’t let her leave )
“Hi,” he says with a lopsided smile that’s more sympathetic than happy to see her. There’s a milkshake waiting for her and her heart hurts. She doesn’t know why.
“Hey. Thank you.”
Betty takes a seat opposite him and notes the tiredness in his eyes too. There are a couple of wrinkles where she doesn’t remember them and a single grey hair in that wave that always seems to cover half of his face.
“How’s your dad? I should’ve asked earlier.”
Jughead’s mouth twitches as he says, “He’s fine.”
“And Luca?”
“He’s at Sweet Pea’s, getting his fix of guinea pig so that I don’t have to buy the dog he keeps asking for.”
That makes her laugh. Just a little. More the thought of Jughead homing an unruly dog than anything else.
“Amelie wants a kitten.”
“Will you cave?”
She can already picture the tiny bundle of fur curled up on her lap. “I hope not.”
He chuckles and his eyes crinkle. He still looks handsome, she thinks.
(And then feels guilty for that, too)
The atmosphere is awkward for a while. She guesses she should’ve expected it - nobody’s ever really sure what to say to someone when a person close to them has died are they?
Still, they drink their milkshakes and Pop brings them a basket of fries like old times, and the sky outside stays light and defiant against the night.
“My dad isn’t fine,” Jughead tells her as they bid goodbye in the parking lot. The sky is bleeding now and the air is thick like a storm is stalking them. Betty has to turn back around to see him. He’s rubbing a hand over his face like he doesn’t quite know what to do. “He got a liver transplant not long after I saw you at the reunion. Now his body is rejecting it and he’s started drinking again.”
They don’t move any closer to each other. “Jughead - “
“- I don’t know why I lied earlier.”
“Maybe you didn’t want to talk about it,” she suggests. It seems the most plausible reason.
He tries a smile but it’s sad and Betty wonders what happened to that boy she met in the Wyrm Hole - the one with the cocky smirk and eyes which would darken with lust.
“Sounds about right.”
“Thank you for the milkshake,” she says.
His smile is real this time. “You’re welcome.”
She watches him climb into his truck, the window of which is already rolled down even though she doubts it will make any difference in this heat. He lights a cigarette and the smoke lounges through the air.
“Jughead,” she calls. “If you do want to talk to someone, I… I guess I might know what it’s like.”
That’s not quite what she’d meant to say.
“I’ll be here,” she adds. “In Riverdale.”
He blows out the drag he’d taken and Betty feels saliva form in her mouth. “That’s good to know.”
She doesn’t know which part he’s referring to.
(She doesn’t ask)
-
Other than Sweet Pea and Toni who isn’t here, he doesn’t know who else to tell. (He doesn’t want there to be anyone else to tell) Jughead dials Betty’s number before he can talk himself out of it. It’s only after she’s promised she’ll be right over that he realises a hospital is almost definitely the last place she’ll want to be right now.
Perhaps he should’ve talked himself out of it.
(He definitely should’ve talked himself out of it)
She arrives no more than ten minutes later, parking her car haphazardly across his driveway and effectively leaving the trunk encroaching onto the road. It isn’t the silver Mercedes he’d seen her husband drive her away from Pop’s in on the weekend of their high school reunion, but a black BMW, even sleeker if possible, than its predecessor.
It screams money.
Jughead thinks he would rather take the truck.
Throughout their relationship, he always drove. It was, if he thinks long enough about it (if he doesn’t manage to stop himself in time) a way of making sure he was in control. Now, Betty is driving them to the hospital so that he can say goodbye to his father - whatever the fuck goodbye even means - and the thing he hates most about it all is that he is riding in the passenger seat.
His jeans are rubbing against the cream leather and he just hopes they don’t leave dirty marks. From the corner of his eye he can see her open her mouth as if she’s open to say something, but then she closes it again and accelerates through the amber light at the junction.
She’s wearing shorts. They’ve ridden up so that enough of her leg is exposed that he can see the line of muscle definition which means she probably works out these days. Her skin isn’t particularly tan but her shirt is made from crisp, white cotton and she looks pristine: elegant in the way that only a true WASP can be.
Betty parks the car, its sensors beeping accusingly as she nears the wall, and then they head across the asphalt together.
“If you don’t want to come in, I un-”
“- Jughead, don’t,” she tells him, quietly firm.
So he doesn’t.
She accompanies him to the room his dad is in and then says, “I’ll be here.” There’s an edge to her words and he can’t tell exactly what she means, but her fingers brush his. It’s soft as a feather, barely a breath, but he feels it.
All of this time I’ve loved you, he thinks.
“Thanks,” he says.
-
For all of Betty’s time spent in the hospital visiting Christopher, not much was spent in the waiting room. She watches doctors deliver both great news and terrible news; watches them apologise for not being able to save someone; watches relatives and friends devour snack after snack from the vending machine.
Jughead had been apologetic on the phone, as though he shouldn’t have called her. She wonders why he did.
This hospital appears to have a budget nowhere near that of the one in Boston she had frequented so often. She’d had both of her girls there; argued good-naturedly with Christopher about what to name them; left each time with nothing but good memories of the sliding double doors and the huge potted palm in the atrium.
And then had come the day they’d been called in by the specialist; the subsequent visits for treatment, for scans, for the news that the tumour was even more aggressive than they’d initially thought, and of course the day she’d packed Christopher’s bag - the one he always used for business trips - so that he’d have some of his things in the room with him.
The room. The room he’d gone to die in.
There’s no coffee house here, but a slim black machine dispensing hot drinks in plastic cups. Betty pays the grand total of $2.50 for two impossibly weak black coffees and carries them via the elevator towards FP’s room.
Through the blinds, she can see the sickly yellow skin of Jughead’s father, marred further by a couple of bruises and cuts on his forehead. She guesses he’d fallen at some point in the not-too-distant past and the injuries have yet to heal.
His eyes are closed and she can tell that Jughead isn’t talking so she knocks lightly using the knuckle of her third finger to avoid spilling the coffee. He looks up and smiles gratefully and Betty doesn’t want to understand why her heart feels like it’s splintering.
Jughead opens the door for her and takes one of the coffees. The monitor is beeping rhythmically and for a moment, if she closes her eyes, it feels like she’s back in Boston at Christopher’s bedside wondering whether she should call her mom.
“They don’t know whether he can hear me,” Jughead tells her.
He can hear you Betty, talk to him.
“I don’t know what to say.”
She takes a seat in the second chair. “Tell him about your day. Tell him about Luca.”
“Maybe I should tell him he’s gotten so sick that even Betty Cooper is here to see him,” he tries to joke. It doesn’t make any of them laugh. “Betty Jones,” he corrects. “Sorry.”
With her free hand, she reaches out to squeeze his. He doesn’t let go.
“So I’m thinking I’m probably going to cave on this whole dog thing,” Jughead tells his dad. “Teach the kid a bit of responsibility.”
Betty keeps her hand in Jughead’s and sips her coffee absently, not listening to the things he’s saying, but remembering her own words to Christopher.
I’ll make sure Ella practices the piano each day and I’ll try really hard to keep Amelie in her own bed at night. I’ll make sure their boyfriends pick them up from the house so I can meet them and -
The heart monitor suddenly lets out a piercing beep, continuing in its shrillness as Betty looks at the screen and sees the line which had previously been peaked turn flat.
Jughead’s hand in hers turns limp and she squeezes tighter. “I’m so sorry Jughead.”
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “Me too.”
-
His father is dead.
Jughead is, above all else, relieved.
He makes a pot of coffee and looks around at the pair of plates draining by the sink. He expects to feel embarrassed by the relative untidiness but he doesn’t.
“Even with the life insurance policy money I won’t be able to pay the mortgage,” Betty announces. “Am I allowed to be mad about that?”
He lets the words sink in but doesn’t ask what she’ll do. Not being able to pay the mortgage is one of his worst nightmares.
“I think,” he says, handing her a mug of steaming coffee, “that if your husband just died, you’re allowed to be mad about pretty much anything.”
“I wanted to buy a smaller house.” They don’t sit. She stands at the counter and blows across the top of the liquid. “Christopher said it would be better to have the space.”
He doesn’t want to get into a debate. Space is always good, he thinks, when you haven’t had it. Perhaps it’s only people who have too much that think they don’t need it, but he’s not about to point out that if she’d spent eighteen years in a shitty old trailer she might think differently.
It’s quiet for a while save for their sips and he’s about to suggest they take a seat on the couch when Betty sets her mug down.
“Am I supposed to take my rings off?”
He blinks, confused as to whether he’s heard her correctly. She’s watching him, waiting for an answer.
“I don’t know.”
“Nobody tells you what to do,” she says. “When someone dies. They all say they’re sorry but they don’t tell you what you’re supposed to do afterwards.”
His coffee burns his tongue.
“What would you do?” she asks. “If it wasn’t your dad. If it was....” she falters.
"I don’t know.”
He doesn’t have to know. Other than Luca of course, there isn’t anyone else. Apart from...
“You don’t know,” she repeats, but it’s in so much of a whisper that Jughead isn’t entirely sure she’s even said it at all.
The sky outside has darkened further, indicating the approaching storm that the weather forecast has been warning of for the past few days. He leans over the arm of the couch to turn on the lamp and when he rests back against the cushions, Betty has turned her whole body towards him.
He is hyper-aware of every part of her.
“I think of you when I see Greyhound buses.”
He had not been aware she was about to say that .
“Why?”
“You promised me you were going to catch one to Boston. Do you remember?”
He remembers. She’d called him after that summer they’d broken up; told him it was early fall now and she’d had time to think about it and he was wrong - they weren’t too different. She’d prove it, she’d said.
“You didn’t come.”
“I did,” he admits. “I got on that bus to come see you. I uh… I bought these shitty flowers from the gas station before I boarded and they were already half-dead but I figured I couldn’t show up empty-handed. I think they were chrysanthemums. They were pink like that sweater with the collar you used to wear.”
Her eyes are glassy and she’s told him she hasn’t cried yet and Jughead can’t be the reason she does.
“What happened?” she asks. “Why didn’t you arrive?”
“I got a call from Sweet Pea. They took my dad into the hospital ‘cause he’d blacked out drunk and hit his head.”
Her eyes close like she’s remembering the details even though she wasn’t there; even though she didn’t know. “ Jug .”
Not that tone, he pleads silently. He can’t. “I missed your call and then you didn’t call again and I figured leaving things alone was for the best. Maybe I should’ve -”
Betty’s lips land on his. They are soft and delicate and oh God, her hands are cupping his face and it’s too much and not enough and he can’t think.
He kisses her back. Her skin feels as it always did: so smooth, like silk, and she makes the gentlest of sighs somewhere at the back of her throat.
And then Jughead feels the cool metal of her wedding ring against his cheek and he’s reminded that she’s married.
It takes everything within him - everything - to break his lips from hers. As soon as he does he misses the feel of their kiss and her breath on his mouth - impossibly sweet, like she’s been eating candy.
“I’m sorry,” she apologises. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
He ducks his head, ashamed. “Me neither.”
He expects her to flee but she doesn’t, just blinks at him instead, those blue eyes still shining with unshed tears. “Would you… uh…” she starts but doesn’t finish, pressing her nails into her palms.
“Betts?”
“Do you think, maybe, you could just hold me? For a little while. And I could, maybe, hold you back?”
There’s a lump in his throat so thick he can barely breathe with the weight of it. His one syllable is rough in its delivery. “‘Course.”
-
She doesn’t want to leave. Not his arms, not this couch, not Riverdale.
Not yet at least.
She wonders how long she can get away with pretending she’s fallen asleep. His breath at her forehead is so warm and his inked arms around her feel so safe that she just wants to press pause: forget for a moment her girls, now without their father, back at their grandparents’ house on Elm Street; forget his dad lying in a hospital bed with a bloated body that had rejected its new liver; forget that fourteen years have passed and they’re pressed together like when they were still high school seniors.
You shouldn’t have pushed me away, she thinks. I shouldn’t have let you .
Outside, a crack of thunder echoes loud enough that it jolts her and Betty has no choice but to open her eyes. Her heart is thundering too but Jughead’s voice is barely anything more than a whisper.
“ It’s okay,” he says. “The storm’s here.”