Chapter 32
“How many days you been clean, Nicky?” Jeannie said, sitting at the potting bench in front of the big window.
After about four and a half years, he knew to come prepared for this question. “One thousand six hundred and forty-three.” He pushed a dying orchid he’d rescued from a grocery store toward her. “Think you can fix this one?”
Her glasses slid low on her nose. “Hard to tell. Guess we’ll find out. Have a seat.”
Nic always thought he was ready for the bulletin board, but every time he came, it stung. Photos of Felicity decorated every inch of its surface. Jeannie didn’t exactly make it a secret who her favorite niece was—not that Nic could blame her.
New photos had appeared since he was last there.
Felicity had done an extra year at school.
Got another degree of some kind. There were images of her in comically oversized glasses for laser eye surgery.
She had visited Morocco. And Spain. And Paris.
In one photo, she was in front of a single-story brick house getting attacked by a little girl with hair the same color as hers.
Nicky assumed this was a niece, though he’d never asked Jeannie to confirm.
They never spoke about Felicity.
He had only seen her once since that night under the stars. He had mistimed a visit, and she was working in the shop for the summer. He hid in the car, but god.
She could still take every bit of breath away from him.
Face of an angel no matter how much she might deny it. The smattering of freckles across her nose more vivid than ever after the months she had spent working in her aunt’s garden.
That was a year ago. This time he had been more careful.
Courtney had visited Sam recently, and he had become an expert on asking the kind of questions that would determine whether Felicity was still visiting without making his motives obvious.
As far as Courtney knew, he’d never even met Jeannie’s niece.
It was unfair not to tell his cousin what had happened with Felicity, since Courtney had been the first person to truly love him.
He should tell her someday. He owed Courtney that.
But she was killing it on tour, and anytime they talked, it was more fun to hear about her adventures playing music throughout Europe and Asia than to remind her of the night he’d made some of the stupidest decisions of his life and stole from her, even if that series of mistakes was what led him to meeting Felicity.
“Did you end up going to the funeral?”
The pruning shears Nic had been holding clattered onto the wood surface.
“How … how did you know?”
“I have my ways.” She ruffled his hair. “I’ve got Google, kid. Same as anybody.”
“Fuck.” He had picked up the shears again but accidentally severed half of the good roots with his shaking hands. He set the shears down and held his forehead. “No, I didn’t go.”
A beat passed. He waited for the inevitable judgment. The chastisements. The admonitions of but he was your father.
None came.
“Well, that seems right. I’m not much of a traveler, but if you let me know where the grave is, I’ll make sure one of my wanderlusting Greene boys spits on it if they get the chance.”
His snort was watery. And he didn’t like how relieved he felt when the brusque woman gathered his shaking shoulders into her arms.
He wasn’t grieving, so he didn’t understand the waterworks.
“Don’t let anybody tell you to show love to dead people who didn’t know how to be anything other than hateful pricks when they were alive.”
“Thanks for that.”
“My pleasure.” She gave him a squeeze. “Are you remembering to live, Nicky?”
“What do you mean?”
“Complicated feelings about death have a way of tricking us into forgetting sometimes.”
“Christ, you’re awful sentimental today, Jeannie.”
She shrugged. “Some days are like that.”
“Do you miss him?” Nicky wasn’t sure what had given him the courage to ask the bold question. He never thought he’d have the balls.
“Now, how—”
“I’ve got Google. Same as anybody.”
Her stern face held his gaze for several beats before she burst out laughing.
“Guess I deserve that.” She pressed down on the earth around the plant.
“I do, and I don’t. He wasn’t a good man.
I can admit that now. But I loved him something fierce anyways.
Felicity found me a therapist. Can you believe that?
Crotchety old me? Seeing a therapist to talk about my feelings about the junkie husband I lost over a decade ago? Absolutely absurd.”
Her name was like a jump scare.
It was the first time Jeannie had spoken it in his presence since that first visit.
“Not absurd at all.”
She shook her head like she didn’t believe him.
“So what you’re saying is that I don’t need to find your husband’s grave to spit on it? Because if it’ll help, I can make a side quest on my way back to Texas—”
“No. That won’t be necessary.” She chuckled. “But I appreciate your willingness to do the service.”
“If you ever change your mind…”
“You’ll be the second person I tell.” Her eyes flicked to a photo of Felicity before meeting his eye again.
They worked on the plants with lighter conversation.
He told her stories from his restaurants.
Gave her an update on what he had heard from Courtney.
He asked her questions about the business.
Laughed heartily at a few anecdotes about ways she got one over on a local blowhard chessboard store owner.
They sipped tea and worked until a customer came in.
She stood to greet them, but Nic put a hand on hers.
“Jeannie … Is … Is she happy?”
Jeannie knew the “she” he meant without further elaboration.
Jeannie’s eyes went to the photo of Felicity and the little girl before she reached to touch it. “Yes. I think she is. Very happy these days. Dating a nice girl for a few weeks now. Taking some classes. Going back to school to become a nurse soon. Still a dreamer.”
He smiled at the photo and at Jeannie’s calloused finger as it touched Felicity’s grinning face.
It was two in the morning when he got back to Texas.
The first few times he’d come back to see Jeannie, he’d still felt angry. He was angry at Jeannie for being so quick to deem him unworthy. But he kept coming back because he loved how hard Jeannie loved.
Except for Courtney, he had never experienced a love like that during his childhood.
It took Nic a while to understand that as much as he’d idolized his mother, she hadn’t given him that kind of love either. He was leverage. Something to be used to hurt the person who hurt her.
He never spoke to his father again after the night he met Felicity. Never asked him for a dime. But when the dimes came whether he wanted them or not, he invested them the best way he could. Always in people much better and more trustworthy than he was.
Tomorrow, he would be opening up his third restaurant. And maybe he would try to work toward happiness too. Sometimes it seemed like the weight of his voluntary self-flagellating atonement did get in the way of living.