Chapter 18
CHAPTER 18
R en
Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to ride my mountain bike to Trix’s house this morning. Turns out, it’s a long fucking way from my place on the Vine Trail when we’re having a heat wave. There’s always one weekend in October when it feels hotter than any summer day, and it sends forth a kind of optimism that I see in the face of everyone who’s out in shorts and a tee shirt one last time before fall takes over again and the days get shorter.
It’s supposed to be an off day from training before our first home game, and my coach would have my hide if he knew I was sweating out electrolytes in the bright sun instead of resting my muscles for tomorrow night’s matchup against Toronto. Well, what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.
I want to be outside. I need the sun on my face. I spend so much time inside an ice-o-plex that I’m probably criminally low on vitamin D. At least, that’s my excuse for riding this morning. That, and the fact that we won both games on the road. I woke up this morning energized with a sense of invincibility—everything in my life is right where I want it to be.
Trix and I have plans today, but I told her we’re not going anywhere before noon. The woman holds herself to a grueling schedule, even three months pregnant, and I want her to get some sleep. It’s Sunday, for crying out loud. Nothing needs to get done today that can’t get done on Monday.
Riding feels good. The valley floor is flat, so my legs don’t have to work that hard. Half the time, I’m just coasting along, looking at the vineyards sprawling out in all directions, feeling the sun at my back.
I had a strange sense earlier that I couldn’t quite identify, and it’s taken me over ten miles of riding to put my finger on what it is. Happiness. I know that sounds glib or overly obvious, but the kind of happy I feel right now is different from the adrenaline rush of scoring the winning goal or reaching playoffs with the team. It’s not about achieving something. It’s about being lucky. It’s about chance and fortune and magic.
Falling in love with a woman like Beatrix Corbett once in a lifetime is more than a guy like me could hope for, but getting a second chance makes me feel like I’ve woken up on Christmas morning, hit the lottery, and won the Stanley Cup all at once.
It’s been almost three months since we ran into each other at the Oxbow Market, and I keep coming back to that day—how I meant to get to the paint store earlier, but then I stayed up late getting muddled up in design plans, which I’ve never done before. Then I slept in, which also never happens. Almost like the renovation gods were conspiring to push us together. If you believe in that sort of thing. I never did.
Maybe I do now.
Maybe I put a little more stock in the idea of fate.
The roads are getting crowded as the day trippers arrive to drive the wine route, so I pedal a little faster down the stretch to Buttercup Hill before it gets crowded. I know that if Trix sees people flocking to the restaurants on the property, her hosting instinct will kick in, and she won’t be able to tear herself away.
And she promised me an entire day off to do something fun.
When I ride up the driveway outside Trix’s house, she’s sitting on a rocking chair on the porch, sipping a cup of tea. The flag on the teabag spins in the breeze, and the sun hits her face. Trix rests a hand on her belly, as if willing it to swell into a bigger baby bump. It’s fucking adorable.
“You rode in this heat? Are you nuts?” The smile in her voice washes over me. Or that could be the sweat bath I’ve brought on by riding.
“Maybe a little.” I lean the bike against the side of the house and take the porch steps two at a time. “You ready for our date?”
“We’re going on a date? I thought you said we were running errands.” She has the nerve to look disappointed.
“I did. We are. Sort of. I knew that if it sounded efficient and useful, you’d have to agree,” I tell her.
“Sneaky.”
“Yup. I hit you in your little type-A happy place with the idea of errands, but I’m sorry to tell you, honey, we are going on a date.”
Pushing herself up from the rocking chair like she’s nine months along, she hams it up to remind me that she’s doing all the hard work. I’m not about to argue.
Reaching out to give Trix a hand, I rest a hand on her hip and reel her in, the other hand reaching up to cup her cheek. I cradle her face like she’s precious—because she is—her big, blue eyes gazing up at me. My thumb sweeps along the apple of her cheek, feeling the soft skin there. “Can you forgive me for the tiny deception?” I ask, leveling her with my biggest smile. She rests her cheek against my chest and nods.
“I suppose. Just don’t do it again.”
“I won’t.”
But I will .
It’s getting harder to convince myself that I’ll be satisfied with something casual with her. I mean, who the fuck am I kidding? I don’t know whether I’m falling in love with this woman all over again, or if I never stopped loving her. But if I need to trick her to get her to relax for a few hours, I’ll do it again and again.
Once I’ve showered, we set off in my car. “Can I get a hint?” she asks, looking down at a tote bag she’s brought along. I know she probably has real errands to run, like a trip to the grocery store or pharmacy, but those are the last places I’d take her on a date.
I shake my head.
“Infuriating.” There isn’t even a hint of playful frustration in her voice. It’s pure fury.
Trix warned me that she doesn’t like surprises, but it’s not really true. She hates surprises. Judging from the grilling she’s given me over the past ten minutes, she can barely hold it together without knowing where we’re going, for how long, and why.
It just makes me wish we had a longer drive.
“This is good practice for you,” I tell her, knowing I’m infuriating her even more. I can’t help it. Seeing the color rise in her cheeks as she gets progressively more irate makes me want to wrap her in my arms and watch her calm down progressively as I drop tiny hints for hours. Then I’ll keep her forever.
Forever?
I do a little gut check at that thought because I can’t confuse my forever status as the father of her child with a forever relationship with Trix. But it’s like being in the middle of a hockey game—I need to make the best plays I can without a guarantee of how it will end.
“Good practice for what? Wanting to murder you and not doing it? ”
I chuckle at the lack of humor in her voice. “When you’re a parent, you won’t know what’s going to happen from day to day. You might get dressed for work, and that’s when the baby decides to spit up all over your shirt. Or you need a good night’s sleep, and that’s when the baby cuts a tooth and keeps you up all night crying.”
She holds up two fingers. “Okay, two things. First, when did you get so knowledgeable about what babies do? And why do you keep saying ‘you’? I’m not the only one staying up all night with a teething kid.”
I pat her leg in a useless effort to calm her. The muscles under her long skirt are tense and tight as rocks. “Remind me to schedule you a massage when we get back.”
“I don’t have time for a massage! I barely have time for this date.”
“Oh, grasshopper, you have so much to learn,” I say, referencing The Karate Kid , which we watched together in college. Glancing at her, I catch her smiling at the reference. “I will be there for at least half of the teeth since we’re sharing custody, and maybe more if I spend the night. And as for my knowledge, I’m a reader, remember? I bought some books.” She gnashes her teeth, but I feel the muscle in her leg relax a tiny bit as each answer to her questions seems to calm the savage beast that seeks order and progress all the time.
“You bought books?” The softness in her voice feels like a well-worn shirt.
“Several.” I rub circles on her knee.
I signal and take a left at a fork in the highway, following a skinny gravel road to where it dead ends at a white farmhouse with green trim. The sign in front leaves no mystery as to where we are—Carraway Farm.
“Wait, are you serious?” She swivels in her seat to face me, eyes sparkling with childlike glee. “We’re going to the farm. Like, the farm? ”
After Trix told me about her obsession with the Carraway Farm she’d been following on social media for the past year, I did a little digging. Turns out the place is not just social media catnip. They walk the talk, raising animals and growing all the ingredients to make the desserts they feature in their videos. The only thing more surprising than learning Carraway Farm hosts visitors was that Trix didn’t figure it out first.
“Yup.”
“Are we allowed to just show up?” She slumps down in the seat a few inches as though she needs to hide. As though she’s capable of keeping a low profile with her enthusiasm.
“We’re allowed. I called ahead and made an appointment. Come on.”
I exit the car and go around to her side, opening the door before she can do it herself. I extend a hand to help her out of the car. Before we reach the front of the farmhouse, the door swings open to reveal a woman our age in a blue overall dress and a straw hat. Long blond braids hang over her shoulders as she waves at us with both hands. “Welcome, you two!”
She comes down the front stairs to greet us. But there’s no need. Trix hustles a little faster to shake her hand. “Oh my gosh, it’s so nice to meet you. I had no idea we were coming here, and I can barely handle it. I’ve seen every one of your videos, and I follow your socials religiously.”
It’s a different side of Trix than I’ve ever seen. Normally so pulled together, she’s fangirling hard, and it charms the fuck out of me.
The woman turns and shakes my hand, introducing herself. “I’m Radish.”
I can barely stifle my laugh. Radish? That has to be made up…right? I school my expression as Radish envelops Trix in a bear hug. They smile at each other like reunited sisters. I’m almost jealous. That is, until Trix leans over and kisses me hard on the mouth and rings her arms around my shoulders. “Thank you,” she whispers in my ear. “If you feel like getting down with a pregnant lady later, I know one who is very fond of you right now.”
“You two are cute,” Radish says, surveying us like a chef trying to decide how to slice and dice a chicken. For a moment, I worry that I haven’t done nearly enough research about this place. If she’s as zany as her name suggests, I might need to keep my guard up. But she just smiles at us. “But cute doesn’t pull carrots out of the ground. I’m putting you both to work.”
She signals for us to follow her into the farmhouse, pushing open the heavy front door to reveal a great room with high ceilings and rough-hewn beams. The walls are painted white, and the roof has large rectangular skylights, letting in so much sun there’s no need to turn on any lights. The walls are covered in framed photographs of the farm animals Trix was gushing about. Tiny lambs. Flocks of chicks following a chicken in the grass. Brown rabbits, white rabbits.
Radish points to a group of small easels in a corner, each with a hanging sheet of paper covered in a finger-painted mess of color. “We host a preschool here three days a week for some of the local kids. We call them seedlings.” She leads us past wooden bird feeders decorated in feathers, sequins, and paint.
Trix inhales a sharp breath, and her eyes shoot to mine. I know what she’s thinking, and I nod in agreement—our little one needs to come to school here with Radish and all the other little seedlings. I feel myself drinking the Kool-Aid I didn’t even know Radish was serving.
We stop in front of a door with a hanging plaque that reads The Chick Inn . Radish waits for us to smile at the pun. Trix squeezes my arm. I just gape at the total transformation of a tightly-wound woman into her own brand of seedling—wide-eyed and excited by the natural world. All thoughts of deadlines, renovations, menus, and agendas seem to have faded into a pleasant blur of animal photos and paint .
“I was just about to feed the chicks, but there are a lot of them, so it’ll go faster if we divide and conquer.” Radish opens the door to The Chick Inn, which is a chicken coop worthy of the Queen Mother Hen.
Looking down at her long, flowy skirt, Trix hesitates. “Am I dressed okay?”
I look down and notice the floor of the coop covered in sawdust and what is probably chicken shit. I should have thought of that earlier and told Trix to wear some old sweats. “I have some practice gear in the trunk. I can run back and get you something to change into,” I offer.
“No need. You’re perfect. As long as you don’t mind brushing off some wood shavings when we’re done,” Radish says.
“I don’t mind at all.”
Radish leads us into the coop, which is tall enough for us to enter without bending down. Once inside, I take in the size of the place—easily as big as my spare bedroom with shelves along one wall and a window that leads to the next room. It’s all made of raw wood with its own skylight in the roof.
“Aw!” Trix gasps. I look down and see a swarm of yellow chicks surrounding her ankles. They’re bigger than newborn chicks, about twice that size, but they still fit in the palm of my hand when Radish bends down and hands one to me.
Trix plops herself down in the sawdust and gathers four baby chickens into her lap. She hugs them close and pets their tiny heads. I’ve never seen anything more adorable in my life. And I’ve never seen her look happier.
“Oh my God, Ren. This is my happy place.”
“Yeah? Even more fun than checking shit off your to-do list?” The joy in her laugh answers my question.
Radish crouches down with a pail and hands us each a little pile of dried worms. They stink. But the chicks love them, so I play along, sitting next to Trix and hand-feeding a worm to each chick in the place. Soon, they’ve all figured out that we are the keepers of the worms, so we’re swarmed with squawking chicks.
“How many can they have? I don’t want to overfeed them,” Trix says.
“A couple more each, and then we have to get them into the other room so they can roost.”
I have no idea what that means, but I follow Radish as she scoops up the chickens, lifts them to the window, and pushes them through to some location I can see. I do the same, chicken feet scratching at me as I try to keep them in my grip. Soon, all the chicks have been moved over, and Radish slides the window shut.
We follow her around to the other side, where all the chicks are now in for the night under a large, warm lightbulb. “They need to sleep in here where it’s warm,” Radish says, moving us along to another area of the barn where the laying hens live. We harvest eggs, pet the hens on the heads, and say hello to a pen of roosters who seem none too happy to be separated from the brood.
“I feel you, guys. I’d want to be with the ladies, too,” I say. Trix gives me a playful punch, and I pull her against my side.
“Thank you,” she sighs. “For the record, I’ll go on a date with you anytime.”
I squeeze her closer, fully intending to hold her to that promise.