Chapter 26
Mom
The mosquitoes are terrible here. There’s no service. It’s HOT and I’m sore. I know Liv can be there for a few days, but I’m coming home early anyway
Adam went to pick up donuts and left Gracie and me to drink our coffees in her bed. I was in a borrowed tank top and black yoga pants.
“Yesterday, before Jasmine left, she said you’d been a mess the past few weeks. Leading up to the fall,” I said each word cautiously, like carefully chosen steps.
She listened, blowing on her hot mug of coffee.
“Gracie, we barely hear from you back home. You’ve been going so…” I tried to find the right word. “You’ve been going so fast.”
Gracie’s eyes brimmed with big tears. She shrugged.
“I know your ankle is sprained, but how’s your heart, your head?”
She broke into a full sob before answering. “I was in such a rush to do it all and on time that I forgot why I was even rushing in the first place. I love to dance. I am excited about everything I’m doing.” She took in a shaky breath. “The problem is that I’ve been too exhausted, too stressed to feel that love for it lately.”
I handed her a tissue from the box on her nightstand.
“I’ve been sacrificing a lot of sleep. I was so tired going into practice yesterday. I felt my body lose balance. When I fell, I was in pain, but I also was lying there thinking, if I don’t slow down, I’m going to fall out of love with it,” she said, dabbing her eyes with the tissue.
“With dancing?”
“With dancing, sure, but with my whole life. I’m not enjoying any of it when I’m just racing through it like this.”
“Maybe you were trying to race toward it because you love it, but went so fast you didn’t realize you’d started to run right through it.” The blankets rustled under me as I twisted to face her.
“My teacher booked me an appointment with the school counselor. We have several free appointments with her each semester.”
I grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “Talking to a therapist helped me so much. I’d also say, if someone is offering you a break, take it.”
“According to the doctor, I have to take a six-week long break.”
“Maybe it’s an accumulation of all the breaks you didn’t take?”
“Right? Maybe.” A small laugh escaped her before her face fell again. “I’m sad, you know, to miss out on the performance. I have a lot of work I’m going to have to do over. My whole plan crumbled.”
“I’m here.” I tried to sound encouraging. “I’ll help you establish a whole new plan. And let me tell you, little sis, life is full of crumbled, marked-through, and erased plans. Adulthood is full of replanning. It’s a lucky moment when things actually go according to our schedules. But, in my experience, when things don’t go the way you expected, sometimes they go even better than you could’ve dreamed up on your own.”
“Way better as in sprained ankles and missed performances?” she asked dryly.
“No, you’re right. Sometimes, it’s sprained ankles. Sometimes, it’s worse than that. Fewer things are in our control than we like to believe. But we are in control of this.” I wiggled our clasped hands. “We’re the water trickling around and through every fallen stone in our stream. We just keep rushing?—”
“But not too fast.” Gracie gave a watery smile.
“You know what always helps me?” I asked. She cocked her head in question. “Saying a prayer is like exhaling a breath. For me, each time I whisper one, it feels like releasing a breath I’ve been holding too long. Releasing one load at a time.”
And then Adam, my own wonderful change of plans I couldn’t have dreamed up any sweeter, arrived with donuts.
Adam and I drove back to Sweet River like we were floating on a cloud. We should’ve talked about the festival—it was starting in less than a week. But the conversation from last night bled into today. We were holding hands across the console and swapping stories. Touring each other like our own personal open house, getting to know each other room by room, stopping at every framed picture on the wall.
Adam told me about how he wrote and read Chronicles of Narnia fanfiction as a teenager and how he thought some of it was the best reading of his life. I told him when I was fifteen, I had my heart broken for the first time and tried to dye my hair black—and failed miserably.
I noted howAdam shook his head sometimes instead of laughing. It made me happy to know that about him. I was hungry to know more.
I finally built up the courage to ask a few questions that had grown bigger in my mind as my feelings grew stronger.
“How do you bounce around the country like you do? Do you ever get…” I couldn’t find the right word.
“Lonely?” he offered.
“Or nervous? Figuring out a new city. Finding new friends. Over and over.”
“Yes, to all the above. But I love the work I do. It’s always felt worth the uprooting. Plus, it kind of helps when you’re so into work to distract from the loneliness.” He shoots me a sideways glance. “Kind of.”
“Kind of?”
“It did help. It’s lost some of its power this summer.” He hit the blinker to switch lanes.
“Did you always want to move around a lot? Is that the plan?” I thought about the conversation I had with Gracie. Trying to stick to a plan for your life is like trying to let a book fall open to an exact passage. You might get close, but it won’t ever land right where you intended.
“The plan is doing the work I love and following where it takes me. Maybe that’s Ohio. Or Sweet River. Or Tokyo.” My heart started hammering when he said Tokyo. “I have a general five-year-plan for career advancement, but it’s about following the job.”
“You just let the job lead you wherever?” I tried to sound casual and calm. As if I didn’t have hopes hinged on his reply at all.
He nodded. “That’s what I’ve done, yeah. You probably always have other things to factor in beyond work, right? You factor in your family. Your traditions. I’ve never had any other factors.”
Could I be a factor?Was that a selfish thought? Was it too soon to think like this?
“I’m a kindergarten teacher, Adam. That doesn’t have some crazy upward mobility that might whisk me away to Tokyo,” I said.
“Your art might whisk you away to some places.” He rubbed the top of my hand with his thumb.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve had one sale, but sure.”
“Come on, you’re a natural artist.” I felt myself halt when he said this. He saw it and cocked his head. “You are an artist. Even if I didn’t have that painting hanging in my dining room, I’d still call you an artist.”
“I’m a teacher, you know. I have my credentials and my job to prove it. I don’t know how to prove to myself that I am allowed to call myself an artist.”
“Do you make art?”
I nodded, my hair falling in my eyes.
“You’re an artist,” Adam said, as if it was truly that simple.
“I feel like an impostor. I’m just Lucy the teacher from Sweet River who hides her paintings away?—”
“Lucy Rhodes, you are allowed to be a lot of things at once,” Adam interrupted me, his voice passionate. “You can be a small-town teacher and a beautiful artist. You can be bravely storming into my office one minute and infuriatingly terrified to admit you want something the next—like how you want me and you want art. You get to be all the things you choose to be. The only person stopping you—is you.”
Something inside clicked as Adam spoke. Maybe the only person who could decide whether or not I was an artist…was me.
“I hope you remember that, too,” I said, leaning in my seat so I could get a good look at him. “You can be a lot of things, too. You’re more than your work, as much as you love it. You can also be more to the people in Sweet River, to your brother, than you’re used to letting yourself be. You have more to offer than you know, more than maybe people in your past took the time to appreciate or discover.”
He raked his fingers through his hair, his jaw set. “You think?”
“I don’t just think,” I said. Then, a little braver, “I know.” In a scary way that made me think he could be somebody I needed.
It was quiet for a beat. The signs outside the window were suddenly familiar as we sped into Sweet River. For What It’s Worth played through the speakers.
“You have Stevie Nicks on this playlist?” I asked excitedly.
“Definitely. She’s classic.”
I started singing along, wiggling my shoulders to the music.
“I take it you’re a fan?” Adam asked through a laugh.
“Who do you think my cat is named after?” I asked incredulously.
Adam tipped his head back. “How’d I miss that? I even met Stevie that night on FaceTime. I just thought it was a cute name.”
“It is a cute name.”
We exited on the street that took us back toward City Hall, back to my own car. I never felt sad to return home, but today I wanted to tell Adam to pump the brakes, to please slow down. I was at the tip top of a roller coaster waiting for the crash landing, where my heart fell to pieces after the long drop.
He parked the car, looking over at me. “I’ve got to run inside to check on some stuff,” he said, looking toward City Hall sadly. “You should get home, get some rest. We’re days out from the festival and it’ll be busy.”
“Really busy,” I said, unbuckling my seatbelt. Back to reality.
“See you tomorrow?” he asked as we both climbed out of the car.
“Yeah, see you tomorrow.” I closed my door.
We looked at each other across the car. A question in the air. A conversation ending mid-sentence.
I opened my mouth to say something when Victor ran up. “Thank God, you’re back!” He was out of breath. “I have a list of people who need to talk to you!”
Adam was listening to Victor, but his eyes kept bouncing back to me.
I gave him a tiny wave goodbye.
He shrugged apologetically, then mouthed, See you later.
“Oh, and we have a conference call…” Victor continued, dragging Adam along with him as he walked toward the office.
Later that evening, I found myself in my art room. Something about Adam made me want to paint in blues and gold like the stars twinkling over the pool water when we first kissed.
First kissedbecause we’d now had multiple kisses. Kissing Adam was something I now did. This fact felt achingly right.
It also made me feel protective over the relationship developing between us like the first few strokes of paint on paper. I liked mine and Adam’s colors. I liked how they looked even better together.
Stevie played by my feet while I swept the paintbrush over the canvas for hours until it was dark outside with the street lights flickering on.
I didn’t wonder if I was an artist or not, I simply painted. Because that’s what I did.
“This painting, I’ll call First Kiss,” I said to Stevie, admiring it. “And this one’s just for me.”