13. Kane
CHAPTER 13
KANE
“ I need to stop at the grocery store on the way home,” Taylor said.
Kane looked up at her in some consternation. It had been difficult enough to face the task of driving through town twice in one day. Now she was telling him that she wanted to run an errand?
“I’m sorry,” she said, clearly reading the look on his face. “But we need food. Don’t worry. You don’t need to come in. I placed an online order, so all we need to do is pull up to the front door and the shopper will load us up.”
Well, that wasn’t so bad. There was still the possibility that the shopper would see Kane, he supposed, but maybe that wouldn’t happen. Either way, they did need groceries. Taylor was right about that. He supposed it couldn’t be helped. Still, he wished that he’d worn the sunglasses he’d been using lately to shield himself from the stares of people in town — she had been right about that , too. Taylor Levine noticed everything.
He pulled up in front of the grocery store and Taylor got out to deal with the shopper. In the rearview mirror, Kane saw that it was a teenage kid, which meant that there was at least some chance he didn’t know who Kane was. Or if he did, at least he probably wouldn’t be able to recognize Kane by sight.
Loading up the car turned out to be quick and relatively painless, and then they were on their way. “Thanks for stopping,” Taylor said.
“It’s not a problem.” It was, a little bit, but it had been less of a problem than he had anticipated, and Taylor nodded and turned her attention to the road as they made their way home.
It wasn’t until they had arrived that Kane realized what she had been doing. He helped her carry the bags inside and unloaded them on the counter. He was looking through them, doing his best to figure out where they were going to put everything, when he suddenly realized that the ingredients before him were familiar ones.
“I know what this is,” he said, turning to face her.
Her cheeks colored. “Do you mind?”
“That you’re making my dad’s chili recipe?”
“I thought you might like to have it,” she explained. “And Jason taught me how to make it. I hope… I hope that doesn’t bother you. The fact that he shared it with me. I think he always wanted to share it with someone.”
“And you’re the one who was here,” Kane said. “No, I don’t mind. Better this than that it had died with him.”
Taylor nodded. “I hoped that’s how you would see it,” she said softly. “And I’ll show you how to make it, so you’ll always have it in your back pocket.”
“Why are you doing all this?”
“I just wanted to thank you for helping me out this morning,” Taylor said. “I know that wasn’t an easy thing for you to do.”
“I don’t think I really have any excuse for it to be a difficult thing for me,” Kane said honestly. “I’m back in town now. I have to face up to my past.”
“I never thought I would hear you say that,” Taylor admitted. “I thought you were done with this town forever. Even now that you’ve had to come back, I thought you’d bail as soon as you could.”
“Well, don’t get me wrong. I’m still going to bail as soon as I can.” He smiled wryly. “I can’t even drive down Main Street without being reminded that I’m the town pariah. I’ll always be an outcast here, so there’s no point in me trying to come back with any degree of permanence.”
“That’s why you never came back, isn’t it?” Taylor asked. “You were worried the town wouldn’t accept you.”
“Of course they wouldn’t. You can’t think they would have?”
“I don’t know,” Taylor said. “I don’t know what the town would have done. But I know what your father would have done. He always wanted you to come back, Kane. More than anything. And he worried that he was the reason you were staying away, that you thought he personally was angry with you. He told me that the two of you exchanged harsh words before you left, and that he always regretted it. He told me that he thought he had driven you to go.”
Kane sighed. “It was never that simple.”
“Can you reach that big pot for me?”
Kane pulled it down from the hook over the kitchen island and handed it to her, and Taylor began to mix in the ingredients for the chili.
“I didn’t leave because of Dad,” Kane said. “Not really. A lot of things happened all at once. It’s true that our fight did make me feel bad. But we fought with each other plenty of times. That alone wouldn’t have driven me to go.”
“No, I’m sure it wouldn’t,” Taylor said. “Still… I can understand how he felt. He always wondered whether, if he had handled that day differently, if he had been more sympathetic to you instead of calling you out for what you had done… if maybe you would have stayed.”
She looked up at him.
And in that moment, Kane realized they weren’t just talking about his father anymore.
“This is about you and me,” he said quietly.
“It isn’t only about you and me.”
“But partly?”
“I should have been nicer to you,” she said. “I should have been more understanding about what you were going through. I should have been kinder to you when you came to me the day after the fire, when you asked me if I would still help you get into college. I was awful to you that day. I’ve never really stopped thinking about that.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he told her. “What happened with me. What happened between me and my father. None of that was your fault.”
“How could it not have been? You came to me for help and I rejected you.”
“You didn’t have any responsibility to help me,” he said. “You were a friend of mine, not a teacher. Not a parent. Those are the people who I consider to have let me down, when I let myself think in those terms. Those are the people who had some obligation to me, when I went looking for help. Not a teenage girl, no matter how much we cared about each other.”
“Well, even if that’s true,” Taylor said, “I could have done better, couldn’t I? I mean, if that conversation had been a good one instead of a negative one, maybe you would have felt like you had some sort of a life raft. Maybe you would have felt like you could stay.”
“Maybe,” Kane said. “But I don’t think so. I don’t think anything could have persuaded me to stay. Not with the way I was feeling that day. And certainly not anything you could have said, Taylor. You’re not the reason I left. Don’t let yourself think that.”
She turned away from him. For a moment, he thought she was angry, but then he saw her wipe a tear away. “All those years your father spent wishing you would come back,” she said. “I never knew how to tell him that I thought it was my fault you were gone in the first place.”
“It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Everyone in town hated me, Taylor. You might not have wanted to help me fix my life, but I never felt like you hated me. You seemed more sad than angry when we talked that last time.”
“That’s exactly right,” she said quietly. “I was sad because of what had happened. I would have given anything to undo it, not just for the Chesterfields, but for you. I wished more than I could tell you that there was something I could do to make it right.”
“That wasn’t your job, though,” Kane said. “Even the fact that you wanted to means a lot to me. More than I can say. I just wish… I wish you hadn’t spent ten years thinking that I left because of anything to do with you, because that’s not the case.”
“And what about your father?” Taylor asked. “You really didn’t leave because of him either?”
“Not at all,” Kane said. “It was more the fact that I didn’t feel like there was any way for Miller Creek to be my home anymore. I thought I couldn’t possibly belong here. And I still think that’s true.”
“Well, what you need to know is that your dad didn’t feel that way,” Taylor said. “If he was ever angry with you over what happened, that anger faded away a long time ago. All he felt for you in the time I worked with him was love and regret. All he ever said was how much he wished you would come home so that he could let you know how he really felt about you.”
“This is a lot to take in,” Kane admitted. He felt shaky, almost on the verge of tears. All this time he had stayed away, thinking he wasn’t wanted, and now Taylor was telling him it hadn’t been true. That he could have come home.
Of course, Miller Creek still wouldn’t have wanted him. Miller Creek almost certainly hated him. He didn’t need to look any further than the first conversation he’d had with Thomas Greely to feel sure of that — all these years later, a man with whom he’d never interacted as a child knew who he was and what he had done. It must be common knowledge around here. No one would welcome him back, nor should they.
But his father would have welcomed him back. Genuinely and with open arms.
Kane had stayed away all this time thinking he had no other option, but that wasn’t true.
It was a bittersweet thing to learn now, a punch in the gut. On one hand, it meant that his dad hadn’t died angry at him, and that was certainly a good thing. But on the other hand, it meant that Kane had stayed away all those years for no reason at all. That he could have come back years ago, before it was too late for them to mend their relationship.
Maybe Taylor noticed that he was struggling with his emotions, because she turned away. “Do you want to prep the meat?” she suggested. “And I’ll season the beans.”
“Sure.” He reached for the package of hamburger meat on the counter. “I just cut this into cubes, right?”
“Or you can even pinch it apart. It’ll separate easily enough. Whatever you want to do,” she said. She pulled out a mixing bowl and began to combine spices.
Making the chili didn’t require a lot of conversation, so the two of them were able to work in silence for the next twenty minutes or so. Kane kept his eyes on what he was doing, not wanting to look up at Taylor.
Somehow, whether she was aware of it or not, she had said the exact thing he had needed to hear.
He wondered if it was possible that she could have known that. If she could understand how powerfully the past few minutes had affected him. He wondered if she had done it on purpose, or if was just the bare truth, spoken without any agenda.
He couldn’t be sure, but one thing he did know — for the first time since he had arrived in Miller Creek, he felt a genuine desire to prolong his stay.
If he had been wrong about Taylor hating him — if he had been wrong about his father hating him — it was just possible that he had been wrong about everything.