Chapter 22 Carlisle
CARLISLE
“It’s beautiful this time of year, right?” I remark to my mother as we make our way out of the large stone-walled gardens of the family home and down toward the town.
“Well, I don’t get out much these days,” she replies, waving a hand.
“Not much reason to, now your father is…” She trails off, clearing her throat slightly and patting her already-lacquered hair back into place.
It’s a tic I’ve noticed since my father’s passing, one that she pulls out whenever she’s feeling tense or nervous, or at the mention of his name.
I eye her for a moment, wondering if this was a good idea, but I brush that aside and offer her my arm. “Come on, let’s get something to eat,” I suggest.
After a pause, she takes my arm, clearly surprised that I’m going out of my way to help her like this.
Honestly, I can’t blame her for being a little taken aback.
After all, I’ve been back in Devin Ridge for the better part of two months now, and this is the first time that I’ve been through to see her.
I know that she’s privy to pretty much every bit of gossip that comes and goes in this place, and she wouldn’t be ignorant to the fact that I’ve been avoiding her like the goddamn plague.
I could put it down to the fact that I’ve been busy with construction—between the school and the new house, it’s not like I’ve had a lot of time for myself.
Living out at the cabin leaves little time to do much more than go back and forth between the town and home again, and I could have tried to spin all of that to her if I wanted to, made excuses for the fact that I’ve been anywhere other than at her side.
But that’s not the reason that I’ve been so intent on keeping my distance, and both of us know it.
No, it’s because, if I show my face around here now, we both have to acknowledge how much time has passed since the last time I even bothered.
And how much I’ve left her to cope with alone, because the thought of shouldering it myself was more than I could take.
My mother and I, we’ve never exactly been close—not since I left home, at least. She didn’t have a bad word to say about my father and everything he did with selling the factories, and I couldn’t stand that she seemed so willing to just go along with it all like it was nothing.
It was easy for her to hide out from the consequences of it, I guess, given that my father was willing to insulate her in this house, make sure she never had to deal with anyone other than the upper crust of the county who would have slapped him on the shoulder for his decision in the first place.
“So, how have you been?” I ask her awkwardly, as we make our way down toward the main street.
I suggested taking her out for some food at the diner—a far cry from the fine dining restaurants she usually frequents, but as long as it gets her out of the house, I’ll take it.
In my brief conversations with people around Devin Ridge, it’s been clear that she has hardly been seen out of our home in the last couple of years, having food delivered and meals pre-cooked for her.
The thought of her, locked up in there by herself with so little to do, makes me feel guilty in a way I didn’t know I could, but I intend to put that right as best I can.
“Oh, you know,” she replies, her voice pointedly neutral. “Okay. Harder, these days, without your father…”
“But you still have all those events to go to, right?” I prompt. “The ones you used to take me to when I was a kid, all the galas and—”
“I don’t have anyone to go with these days,” she replies, shaking her head. “Without you or your father, it’s not as though I can muster the energy for it.”
My mind drifts back, all at once, to a memory of her that must have come from when I was a kid—in a fancy dress, doing her hair in front of the mirror in the hallway, while I sat on the stairs and waited for her to finish up so we could leave and I could get whatever event this was out of the way once and for all.
My father emerged from the living room and when he saw her, his eyes lit up and he pulled her into a warm embrace, telling her how beautiful she looked.
Her gaze was shining when he pulled away, happiness written all over her expression.
The thought of her denying herself that doesn’t sit right with me, no matter her reasons for it.
“But you should come to the town more often, at least,” I prompt. “Would do you good, to get out of the house more—”
“Not when everyone seems to have so much to say about your father.” She snorts in derision, like the mere mention of it is so damn ridiculous to her.
I frown. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, come on, Carlisle,” she replies, looking over at me and frowning.
For the first time since I laid eyes on her again, I notice how much older she looks, the frown lines etched around her lips, her brows kitted together.
“You must get it too. The way they talk about him, as though—as though he was the one who started that forest fire!”
She shakes her head. “It’s ridiculous,” she huffs. “He did what any sensible businessman would do, and yet he gets treated like some kind of ogre, even after he passed. It’s not fair. I don’t want to hear it, not if I can help it.”
I grit my teeth. It’s not that I think she should be the one to bear the brunt of it, but at the same time, surely she can understand where these people are coming from.
As easy as it might have been for her to live with his choice, given that she got to reap the benefits of it in every way she wanted, the rest of this town had to fight just to right itself again.
Before I can say another word, I feel eyes on us—and I look down the street to find someone staring up at us from just outside the grocery store, eyes fixed like he’s looking for a fight.
My mother rolls her eyes at me, shaking her head. “You see? He’s one of them,” she tells me, gesturing down to him. “Jacob, I think his name is. He always has something to say to me about your father, and I just don’t think that it’s—”
“You the Devin boy?”
Suddenly, the man is upon us, right in front of us and glaring us down like he’s trying to start a brand-new fire right then and there.
I nod, trying to keep my voice even as I reply, “Sure am.”
“You’ve got some nerve, showing your face around here,” he tells me, his nose wrinkling. He looks to be around my father’s age, with thinning gray hair and a bloated belly like he’s been putting away the better part of a six-pack a night for at least the last decade.
“You don’t get to speak to him like that—”
I squeeze my mom’s hand, letting her know that I’m capable of handling this.
I don’t want her stressing herself out for no reason, not when I feel like this guy has a right to talk to me about this stuff.
It might not be what I want to hear right now, not as I’m trying to get my mom out of the house for a change, but the harm my father did doesn’t just vanish because it’s inconvenient for me.
“Why do you say that?” I ask him, not breaking his gaze for a second.
He bristles, like he’s annoyed that I even have to ask. “He really kept all that from you?” he remarks, raising his eyebrows. “Made you think that we all deserved it, losing our jobs like that? God knows what kind of fancy school you went to off our backs—”
“I didn’t go to any fancy school,” I reply, not missing a beat. “I enrolled in the military. Then started volunteer firefighting. That’s why I’m here, actually, because I was helping out with the blaze that happened a couple months ago.”
My mother straightens up a little beside me, clearly pleased to have something to show off about, if only for a moment.
The man’s face flickers, and he bristles on the spot. “Doesn’t mean that he didn’t screw over half the people in this town to make his money,” he snaps back. “And you have the nerve to come walking through here, acting like you didn’t make it half-impossible for us to—”
“You see that building site at the bottom of the road?” I cut him off, and he blinks, surprised.
Glancing behind him, he locks eyes on the school, which is slowly starting to take shape. Might be a few weeks late to start the summer term this year, but at least the kids will have somewhere to study soon enough. “Yeah…”
“I’m paying for that,” I reply evenly. “With the money my father left me. Same money I’ve been using to fund the firefighting crew I work with, actually, the ones who got the town evacuated when the fire started.”
He lifts his chin slightly, not able to come up with anything in return.
“And I know that what he did hurt this place,” I go on.
“And I’m sorry for that, Jacob, I really am.
I was ashamed about it for a long time, and I think I had good reason to be.
The logging industry, that was the heart of this town, and he gutted it without any warning and left you all scrambling to get back on your feet. It can’t have been easy.”
He grunts—it’s close enough to an agreement to convince me to keep going.
I can sense my mother staring at me out of the corner of her eye, no doubt irritated that I’m affirming even a few of the issues that he has with my father, but we’re not going to be able to move on from this until we get it all out in the open.
“But I’m going to use his money to make this town a better place,” I promise him.
“That’s what I want to do, now I’m back.
And I’m not saying that it’s going to fix what happened in the past or undo how much you all struggled when he sold the factories, but at least we can make things a little easier for the next generations, right? ”
His face softens. I can almost see the anger unwinding from him, as strange as it sounds. It’s like something has finally given way, something that he’s been carrying for a long time, maybe even longer than he knew.
“My granddaughter, she’s going to be starting school next fall,” he remarks, his voice slightly gruff.
“And she was so sad when she heard the school was down. She thought she would have to go somewhere else to start classes, but…” He shakes his head, and he plants a hand on my shoulder, giving me a nod. “Good for you,” he finishes up.
And then, before I can say another word, he shoots off down the sidewalk, leaving my mother and I standing there trying to make sense of what just happened.
She’s the first to break the silence. “You’re really using your father’s money for that?”
“It’s my money now,” I remind her. “And yeah, that’s what I want to use it for. Make this place better. Fix up some of the shit that he—”
“Language.”
“Stuff that he left behind.”
For a moment, we just look at each other. And then, she lets out a slight laugh, shaking her head. “I can’t remember the last time I told you off for your language,” she remarks.
“Been a while, huh?”
Something of the tension between us finally seems to have broken, some of the weight of everything we’ve been carrying starting to unwind.
I know it won’t be that easy, not by a long shot, but at least she feels like my mom again, even if it’s just to tell me to get my language in hand and not sound so uncouth.
“It has,” she agrees. And I know she’s not just talking about what she just said to me, but the feeling that passes between us right now, that sense of something falling back into place where it belongs after all this time.
“Come on, let’s find a table at the diner,” I tell her, leading her a little further down the street. I might just be imagining it, but she’s walking with a little more certainty now, carrying herself like she knows she belongs here.
As we wait for a table, she glances toward a family at the far side of the diner—a mom and a dad with three kids who they are trying their level best to get under control.
She smiles slightly as she watches them and then turns to me.
“You know,” she remarks. “I think you’d be a good father, one day. ”
“You do?”
I don’t want to tell her that I might already be a father, even if I don’t know for sure. I’m still trying to figure out everything that’s going on with Angelie, and I don’t want to get my mom’s hopes up before anything is set in stone.
“And I would like a few grandchildren one of these days, you know,” she continues, raising her eyebrows at me. I can’t help but laugh. She speaks like I’m going to pull them out of my back pocket right here and now, as ridiculous as that sounds.
“And this is a good place to raise a family, right?” I remark.
A smile fills her face, so warm and so unconstrained it reminds me of that night I sat on the stairs and watched her with my father.
“Well, I think you turned out okay,” she replies.
Finally, one of the tables at the far side of the diner frees up, and the bored-looking teenager gestures for us to take a seat.
To anyone else, it might look like the most mundane thing in the world, someone sitting here with their mom for lunch on a Sunday afternoon.
But for me, as I slip into the faux-leather seats, it’s anything but.
It’s another reminder that I have a place here, no matter how long I’ve tried to convince myself otherwise.
And maybe, just maybe, there’s no reason for me to leave again.