Chapter Fifteen
W hen Lily came home, she was the immediate and total focus of Marigold’s feelings, because what else was she supposed to do with all the pain building up inside her chest.
Certainly not feel it.
She almost laughed at that. At herself for being so ridiculous.
At everything.
“You’re really okay?”
“I said that I was,” Lily said.
“Well, I just I know breakups can be hard and...”
Lily frowned. “Are you okay?”
She realized that she probably looked a mess, and that her mascara was running.
“I’m good,” she said.
“Did something happen with Buck?”
“Lily... This isn’t about me. It’s about you. And the fact that you chose to do something rash because you were worried about me.”
“That wasn’t why. I was thinking about what you said. About the fact that I’m going off to school, and you’re right. How am I supposed to go off and have new experiences if I’m obsessing about a guy back home. I like Colton, and I didn’t want things to get dramatic between us. So now they don’t have to. It’s not a drama.”
“Oh.”
She wouldn’t know what “not a drama” was like. Since every time she tried to feel something, apparently it was a drama. It ended with screaming in the streets.
“Lily... Buck and I broke up.”
“You broke up?”
“Yes.” She sighed heavily. “I wanted more than he was ready to give. And you know, this is why I worried about you. You and Colton. It isn’t about maturity, it’s about the fact that this kind of stuff can be really dangerous. I’m thirty-three, I should have it together a little more. It’s not like I’m totally inexperienced with men.”
Lily grimaced. Because what could be more horrifying than having to hear about your mother’s past sexual experiences? Even if implied? Nothing.
But if Marigold had to be a cautionary tale, then she would be.
It would at least make this heartbreak feel like it had a point.
“Well, you know you were born somehow,” Marigold said. “So don’t grimace at me.”
“I’m just... Mom, are you okay?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, I’m going to get out of bed and I’m going to do things, and I’m going to be your mom, and I’m going to be myself, but I’m hurt. It’s been really, really difficult these last couple of hours. So I don’t know what it’s going to be like going forward. I really thought we had something. I thought he was in love with me. Anybody can get hurt when there are bodies and hearts involved. And so if you take anything away from this, I just want you to take away that...this is why I was worried about you. Because it’s hard for me to go through. And I would never want to see you in this kind of pain.”
“I don’t want to see you in pain either,” Lily said. “How can he not be in love with you? You’re the best and you’re amazing. You are the sweetest, nicest, most caring person I know. You’re the best mom. You have done more for me than I can ever thank you for. You’re just... You’re wonderful. And if he doesn’t realize that, then he can go straight to hell.”
Marigold should probably correct Lily for speaking out harshly, but she wasn’t going to.
“I don’t want you to be jaded, and I don’t want you to be armored,” Marigold said. “But I do want you to be aware that... Love can be... Well, it can be this .”
“I’m sorry.” Lily wrapped her arms around Marigold. “He should appreciate you.”
“Thank you. I want you to remember too, Lily, that love can also be this .” They parted for a moment, and she felt a little glimmer of hope inside her, a little shaft of light shining through the gross darkness. “We have had a lot of love. And we have a great life. Nothing was ever missing. How could it be, when I have you? The greatest daughter in the world. I’m so proud of you.”
“Thanks, Mom,” she said.
“I’m going to be okay.”
“Are you going to date other men? Are you going to go wild when I leave?”
“Maybe,” she said, trying to smile. “Probably not.”
“It would serve you right if you did. I’m very sex positive, Mom. It’s your body. You can do what you want with it.”
She tried to contain her grimace. “Thank you. I didn’t need to hear that.”
“Well, I don’t want to know about it. I’m just saying...
Times have changed and women are allowed to express themselves that way.”
“Thank you very much,” Marigold said. “Someday, I will regale you with stories about how I am a slut of the old ways, my child. But you’re not ready for that yet.”
That earned her a look of horror, which she decided to call her one win for the day. Well, other than the fact that no matter what happened, Lily loved her. And so all wasn’t lost. It couldn’t be.
But when she left Lily downstairs, Marigold threw herself across the bed and wept. Because all might not be lost, but a big piece of her heart was.
And she didn’t know if it was ever going to grow back.
He was trying to fix fences, but mostly, he was just hammering his thumb. He cursed and chucked the hammer across the field, and Colton picked it up and handed it to him. He looked up and saw that Reggie and Marcus were standing behind him.
“Here, you dropped this. Dumb ass,” Colton said.
Buck looked up at his oldest son, who was glaring at him like he’d just clubbed a baby seal. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” Colton said, his eyes full of storm. “I didn’t stutter.”
“What did I do?”
“You broke up with Marigold,” Marcus said, stepping forward, even angrier looking than his brother.
Buck wasn’t about to be lectured by a half-grown piglet who’d never even touched a woman. “Yeah. I did. For her own good.”
Reggie howled. “For her own good! Do you hear yourself? You sound like a chump.”
“Listen,” Buck said, his voice hard. “Men and women are different and—”
“You sound like you have a podcast ,” his youngest added.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Do you feel insulted?” Reggie asked.
“Yes.”
Reggie narrowed his eyes. “Then you know what it means.”
Buck stared at his boys. “I’m serious. She is an amazing woman. And she deserves somebody who... Who is better than me.”
The three of them exchanged glances.
“She does? But we don’t?” Marcus asked.
“That’s not what I said,” Buck said.
“It kind of is, though,” Marcus said. “A little bit. Why are you not good enough for her, but we’re supposed to live with you?”
Those little rats. That wasn’t what he was saying at all, and it was different, and they ought to know it. He was sort of tongue-tied trying to figure out how to explain that it was different, but it was.
“I... It’s different . Romantic stuff is different.” He decided to go with that very articulate explanation.
“Is it?” Reggie asked.
“You’re a smart-ass, shut up.”
His words didn’t have any heat; they sounded petulant even to him. And Reggie was not deterred.
“ Seriously , Buck. You meet a nice woman. A beautiful woman. We all like her daughter—sorry Colton—and you break up with her. We could’ve had a mom .”
It was the slight break in Reggie’s voice at the end that got him.
That stabbed him clean through the chest. “That’s not... That’s not fair. You are an emotional terrorist,” he said.
“Maybe you deserve it,” said Marcus. “Maybe you deserved a little bit of emotional terrorism for the shit you put her through.”
“I’m not trying to hurt anybody,” Buck said. “I’m a mess, okay? That is a documented fact. In high school I drank too much, and I was adjacent to that awful accident. I frankly should’ve been in it. Everybody in town blamed me. Then I abandoned my family.”
“So what? That’s all you are? You just do stuff because you feel guilty and you feel like you have to make up for it?”
“Yeah. That’s why I do stuff.”
It was why he had to. To try and be better. To try and atone.
“Ah. So we’re all part of your redemption scheme. You just feel guilty. See, you adopted a bunch of sad foster kids so you could try to right your balance with the universe.” Reggie looked angry now. “Good thing my mom died, I guess, and my sister too. What a big help to you. It made it really easy for you to earn some points on that one. I was an extra sad case.”
This was going all wrong.
“Reggie, that’s not what it is.”
They were all looking at him. All angry.
“I love you,” Buck said. “I didn’t expect it. I can be honest with you about that. I thought... I thought it would be like taking care of you as campers. But it’s not. It hasn’t been. I’m your dad. And I love you, and guilt has nothing the hell to do with it. You knuckleheads. You’re not just mine right now, not just mine because...because I feel like a mess, and I wanted to do something to make myself feel better. You’re mine because you were meant to be. Because the whole fucked-up road I took to get to Hope Ranch led me to you. And I was supposed to be there, even though a whole bunch of stuff around it wasn’t supposed to happen. Adopting you three was one of the few good things I did. I listened to my gut. And then I ended up... You changed my life. If not for you, I wouldn’t have come back here. I never would’ve reconnected with my family. That’s not guilt. It’s love.”
Colton blinked, then looked away, a muscle in his jaw twitching. “Sounds to me like you don’t really need the guilt.”
And all Buck could do was sit there, shell-shocked. Because it was true. It wasn’t guilt that kept him with the boys. It was love.
Guilt wasn’t what kept him going.
He thought of his choice to leave his family. There had been misguided love there, even if the choice had been wrong. He had acted from a place of love. Flawed love. But...
Every day with the boys he saw what flawed love could do.
Why wasn’t he willing to try that with Marigold?
Because you’re afraid. Because everything she said is true.
His heart caught hard in his chest. Yeah. That was true. He was afraid. He was afraid of letting go of his guilt. There was a reason he hadn’t gone to see Joey’s and Ryan’s parents. There was a reason he was holding on to those shields.
Because they protected him, not because they protected the people around him.
Because he was afraid he could never be worthy of her love, and if he accepted it and he lost it...
He had never felt weak. He had felt a lot of things, but never weak. Yet in this moment, that was how he felt. Like nothing more than a coward.
And that was unacceptable.
“I’ve got to fix it,” he said.
“Great,” said Marcus.
“But I’ve got to fix me first.”
“Shit, bitch,” said Reggie. “We don’t have that kind of time.”
“Maybe not all the way. But I have to... I have to do something.”
“Maybe you should make a list. That’s what my therapist used to say to do.”
“Okay. I’ll make a list.”
So he did. He spent the day writing down what he needed to do, who he needed to talk to. He started at Joey’s old house. Joey’s mother let him in. His father had died five years earlier. She didn’t condemn him.
Then he went to Ryan’s place. And as he talked to Ryan’s parents, he released the guilt. He realized he was the only one holding on to it.
And then it was time to go to his own parents’ house.
“What brings you here?” his mother said, smiling.
“I want to say that I’m sorry. I really am so fucking sorry. I’m so sorry that I missed so many years. And I really want you to forgive me. Because I want to be different. I don’t want to feel this way for the rest of my life. I want to be more than grief. And more than mistakes. And more than good deeds trying to cover up everything broken inside of me. I want to be better. And I want... I want to be able to love a woman the way that I should. I love Marigold. I want to have a future with her. A family. I messed up big-time with her. I realized not too long ago it’s because I’m such a mess.”
“Hell,” his dad said. “Son. We are all a mess and none of us makes it through life without getting messier than we were when we were born. I spent years feeling regret over how you left. Wondering what I could’ve done better with you.”
“So did I,” his mother said.
“No,” Buck said. “Don’t feel bad. It was my decision to leave. I was the one who couldn’t handle it.”
“And I feel like, as your parents, we should have done something different to make it so you knew you could stay.” His dad cleared his throat. “That’s life.”
“What if we all just stopped blaming ourselves? Because there’s no room for regret. I mean, I have it. A bunch of it. For all the time I missed, but...”
“But you have your boys.”
“Yes. And I hope that I’ll have Marigold. And if so, then what it took to get there... It would be worth it. Somehow all my bad decisions led me to the right place.” He thought long and hard about that intuition in his gut. And he realized, that was the thing that had been leading him all along. More than a gut check. Divine intervention. Because it was nothing short of miraculous that with everything he’d done wrong, so much was right.
“I’m just thankful,” he said.
“I think that’s a pretty good start.”
He nodded slowly. And when he went outside, the sun felt different. Warmer. He couldn’t change his past. He couldn’t go back and make better decisions. He could only make good ones going forward. And give thanks for the fact that he had been given so much in spite of himself.