Chapter 10 Cal
CAL
If Cal could depend on one thing in his life, it was that his telephone would never ring.
He’d lived in his cabin in the woods for nearly five years now, and he rarely, if ever, received phone calls.
He didn’t even have a cell phone. He kept a landline for emergencies, and he never really had a good reason to use it.
Now it was ringing, and he still didn’t want to use it.
Then he got the what-ifs. You know. What if it’s important?
What if it’s an emergency? What if it’s a long-lost friend who will never call you again because they’ve decided you hate them after you failed to pick up the phone?
What if it was the bank checking to make sure he really was the person who was currently trying to buy something obscenely expensive all the way across the country? And he picked up the damn phone.
The voice that responded to his hello did not disappoint. It was April, and he couldn’t have been happier to have bothered to pick up his phone. “Hi, Cal!” she said excitedly.
“Well, hello there, Nurse April.” He couldn’t keep from smiling.
“Don’t hate me now,” she said.
“Impossible. What is it?”
She took a deep breath. “Well, have you ever been to the local farmer’s market? I was going to spend the afternoon there, and I thought it would be a lot of fun if you and Owen joined me.”
As much as Cal enjoyed the company of April, he wasn’t sure it was worth getting friendly with Summit Falls again. “I don’t think we’ll be able to go,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Oh.” She sounded more disappointed than he’d expected her to be. “That’s too bad. They have so much fresh produce there, and it’s just local farmers selling their crops. I thought you’d enjoy talking to them. They seem like your type of person.”
Cal laughed. “No person is my type of person.”
“Well, I’m sorry your plans overlap. I should have told you earlier. It was just a spur-of-the-moment idea.”
“There aren’t any plans,” he admitted, and his palm immediately flew to his forehead.
That hadn’t exactly been a smart move to make if he really wanted to keep his excuse valid.
And he did want to keep his excuse valid, didn’t he?
He didn’t want to be pressured into spending a pleasant afternoon at the local farmer’s market with a beautiful woman.
Right? But he couldn’t convince himself of any of it.
Part of him wanted her to pressure him, to talk him into doing something he would never normally do.
“Oh,” she said, clearly taken aback. “Well, I hope it’s not because I didn’t sell it well enough.” She laughed. “I was also thinking of your garden.”
He smiled at her effort. Few people had put any effort at all into spending time with him, so it meant more to him than it might have meant to anyone else. “What about my garden?”
He could almost hear her smile on the other end of the line.
“Well, they sell so many different seed varieties, too. You could plant winter squash or even strawberries in a sunny patch. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a large variety of seeds in one place.
So, you know, I thought maybe you’d love it.
It would be a day out, anyway, and…” She seemed to hesitate to say what she said next.
“Well, I’d like to see you again. You and Owen, I mean.
I’d like to spend more time with you two, if you’re OK with it.
And I thought, since you took the time to show me around your home, I would like to take the time to show you around mine. ”
Cal wanted to keep her hanging for just a few minutes more, if only to hear her voice on the line—on his line.
But he also didn’t want to hear an ounce of disappointment in her voice.
“I suppose I should ask Owen.” His son was sitting at the table, using crayons in a coloring book that taught him very basic math problems in the form of slowly multiplying small animals.
“What do you say, Owen?” he asked. Owen’s eyes snapped up expectantly.
“Do you want to go to the farmer’s market with Nurse April? ”
Owen immediately abandoned his coloring book. “Yay! Yay! Yay!” He leapt up in his chair and jumped around the room so much that Cal had to remind him to calm down or he would hurt himself. “Let’s go now,” Owen said when he’d calmed down a fraction. “Can we go now?”
“This afternoon,” Cal said.
“Around one,” April added.
“Two hours,” Cal said.
“It’s too long!” Owen whined.
“Sounds like the kid wants to go,” April said as though it wasn’t blatantly obvious. “So, that’s two against one.”
“I’ll never win with you two.” Cal laughed.
“Meet me at the library?” April said. “We can park there and walk. The market is a block away. The library won’t mind. I do it all the time.”
“OK, we’ll be there.” Cal hung up the phone and reminded himself he was not supposed to be as excited as his son about this visit. Except he was. He was excited to spend the afternoon in town, of all places, because one woman would be with him.
The leaves on the trees in town were greener than they had been before.
That was something Cal noticed early on in his drive into town.
Had they ever been this green, even in previous summer months?
He didn’t think so. The strangest sensation overcame him, and he had to admit to himself that he was feeling happy, excited for the future, hopeful.
Hope was something Cal hadn’t felt in years.
Sure, he’d had the occasional happy memory made with Owen, the occasional pride that came with fatherhood.
But hope had eluded him ever since that day, ever since he lost everything except his son.
For years, Cal had viewed the outside world through a lens of suspicion.
If people weren’t outright untrustworthy, they were at least well-meaning but incompetent.
He had no hatred in his heart, but he also had no trust. It had all been used up when his son was born.
Now he was feeling hope, maybe even a little trust, although that was still unlikely.
He pulled into the library parking lot, having just been there not all that long ago. It was a surprisingly warm day, and once again, April was already there waiting for them. This time, Owen ran to her and hugged her right away.
“Are you guys ready?” April said.
“Are we ever!” Owen bounced in place, and Cal shook his head at his son’s excitement.
It was a bit much. But he supposed the poor kid felt he had to make up for his father’s lack of enthusiasm.
It wasn’t that Owen wasn’t a regular kid who got excited.
He was, but there were times when Cal could tell he was pushing it a little over the top to please someone else.
It was one of the many ways he showed his thoughtfulness and kindness.
Cal supposed some adults might find it irritating, but all it did was make Cal prouder.
They walked together, the three of them, with Owen clinging to both April and Cal’s hands.
Every once in a while, he would swing between them, picking his feet up off the ground and saying, “Whee!” each time.
Cal could almost see the three of them the way some random onlooker might. They looked… like a family.
The farmer’s market was much less overwhelming than Cal had assumed it would be.
He had imagined crowds pressing in, people loudly dickering to get their prices down, essentially chaos.
But there weren’t nearly as many people there as he had expected.
There were a few lines at the more popular booths, but those lines were organized and pretty relaxed, all things considered.
The produce was beautiful, colorful and fresh.
People were paying with cash, which was something Cal had a lot of nostalgia for.
Owen seemed to be in seventh heaven, running back and forth in a zigzag pattern, standing on tiptoe to see everything at each booth. “Look, Dad! Carrots!” he said after running up to a particular booth with a lot of root vegetables.
“We have carrots at home,” Cal reminded him.
“But these ones are purple,” Owen said. “Do the purple ones taste different?”
“Not too different, I should think.” Cal walked up to the table to stand beside Owen.
“They’re bigger, too.”
“Well, that’s probably because they don’t have a family of rabbits eating them regularly.
They have the time to grow.” He laughed at how the carrot size comparison had offended him for a moment before he realized that being offended by such a thing was ridiculous.
“Would you rather have bigger carrots or Georgie?”
Owen didn’t hesitate. “Oh, Georgie, obviously. But purple carrots would be fun to grow. I wanna find out if they taste different.”
The merchant behind the counter chimed in. “We do have seeds today, if you’d like to give it a try.”
April joined them at the table. “Growing and eating them would be the best way to find out, I think. Like a delicious science experiment.”
“What’s a science experiment?” Owen asked her.
“Oh, they’re fun. You’ll be doing some soon when you start school, I imagine.”
Owen turned to Cal. “Will we, Dad?”
“Sure, we will,” Cal said, realizing that Owen had just inadvertently revealed that he was going to be homeschooled.
Cal was pretty certain April wouldn’t approve of that, which was another reason he was not about getting into a relationship right now.
No one else needed to have input on how Cal raised his son.
As far as he was concerned, he’d done a fine job so far.
Currently, April’s opinions were just that—opinions.
If Cal got into a meaningful romantic relationship with her, then her opinions would carry a lot more weight.
Despite her not being a part of their family, Cal still expected April to express some displeasure at his decision to homeschool. But she didn’t. Instead, she said, “Maybe we can all do one together, one day.”