Chapter 6
Marc frowned at his phone and then I watched him text back.
He mouthed the words as he wrote and it was easy to read his lips.
As his thumb slid around the screen, I repeated his message out loud: “What are you talking about? No, I didn’t say that!” I whispered.
“You always blow things out of proportion!”
Shit.
Was he writing to Taygen?
“Marc,” I said, but he held up a finger to me and then kept writing.
“Babe I have no idea why you’re reading so much into this,” I murmured.
“You’re being too sensitive and dramatic.”
“No!” I burst out loudly, and he did look over at me.
“Marc, are you talking to your fiancée right now?”
“No,” he shot back, but he was, which I soon knew without a doubt.
A few moments later, after he’d gone out to his truck and had started angrily clearing things from the bed by throwing them on the ground, Taygen wrote to me.
My Lord. I hadn’t ever considered that, as the one who’d first brought them together, my role would continue as the person who had to keep bringing them back together.
I was no expert! They both knew my own relationship history, like how I’d gotten left at a gas station in Calhoun, Georgia when I went inside to use the bathroom and my boyfriend met another woman while he’d filled his tank.
Fortunately for me, it had been a very nice, very clean gas station with really good snacks, and Uncle Johnnie (who was Megan, Matthew, Marshall, Michaela, and Marc’s father), had been able to leave work to come pick me up.
So I did owe their branch of the family, and I was going to do my best for my cousin now.
Taygen and I exchanged messages for a while and I thought I was making headway with her, so then I moved on and talk to the third person in this relationship.
“Hi,” I said to my cousin as I walked outside.
Sir joined me and got excited about the mess of trash he found, since Marc had started emptying out his back seat, too.
He was really a pig about his truck and there was a ton already on the ground for the dog to sniff.
“Kayleigh, whatever Taygen just told you is wrong. Damn it!” Marc jerked back and put his finger in his mouth.
“Who left a screwdriver in here?” he demanded.
“I just stabbed myself.”
He had left it there, but I didn’t judge.
“That’s how it always goes,” I agreed.
“Sometimes life seems to conspire to keep kicking you when you’re down.”
“I’m not down!” he retorted angrily.
“I’m not down, I’m right!” He stared at me and he got the same face he’d made when we’d been little and had fought over the rules of a card game we’d made up together: he looked mulish, a new word I’d just learned.
I reined in my own temper.
“From what Taygen explained, I could see how everyone’s words could be misinterpreted,” I said carefully.
“‘Misinterpreted?’” he quoted.
“Like hell they could!”
“If your mama heard you talking right now…”
He actually looked over his shoulder before continuing.
“There is no way that I’m installing shutters on my house. It’s aesthetically wrong.”
“Marc, do you hear yourself? You don’t even have the siding up yet! Why are you fighting about shutters?” Although, when I’d texted with Taygen, she hadn’t sounded much better.
In fact, she’d struck me as equally silly and…
what was it? Intransigent.
As she’d typed a particularly long complaint, I’d killed time by looking up synonyms for “stubborn.”
“If he won’t install shutters, I’ll do it myself!” she’d ended that message, with a lot of capital letters and so, so many angry emojis.
“Taygen,” I’d started to cajole, but then she’d continued with more.
She was as obstinate as her fiancé, which was another good word.
“I’ll stand on the highest ladder I can find so that he gets nervous, and then I’ll paint the shutters pink, hot pink so that he has to regret them every time he pulls into the garage. Which is only for one car, by the way! Marc says that he’ll have to be the one to park inside because of the tool chest in his truck but what if it’s raining? I don’t even know if he loves me.”
“He does,” I had assured her.
“Didn’t he just fix your toilet?” Then I’d promised that I would talk to my cousin, and I was giving it my best shot.
“Marc, why do you want to marry Taygen?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled.
He was sucking on his injured finger again.
“I mean it,” I pressed.
“Why do you want to marry her?”
“Well…” He sighed.
“She’s fun. She’s ready to go and try anything, on a moment’s notice. But she’s not crazy.” He quickly glanced my way, to see if I’d taken offense.
I only nodded encouragingly.
“She was so happy when I rolled out her trash can the other day. You would have thought I bought her a diamond ring and I will do that, someday. But she didn’t care about the ring I gave her when I asked her to marry me. She said, ‘I just want you, not some jewelry.’”
I put my hands over my heart, very impressed.
Taygen had really liked the ersatz stuff from Aunt Paula that I’d shared with her, but I knew just what she’d meant: the engagement ring hadn’t mattered, but the engagement did.
“Marc, you love her and she loves you. It’s almost Valentine’s Day! Why are you fighting like this?”
“Yeah, you’re right.” He sighed again.
“I’ll talk to her more about installing shutters. I could explain how stylistically, it’s a bad, terrible, stupid idea.”
“No,” I told him.
“What am I supposed to do, then?”
We spent a while cutting out cardboard and painting it, and Marc left early to go hang the pieces on his house so that they could both get an idea of how shutters would look there.
“When you discuss this with her, you are not to say ‘wrong,’ ‘ridiculous,’ or ‘sensitive,’” I admonished.
“There are more words to avoid and I’ll text you a list.” Then I wrote to Taygen, too, reminding her that this was his area of expertise, after all.
It was also the home he’d purchased himself and had worked to renovate, after-hours and on weekends, toiling mostly alone to make it the very best he could.
“Give him a little break,” I urged.
“He loves that place and he’s not saying ‘no shutters’ because he wants to insult you and start a fight. One of the reasons you love him is that he’s pigheaded,” I further reminded her, and she admitted that I was right, and she would try to be more rational about the home’s exterior.
My Lord. That had been exhausting!
“I’m over relationships,” I texted next, but not to either of those people.
“Did you start one while I wasn’t looking?” Caleb wrote back, and I gave him a brief summary of the day’s activities.
He returned with, “Hell.” Then he stated, “They sound like kids.”
Well, they were pretty young.
Marc was only twenty-five, I wrote, which was really just barely out of the teen years.
I was surprised that, as someone with such a strong math background, Caleb hadn’t done some quick subtraction.
“He’s older than you?” he wrote, and I answered affirmatively.
“You’re always saying that you’re ancient.”
“I’m not ancient,” I said out loud when he answered his phone.
I’d gotten tired of waiting for him to type because he was very slow at that, so I’d called him.
“I don’t think I ever said that I was ancient.”
“You talk about step-counting all the time.”
“I don’t need to count those anymore.” I yawned.
“Sir and I went running this morning and I’m feeling it now. Isn’t it supposed to be energizing?”
Caleb got excited about my pace and distance, and he wanted to know the route I’d taken.
He didn’t know the streets we’d traveled very well yet, but he was interested in learning his way around.
We’d walked there together, too, on the previous weekend, so that he could get a better lay of the land.
“It’s so nice up here,” he’d noted, as another neighbor had waved and greeted us from her porch.
“I can understand why my mother didn’t like it. She wasn’t friendly like this and she would have gotten annoyed when people talked to her.”
The more he said, the more I was convinced that Lara-Lee Woodson and I would not have gotten along at all.
But I was grateful to her, because she’d done something amazing: she’d made this man, and the more time I spent with him, the more I liked him.
Now, when he invited me and Sir over for dinner, I forgot my exhaustion.
“Yes, absolutely!” I answered.
“We’ll be there.”
“No, scratch that,” he said.
“It’s too far for you to drive. I’ll come up the mountain and see you instead. I want to take another look at the columns on the porch, anyway.”
“You’re a hands-on landlord,” I complemented.
“I appreciate it.”
I appreciated all of what he’d done for me and Sir.
It had turned out that there weren’t too many other landlords who were excited about renting to me and my slightly-more-than-hundred-pound dog, especially not in the time frame I’d needed.
My time frame for a move had been immediately, now, with extreme haste.
“We can stop looking,” Caleb had said after we’d spent some time calling, texting, and emailing about various places (and getting negative responses back).
“I know a house on Signal Mountain, but I’m not sure if you’ll want it. It’s worn-out and needs multiple repairs, and it’s a good distance from your job. But it has a fenced yard and I know that the owner is a big fan of Sir.” He’d given some good tummy scratches as he’d said that.
“What do you think, Kayleigh? Would you want to move into my house on the mountain?”
Part of being an adult and being responsible was due diligence—however, sometimes you just needed to jump on the opportunities that were offered to you.
“Yes,” I said without hesitation.
“Oh, I’m very relieved.” Because I might have talked a good game about how I wasn’t worried about finding a place for me and Sir, but I had been.
My biggest fear was that I’d have to turn to my parents or the million and two other McCourts to beg for their assistance, and they would think that I was helpless, dumb Kayleigh again.
So, Sir and I were now driving down to work every day and back up at the end of it, trips which he didn’t enjoy.
I’d decided to let him sit in the front, which I’d been avoiding because I didn’t think it was safe.
I’d bought a dog seat belt and he wore it after a lot of arguing.
He didn’t fit very well in my smaller seats so he couldn’t lie down, and he rocked back and forth as we went around the curves of the road.
He cried, too, and he tried to snuggle with me as I tried to drive.
That was why I made the suggestion now that Caleb could stop by the office to meet us here, and then he could take Sir with him in the truck.
I’d also purchased a seat belt for that vehicle, so my dog would be equally safe in it.
As usual, he heard the truck’s arrival long before I did, and he ran to the glass door and butted it with his big head.
“Let him come to us,” I said.
“It’s something my nana used to tell me about boys and now that I’m old, I lean toward thinking that she was right.” I lasted for about twenty more seconds as we watched Caleb park, and then I went to open the door myself.
“Hi,” I said, and he smiled back at me.
“Hello, Kayleigh McCourt. Sir, are you ready?”
My dog, as usual, rushed to greet Caleb and leave me in the dust. But I smiled at that, too, because it made me happy that he had such good friends.
And I did, as well. As I was driving behind them toward my new home, my cousin Cassidy called me from wherever she happened to be right now.
“Hi,” I said happily.
“How’s the tour?”
“Good, wonderful!” she answered.
“Aria, are you there?”
“I’m here,” my other cousin said, so it was kind of like the three of us were together again.
“KayKay, something’s going on but she wouldn’t tell me until we were both on the phone.”
“I do have news,” Cass announced, and I heard tons of excitement in those words.
“Are y’all sitting down?”
Aria said yes and I was, of course, since I was driving.
“What is it?” I demanded.
“Tell us!”
“Jack asked me to marry him, like formally with a ring and we already planned our wedding and it’s going to be in Hawaii and also…I’m pregnant. We’re going to have a baby!” Cass told us.
“Oh, Cassidy,” Aria said, and started sobbing with happiness.
This was what our friend had wanted more than anything and if anyone deserved it, she was the woman.
“I’m so glad for you,” I told her.
“This is amazing!”
We were all crying and that was fine, except that I was also driving.
I was doing my best, but the truck carried Sir and Caleb further and further ahead of me as Cassidy discussed how she was feeling and told us about their future plans.
One of those plans was happening almost immediately: they were having their wedding in only two weeks.
“Wait, what? You want us to go to Hawaii in two weeks?” I asked.
I wasn’t much of a traveler but I had an idea of how expensive that would be.
“Jack and I are arranging everything,” Cass said firmly, which started an argument between her and Aria, who also didn’t have a lack of funds.
“I don’t need you to buy me a ticket, either,” I said, but they pretty much ignored that.
The wedding was going to be quick and out of town due to her fiancé’s celebrity and also due to all the McCourts.
“I can’t plan a big thing right now,” she explained.
“We figured if we went far, far away and only invited our parents and very close friends, no one would be mad.”
“They’ll still be mad,” Aria cautioned, and Cass answered that she knew, but maybe they wouldn’t be very, very mad.
“Anyway, I have to have the two of y’all…because I need bridesmaids! What do you think?”
We were both screaming yes, which made it a good thing that Sir wasn’t in the car.
He would have gotten worked up with my level of excitement, but it wasn’t every day that your best friend announced that she was marrying a country music star in a tropical-destination wedding in two weeks.
Sir got worked up anyway and barked at my car when I pulled into the gravel driveway at Caleb’s house—my new rental.
I’d taken the day off from church the weekend before and we’d packed my belongings into his truck and into my uncle Travis’s trailer, which I’d borrowed.
My uncle had also wanted to loan some of his children, my cousins, to help, but I didn’t have much stuff.
Really, it was kind of a pathetic assortment for someone as old as I was.
People my age were doctors, or well on the way.
They were running for seats in government, they were teachers helping kids figure out the world themselves.
They were married with families, like Aria and soon, Cassidy.
“What happened to you?” Caleb asked when I got out of my car.
He and Sir were in the front yard and one of them was closely watching a squirrel who was nosing at something on the ground and who didn’t seem to realize that he was taking his life into his little paws.
“I got a call from my two best friends. Cassidy’s getting married! In Hawaii!” She had asked us not to share the baby news yet, but I was practically bursting with it.
I’d tell Sir later.
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“Yes,” I answered immediately.
“Then why do you look like you’ve been crying?”
“What?” I bent and checked my face in my side mirror and spotted snot, swollen eyes, and a red nose.
I’d been quietly blotting my face as I drove but you couldn’t hide everything, not even things that you might want to keep from yourself.
There were always traces, like my chapped lips that had overdried as I wiped tears off them.