Chapter 8
M y Lord! Were they at it again?
I quickly took out my phone and, just like I’d done on my flights to Hawaii, I turned on airplane mode.
Sorry, Taygen, I internally apologized.
But this would be the third fight this week alone, and I didn’t want to be involved anymore.
I was done.
“What do you want from me?” Marc typed.
I knew this, because he mouthed the words as his thumb slid around on his phone’s keyboard.
“I’m doing the best I can. I’m afraid that if I screw it up, I’ll be done. No one will hire me. I have to make it work because this is our future.”
He stopped squinting at the screen and rubbed his temples.
I’d known that he was worried about the barn project, but I didn’t know he felt like this!
He sounded almost at wit’s end and totally overwhelmed, which made sense.
Prior to taking on the job at Caleb’s, we had handled a one-car garage remodel, a powder room, and part of a kitchen (we’d saved money by avoiding a total gut and the owner had been happy with our thriftiness).
So the barn, with the multiple stages, multiple subcontractors, and multiple money draws?
It was more than we were used to, a lot more.
It was understandable that he’d have been stressed and worried but I hadn’t known that it was this bad.
I watched out of the corner of my eye as he shoved the phone into his pocket, and then I nudged Sir.
“Go see Marc,” I whispered very quietly and dogs did have that amazing hearing.
He padded right over and nudged his dump truck-sized head into my cousin’s lap, and after a moment, Marc looked down and started to scratch his ears.
“You’re a good dog,” he told Sir.
We’d done a few of the obedience classes, but that loving instinct was natural because he really was a good dog.
I stood and made a little show of checking my own phone.
“Oh, wow! I didn’t realize how late it was getting. No wonder I’m hungry.”
“Huh?” My cousin looked over at me, confused.
“Did you have lunch yet?” I asked.
No, he hadn’t, because he’d been out at Caleb’s and then had come tearing back here to have a meeting with the subcontractor who’d messed up so badly before I’d left for Hawaii.
They seemed to have worked things out, and they would not be badmouthing each other or working together in the future.
At least that problem had been put to rest.
“I guess I missed it. Did you bring anything?” He looked hopefully at our little fridge.
Yes, actually, I had packed a lunch bag for today, a cute one I’d gotten for Christmas.
But now I had other plans.
“It’s so nice out. Why don’t we take a walk down to the taco truck? We can sit outside at those picnic tables with Sir. My treat, and I know you love their guacamole.”
He did, and I’d seen his face light up when I’d mentioned “taco” too.
At least it had made him look less like he wanted to scream and/or cry.
“Sure, let’s go,” he agreed.
Sir and I practiced what we’d learned at our training sessions about walking on a leash.
He behaved very nicely, not yanking at my arm, but we still had a problem with—
“Holy crap!” Marc grabbed me before the dog pulled me off my feet and flat onto the sidewalk.
“No, Sir!”
“Thank you. He saw that squirrel and they’re his downfall,” I explained, righting myself.
Sir now sat politely, and looked back at me to ask what my problem was.
“You would have torn up your knees for sure,” my cousin commented, because I was wearing a skirt today.
Sir and I had dinner plans, so we had both dressed up.
I had foregone my jeans and he had a very masculine bow on his collar which he hadn’t yet noticed so it was intact.
“Are you wearing that because you’re going out with Caleb?”
My cousin had never forgotten the party dress I’d put on for our first meeting at the barn, but to his credit, he’d never told anyone in our family about it.
“We’re having dinner at his house,” I answered.
“Then you’ll be able to see the lack of progress that went on today.” He sighed deeply.
“You want to tell me about it?”
For the first time in weeks, he did.
He described the many problems, most of which I had zero knowledge of and some of which I could have done something to solve.
As I listened, I felt so sorry for him.
And I also felt mad.
Very mad.
“Why in the world didn’t you mention any of this to me?”
“I can handle it,” he muttered.
“ We handle things, because we work together. Why did you hire me if you don’t want my help? Or…” My mind went to a word that I didn’t like: pity.
“Did you keep everything to yourself because you didn’t trust me?”
“What?” Marc seemed genuinely confused.
“No, that’s not why.”
I stopped on the sidewalk and I would have put my hands on my hips, except Sir was pulling me.
“Then what is the problem?”
“I’m failing. There. Are you happy that I admitted it?” he asked, his cheeks red with anger.
Sir cried and my cousin bent to pet him.
“It’s all right. We’re not mad at you.”
“You can do this,” I said, and linked my arm with his.
“ We can. Let me help you, please? And let your dad help too, if you need it. When you played football, you didn’t just go out on the field and expect to know where to run and how to block. It’s the same.”
“I worked for my dad since I was a kid and then I got a degree in construction management. I should already know what I’m doing.”
“Don’t professional players also have coaches, or is there a point where they’re supposed understand everything and execute on their own?” I asked, and he finally smiled.
“I think that’s one of those questions where you already know the answer.” We walked for a while before he spoke again.
“When I worked for my dad, we used to talk through issues and I’d give him advice, although I don’t know how helpful I ever was. It’s good to have a sounding board.”
“Exactly. It can be me, it can be him, but please let it be somebody.”
We got in line at the food truck, but after a moment, Marc had to take Sir away from the overload of delicious smells while I ordered our lunch.
The dog did get a small helping of his own, because we were celebrating.
“Why?” my cousin wondered when I noted that fact.
“Is it because I’ve admitted how bad I am at my job?”
“No, you’re very good at your job,” I said firmly.
“We’re celebrating a fresh start.” I touched my taco to his.
“Cheers.” He seemed unconvinced, but I knew a lot about having to begin again.
“You know how I went to rehab twice?”
“Yeah. What does that have to do with this problem?”
“The first time, I went because my parents were so scared. It was after I’d been in the hospital,” I explained, and he nodded slowly.
I was sure he remembered it well.
“I went for y’all, the people who loved me.”
“Ok.Well, thanks.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“That was the wrong reason. The second time I went, it was for me. I knew that I had to change things. I had to change almost everything about my life and I had to change myself. That was much worse because it was so scary. I had been thinking about my drinking and using like they were problems of perception. Everyone else believed that I had issues and I needed to clean up so they would stop feeling that way. It terrified me to realize that I really did have a problem. I really needed help, because things had gotten so out of control that I…well, I thought I might die, and I didn’t mind that thought.”
“KayKay.” He put down the taco and hugged me.
“That’s terrible.”
“But I’m ok now.” I looked at his face when he let go, and he didn’t seem to doubt my words.
“I needed to admit that I was over my head and to accept that it wasn’t their perception, it was real. When I did, I saw that there were other ways for me to live. I just had to open my eyes to them.”
“I think this is one of those stories that’s supposed to have a lesson,” he said.
“Yes, and it’s this question: did you think less of me because I needed help?”
“No! I was so damn glad. I was so relieved,” Marc told me.
“When you came back for the second time, it was one of the best days of my life. KayKay, don’t cry about it.”
“I’m not!” My greasy napkin wasn’t great for wiping away tears.
“Do you get my meaning?”
He touched his taco to mine again.
“Ok, we’re celebrating. It’s the beginning of a new era, the ‘Marc Needs Help’ phase of life.”
I nodded and we both chewed for a while.
“You know, some people watch me like they’re afraid I’m going to backslide,” I remarked.
“You don’t.”
“No,” he said.
“I know you’ve changed and you’re different now. I trust you.” He looked into my plastic basket.
“You want to finish that?”
I got him more food of his own, because he was obviously feeling better, and I got Sir another little helping, too.
We were celebrating!
It was a huge mistake.
“It just didn’t sit well with him,” I lamented as we stood in Caleb’s driveway.
“Oh, my Lord! I can smell it even when I breathe through my mouth.”
“Hell.” Caleb coughed and put his fist to his own mouth, but not to hide a smile or his laughter like he usually did.
Now it seemed as if he might have been holding back puke.
“Never take him there again.”
“No, I won’t,” I swore.
“No more people food for the dog. I’m sorry,” I told poor Sir, although he seemed fine now that he’d disgorged approximately fifteen gallons of vomit onto my dashboard.
“Kayleigh, I think this mess is beyond us. It’s in the vents and you’re going to need to take it in to get it fixed. Don’t you have a cousin who has a shop?”
“I do. But I hate to give this mess to poor Poppy,” I said.
“I’ll roll down the windows and let it air out.”
“It would take a tornado.” He walked back about ten paces back where it smelled a little less like the bottom of a hot dumpster, and I joined him there.
“You can leave it here for now and use mine,” he said.
“How will you get around without your truck?”
“I also have a car, from when I lived in Florida.” We went to the other side of the house and to another of his outbuildings, and inside was a lovely, new, expensive automobile, the leather seat and non-squeaky windshield wiper type.
I immediately shook my head.
“No, sir.”
The dog looked up and ran over to me.
“Sorry, I meant, ‘No, Caleb.’ I can’t take that! Look what just happened to my nana’s car. I don’t think that Poppy repairs luxury vehicles.”
Caleb argued that yes, I could take it, and we continued the discussion throughout our dinner.
We talked about many things, in fact, but what was on the forefront of my mind was something that I felt I couldn’t bring up: Marc.
Unless I did it another way.
“Have you ever felt like you were in over your head?” I asked casually.
“Sure, when I went to boarding school. I felt it again in my first job out of college. I started working at an investment bank and it was cutthroat.” He shook his head, remembering.
“I was sick to my stomach every morning before I went in and I hated it. It’s why I started doing my own thing.”
“Wasn’t that even scarier?”
“It was different because I was in control, but then the scary part was not having a backup plan. There was no backup at all, except me pulling myself out of it.” He placed his utensils on his empty plate.
“If I ever have kids, I’ll be that backup. I’ll be there for advice or a loan, whatever they need.”
“Your mom wasn’t like that,” I said, stating the obvious.
“No, she wasn’t. When I left for college, she made sure I understood that it was for the last time. I was eighteen, an adult, and I wasn’t welcome back.”
“Not even for vacations? For the summer?” I asked.
“What did you do?”
“You can stay on campus more than you’d expect,” Caleb told me.
“There are international students, poor kids like me, and people who just can’t go home. Also like me. Over the summers, I got jobs, mostly in New York but once in San Francisco.” He looked around the vintage kitchen.
“I never came back, not once.”
“Until she needed you,” I pointed out.
“You said that you were here for more than a year before she died, because she needed you.”
“We’d talked a few times, so I knew that she…this wasn’t what we were discussing. What did you ask me?”
“I asked if you ever felt like you had gotten in over your head, and I’m glad to know that you understand the feeling. Because someone I know is struggling, although I’m also sure that it’s going to be fine great due to a lot of support and love, and due to the fact that this person is smart and capable, with so much potential. I’m sure it’s going to work out.”
“I’m glad about that,” he answered, and I felt like this topic was a little too dangerous.
I shouldn’t have brought it up, but my breakthrough with Marc had been a big part of my day and I liked talking about my day with Caleb.
I liked hearing about his, too.
I now understood more of what he was doing in front of his computer all the time and what the red and green line graphs were.
He would tell me, “You can’t really be interested in this,” but I was.
I really was.
Fortunately for me, he introduced a different topic.
“You know, something’s coming up.”
“Easter?”
“That, but I was thinking of your birthday,” he corrected, and tapped his phone.
“Someone reminded me that I have a calendar in this thing.”
“Let me see,” I said, and he passed it over.
Yes, there it was: “Kayleigh’s birthday,” not “Kayleigh McCourt” but just my first name.
And he’d set it to repeat every year, or maybe his phone had just defaulted to that.
I preferred to think that he’d made the choice himself.
“What are your plans for the day?”
“My parents are going to want to have me and thirty other people over for dinner, and my mom will make a cake or two, or three.”
“That’s nice,” he commented.
“Why do you sound so glum about it?”
I shrugged.
“Your birthday’s coming up, too. I also have it in my calendar.” I had everyone’s, so that birthdays popped up left and right.
But I’d put his in capital letters.
“It’s coming in July,” he noted, but as someone whose job depended on looking at future trends in the economic markets, he should have known that summer was a mere eyelash away in a timeframe sense.
“Can I invite myself to your party?”
“Of course you’re invited,” I said.
“I mentally include you in everything.” After the first time he’d come to church and then to our family get-together afterwards, he’d kept coming, and it had felt totally natural.
“I’m Kayleigh’s friend,” he’d explained to all my relatives on that first day, and they’d accepted that and had been happy to have him.
So he was invited for the next Sunday, too, and all of them in the future.
I loved to have him there, although I knew it had been hard for him sometimes.
When put together, all the McCourts were a lot—especially for a guy who’d grown up so isolated.
After hearing that he hadn’t been able to come home from college, I could now picture him getting dropped off at his boarding school at age fourteen and then watching his mother drive away.
Had she let him return for the holidays back then?
Probably not. He’d been less than an hour from home, but it was the same as a million and two miles of distance.
Sir was nosing at my knee, and he didn’t ever interrupt at the table anymore unless the situation was dire.
“His tummy might be acting up again,” I said nervously, and Caleb jumped to his feet and ran for the door, with the dog loping along behind him.
I followed because…well, I just got a weird feeling when I was in the farmhouse.
It felt sad to me, which was probably due to the awful stuff I’d heard about Caleb’s life here.
Loneliness, isolation, friendlessness, and a total lack of love—that was how he’d lived, and maybe those emotions remained.
Anyway, it made me anxious, especially when I was alone, so I followed them out onto the porch.
They disappeared behind the outbuilding which held the beautiful car, the one I wouldn’t be taking.
The first time Marc and I had come here, I’d noticed that the front porch was wide and gracious.
It could have been beautiful, but at the time, it had been mostly covered by sticks, leaves, and dirt, and the only furniture had been a broken rocking chair.
Caleb and I had swept it off and put the chair into the construction dumpster, so it had improved a lot.
Now the main feature was an oversized rolltop desk that listed to one side, because one of the legs was broken and had been propped with a rock that wasn’t quite big enough.
The desk had previously sat in the barn, but Marc’s crew had moved it up here to save it.
It had belonged to Caleb’s mom.
I walked over the creaking floorboards and carefully tugged up the slatted top, which resisted a lot before it gave way.
The interior was crammed with papers about a foot high…
my Lord, what was in here?
“Hm,” I sniffed. “Lara-Lee, you were a pig.”
The front door of the house, which I’d left ajar, suddenly slammed shut.
I jumped and the breeze blew around the leaves we’d missed during our cleanup and lifted the papers on the desk, which I quickly held down until the air stilled again.
The top layer consisted mostly of bills, I found.
I flipped through invoice after invoice for things that seemed plant-related, like fertilizer and grafting tape.
Under that, I found her tax bills and her power bills, going back years.
“What are you doing?” Caleb called as he and Sir approached.
“Just looking at this.” I put down one of the invoices.
“Do you mind?”
He shook his head.
“I kept meaning to do it myself, but I’ve been putting it off.”
“Do you think it would make you sad?”
“No,” he told me.
“It’s complicated.” He tested the porch railing, shaking it hard with his hand, before he rested against it.
Sir leaned against his legs.
The dog was definitely more than a hundred pounds now and Caleb wasn’t hefty, but he wasn’t a lightweight, either.
He was what my aunt Amber would have called “very nicely formed,” just like she said about her husband Jed.
“She kept a lot of old bills,” I noted.
“She must have been worried about money.”
“No.”
“No?” I asked.
“I’ve told you how we lived,” he said.
“No heat, no TV, no vacations, no good food.”
“I didn’t know about the last one.” I frowned.
There were resources she could have used to help her hungry child.
“My mother wanted to live off the land as much as she could. She was mostly vegetarian, but we had chickens to keep down pests in the orchard. I used to suck on their eggs because I was so hungry.”
“Caleb!”
“I eat well now,” he assured me, and I thought again about the old bills in this desk.
There hadn’t been any for groceries or dinner deliveries.
“Food was at a minimum, so there were no treats. No cake, no candy, no ice cream.”
“Not even on your birthday?”
“We didn’t celebrate very much,” he said.
“I always assumed that we were poor. There wasn’t money for the uniform I needed for high school, there was nothing for a car for me, there was nothing for college. I worked and paid for those things myself. But when I came back here, when her health was bad, I found out the truth.” He pointed at one of the desk drawers.
“I was trying to figure out her financial situation, and I came across her bank statements.”
I pulled hard and that drawer slid open, revealing another messy pile instead of files or anything that looked like organization.
I took the papers from the top and my eyes widened.
“She had this much? My Lord!”
“That’s just one account,” he said.
“This land has value, but there’s even more. She kept her will in that same drawer and more records, too. She had several bond portfolios. She had stocks and land holdings passed down from her great-grandfather and today they’re worth a lot. A lot,” he repeated.
I understood that his idea of “a lot” was probably a much larger number than what I had in mind.
“And now it’s yours?” I asked, and he nodded slightly.
“Aunt Paula said that your mama was proud of being a Woodson. I assumed that the family had…diminished, and that was why this farmhouse didn’t have heat and the water doesn’t seem to come out very strongly.” It was hard to make the toilets flush, for example.
“No,” Caleb answered, “there was no diminishment. She chose to live this way, in cold squalor. She chose to have me live this way, too.”
“Why? No, I’m not asking about your mother’s choices,” I amended, before he answered.
“I understand that she was angry and didn’t like people. There’s a really good word for that, by the way.”
“Misanthrope. Yeah, that was Lara-Lee.”
“But you’re not. Why are you still here?”
He turned his head to look toward the stunted orchard.
“I want to bring it back.”
“You told me that she had a dream for this farm and that you wanted to make it come true. But I don’t understand why. It seems like it would be easier to sell the land and walk away from the place where you weren’t happy.”
The front door slammed again—it must have drifted back open.
Marc could fix the latch, but Caleb hadn’t seemed to notice the problem.
He continued to look at me steadily, as if he was thinking about his answer to my question.
“I wanted to make her proud,” he told me after a while.
“Finally. I had never done enough, but maybe I could turn the farm into what she had dreamed of. She had never succeeded but I could. I could try.”
“Oh.” I put down the papers in my hands and walked over to the railing.
“I don’t want to startle you like I did at the airport, but I’m going to hug you again.”
“You are?” He didn’t seem opposed, though, because he widened his knees so that I could stand between them, and he opened his arms slightly.
Because he was leaning on the railing, his head was close to my level so he put his chin on my shoulder.
“I guess this is my day to give advice,” I said.
“I gave a big speech earlier about accepting help but you don’t need that. What you need is to let go.”
“I don’t want to let go.” The first time I’d hugged him, he’d given me sporadic pats on my back, but now he had his arms around me.
“I don’t mean to let go of me,” I said, because I didn’t want that either.
“I don’t know what I expected when I came back here to help her. I told myself that I didn’t expect anything, but I was still hoping for something different.” He pulled me a little closer and I let myself rest against him.
“It was too late.” He sighed.
“She was already out of it and the house was a disaster. It had never been neat or clean, but it was unfit for someone to live in. I was ashamed that I’d let it get so bad.”
“She told you that she didn’t want you here.”
“She wasn’t capable of making those decisions at the end. I shouldn’t have let my own anger stop me from stepping in, and I’m trying to make up for it. I’m trying to make up with a dead woman.”
The breeze rustled the papers on the desk and I turned my head a little to see.
“You said that I don’t need help, but I do,” Caleb said.
“Will you help me with her stuff? There’s that desk and there’s more in her bedroom. Even the glovebox of the truck is full of her things but I haven’t gone through it.”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Yes, I will definitely help the man who washed cow pies off my dog and wants to loan me his perfect car.”
“It’s yours for as long as you need it. Is Sir pushing you?”
“He’s participating in this hug by shoving all his body weight against my legs,” I said, and laughed.
“He’s—what was that?”
Because I’d heard a cracking sound.
And then the next thing—
“Hell.”
“Caleb!” I sat up, pulling away from him.
“Caleb! Are you ok?” Sir stood above us barking so loud that I wasn’t sure if he’d heard my question, although I was now lying on top of him.
“Yeah.” But he winced and he felt his head.
“The railing broke,” he pointed out.
It had, and we’d gone backwards off the porch.
Sir had scrambled free and I’d landed on Caleb, but he’d landed on a scraggly bush that couldn’t have given much cushion from the hard ground.
“Are you hurt? My Lord! You could have been killed!”
“I don’t think so. But it’s not great,” he acknowledged.
“Sir, knock it off. Come down the steps and you’ll see that I’m fine.”
The dog joined us and did stop barking.
He started licking, though, and trying to join us in the bush, and it took a while for everyone to be up and out of it.
We were all dirty by that point, covered with more dead leaves and dust.
I helped Caleb to his feet and he frowned at the broken boards.
“Maybe I’ll ask Marc to start on the house sooner rather than later,” he mentioned as he brushed off his jeans.
“Or maybe it would be better to let him finish one project before he begins another,” I said quickly.
“That way you would know that everything was done thoroughly and had all his attention.”
“Uh, ok. Your arm is bleeding. I think you got scratched.”
We had to go back inside the house, which only seemed darker and gloomier than before.
We did the best we could to clean ourselves, wiping away the dirt and dabbing at our scrapes with some antiseptic that Caleb found.
“What is that?” I asked, looking at the bottle.
“Is it homemade?” I sniffed and then jerked my face away.
“What is that smell?”
“I don’t know exactly what’s in here,” he said, holding it up to the light.
The liquid was cloudy and there was stuff floating in it, even though he’d shaken it hard.
“My mother didn’t believe in purchasing medicine so she made her own remedies. The first time I took aspirin for a headache, I thought it was a godsend.”
I took the bottle from his hand.
“This may work fine, but maybe we’ll just stick to soap and water. I would feel more comfortable with that.”
He looked at it too, and then nodded.
But there wasn’t a way for me to shower at his house and I needed to.
My hair was full of sticks and leaves, so Sir and I left after a little while so we could use something besides the weird antiseptic and the trickle of water that came out of the faucets at the farmhouse.
And I did take the car, the one with the Florida plates.
I’d given in when I’d gotten another whiff of my nana’s vehicle and had found that the smell seemed to have intensified.
“Call Mama,” I ordered Caleb’s car, and it listened to me.
It was so nice, and I was so afraid that Sir and I would do something to it.
That was why I’d also borrowed blankets and towels to cover all the leather seats and on his side, the dashboard.
“Caleb’s mother was a witch,” my own mother announced after I’d told her some of the things I’d heard over dinner.
“That’s not nice.”
“What else would you call a woman who treated her son like that?” she demanded.
Her voice rang out through the speakers and she was right: witch was a good word for Lara-Lee Woodson.
“I can’t imagine dropping off a child at college and telling him, ‘This is the final goodbye. You’re no longer welcome in my home,’” she continued.
“I don’t think she dropped him off. He had to get there himself.”
“The poor boy!”
“But he’s doing great now,” I reminded her.
“He’s a wonderful person.”
“I like him a lot,” she said.
“Daddy and I both do.”
I did, too.
I got a funny feeling in my stomach and for a moment, I looked at Sir and terrible memories flooded back of when I’d seen his lunch for the second time.
Was I going to puke, too?
But then I realized what it was: anticipation.
What would happen next?
It seemed like it might have been something good, that the blank pages of this year could fill up with something wonderful.
I rubbed the scratch on my arm, smiling.
“Today was a great day,” I told my mother.
It was an affirmation of the truth.