Chapter 9
Over the past one thousand, five hundred eighteen days, I’d learned that life was harder than I’d thought.
Drinking (and pills, lines, and whatever else I’d put into myself) had rounded the corners and smoothed away sharp edges.
Sure, stuff had bothered me.
I remembered being sorry to lose a job, feeling bad that various guys had walked out, being upset when Aria had gotten married and moved away.
Now, without the buffers of legal and illegal substances, my emotions loomed larger.
I’d been so happy in the moments before Caleb and I had fallen off his porch and into the bush—like, almost giddy with it.
But it went the other way, too, because when things were bad?
They felt worse and I didn’t have any liquid to pour on them, like the way you’d dampen a fire.
This evening, I was mired in a mixture of anxiety, frustration, and general unhappiness, and there was nothing I could do except deal with it like everyone else had to, like an adult woman who was (supposed to be) in control of herself.
I stood at the window and looked out into my parents’ front yard, trying to be that woman.
I tried to feel the way that I should have on this day: happy!
Happy birthday to me.
My relatives had gathered here and my mama had worked hard to make the house nice and to bake some beautiful cakes.
They had all taken time out of their lives to come and celebrate with me, and I was appreciative even if I didn’t really want to be here myself.
I didn’t really want to see anyone except for one person who hadn’t shown.
Not yet.
“It’s not that late,” Aria told me.
“I’m sure he’s on the way.”
I remembered saying the same things to her, but on the much more important day of her wedding.
That had worked out great, because she and her husband Cain were very happy now.
What did his tardiness matter, several years and a couple of kids later?
And this little party didn’t matter either, which was what I told my cousin.
“I’m not worried about it,” I answered confidently and that was definitely the way I should have felt.
“Ari, can you do me a favor and see what’s wrong with Taygen? She went into the back yard and she’s sitting on the swing set, looking all tragic.”
“Oh, my word. Are they fighting again?” Aria shook her head and carried her baby into the back to check on Marc’s fiancée.
I assumed that yes, they were fighting again.
That particular situation hadn’t improved, but since he and I had our come-to-Jesus talk about asking for help, he had tried to make other changes.
His dad, Johnnie, had come by the office a few times and the three of us had done some plotting.
My uncle had also been out to the jobsite, where he had talked to Caleb.
Uncle Johnnie had said that he was consulting on the project, and the three of them had walked around the house, getting more ideas about what could be done in the future.
“You’ll want some insulation up there,” Johnnie had said as he’d descended from the attic.
“I’m sweating like a sinner in church.” We’d been going through a warm spell.
“Call my niece Dasia about HVAC and have her see what she can do.” Dasia had come and had gone crazy over the farmhouse—she had always loved the idea of living in an old-fashioned place the country, and this was definitely ancient and far away from everything.
She’d mentioned to Caleb that she had also been up at his house on the mountain, under my direction, and further told him that some of our other relatives had been working on his electrical system there.
He hadn’t been overly pleased about me taking on the repairs by myself, but I was still driving his car, wasn’t I?
Yes, I was. My Lord, it was hard to give up!
The more time that Sir and I spent in it (with him on the blankets), the more I loved it.
And my nana’s car still had an odor, no matter how hard everyone at the shop had worked to clean it, so it was back at the farm and airing out more.
We hoped that time would work better than modern chemicals to solve the problem.
Caleb was driving the old truck, which couldn’t have been as reliable as either my stinky car or his beautiful vehicle with the Florida plates that now sat in my parents’ driveway.
I hoped he hadn’t broken down somewhere, stranded.
Of course, he had a phone…
I checked mine again, but he hadn’t been in touch.
“He’s coming,” my mother reassured me.
She took my arm and pulled me away from the window.
“You have other guests, Kayleigh.”
Well, I didn’t—not really, because she had invited everyone, so they were her guests and not mine.
I considered it a pretty ridiculous thing to have a birthday party for a woman as old as I was, but she had insisted.
This was what happened when parents didn’t have grandchildren to dote over, I decided.
They had to keep making do with their lot in life: a single daughter and a dog, who was great but was not the same as a baby.
My mom had dressed Sir up for the occasion with a large bow on his collar that he was tolerating for now.
Originally, it also had a streamer that said “Happy Birthday!” and trailed behind him as he ran, but he’d eaten it almost immediately.
Despite that lapse and despite not being a human grandchild, he actually was getting along nicely with my parents.
When we’d arrived, we’d given all the guests a demonstration of what he’d learned lately in obedience school and they’d clapped and been very impressed.
Fortunately, no squirrels had run past as we showed off.
Now, as per my mother’s instructions, I mingled.
“Hi, Aunt Paula. Thank you for coming,” I told her, and she smiled and said I had a lot of sass, which she liked.
She’d come because I’d given her a ride here and I would be driving her home later, too.
Very reluctantly, Sir had surrendered his spot in the front seat after I’d given him a short lecture on manners.
Midway through that, I’d stopped, horror-struck, because I’d realized that I sounded just like my aunt Amber.
Aunt Paula had laughed her head off when I’d admitted that.
“Where’s that Woodson boy?” she asked me now.
“He’s on his way. He may have gotten stuck doing something for work.”
“It’s Saturday,” she pointed out, and I told her that Caleb worked very hard, every day.
“Like his mama,” she said, nodding.
“You told me before that Lara-Lee was a real scholar. I’ve been helping Caleb to box up her things, and there’s a lot of scientific stuff in there.” Her bedroom was full of academic-looking texts, cartons of papers, notebooks filled with symbols and words in cramped handwriting, and various laboratory instruments that I didn’t recognize.
It must have been uncomfortable for her to sleep in that place, and it felt uncomfortable for me to be in there at all.
Aunt Paula nodded. “Science was what she was interested in. We were at school together on the North Shore, but she would get in a taxi to go across the river to take classes at the university. She was well ahead of the rest of us.”
“So was Caleb,” I said with pride.
“He’s the smartest person I’ve ever met but he never brags about it.”
“Then he’s very different from his mama,” she answered, and I agreed that he was.
Everything I’d learned about her made me believe that woman was selfish, stingy, and mean, but that wasn’t Caleb at all.
You could tell by the way he treated Sir—you could tell by the way he treated me, except that he still wasn’t here.
“Botany,” Aunt Paula announced.
“What about it?”
“That was Lara-Lee’s main interest, botany. She was always talking about important experiments that she was conducting with plants, as if any of us girls gave a hoot. We were much more interested in boys than seedlings, and she used to say that we were cretins. We probably were,” she added reflectively.
“She kept up that interest, because she moved to her farm and planted an orchard. It doesn’t look like she had a lot of luck with it, though.”
“That makes me very surprised. She was the most hard-headed woman I ever met, including myself. I find it difficult to believe that she would have given up…oh, there’s your boyfriend.”
“Aunt Paula, he isn’t,” I said, but I was already moving toward Caleb.
“That’s how we all refer to him!” she called after me.
“Hi,” I greeted him.
“Is everything all right?” He was frowning as if it wasn’t.
“No. Yes,” he answered.
“Yes, everything’s going to be fine, and I’m sorry that I got held up. Happy birthday.”
“You already told me this morning,” I reminded him.
I’d awoken to Sir nudging me and to a text from Caleb.
“Now I can say it face to face, and I can give you this.” He handed me a box whose size, shape, and weight was immediately familiar.
He’d gotten me shoes?
“You didn’t have to buy me a present,” I reminded him, smiling.
That was something I’d been adamant about with my mother: I would allow a party, but absolutely no gifts.
Aria hadn’t listened, either.
“Thank you very much, though.”
“You’re welcome. Hello, Sir.”
The dog had barged over and then made his happy noises as he greeted Caleb, his favorite person.
Whenever we got within a few miles of the farm, he started whining and barking in anticipation.
Dogs just knew.
“Caleb, I’m glad you could come,” my mom said as she approached, and he got moved along into the party to see the other guests.
I spotted him in conversation with Aria’s husband and later with Marc.
But I hadn’t seen Aria since I’d asked her to go outside and talk to Taygen, and Marc himself wasn’t looking very happy.
He was also trying to disguise that, but he’d always been terrible at hiding his feelings.
I sighed inwardly and also went into the back yard, where Aria and Taygen sat on the swings that my cousins and I had loved to play on when we were kids.
Taygen held Aria’s little girl but was not looking any happier than when I’d seen her come out here.
“Maybe you can explain it, Kayleigh,” she called.
“You can tell me what’s wrong with Marc.”
“Wrong?” I asked carefully, and just as carefully settled myself into the third swing.
After the porch railing disaster, I’d been more cautious about interacting with the world around me.
Taygen started listing an inventory of problems that she and my cousin were having, including the old argument over installing shutters on his house, his lack of interest in wedding preparations, and his constant focus on work.
Aria met my gaze over her head and raised her eyebrows.
Whatever advice she’d been giving, it hadn’t worked to calm things down.
“So, what’s wrong with him?” Taygen asked me.
“Why has he changed so much?”
“I think he seems a lot the same,” I answered, still cautious.
“He was very worried about our big construction project, but that’s easing up.” At work, he did act more relaxed about it and I was taking a much bigger role in organizing, so things on-site seemed to be improving, too.
“Is he going to behave this way every time he gets hired? I thought that he wanted to be a contractor,” she said, frowning.
“That’s all he’s ever done, it’s his dream.”
“Maybe that’s part of the problem,” Aria pointed out.
“He wants it so much that there’s even more pressure on him.”
“It’s like he’s a different person,” Taygen told her.
“He spoke really ugly to my dad.”
“What? Marc did?” I was surprised, but also…
not. He’d been talking to me about how he didn’t care much for her father.
Marc didn’t like the way that Taygen’s dad treated his wife and he also didn’t like how much the guy had to drink each night.
Apparently, there had been a discussion about the wedding that had turned mean-spirited.
Taygen was the only girl in their family and her parents had offered to pay for everything, which meant that they believed that they should have a lot of say in the planning.
For example, they didn’t like Marc’s choice of groomsmen, they didn’t agree about the suit he had chosen, and…
“They don’t want to pay for so many guests,” she finished, speaking the words quickly.
“Which branch of our family do they want to cut out?” I asked, and her eyes darted in my direction before she resettled them on the baby’s beautiful face.
“It’s just about numbers,” she mumbled.
Was she talking about me or was I being too sensitive again?
I glanced over at Aria but she looked as confused as I felt.
“Obviously, they know more than he does!” she continued.
“Why can’t he listen?”
“It’s his wedding, not theirs,” Aria said gently, and Taygen frowned at her.
“Ok.” I sighed. “I’ll ask you the same thing that I ask Marc every time I’m in the middle of one of your arguments. Why do you want to marry him?”
“You asked Marc why he wanted to marry me?” She stared, and then stood up from the swing.
“Why did you do that?”
“Because I knew he’d have a lot of good reasons,” I told her.
“He loves you—”
But she was handing the baby back to Aria.
“I better go,” she told my cousin.
“She’s gorgeous and so sweet.”
“Thank you,” Aria answered.
“Taygen, I think that Kayleigh was trying to show your fiancé that he shouldn’t have fought with the woman he loves so much, that’s all.”
“It sounds to me like she was trying to suggest that he shouldn’t have wanted to marry me at all.”
“What? No! I was the one who introduced you,” I said, my temper rising.
“I think you’re great together! You’re going through a hard time, but it’s not my fault.”
“Isn’t it?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Weren’t you the one who got Marc involved in this all-consuming job with your boyfriend?”
“He isn’t my boyfriend and Marc wanted it! It’s a great thing for his company and if you really supported him...” I stopped, but she was already walking away.
“She’s just lashing out because she’s upset,” Aria told me.
She held her daughter with one arm and leaned her swing so that she could put the other around me.
“Maybe they got together too fast.”
“Are you serious? You married Cain about ten minutes after he came home to Tennessee,” I reminded her.
“Look how well it’s going now!”
“Yes, but it was rough at first,” she reminded me back.
“It might have been better to date for a while. Why did they want to get engaged so quickly?”
“You know the story,” I answered.
“They got caught up in the moment. They were having such a fun time together in Nashville, kissing on the sidewalk. When they looked up, they were standing in front of a jewelry store. They took it as a sign.”
“It is pretty romantic.”
I had thought so, too, but the story was souring for me.
“What if they’d stopped in front of a bookstore or a bank? It might have been better.”
Aria glanced at me and bit her lip.
“I think they can work this out. But it’s not your fault, no matter what.”
“Kayleigh!” my mother’s voice called.
“Come on inside, girls.”
It was time for the cake, which she had made for me just like always.
Every year, it was my favorite chocolate layers covered with buttercream, with “Happy Birthday KayKay!” written in pink, my favorite color.
For as long as I could remember, it had been this way and I had always loved it.
Except there were so many candles now that it was a little hard to see the message on the top.
The cake glowed like a volcanic eruption as they sang.
“Twenty-five years old!” one of my relatives said, and I looked again at the candles and thought about that before I carefully blew them out.