Chapter 9
9
Tom
I hope I didn’t make a mistake by laying it all on the line with Lexi. I’ve had a big wake-up call that time is precious and all that matters is the people we care about.
I care about her. I want to be with her, but only if that’s what she wants, too.
It’s such a relief that she knows how I feel. Keeping it secret from her all these months has been torturous, but she was extremely fragile when she first moved in. I didn’t want to do anything to add to her grief, so I played it cool. I gave her friendship, because that’s what she needed most.
I don’t want anyone to think that I’m a jerk, or that I invited her to live with me with ulterior motives. I knew from the beginning it was possible nothing would come of it because she was in such a difficult place in her life. I offered her the place to live before I even gave it half a thought. I had something she needed, so I made it available to her. I wasn’t thinking, Oh, maybe someday Lexi will be more to me than a roommate. First and foremost, I was thinking I could make her life easier, so I did.
I’ll never regret offering her a place to live. If she moved out tomorrow and said, Let’s just be friends , I’d be fine with that, even if it would be disappointing. At some point during these last few months of living under the same roof, Lexi‘s happiness has become more important to me than my own. After hearing more about what she endured during Jim’s illness, I know no one deserves happiness and peace of mind more than she does.
I’ll never do anything to mess with either of those things, especially in light of recent events. She’s probably thinking she’d be crazy to get involved with a guy with a faulty ticker, especially after spending years as a caregiver to her terminally ill husband. She’ll probably give it some thought and decide to cut her losses before things get any more intense.
I wouldn’t blame her for that. When I think about her coming home to find me laid out on the floor, I cringe. I have no memory of that entire day. I haven’t told anyone that, lest they think I’m nuts, but my brain is a total blank. I went through my phone to see what I was doing that day, read texts from customers and employees and was able to unpack most of what went on, but I don’t remember any of it.
Doctors, family and friends have asked if I had any symptoms.
I didn’t have a single ache or pain, no shortness of breath or any indication that I was primed for a massive heart attack, except maybe being more fatigued than usual. I’d chalked that up to the hectic schedule I keep while running my own business. The lack of a real warning is seriously unsettling. I never got the chance to ask my dad if he had signs that his number was coming due, because he died almost instantly. None of us recalled him saying anything about not feeling well or any changes in his overall demeanor before that day.
It’s scary as shit to know that something like this can strike like lightning and end the whole ballgame in the early innings.
Why in the world would someone like Lexi want to risk that when she’s already been through so much?
She might want to, but when she has time to consider it, she’d be wise to bail out before it’s too late.
That thought depresses me as much as anything has in longer than I can remember. Even nearly dying wasn’t as much of a bummer as surviving would be if my future doesn’t include her.
I sound overly dramatic, even to myself, but in the years since I fell for her in high school, I’ve dated a lot of women. I had more first dates than any guy I know. Cora tells me I’m too picky, that I don’t give people a chance, and she’s right on both counts. I can tell in the first five minutes of a date whether I’m going to want to get to know the person.
Is that fair? Absolutely not, but I can’t change how I’m wired. If I could, I’d do something about my cardiac wiring first and foremost.
What my sister will never know is that every one of those first dates was measured against a girl I knew years ago, and they were all found to be lacking in comparison. She’s my one. She always has been, and how funny is it that she achieved that status before we ever even had a meaningful conversation?
Some things can’t be explained. They just are . She’s that for me. The night I saw her sitting alone at the bar of a local restaurant will go down in my personal history as one of the best nights of my life. As I took the seat next to her, I told myself to breathe and relax and not be weird.
Easier said than done when the crush of all crushes is sitting next to you for the first time ever.
She did a double take when she recognized me, which was a relief. I didn’t have to say, Hey, I’m Tom Hammett, and I remember you from high school. Thank God for small mercies.
“Lexi, right?”
“Uh-huh, and you’re Tom.”
“I am.”
“You come here often?” she asked with a small smile.
“First time in years.”
“Same.”
The coincidence of us being there for the first time in years—at the same time—is something I’ve thought a lot about since that night. Was it the universe finally getting involved to give me something I’d wanted for a long time?
The bartender came over to ask for my order. “I’ll have a Sam Summer and another for the lady.”
She put her hand over the top of her glass. “Thank you, but I’m one and done. I have to drive.”
“I owe you one, then.”
The bartender returned with my beer. I held it up to her.
She touched her glass of wine to my beer bottle. “Cheers.”
“Cheers. So, what’ve you been up to since high school?” I knew she went to college at UVA in Charlottesville and got married shortly after, but it’s been a while since I heard anything about her. I’m not on social media, so I’m clueless about people I don’t see frequently. After I heard she got married, I pushed my crush into a closet in my mind and closed the door.
“College, marriage, work and now widowhood.”
“Oh damn, Lexi. I’m so sorry. I hadn’t heard your husband passed.”
“Yeah, it was about three years ago now. He had ALS. Four years of hell.”
The words were like a punch to my gut. “I have a friend from college whose mother has that. I’m very sorry. It’s a cruel disease.”
“It truly is.”
I had no earthly idea what to say next. “Are you… I mean… You’re doing okay?”
She shrugged. “Good days. Bad days. Today was the latter, so I took myself out for a drink after the gym to get a change of scenery. A couple of years after my husband got sick, we moved into my parents’ basement because we needed their help so badly. I still live there since neither of us thought life insurance was a priority in our twenties, so… I’m kinda stuck.”
I’d had the idea right then and there.
“It’s okay, though. My parents have been amazing. They helped us with everything, and I never would’ve survived it without them—and his family, too, of course.”
“I’m glad you were well supported.”
“Enough of all that. What’ve you been up to? Did you get married?”
“Nope. Never even came close.” Because I was still thinking about a girl I’d never even talked to back in the day, who looked positively adorable in her marching band uniform. “I own a construction company. We build houses and do some commercial stuff all over NOVA.” That’s the local abbreviation for Northern Virginia.
“Wait. Hammett Homes. That’s you?”
“Yep.”
“Wow. Impressive.”
That made me laugh. “If you say so.”
“I see your signs everywhere. I say so.”
“It’s mostly a gigantic pain in my ass, but hey, it’s a living.”
“How is it a pain?”
“How much time do you have?”
“I’ve got nowhere to be.”
“In that case… It’s always something going sideways. Materials on backorder, customers in a red-hot rush, employees who don’t show up for work or flunk a drug test, permitting offices that take forever, building inspectors who nitpick, people who don’t pay their bills… To start with.”
“Yikes. Sounds like fun.”
“The fun never ends.”
“The houses you build are gorgeous. Two of my friends from college who married each other saved for five years to buy in one of your neighborhoods.”
“Who was it?”
When she told me their names, I smiled, because they were among my favorite customers. “They’re a great couple. I loved working with them.”
“They loved working with you, too. They told me about it long after the house was done. It never occurred to me to ask what their contractor’s first name was.”
What would it have mattered? She was married then.
Hearing she was no longer married had me spun up in a way I didn’t often get. I wanted to ask her to dinner. I wanted to ask her to marry me. Haha, just kidding. Sort of.
“So, what’s your plan for this next part of your journey?”
She gave me an odd look.
“Is it okay to ask that?”
“Of course, it’s just that most people don’t ask me things like that. They ask if I miss Jim, or if I’m angry with him for getting sick and dying, or if I’m dating, or if I wish we’d had kids, or a lot of other things that are none of their business.”
“I can’t believe anyone would ask you those things.”
“They do. They love to say, ‘Thank goodness you didn’t have kids.’”
“Stop it.”
“True story.”
“Oh my God. What the hell is wrong with people?”
“Is that a rhetorical question? I’m especially thankful for my Wild Widows, who keep me from losing it.”
“Wild Widows?”
“A group of young widows focused on figuring out what we plan to do with our one wild and precious life, per Mary Oliver.”
“So it’s like a support group?”
She nods. “That’s become a family.”
“I love that. Not the reason for it, but that you have each other.”
“They’ve saved my life—and my sanity. Anything that’s happening to me has also happened to one of them. It makes you feel less alone with the grief. Young widowhood is very different from the usual white-haired-widow stereotype. We often have most of our lives ahead of us rather than behind us, so it’s a unique experience that way.”
I was ashamed to admit I’d never once considered how young widowhood would be much different from the older version.
“But to answer your question about what’s next in my journey, I’m still trying to figure that out. It took forever to find a job after being out of the workforce for years. If you can call basic data entry for twenty bucks an hour a job, but it’s helping me to pay down some of the massive debt we incurred during Jim’s illness.” She glanced at me. “Do you have life insurance?”
“I do.”
“Good. I tell everyone to get it, no matter how young and bulletproof they think they are.”
“It’s excellent advice.”
“It would’ve made all the difference for me, especially after his illness all but bankrupted us. I’ll be paying off medical debt for the rest of my life.”
“Our system is so messed up. In what world should an illness like what Jim had financially ruin his family?”
“The world we live in, unfortunately.”
“Ready to eat?” Lexi’s voice pulls me out of my memories from the night we reconnected. Or I should say connected , since we’d never spoken to each other before that night despite our mutual awareness of each other in high school.
I open my eyes and look up at her. “I’m ready.”
“Did I wake you?” she asks as she puts a tray on my lap that has a bowl of salad and a glass of ice water.
My days of steak and well-done burgers on the grill are over. “No, I wasn’t sleeping. I was thinking about the night we first met up.”
She sits across from me on the sofa to eat her salad. “What about it?”
“Just how great it was to see you.”
“That night changed my life in so many ways. You changed my life in so many ways.”
“Likewise.”
She gives me a puzzled look. “How did I change yours?”
“You have no idea how nice it is to have your company around here, do you?”
“Um, well… I guess I hadn’t really considered that.”
“I thought I liked living alone until you moved in.”
“Is that right?”
“Yep. I never wanted a roommate until you said you needed to get out of your parents’ basement, and then suddenly, having a roommate was the best idea I’d ever had.”
A smile blooms slowly, lighting up her entire face. “You’re pouring on the charm tonight, Mr. Hammett.”
“No time to waste.” The stricken expression on her face has me immediately regretting that I reminded her of my near miss. “Hey, I’m fine, and I’m going to be fine. I promise.”
As her brows furrow, she pokes at the salad with her fork.
“Lex.”
When her gaze shifts my way, I see the torment she’s trying so hard to keep hidden from me.
“I’ll follow every order from every doctor to the letter. I’ll do whatever it takes to stick around for many, many years so I can spend as much time with you as humanly possible.”