Chapter 25
Charity
Leather & Lace -Stevie Nicks & Don Henley
With some time to spare before I needed to be at Liam’s house, I decided to check on my folks. Dad had sounded great on the phone earlier, telling me about Faith’s call, but I still worried that taking care of Mom took its toll on him.
Dad answered the door before I’d even knocked twice. “Sugar! What a lovely surprise.”
“Hey, Dad.” I stepped inside and kissed his cheek, breathing in the spicy cologne he’d worn for years. “I know we spoke earlier, but I just wanted to come around and see how you were.”
“Oh, we’re great. Your mom is in the living room doing her crossword puzzle.”
Walking down the narrow hallway, I instantly felt calmed by the hint of Mom’s lavender candle in the air. As I walked in, she looked up, her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose.
“Charity, please help me. A seven letter word for stubborn. Starts with H.”
“I told you, Marian,” Dad said, following me in and flopping down on his ancient chair that molded to him. “Hardened.”
“And I told you, Herb, there’s no ‘G’ as the last letter.”
I smiled, knowing that they could argue like this for hours about crossword puzzles.
“Headstrong,” I suggested, raising an eyebrow in Dad’s direction.
Mom squealed. “My clever girl.” She wrote the word in, slowly and purposefully, the stroke having taken a lot of the movement from her right hand. She was making progress, though, that was the main thing.
“Everything okay, Sugar?” Dad’s voice cut through my thoughts. “You look tired.”
“Gee, thanks, Dad,” I said with a laugh. “But you’re right. I am. And I still have more work to do.”
“You work too hard,” Mom added, still looking at the puzzle.
“Well, it’s actually dinner with Liam Brown, but we’re going to be talking about the cooperative dinner.”
“He’s still in then?” Dad asked, rubbing his hands up and down the well-worn arms of the chair.
“Yes, he’s still in, but has some stipulations.” I held back a heavy sigh, not wanting to have to explain anything else about Liam and whatever was happening between us. “We just thought it would be easier to talk over dinner.”
“He’s very handsome,” Mom added with a knowing smile. “We saw him at the hardware store around Christmas time. Very striking green eyes. They’re what we called ‘come to bed eyes’, when we were young.”
“Really, Mom,” I protested, heat creeping up my neck. “And why were you in the hardware store?”
“I needed a new rake,” Dad said. “And your mom loves to look around the tool section.”
I didn’t have a clue why my mom would like to look around tools. I also didn’t need to know.
“Anyway,” Dad added. “It’s good he’s still cooperating. Now, let me get you something to drink.” He clapped his hands. “I do believe it’s time for wine.”
“No, not for me, Dad. I need to drive to Liam’s.”
“Ooh it’s so exciting.” Mom giggled. “Charity and Liam Brown, imagine how beautiful their babies will be.”
“Mom!”
I may have sounded offended, but I wasn’t.
It felt good to be in my parent’s house and not be discussing Faith.
For the first time in years, I wasn’t sitting there feeling like Atlas carrying the weight of the world.
And so, with the warm glow of parental teasing about my love life, I spent an hour in their company and loved every second.
Glancing at the strawberry cheesecake on the passenger seat next to me, I had to wonder if I was doing the right thing, if tonight was even salvageable. Liam had been quite adamant about Dexter Whitfield being uninvited to the cooperative dinner yet wouldn’t tell me why.
That just made me more determined that I wouldn’t do as he said.
I’d made an effort with dessert, despite having it in the back of my mind that I wasn’t going to have dinner with him.
The pull of Liam was too strong, though.
I missed him, like we’d spent every minute of every day of the past year together, not just a couple of stressful days looking for my sister.
Maybe I had some kind of complex. Maybe I was only attracted to him because he’d helped me and Faith so much. Maybe tonight when we argued about Whitfield, which we would, I’d realize that he wasn’t a kind, generous man who was just trying to work through a trunk full of demons.
Looking through the windshield at the cloudless, quiet sky, it was clear to see it was full of snow, bursting at the seams ready to fall.
The peace of it was beautiful. Quiet roads with everyone staying home just in case.
There were no kids around, not even any teenagers hanging around the Daffodil Diner or the Ice Station for ice cream.
It felt like the quiet before a tremendously loud storm, probably one that was going to start at Liam’s farmhouse.
When I pulled up outside his house, the door immediately opened, and Liam stepped outside.
He was wearing jeans and a plain white t-shirt, his biceps bulging as he crossed his arms over his broad chest and ambled down the pathway to the grass verge that sloped down to the road.
It wasn’t a typical farm. Isolated in thousands of acres, it was more a smallholding with a couple of houses across the wide road, and with another small farm less than a quarter of a mile up the road.
It had been where the Jenkins family had lived once upon a time but was now owned by Donny and Evangaline Gray who had turned it into a sunflower farm.
Liam knocked on my window with a knuckle and indicated for me to wind it down.
“Hey.” My voice was tight, as I forced the word past my teeth.
He leaned in through the window, and I caught the scent of lemon and fresh linen. “Want to park up behind my truck in the driveway. The snowplow might come down here later.”
I nodded but said, “Maybe I should go before it starts.”
He looked up at the sky and shrugged. “It won’t snow tonight. Early hours maybe.”
“How do you know?”
“My dad grew fruit trees, and we got pretty good at reading the weather. You won’t get stranded here, don’t worry.”
I chose to ignore the flatness of his tone and put my car into drive, and without commenting, I pulled away and onto the driveway behind his black truck, which was extremely dirty and splattered in construction site mud and dust.
“You could do with visiting a car wash,” I said brightly as I got out of my pristine red Honda.
“Pointless,” was his short answer as he turned to head back inside. While I shivered against the drop in temperature, I marveled at how he didn’t even seem to have a single goosebump on his arm. “I’m all set up in the kitchen.”
I followed him in, and this visit took some time to look around.
Noticing a neat line of boots and sneakers inside the door, I slipped my high-heeled pumps off and placed them on the end.
Next to it, a white-washed wood console table stood against a dark green wall, and on it sat a green glass bowl and matching vase.
A set of keys sat inside the bowl, so I dropped mine in there.
Liam clearly liked to be neat and tidy. A couple of family photos were on a shelf above it, his mom and dad center in both.
His mom was a petite, pretty woman with a shock of chin-length auburn hair.
His dad was tall and broad, his hair blond in one photograph, but in the second one, it showed more silver, and he was leaning on a walking stick, while his three children all gave the peace sign behind them.
I couldn’t help notice that there was little humor in Liam’s eyes, while Tally and Cole were smiling widely as they goofed around.
The other photograph was more formal. Liam and his siblings were much younger.
I wondered if it had been taken around the time that Ezra passed because there was very little joy on any of their faces, but Liam, his eyes were dead as he stood a little away from his family.
I rubbed my breastbone, not able to imagine what each of them, but particularly Liam, had gone through. Letting my fingers drop from the gold frame, I turned to go down the short hallway to where I could hear the soft clatter of pans.
The kitchen was light and airy, white cabinets and walls in a lighter green paint than the hall with a large square island in the middle.
One side of it had three black and bronze bar stools pushed against it, while the other side housed a sink and a hob that already had a pan on it that Liam was spooning ground beef into.
“We still having lasagna?” I asked brightly. “Shall I make the sauce?”
“Yep, sure. Everything is in the refrigerator.”
Taking a breath, I paused, wondering whether to bring up the subject of Dexter Whitfield.
The stiffness across his shoulders was a clear indication that he was still annoyed by it.
When he dropped a spoonful of beef onto the hob and cursed, I decided against it.
Instead, I moved to the refrigerator and took out everything that I needed.
We worked alongside each other for ten minutes in complete silence, the tension building with each second that passed. No words, just both of us working industriously to create the lasagna for dinner. As Liam pulled out a dish to put it in, I remembered my cheesecake in my car.
“I’ll just pop back to my car to get the dessert.”
“You don’t need to bother on my account. Not a big dessert eater.”
I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Well, I’ll get it anyway. If you don’t eat it then maybe Cole will. Or—” I said, slapping on a thin smile “—you could just throw it in the trash.”
“As if I’d do that.” He turned to me, his legs apart, his hand on his hips. “Why would you think I’d be that disrespectful?”
“Well, I don’t know, Liam. Maybe the fact that you’re clearly angry and don’t want to speak to me.”