Tangled Up In You (Meant To Be #4)
Chapter One Ren
Fragile morning sun sent its thin, golden fingertips dancing across a fresh blanket of snow. The view was spectacular; even the barest hint of light turned the ice into diamonds, transformed each blade of grass into a menacing shard of emerald. It was the kind of view to be taken in with a long inhale and sweeping gaze.
Maybe another day.
Ren Gylden’s boot made a satisfying crunch as it smashed through the hard, lacy surface of last night’s snowfall. Her sharp whistle cut through the still air, drawing her animals right up against the fence.
With a full bucket in each hand, she whistled again and pressed her back against the gate, pushing up on her toes to unlatch the lever with her butt. She was met with a chorus of snorts and clucks as she opened the gate and entered the enclosure.
“Today’s the big day.” Unable to meet their eyes, she kicked the gate closed, crossed the barnyard, and set her buckets down. She dumped one slop bucket into the trough, saying, “I know you’re all happy for me, but maybe you’re worried, too.”
Her favorite pig, Frank, nudged her leg with his muddy nose, and she stepped out of his way, letting him have a go at breakfast.
“Yes, this is a big change,” she continued, “but don’t worry. I’ve told Steve everything he needs to do to take over the morning chores during the week.”
Dumping the rest of the slop at the low end of the trough where the smaller piglets could reach it, she said to them, “It’ll be the first time in your lives that someone else is feeding you. I wonder if any of you will notice.”
Sitting down on one overturned bucket and leaning back against the chicken coop, she patted her lap for the tomcat, Pascal. As if his legs were spring-loaded, he hopped up, landing gracefully. “What do you think of all this, huh?” she asked, scratching him between his ears. “Are you going to miss me? I wish I could be in two places at once. Here and there. I’d love to hide behind the oak tree and watch how you all react tomorrow morning.”
Pascal flexed his right paw, pressing his claws into the thigh of Ren’s thick denim overalls.
“You don’t think it’ll be any different? Yeah, me either.” She exhaled, long and slow, her breath condensing into a white puff. “Not for you, at least.”
The cat purred.
“For me…I don’t think it’ll ever be the same again.” She leaned her head back, closing her eyes and focusing on this exact moment—the sharp dawn air, the snuffling of the pigs rooting in their breakfast, the hypnotic pecking of the chickens at the dried corn and barley—rather than the one she’d be facing this time tomorrow. Tomorrow was a yawning black of unknown. For as many books as she’d read in her lifetime, Ren had never found one that taught a woman like her—raised away from society and off the grid for most of her twenty-two years—how to live in the real world.
Still, she was so ready for the change, she could practically taste it.
Another whistle cut through the air, her father calling her back to the cabin. When she opened her eyes, the sun had fully tipped its yellow cap over the crown of the mountain. It was her cue.
Pascal, sensing the shift in her energy before she even moved, hopped off her lap. “I’ll be back every weekend,” she promised to his retreating form as he slunk away from the pigpen and disappeared under some brush near the barn. “Go make me some kittens.”
With a grin, Ren gathered her buckets and gave Frank one last pat on the head before heading back to the cabin to load up the truck.
But for the very first time in her life, she didn’t feel like leaving the homestead.
Hesitation was the last thing she’d expected to feel today. She’d made a countdown calendar last month and pinned it to her wall. She’d even started packing up her hand-carved trunk a week ago—and she barely had anything to put in there to begin with. In the days leading up to the move, she’d driven her parents to exasperation with the singing and the dancing and the What ifs. There had been something about this brand of her excitement that couldn’t be muted.
Until now, she supposed.
All that was left was to lift her new trunk into the bed of the old truck and climb in, right into the middle, where she’d be sandwiched between Gloria and Steve all the way to Spokane. But Ren couldn’t seem to make her legs move.
It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t like she’d never left the homestead before. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, the family would go to the farmers markets over in Troy and sell their honey, jams, and every kind of seasonal fruit and vegetable imaginable. Every Monday, Ren would take the truck by herself up to the library in Deary, where Linda would hand over the new stack of used books that had come in. And once a quarter, the three Gyldens would drive to Moscow for fuel, feed, and any other business they’d need to get done.
But this time, getting in the truck felt different. It was a permanent rip down the page. Ren had never spent a single night away from the land since they’d moved here when she was three, and now she’d be living five days a week in a college dormitory with a stranger, home only on weekends. Every day she’d be sitting in a room full of people—different rooms, full of different people—who had spent their whole lives in situations that were completely foreign to her. This—going to college—had been Ren’s dream ever since she was little, but now that she was standing there facing it, anxiety gnawed at her gut like a termite on a fence post.
Would her parents truly be okay without her? Gloria had never been good at getting the pilot light back up when it went out overnight, and Steve couldn’t easily bend to reach it anymore. It was late January, and as cold as it would get all year; the firewood was budgeted for heat, not cooking. What if the stove went out and they didn’t have any way to light it until Ren came home? Would they go down to the Hill Valley Five and Dime to use the phone? Would they even know what number to call?
And the pilot light was only one small thing. When there was work to be done—and there was, always—it was all hands on deck. The garden and fields didn’t check the calendar; they wouldn’t care if it was finals week. The old milk cow, Callie, wouldn’t care if Ren had a paper due. And what if Steve poured both slop buckets into the highest part of the trough, where the piglets couldn’t reach? What if he forgot that Gloria’s old chestnut mare, Poppy, was allergic to alfalfa and accidentally threw a few cubes into her feed?
For as long as she could remember Ren had wanted to attend school, but it had only been recently—when the desire for deeper knowledge had grown into a living, pulsating shadow in her chest—that she’d finally wondered what on earth was stopping her. Her parents’ unwillingness to enroll her in school growing up had mostly been rooted in their philosophy about living free of society’s influence and a general mistrust of the ways of the modern world, but they’d taught her well, hadn’t they? Ren knew what mattered: honesty, humility, hard work, and self-sufficiency. And she was an adult now; in theory, she could make her own choices. But Ren knew she was too tightly woven into the life of the homestead to unthinkingly do whatever she wanted.
It was only as she was standing there beside the truck, ready to pack up, that Ren felt the more practical weight of her parents’ longtime hesitation: They needed her. On a homestead of this size, six hands were always better than four, especially when two of those hands—Ren’s—were younger and could do over half the work. Leaving might be the most selfish thing she’d ever done.
Her parents had known she was applying to university in the same way they’d known when she was building a wind-power system from old scraps from Mr. Mooney: She’d disappeared down the road for a few hours every day, and then the new power source appeared. But at least when she connected the wind-power to the grid, Steve and Gloria had been happy to have electricity all day, every day. When the acceptance letter from Corona College landed in their PO Box, Steve and Gloria stared at it on the dining room table like Ren had dumped the slop bucket there by mistake.
“There’s nothing they can teach you out there that you can’t learn right here,” Steve had said.
Gloria had nodded. “There’s influences out there that’ll poison your thinking.”
“Is this about you wanting more books?” Ren’s father had asked. “We’ll take you to the big library over in Moscow.”
The truth was that none of them had expected her to be accepted—at the age of twenty-two, Ren had never stepped foot in an actual classroom—so she hadn’t properly prepared her argument by the time the thick white envelope landed.
It sat unopened on the small dining table for a day and a half, an uninvited guest in their home. Ren finally made the only argument she had, the one she knew would appeal to their biggest fear: “We need to better prepare for this cycle of drought and flood. Our crop yields are smaller every year, and if I’m going to live here the rest of my life, I need to make sure this land can support me once you’re gone. I need to see what the world outside has learned so I can bring it home.”
Gloria and Steve had exchanged looks.
Steve had asked, “Who’s gonna pay for it?”
“They offered me full tuition and board.”
Ren’s parents sat with it overnight, then, in the morning, laid out the ground rules.
She would live in the dorms Monday through Friday. Every weekend she’d be home, where she’d still be expected to complete her weekly chores. She was not to tell people the location of the homestead or specifics about their way of life, and if she ever felt the modern influences pressing in on her, she’d tell her parents immediately. She was to avoid technology as much as possible and outside of classwork was forbidden from searching the internet. If they sensed any change in her disposition, they’d withdraw their support, and she could either come home or stay away forever.
But when it came down to it, there was no knock-down-drag-out fight, because the truth didn’t need to be said aloud: Her parents couldn’t legally keep her from leaving even if they wanted to.
And now she was right on the cusp of doing just that.
“Too late to be scared now, Rennie,” Gloria said with her trademark blend of exasperation and weariness. It was what Ren had always admired most about her mother; she didn’t waste time sugarcoating anything.
“If you’re going off to school,” Steve said, coming up to unlatch the gate of the pickup, “you’re gonna have to carry your own weight.” It was what Ren had always admired most about her father; he made sure she’d never had to rely on anyone else.
“I’m going to miss you both,” Ren told them earnestly. “I’ll write letters every day so you have something to find in the post office when you go to town on Wednesdays.”
With a quick, deep inhale, she bent at the knees and hefted the heavy wooden trunk into the bed of the pickup. Ren closed the tailgate and latched it shut with the long metal pin before turning to look back at the only place she’d ever called home. The roof of their little cabin was covered in a soft blanket of snow from the previous night, but in the warmer months a fifty-year-old oak tree gave them shade, as well as the best branches to climb. Behind the cabin, the fields stretched on as far as the eye could see. Ren said a silent and temporary goodbye to the animals huddled together there, braving the wind to soak up weak tendrils of the late-January sun.
Gloria broke through her reverie: “What are the rules?”
Ren blinked back to focus on where her mother stood holding the passenger door open. “I can leave the dorms for meals, class, or the library,” she said, and adrenaline pricked beneath her skin just thinking about it.
“No boys, no booze,” Gloria said. “No restaurants.”
“No internet, no makeup,” Steve added from behind the wheel, and Ren coughed out a laugh as she slid to the middle of the bench seat.
“Makeup! Me?”
“You just wait,” Gloria said. She hauled the heavy truck door closed behind her. “College coeds will try to get you to do all kinds of frivolous things. You want to learn, so go learn. Leave the nonsense to everyone else.”
“I have a solid foundation about what matters,” Ren recited confidently. “Boys and booze and makeup don’t.”
“That’s right.” Steve turned the key, starting the gruff, rumbling engine.
Ren knew better than to let any hesitation about this adventure leak free, but with the sound of the truck’s engine turning over, nervous excitement bubbled up in her chest, dislodging the tiny worry floating right at the top: “Do you think it’ll be okay that I’m starting late?” The beat of silence that followed made her lungs immediately constrict with regret. “I only mean—”
“What’s this ‘starting late’?” Steve asked sharply. Starting late was the worry Ren tried to keep in this whole time—well, one of a thousand about what this experience might really be like—that starting college four years later than everyone else and coming in halfway through the school year because of the fall harvest was going to make her stand out when all she wanted was to blend in.
“That’s some cyborg programming hogwash right there,” he continued, shifting the truck into gear with a clunking thud. “Who says you have to start school at a certain time? Who says you need school at all?”
“You read every damn book in the libraries all across Latah County,” Gloria murmured. “You probably know more than those brainwashed teachers anyway.”
“I know that’s right.” Steve eased the truck down the long driveway. “And if I hear one speck outta you about five-year plans or summer enrollment or study abroad, I’m yanking you outta that place so fast your head’ll spin. This is gonna be hard on your mother and me, what with you not here pulling your weight. We’re already moving everything around this season so you can take care of your chores when you’re home on weekends.”
Ren nodded, feeling immediately chastened. “Yes, sir. I’m very grateful, I hope you know that.”
“Sometimes I wonder.”
“Every Friday,” Gloria said with finality. “Five o’clock sharp, we’ll be there to bring you home.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Ren looked across her lap to the passenger side-view mirror, to where the last nineteen years of her memories receded behind them with the homestead until they were just tiny specks of brown broken up by naked trees. “I’m sure I’ll already be outside waiting.”