Chapter Ten #2
It had been six full weeks now since their first pizza night here.
They’d spent the first few meetings dancing around each other a little bit and referencing their childhoods a whole lot more—though always in a way that kept it light.
Easy. None of the darkness that Tennessee was sure they could all roll out if they wanted.
And now it was like they were building memories rather than comparing notes on old ones. Tonight Helena was telling stories about customers at her coffee cart.
“Nothing beats the extremely grumpy ranchers,” she said. “I’m supposed to know, from a single glare, the exact and precise order, even if there’s been no verbal confirmation. All because the man raises horses.”
“I think you mean Colton Dean,” Tennessee said, and wondered if everyone at the table noticed the way Helena sat up just a little bit straighter.
Like that name landed on her with some force.
Interesting. “He’s pretty ill-tempered. Always has been.
His grandfather spends a lot of mornings in the diner and that’s a major topic of conversation. ”
“Imagine,” Cat said with a delighted sort of laugh, “being grumpy enough that Tennessee noted this.”
Then they all sat around, having a grand old time casting aspersions upon his character in what was certainly a family bonding moment, so Tennessee let them have it.
He sat back in his chair and thought about Matilda.
Again. As usual. But specifically about how terrified she’d looked when she’d told him she loved him, and how fast she’d run out the door.
He thought about the crushing weight of the responsibility he’d always felt for his family, and how he’d let that guide everything. How it had made him monastic. How it had given him control issues. How it had made him prize a clean house over puppies, for God’s sake.
How maybe, somewhere along the way, he’d let what he considered his duties become his personality.
So that even now, though she’d told him she loved him and he’d already known this was forever from the moment she’d kissed him, Matilda doubted him.
That didn’t sit well with him at all.
The pizzas came. They laughed a whole lot, told more stories, and Tennessee was pretty sure that he could see them getting closer in real time.
Exactly what their mothers had hoped. It didn’t just feel right, it felt like this was supposed to happen.
What their father had split, they were damn sure going to bring together.
When they finished eating, most of the group decided to stay. Only Cat said she needed to go home, and so Tennessee walked her out, claiming his usual early morning as an excuse.
Out on the street, Cat went to the truck Wilder insisted she drive through the winter and pulled out a box from the front seat.
“Will you give this to Mom?” she asked Tennessee. “If I take it up to the house myself I’ll end up hanging out for much too long, and I have to study tonight.”
Tennessee could not exactly say that he had to chase Matilda down without getting into a long conversation about how and why, could he? So all he did was nod.
But Cat didn’t get into the driver’s seat. She stood by the side of the truck and studied him instead, seemingly impervious to the kick of cold wind rushing down from the mountains.
“Matilda Stark?” she asked again, quietly.
Tennessee nodded toward the truck door. “You just said you have to go home and study.”
“The thing is, Tennessee,” Cat said, with a very small smile that suggested she knew more than he wanted anyone to know right now, “you seem to forget that I am the person who knows all about the seemingly inappropriate love interest who actually turns out to be the love of your life. In case you forgot.”
“Good night, Cat,” Tennessee muttered, and turned around to walk across the road toward his house.
“I’ll take that as confirmation,” Cat called after him, loud enough that it followed him as he walked. “Because it wasn’t the usual death scowl.”
Tennessee did what both of his siblings would have done, if the positions had been reversed. He did not turn around. He simply lifted his middle finger into the air in her direction, and kept right on walking.
And found himself grinning a little bit at her delighted laughter as he went.
Rather than hike halfway up the hill when there was still snowpack on the ground, that icy crust on top, and a cold night settling in, he climbed into his truck and drove up instead.
He pulled up in front of the old house that he kept shoveled much better than his own driveway, grabbed the box, and then, as always, let the grip of history pull at him as he walked.
It was a clear night. The old Victorian was lit up like a perfect little music box of a house, looking pretty and gracious in the dark. Higher up, the old lighthouse that Dallas had been working on for so long was casting its beams of light over the valley and rolling across the little town below.
Everyone had complained when Dallas got the light operational again. Many of them had complained to Tennessee. And now, when it was off of an evening because it needed maintenance, everyone complained about that, too.
He supposed that was the part of the history here that he forgot. Everything was done the way it always had been done, until someone came along and made it different. And then, eventually, folks got used to it. And then that was the only way that it should be done, as far as they were concerned.
Maybe tradition was nothing more than the stories people told, the way they told them, and who they told them to.
And maybe, after all this time, he needed to accept that when it came to the story he told himself about his family, his burdens, and the way he needed to live his life, he was an unreliable narrator.
Because the person he’d been so sure he was would never have gotten involved with Matilda Stark in the first place.
He could fool himself all he wanted and claim it was her showing up with the puppy that had done it.
But that didn’t explain that cascade of memories it turned out he’d been hiding away inside of all these years.
Like he’d gone out into a winter’s night when he was too young to know better, and had been frozen in place ever since—until Matilda had come along and melted him.
The tread of his boots sounded loud on the porch, but he thought that was a good thing.
It gave his mother some warning that he was approaching.
This might have been his childhood home, but he hadn’t lived here since high school.
He always made sure that he acted more like a guest than a resident.
He knocked, waited, and then let himself in. The established protocol.
And he wasn’t surprised to find Jenny in the kitchen, sitting at the table with the local paper and a steaming mug of the herbal tea she liked to drink in the evenings.
“Cat wanted me to bring you this box,” he told her. “I don’t know what’s in it.”
“How lucky that I do,” his mother replied, and smiled. “She picked up a package for me from the post office down in Marietta. Can I get you some tea?”
Tennessee did not want any tea. In point of fact, he did not see the purpose of tea.
It either tasted like strangely aromatic water, though heated, or like dead leaves.
Besides, there was that driving anxiety inside of him that was shaped like Matilda, and it was harder to ignore in the quiet of the house he’d grown up in.
And he didn’t understand why he kept getting caught up in these family things when all he wanted to do was go to her.
But he also didn’t say no to his mother.
So he went over to the kettle on the stove and prepared himself some steaming bilge water so he could sit down at the table and dutifully, resentfully, choke it down.
Hopefully with something like a smile on his face, because she didn’t like it when she only saw his stern face.
As she might have mentioned a few million times.
His mother was looking at him with a kind of amused expression when he finally settled in across from her, the tea mug between his hands. And something on his face, anyway. He could make no promises about what.
“Alternatively,” Jenny said after a moment, “you could just say no. That you don’t like tea and that you’d rather not sit here and drink it.”
Tennessee held her gaze. “For all you know I love tea. Maybe I’ve become a tea guy. Maybe I have a kitchen filled with nothing but tea these days.”
Jenny sipped at hers. “Do you?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“So while we’re on the topic of things you like,” Jenny said, her smile very real and not at all like the grimace he was afraid he was wearing, “I hope you’re not going to tell me the story that I’ve been hearing around town.
You know the one. That you’ve suddenly become passionately interested in animal rescue.
Because I know that you haven’t. I was there when you buried Angus. ”
Another direct hit.
“Is it so hard to believe that I care about animals?” Tennessee asked mildly. Or at least he tried to sound mild, anyway. “Why does everybody act like I’m some serial killer that would rather butcher them in my backyard?”
“I don’t think anyone has suggested that,” his mother replied in that calm voice of hers that he remembered from childhood.
Usually in moments of grave injustice, when he had been outraged and she had been entirely unflappable. It only occurred to him now that maybe he’d gotten it from her—which was probably why he couldn’t seem to use it when he was with her.