Chapter 24
While I’m caught off guard by Adelaide’s thinly veiled intervention, Caleb seems ready to seize the opportunity. From under the table, he texts me.
To be clear, I am free all day on Saturday.
I don’t respond. Admittedly, I’m in a weird place after Adelaide caught us red-handed, and Mom inadvertently asked the question she should have asked two decades ago, spilling our baggage all over the booth at Nowhere Saloon.
When Mom and I get home, I help her get ready for bed as if nothing happened.
We offer niceties, but neither of us confronts the issue.
I pace for an hour as I debate the merits of spending the day with Caleb on Saturday. Adelaide’s warning rings too true to ignore. I have no experience with cavalier.
I also have little experience with genuine passion, or what it might do to my stability.
I didn’t come here to make my life more complicated. I came here to be a responsible daughter and untangle the past’s hold on me. I came here, essentially, to move on from Grand Trees and find a path forward for Mom and me. Frankly, I’m doing a horrible job of both.
I text Cassie just before midnight.
Me: Are you up?
Cassie: Yep. Went to bed at 7, woke up an hour ago feeling like a boxer had punched me in the calf. It was a charley horse. I swear, society gatekeeps 90% of pregnancy symptoms from women. If we knew, none of us would do it, and humanity would die off.
Me: Sorry, Cass. How are you feeling otherwise?
Cassie: Hungry. Tired. Nauseated. Emotional. Justin went out to get me a milkshake, and I cried because he bought me chocolate chip instead of vanilla.
Me: Chocolate chip is your favorite.
Cassie: Apparently, it is not the baby’s.
Me: Ah.
Cassie: How’s your mom?
Me: Getting stronger.
I console myself that the answer is at least somewhat true.
Cassie: How’s your grumpy arborist?
My fingers hover over the screen. But what is the point of this SOS call if I don’t ask for the help I desperately need?
Me: Maybe not as grumpy as I thought.
Cassie: Explain.
I struggle to respond, typing out a few lines before erasing them and starting again. Within two minutes of my indecision, my phone rings. And shoot, my ringer volume is turned all the way up. I answer quickly, desperate not to wake Mom.
“Explain,” she hisses.
I sigh and pick up the pace of my steps across the loft. The night is jet black behind the wall of windows. It doesn’t have any answers for me either. “I kinda slept with him,” I spit out.
I have to pull the phone away from my ear when she screams. I hear a scuffle in the background—Justin’s groan and Cassie’s frantic apology.
“Cassie, did you wake your poor husband?” I giggle.
“Poor husband, my ass,” she whisper-hisses.
“He knocked me up and has the audacity to sleep like a baby. What about poor Cassie? I’m constipated, up all night, peeing every few minutes, with constant leg cramps and passing gas like a trucker.
” A door clicks behind her and she shifts to full volume.
“Wait. What do you mean kinda slept with him?”
“We had a quickie in his truck.” I don’t pull the phone away in time, and my ear rings from her squeal.
“Yes! I’m so proud of you.” She cackles. “When? How did this happen? Please tell me he’s as good with those big hands as he looks.”
I sink down on the floor beside the bed, cradling my head in my hands. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“But does he? Because he looks like he might be an excellent hands-on teacher, if you know what I mean.”
I laugh, but my heart’s not in it. “Cassandra,” I scold.
“He’s Sonny’s nephew and a single dad to an observant teen.
We’re sneaking around, trying to hide this thing from the entire town.
Because it can’t last, and we don’t want anyone shaming or encouraging us.
And I don’t know.” I sigh. “I think I like him too much to get involved in something destined to end.”
“Edie,” she cajoles. “If you’re only willing to start something without the power to shake you, you’ll never have your world rocked. And you never know how things will end.”
“Jeff had his baby.”
She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, but she doesn’t scold me for the change of subject.
“That poor kid. Destined for daddy issues and a six-figure therapy bill.” She pauses, her tone slipping into something more soothing.
“Even if your marriage had lasted, Jeff wasn’t going to be your happily ever after.
You need to stop settling for fine when you can have great. Even if great may not last forever.”
I hate it when she’s right, which is most of the time. “I’m a mess, Cass. I don’t know how to deal with being here. Maybe I’m preoccupied with Caleb because it’s easier than fixing things with my mom.”
“I think you’re fantasizing about Caleb because he’s a fine-ass man who can throw you over his fine-ass shoulders. Besides, you are a capable woman; you can multitask. You can bury the hatchet with your mom and then let Caleb bury his big—”
“Cassie!” I cackle, and she giggles. But I sober, sighing before I say, “Mom and I got into a huge fight because I told her she should move to the city with me.”
“You what?”
“It’s the best option for her. There are better treatment options there,” I say.
“Well, sure. But she and your dad haven’t spoken in twenty years, and San Francisco probably has upsetting memories for her like Grand Trees does for you. Did you talk to your dad about it?”
“He’s the last person I’d want to talk about any of this with.”
“I saw him on Wednesday.”
The night I usually join him for dinner. “Thanks for being my surrogate.”
“He asked about my trip there and about your mom. I think he’s researching Parkinson’s. That man still has it bad for her.”
I groan. “I know. But not bad enough to actually talk to her. Why is my family so hopeless?”
“You’re not hopeless. Just emotionally repressed.”
“I’m not particularly repressed these days. I’m surrounded by all these memories—happy and triggering—and I’m feeling all these old things and new things, and they’re all scary and uncomfortable and exciting and unnerving and—”
“That’s great, Edie. That’s life. You’ve let yourself grow accustomed to being numb. You should feel things. You should let that hot man make you feel all the things.”
She makes me laugh, even when she’s practicing tough love. “I don’t know.”
“You do know. You texted me because you want me to be the devil on your shoulder telling you to ride that man until you’re raw.
But what you don’t know is that I’m actually your angel.
You deserve good sex. You deserve fun. You deserve to be a little infatuated with a beautiful man who knows what he’s doing.
Enjoy this. Don’t think about whether it’s practical.
It isn’t. Don’t think about what happens when you leave.
It’ll probably suck. But you’ve spent your whole life living in the future or the past. Just let yourself be in the now. ”