Chapter 36
THIRTY-SIX
Love is something where someone really cares about someone else, like a family member or also marriage.
Gil did not come out once from the office, just shut himself in there like he was in a zombie movie and any wrong move could be his demise.
I’d been standing in front of the door for five minutes, trying to talk myself into knocking.
Jorge had just left so the place was quiet, except for the dulcet sounds of Spanish pop music coming from the radio Jorge had forgotten to shut off.
Sunny would tell me I was procrastinating. “Just pull the band-aid off,” she’d surely say. “You’ll feel better after.”
Sometimes I wondered if Sunny ever made a mess of her life and had to clean it up. She always seemed like she had it all figured out.
“Just do it,” I muttered and lifted my hand to knock.
The door swung open before I had the chance. Gil filled the doorway.
“What do you want?” he asked, wariness and annoyance fighting for position on his face.
I frowned. It’s not like I expected an enthusiastic greeting but at least something a little less…caustic. “We need to talk.”
He leaned a shoulder against the doorframe. “I thought you didn’t believe in announcing your intentions when it came to talking.”
“Fine, then.” I wished I wasn’t standing quite so close to him.
But taking a step back felt like I was showing weakness, or something.
“We need to be adults and talk about what happened. Oliver saw us. He likes you a lot.” I like you a lot .
“I’m worried he’ll get the wrong idea.” I’m worried I’ll get the wrong idea .
“What idea would that be?” he asked.
“You know exactly what I mean. Oliver’s got it in his head that we’re going to fall in love or some such nonsense.
” I fisted my hands at my sides. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes as a mom, trust me, but I’ve always been careful to keep my dating life separate from Oliver.
He deserves better than watching a bunch of jerks parade in and out of his mom’s life.
Or worse, he get attached to one of them.
And like we both agreed last night, we have different life plans here.
If you get what you want, I have to pick up my entire life and figure things out all over again. ”
He stared at me intensely. The would-be silence punctuated by the polka beat of the song on the radio.
I swayed a touch closer without meaning to.
His arm brushed my shoulder. He didn’t give an inch, just kept watching me.
His gaze traveled my face, stopping at my mouth long enough for my breath to become unsteady, then back to my eyes.
I had to put space between us, or I’d be begging him to kiss me.
“I saved you a taco plate. Come eat and we can talk.” With that, I twisted on my heels and all but sprinted into the dining room. A few moments later, he followed.
I didn’t look at him as I pulled his plate from under the heating lamp and placed it at the counter. He sat while I poured him a glass of iced tea.
“We made things weird,” I said when I couldn’t take all his silence.
“I get it,” he said without looking up.
There was one piece of lemon meringue left so I plated it and took a seat next to him. This felt a little less intimidating. We weren’t looking at each other.
“I don’t think you do.” I loaded up my fork with pie.
“I left for LA at eighteen. My high school boyfriend went with me. After he broke up with me, I did what I wanted to do. I didn’t have my parents watching over everything I did.
I was single. I didn’t even care if the guys I saw wanted anything more. I just wanted fun.”
I could feel his eyes on me, but I stared down at my pie.
“Then I hooked up with Oliver’s father. When he left, everything changed. For a while, I was trying my hardest to do the right things. It was so, so hard being a single mom. I was working and taking care of Oliver, and that postpartum depression is a real kick in the ass, let me tell you.”
Those days had been so hard. I had no idea what I was doing. My mom lived halfway across the country. And I didn’t want anyone to know how much I was struggling.
“I thought if I tried to be the old Ellie, the girl who liked to have fun, maybe that would fix me. But all it did was make things worse. I drank too much. Way too much. I made a lot of mistakes, and I was miserable. Then I got my brother in the middle of my mess.”
I swallowed, feeling tears pressing against the backs of my eyes. My fork clinked against the plate because my hand was shaking.
Gil gently reached out and took it from me. He laced our fingers together and I held on like it was my one connection to reality. “What happened?”
“It was so dumb. He was in Vegas for his birthday party. He’s not really that kind of guy but his friends on the team organized it so he went.
I drove over from LA to see him. We talked at least once a week, and he’d come and visit.
We’re close. But I didn’t even tell him how much I was struggling. ”
I turned on the stool toward Gil, staring at where his hand wrapped around mine, his skin tanned and rough with calluses, but oh-so gentle.
“I showed up at the party and started drinking and I made a mess of everything. I don’t even remember most of it.
Chris tells me I deemed myself the entertainment—dancing on tables, stripping down to my underwear, singing the National Anthem while doing a headstand, real classy stuff. ”
“Sounds like you came close to having to forfeit your Miss Tomato Harvest title,” Gil said.
“Imagine the disgrace.” I snorted. “Chris has always had a reputation as a real standup guy. He’s an actual Eagle Scout, you know?
He got concerned about how I was acting at the party, so he threw a towel around me and walked me to his hotel room next door.
Got me cleaned up and in bed. Called our mom because he was so worried about me.
” I propped my elbow on the table and my chin in my palm.
“But someone took a video of him helping me and sold it to a gossip site and one thing led to another. It was plastered everywhere that my brother was involved with a Vegas stripper, and it ballooned from there.”
“I think I remember hearing about that,” Gil said. “So…you were the stripper. From Miss Tomato Harvest to Vegas stripper. How the mighty fall.”
“I know it sounds dumb, funny even, but it could have ruined a lot of things for him. It was a whole big thing. Anyway, my mom flew out to Vegas, drove me back to LA, and we had a long, long talk. I think I was on the verge of some kind of breakdown. Chris found this place on the coast where I could go and rest and work with a therapist. I was there for a little over a month.”
I chipped off a tiny piece of my pie crust. “It was good for me. For the first time in maybe ever, I had this clarity about life. I stopped drinking, admitted that the whole acting thing wasn’t working out.”
“After Kangaroo’d Three , it was only down from there.” He squeezed my hand, his thumb making circles on the back.
I huffed a laugh. “Exactly. Then one day, I woke up and realized I didn’t want Oliver to grow up in LA. I wanted him to have more than that. I didn’t want my screw-ups to affect his life.”
“So, you packed up and came here to Two Harts.”
I nodded. “The plan was to go to Oklahoma and stay with my parents for a while. At the last minute, I took a detour. I wanted to meet Mae. But it had been a long drive, so I decided to rest for a couple of days. The next day, I took Oliver to find some lunch and stumbled across the Sit-n-Eat. That’s when I met Ollie. ”
“And you never left.”
“Nope, Two Harts is more than just a town to me. I was raised in Oklahoma, grew up fast in Los Angeles, but here in Two Harts is where I’ve become an adult, you know? I’m becoming a person I like, one who makes good decisions and doesn’t beat herself up if she makes a mistake.”
He made a low sound of encouragement.
“This town, the people here, Ollie? They’ve all been part of helping.” I took a deep breath, fighting back an overwhelming urge to cry. “I know it’s just a house and a business and some land for you in some podunk town but not to sound too dramatic here, it kind of saved my life.”
“No one sees you that way, you know.”
“How?”
“They don’t see a woman mostly made of her bad decisions. They see a woman made of joy and laughter and hard work and fierce love. I’m glad I know her.”
A tear slid down my cheek. He caught it with his thumb.
Somehow, we’d turned toward each other, my legs trapped between his.
The tension, this primitive pull between us ratcheted up to a level ten, and the desire to lean forward and kiss him was part survival.
Like maybe I couldn’t survive without it.
I licked my bottom lip. He pulled me a fraction of an inch closer.
Someone knocked on the back door, loud and persistent. I jerked away and stood, leaving my half-eaten pie, and possibly my heart, on the counter. “I need to get that.”
It was Teddy. He waltzed into the kitchen, wearing the suspenders I’d given him last month. “Hiya, Ellie.” His brow crinkled. “You okay? You look like you’ve been crying.”
I pressed my hands to my cheeks. “Oh, no. I’m fine. You caught me in the middle of cutting onions.”
Teddy scanned the kitchen where zero evidence of onions or of me cutting them could be found.
Eyes narrowed, he straightened to his full height.
He was well over six feet but thin as a rail.
Maybe once upon a time he’d been big and tall and weighty enough to cause some real concern.
Nowadays, he hardly looked strong enough to walk more than a mile.
“Someone made you cry. Who is it? I can take care of them for you, if you want.”
“Now who’s lying,” I said.
He pressed a hand to his heart, looking terribly put out. “It’s not about the size.” He tapped a finger to his head. “It’s about the brains.”
I shook my head and smiled. “You hungry?”
“Always.”
“Let’s get you something to eat.” I linked my arm through his. “Ollie’s grandson is here.”
Teddy’s eyes lit up. “Is that so?”
I brought him into the dining area and stopped at the counter. “Teddy, this is Gilbert Dalton, Ollie’s grandson. And Gil, this is Teddy Cane.”
Teddy rounded the counter and shook Gil’s hand like he was getting paid for his enthusiasm. When he stopped, he gazed at Gil carefully. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time.”
Gil’s head tilted to the side. “Did she say your last name is Cane?’
Teddy smiled slowly and looked at Gil expectantly. “It is, indeed. Since the day I was born.”
“Sit on down,” I said. “Tell Gil some of your Ollie stories. Let me go get you something to eat.”
The second I disappeared into the other room, I rushed into the bathroom and studied myself in the mirror, seeing the slightly puffy eyes and flushed cheeks.
What had just happened? I was supposed to be setting boundaries.
I splashed water on my face and dried it as best I could.
Back in the kitchen, the murmur of voices drifted in.
I quickly warmed up the taco plate I’d set aside for Teddy and brought it to him.
He and Gil had moved to a table. Gil was listening intently as Teddy rambled on, in the middle of one of his stories. I slid his plate on the table and pulled a chair over to sit, not next to Gil—that way seemed dangerous.
“We used to get in all kinds of trouble. Stealing laundry off the line, went cow tipping once.” Teddy’s blue eyes sparkled.
“My younger sister was always on our tail. If we wanted to do something, so did she. We blamed a lot of things on her when we got caught. You’d think she’d learn but she always came back. ”
“Poor girl,” I said.
“Nah,” Teddy said. “We weren’t mean or nothing.
Just making mischief. Wasn’t much else to do.
Mom kicked us out when the sun came up to do the chores.
After lunch, we weren’t expected back before it got dark.
” Teddy smiled softly, watching the memories in his head.
“Long, hot summer days. Good times, I miss that.”
“What happened to your sister?” I asked. I hadn’t heard much talk of Teddy or his family. “Is she still in Two Harts?”
“Oh, no.” His smile wilted a bit. “She left a long time ago. Never did come back to Two Harts. She met a nice man in Houston and married real quick. Didn’t even have a wedding really, just went down to the Justice of the Peace. He was from Louisiana, so she moved there.”
“She came back to visit, I bet,” I said.
“I wish she had. Would have loved to meet my niece.” His eyes moved to Gil, watching his face intently. “She didn’t think it was a good idea to come back.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated, I guess. Easier to stay away.” He frowned. “Sometimes it’s hard being the only one who remembers from back then. Ollie’s gone now. Amelia passed on years ago.”
My heart stopped. Gil’s grandmother’s name was Amelia. He’d said he spent the summers with her in Louisiana. “Amelia?”
I looked to Gil whose gaze had sharpened on the older man.
“My sister,” Teddy replied as he picked up a taco. He gestured toward Gil. “She was your grandma. I guess that makes me your grand-uncle.”