Chapter 9 #2
Tessa highly doubted that. But she had to admit it was warm and filling.
They ate it together at a table Mick had built with his own hands, and it was nice.
Really nice. For the first time since they’d moved to the farm, the house didn’t feel like someone else’s.
It felt, however temporarily, like theirs.
Hamlet waddled over from the couch and positioned himself beneath the table with strategic patience.
He obviously knew that if he waited long enough, Makayla would set her empty dish on the floor and let him lick it clean.
Tessa looked down at his bright brown eyes and his hopeful, slightly open mouth.
“Sorry, Pig,” she told him. “This has onion in it and that’s toxic to pigs.”
She’d read that in Fern’s chicken guide, of all places. She was learning things she’d never imagined needing to know, and it was starting to feel less like survival and more like competence.
Dillon came by Sunday morning to check June’s heart after her big outing yesterday.
He pressed the stethoscope to the old mare’s chest just behind her left front leg and stood motionless, eyes closed, face intent, while June turned her head and lipped at his shirt pocket in search of the peppermint she knew was there.
Tessa watched him pull the stethoscope from his ears and was startled to clock that she was anxious about the mare’s health. “How’s she doing?”
“Sable. No change in the murmur from last week.”
“She ate all her meds this morning. No molasses. First time.”
“Good. You’re winning her over.”
“No, you’re winning her over. She held out on me until she heard your truck, and then she gobbled up her pills like an angel. She won’t eat for me unless she knows you’re coming with a peppermint chaser.”
“That’s not true.”
“It absolutely is. You bribe my horse.”
“I do not—”
“You do, and you’ve corrupted her. She used to have principles. Standards. Now she performs for your candy like a circus pony.”
“I’d hardly call standing still while I listen to her heart performing.”
“She batted her eyelashes at you.”
“Horses don’t bat their eyelashes.”
“June does. And she does it at you. She’s shameless.”
The shameless horse in question nudged his shoulder hard enough to knock him off balance, demanding her treat.
He reached into his shirt pocket and produced two peppermints.
He unwrapped on crinkly plastic wrapper and gave the round disk to June, who took it with the delicate precision of a duchess accepting a canapé.
As the horse loudly crunched the hard candy, he held the second one out to Tessa.
She stared down at it. “What’s that for?”
“You seem jealous that I’m bringing another lady treats and not you.”
“I am not jealous of a horse.”
“Then why are you complaining about me bringing her peppermints?”
“That’s not jealousy. That’s legitimate concern about the ethics of veterinary bribery.”
“Take the peppermint, Tessa.”
She took it. Their fingers brushed and she told herself the warmth that shot up her arm was a perfectly normal neurological response to brief physical contact and had nothing whatsoever to do with the person touching her or the way he was looking at her.
She unwrapped the sweet, popped it in her mouth, and batted her eyelashes at him with exaggerated slowness.
He stared at her, jaw slack, and for one deeply satisfying second, the unflappable Dr. Steele had absolutely nothing to say.
“It’s the peppermint,” she said innocently. “They have that effect on all females.”
A laugh transformed his whole face and made his eyes crinkle at the corners in a way she was not going to think about later. She was definitely not going to think about it.
“I think you’re spending too much time with the livestock,” he managed.
“You’re the one who taught her the trick. I’m just a quick study. Your words.”
“I retract my words.”
“Too late. They’ve been heard and can’t be unheard.”
He was laughing more quietly now, and she laughed too, caught off guard by how much she enjoyed sparring with him. Their laughter faded, leaving them standing close in the barn aisle with June beside them. Dillon’s gazed fondly at her in the dusty light, and she didn’t look away.
The moment held. Longer than a vet visit justified.
Long enough that the air between them changed quality and Tessa became aware of the specific distance between his hand on June’s halter and hers—six inches, maybe less—and the fact that not moving her hand those six inches was a deliberate, increasingly difficult choice.
June stuck her tongue out, rolled like a human’s and sucked blissfully, undoubtedly enjoying the last of the peppermint fragments stuck between her teeth. Two sparrows argued in the rafters. The morning light came through gaps in the old board siding in narrow gold stripes.
Tessa looked away first. She busied herself putting June back in the stall with Biscuit and hanging the mare’s huge halter on the hook mounted on the stall door. Her hands were steady, but her heart was not.
“Same time Wednesday?” she asked, as if she hadn’t memorized his schedule weeks ago.
“Same time Wednesday.” He tipped his hat to her the way he always did, an old-fashioned and strangely gallant gesture, and left with a quiet spit of gravel from his tires.
She stood in the barn with June, the peppermint still sharp on her tongue, and thought about how he’d looked when she batted her eyelashes at him. His whole face had opened up, surprised and delighted and completely defenseless. She didn’t move for a long time.
Sunday afternoon, Tessa sat on the porch and did nothing.
She didn’t check her email. Didn’t review gown photographs. Didn’t call Charlotte to discuss the boutique timeline or check on her store’s inventory. She didn’t organize, plan, schedule, or strategize a single thing.
She sat in an old wicker chair she’d hauled downstairs from the guest bedroom and watched the light change on the mountains while Hamlet slept at her feet and Chairman Meow, who had recently begun tolerating her with something approaching neutrality, sat on the porch railing and groomed himself meticulously.
The peace was extraordinary. No one needed her to be anywhere. No one was evaluating her performance. No one was watching to see if she did it right.
Here on this porch, nobody was watching her, and no performance was required of her. But without a role to play, she had no idea who she was. She wanted to find out, though.
Her phone rang.
She almost didn’t answer. The screen read Mother, and every muscle in her body tensed. She’d spent her entire life bracing for criticism from Judith. But her mother rarely called, which meant something major had happened, and Tessa couldn’t afford not to know what.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Tessa.” Judith’s voice was precise, controlled, and entirely free of warmth. Her mother viewed emotion as a structural weakness in the architecture of a well-ordered life. “I’m calling about your grandfather.”
Tessa’s hand tightened on the phone. “How is he?”
“He’s been moved to a memory care facility.
The doctors say his condition has progressed more rapidly than they initially projected.
He’s having difficulty with basic tasks.
” A pause. “He’s also been asking for someone named Tassie.
The staff assumed it was a former caregiver, but I believe he may be referring to you.
Didn’t he call you something like that when you were small? ”
The mountains, the lake, the porch, the pig at her feet—all of it receded until there was nothing but her mother’s voice and the name Tassie echoing inside her like a bell struck in an empty cathedral.
Her Gramps remembered her. Not her name—not Tessa—but the name he’d called her when she was five years old and he’d lift her onto his shoulders in Central Park.
He’d buy her an ice cream cone the size of her head and tell her she was his best girl.
Tassie. Nobody else in the world had ever called her that.
“Is he—” Her voice cracked. She pressed her lips together and tried again, aiming for the composure Judith expected and missing by a mile. “Is he in pain?”
“The doctors assure me he’s comfortable.
He has good days and bad days. Yesterday he tried to leave the facility because he believed he had a lunch meeting at the Yale Club.
” Judith delivered this with the flat disinterest of a woman reporting on weather in a distant city.
“I’ve hired a companion to sit with him during the day.
It’s an additional expense, obviously, which brings me to the matter of his finances. ”
And there it was. The pivot from care to cost, from grandfather to ledger. Tessa knew what was coming as surely as she knew Arlo’s cryptic hints preceded disasters.
“I’ve taken a closer look at the disbursements from the trusts he managed. There are recurring monthly transfers to an account in Montana. Yours, I presume.”
Tessa closed her eyes. “He set up a small allowance for me out of my trust fund after Mick died.”
“Without consulting the family.”
“Without consulting you, Mother. He didn’t need your permission. He established the trust.”
A frost-edged silence. “He agreed to cut your off after you married that . . . man. And now that I’m managing the family trusts, those transfers will stop. Effective immediately.”
Tessa opened her eyes. The mountains hadn’t moved. The lake still glittered. She calculated quickly. Makayla’s violin lessons, the tutor, the savings she put away each month. The store covered their basic expenses, but the allowance was the margin that kept them from living paycheck to paycheck.
“He wanted me to have it,” she said quietly.