Chapter 13 #3
Silence settled between them.
Murphy snorted inside the horse trailer and gave the front partition a whack with a hoof to remind them of his presence. It broke the spell that had them staring at each other like a pair of shy teenagers at a school dance.
Tessa sighed. “Fine. She can have the horse. On a trial basis.”
“Thank you,” he said fervently.
“I believe I’m the one who should be thanking you. This is an extremely generous gift. Too generous, honestly.”
“If it makes you feel better, I’ll tell Makayla I’m letting her ride him in return for her caring for him.”
She nodded, relieved. “That would make me feel better about saying yes.”
“Done. Now let’s get this fellow out of the trailer and introduce him to the other animals.”
He backed out a stocky bay horse with a pretty white star on his forehead. He had big, gentle brown eyes and stopped to sniff Tessa. He offered his forehead for a rub, and she obliged, charmed.
“Well aren’t you the sweetest thing ever?” she murmured.
Dillon grinned. “You can ride him, too, you know.”
“No thank you. A rocking chair is exactly my speed.”
They spent the next half hour cleaning and bedding one of the unused stalls for him and letting him meet June, Biscuit, and Loretta over their stall doors.
“Weird horse, huh Murph?” Dillon murmured as they moved on from the donkey.
“Wait till he gets a load of Dolly,” Tessa replied. “She’ll be the weirdest looking cow he’s ever seen.”
Dillon grinned and nodded.
Murphy did prick his ears and take a hard look at the llama, but after one skeptical blow through his nose, he seemed to accept the strange creature and relaxed.
Dillon unloaded a bag of Murphy’s current grain and told Tessa how to transition him over to her horse feed, which was thankfully similar to the stuff he was already on.
When he was settled in his stall placidly munching on some hay, they left him alone to settle in.
Dillon volunteered to pick Makayla up from school, and Tessa agreed to close the store early and be home when they arrived so she could see Makayla’s reaction to her new horse.
Dillon left, grinning like he’d just won the lottery, and she spent the next hour photographing a gown in Mick’s woodshop. The bias-cut silk moved in the golden light like water, the train sweeping across the planked floor elegantly.
When she reviewed the shots on her laptop back in the kitchen, she sat very still for a moment. These were the best photographs she’d ever taken. Quiet satisfaction flowed through her. She’d just finished labeling and saving the best images when her phone lit up on the table.
Mother.
Every muscle in Tessa’s body tensed. She was sorely tempted to ignore it. But the one thing worse than a call from Judith was not knowing what her mother had to say.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Tessa.” Judith’s voice was devoid of warmth, as always. “I’m calling to update you on your grandfather.”
Tessa went outside and sat in the wicker chair because, if the news was bad, she wanted to be able to see the mountains while she heard it.
“How is he?”
“He’s settled in the memory unit, and they’ve put him on a new medication that seems to have stopped his agitation.” A beat. “He’s stopped asking for Tassie.”
Tessa closed her eyes as Judith’s dagger found its target and slipped between her ribs.
Her mother twisted the knife, saying, “He’s asking for his mother now. Alzheimer’s patients often fixate on people associated with various times in their past as they regress.”
Regress. Judith had a gift for selecting the single word that would do the most damage, as if she had a thesaurus in her mind organized from gentle to fatal and always reached for the lethal end of the shelf.
“The staff says he’s content. Harmless. Yesterday he told a nurse his mother would be by to pick him up from school soon.”
Across the lake, the mountainsides were turning shades of light, fresh green.
Tessa watched it without really seeing it.
Her Gramps wasn’t asking for her anymore.
He wasn’t asking for his wife. He wasn’t asking for anyone he’d known for the past sixty years.
He was a small boy waiting for his mother.
She understood, with a clarity that struck her all at once, that the last bridge between herself and her grandfather had quietly fallen in on itself while she wasn’t looking. And her mother wanted her to know it. Be hurt by it.
“Thank you, Mother,” she said, proud of how level she kept her voice. “Is there anything else?”
“The Whitmore Academy has extended the audition window for Makayla by two weeks as a courtesy. I told them you’d be in touch in the next few days.”
A beat.
“Goodbye, Mother.”
“Tessa—”
She hung up.
She set the phone face-down on the arm of the wicker chair and laced her fingers together formally in her lap. And then she dropped her forehead onto her hands and stopped pretending.
The grief that rose in her was not the sudden wound and sharp agony of losing Mick.
This grief was a cut that bled slowly, drop by painful drop, as someone she loved vanished one memory at a time.
He’d forgotten her name. And now he had forgotten he was ever old enough to have a granddaughter at all.
Her throat hurt. Her chest hurt. Her hands gripped each other hard enough to leave marks. She was, she registered distantly, not going to be able to put this pain back in its box. But she refused to cry.
She heard the squeak of the fence between her property and Arlo’s but didn’t lift her head.
Boots crunched on the gravel driveway, unhurried, the slightly uneven gait of a man whose left knee had been giving him trouble. Brown Dog’s toenails clicked on the porch boards. She felt the dog flop down beside her chair and heard his long, theatrical sigh. The dog rested his chin on her foot.
Arlo lowered himself into Fern’s rocking chair with a grunt.
He didn’t speak.
She didn’t, either.
After a long while, he said, “Came over to get that pressure canner Fern said I could have.”
Tessa finally sat up. “She tell you that before she died or after?”
“Oh, she told me that for twenty years. Figure today’s as good as any to collect.”
His voice was mild, and it dawned on her that he’d been raised in a time when one didn’t randomly walk up on a grieving person. The pressure canner was just an excuse to come check on her.
She didn’t look at him. She couldn’t. If she saw even a hint of sympathy in his eyes, she would fall apart.
He didn’t seem to mind.
“Brown Dog’s been limpin’ again,” he announced after a while to the general air in front of him. “That left hind. He’ll work it out by suppertime. Always does.”
She made a noncommittal sound. Dillon told her last week that Brown Dog mysteriously developed a limp any time he wanted human food for dinner.
“Geese are extra mouthy today,” Arlo observed. “That’ll be the weather shiftin’. Means a storm’s comin’. Tomorrow night, maybe. Folks usually bring the chickens in early when the geese won’t shut up.”
“Is that so?” she managed to respond evenly.
“Fence post on the line between our places is leanin’. We’ll need to reset it before the ground freezes next fall, though it can wait till we get a good rain. No sense fightin’ hard ground when you don’t have to.”
He rambled on like that—weather, fencing, a discourse on the right way to stack firewood. She stared at the lake, half-listening, and somewhere in the middle of his observations about seasoning oak versus seasoning pine, the tears finally came.
She didn’t make a sound and she turned her face away from him. But Arlo was eighty years old and was not fooled for a second.
Blessedly, he didn’t stop talking and he didn’t reach for her. He didn’t offer her a tissue or a casserole or an opinion. He just talked about nothing in his slow, easy porch voice, and Brown Dog’s chin stayed heavy on her foot. That was the whole of the comfort he offered, but it was enough.
More than enough.
When her shoulders had stilled and her cheeks dried, he said, “Fern’s daddy went the same way, you know.”
She did look at him then. “He did?”
“Mm. Before you and Mick got together. He was in a nursing home out near Kalispell. Fern used to drive over every Sunday and sit with him. Last six months, he didn’t know her. Thought she was a waitress at the place he used to take her mother for their anniversary.”
Arlo shook his head slowly. “She’d sit there for two hours and let him order pie off an imaginary menu. Peach with vanilla ice cream. She’d bring it the next week and eat it with him, and he’d tell her she was the prettiest waitress in the county.”
“She never told me that,” she said.
“She didn’t tell anyone. I only knew because she asked me to drive her once.
I sat in my truck in the parking lot with Brown Dog while she went in.
” He looked out at the lake. “On the drive home, she said to me, ‘Arlo, they tell you grief is the worst part. It’s not. The worst of it is watching them slip away while they’re still in the room.
’ She never spoke of it again after that. ”
Tessa nodded slowly. “My grandpa doesn’t know my name anymore. He’s asking for his mother and waiting for her to pick him up from school.”
Arlo’s eyes—pale and tired and kind—were steady on her face.
“He still knows you,” he said. “Not in the way you think. But deep down. The ones we love are in our hearts, Tessa. Deeper than names, deeper than faces. That man’s loved you since you were born.
He may not know your name anymore, but he’s carryin’ you somewhere inside the fog. He’s still carryin’ you.”
She put her face in her hands and cried in earnest then.
Arlo didn’t move.
He didn’t fix it. He didn’t shush her. He didn’t pat her shoulder or hand her a handkerchief or say any of the terrible, useless things people said when they couldn’t stand to watch another person cry.
He just stayed beside her. Brown Dog on her foot.
The afternoon light sliding down the flanks of the mountains, one inch at a time.
And somewhere between one breath and the next, in the middle of a ruined Thursday on a porch in Montana, Tessa finally understood what real family was.
Not blood. Not a shared name. Not dinners in a penthouse with the right forks and the wrong conversation.
Family was the person who came over with a thin excuse about a pressure canner and stayed until the worst of the grief had passed and didn’t ask you a single question you weren’t ready to answer.
Her Gramps had been that person for her, once.
Fern had been that for Arlo. She’d been that for her father, too, it sounded like.
And Arlo, for reasons that eluded her, had chosen to be that person for her.
She wiped her face with the sleeve of Mick’s flannel shirt, which Judith would have declared a crime against good manners, and she said ruefully, “I’m the worst mess ever.”
“I’ve seen worse messes,” Arlo said. “Fern dropped a jar of pickled beets on her living room rug in 1987. Now, that was a mess.”
Tessa laughed shakily, but it was real and it felt good.
He squinted out at the lake. “I believe. I’ll collect that pressure canner another day, if it suits you. Don’t feel much like rootin’ around in Fern’s basement this late in the day.”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
“Mm.”
He settled deeper in the rocking chair and didn’t show any sign of leaving. Brown Dog rolled onto his back against her leg and showed her his gray belly without the slightest interest in moving.
Across the property line, his rocking chair sat empty on his porch as the afternoon light lengthened, the seat worn smooth from years of bearing his weight. The space beside Fern’s rocker on this porch was empty, now.
Tessa looked at the two rocking chairs, alone on their respective porches, and thought for the first time since she’d signed the inheritance papers in Mr. Sutter’s office, that someday—not soon, not this month—she might sit in Fern’s chair and let herself feel what it was like to sit where Fern had sat.
Not yet. But someday.
Arlo, watching her watch, didn’t comment, for which she was grateful.
He just stayed.