Chapter 17
Tessa couldn’t fail to miss that Dillon was avoiding her.
He didn’t come inside yesterday when he dropped off Makayla from school, even though he always stopped in to say hello.
He didn’t stop by the house last night after he left the woodshop, either, though she didn’t really expect him to.
What she had expected was a response to the texts she’d sent him.
Each one was delivered. Read. And not answered.
She hoped Dillon was just busy but she feared he’d found out about her mother’s ultimatum and made up his mind that she was leaving.
Truth was, she hadn’t planned to lead with the music academy and trust fund blackmail when she finally talked to him. She planned to lead with, I told my mother no, or possibly with I love you, you stubborn man, so sit down and listen to me, depending on how much longer he dodged the conversation.
She sat on the porch and watched the sun come up. Hamlet flopped down beside her with the boneless contentment of a two-hundred-pound dog. She put her hand down without looking and scratched the top of his head.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she told him.
He grunted.
“That’s not helpful, Hamlet.”
He grunted again, more definitively.
Yet again, she was being comforted by a pig. At some point she was going to have to think about what that said about the trajectory of her life. But today was going to be full enough without deep self-reflection before breakfast.
Makayla barreled into the kitchen at seven-ten, stuck her head in the refrigerator, and declared, “We’re out of the good milk.”
“We have a nearly full carton.”
“We’re out of whole milk. The kind Dillon drinks.”
“Dillon isn’t the only person who drinks whole milk.”
Makayla regarded her suspiciously. “Why are you still in your bathrobe? It’s late.”
“It’s seven a.m.”
“Arlo says on a farm, anything after six a.m. is midday.”
“Arlo says a lot of things. Most of them are only true if you’re old and cranky.”
Makayla grinned. Then, “Is Dillon coming today?”
“I’m not sure,” she said carefully. “He’s got a lot of calls scheduled this week.”
Makayla paused with the milk in her hand. She was very bright and could read a room better than some adults. She studied Tessa intently and then asked, “Is he mad at us?”
Gulp.
She made herself breathe. “No, honey. He’s not mad at anyone. He’s just . . .”
What? Protecting himself? Running from the drama in her life?
“He’s working through something,” Tessa said finally. “People do that sometimes.”
“Like when I wouldn’t talk to Ashley Deckard for a week?”
“Why wouldn’t you talk to Ashley Deckard?” Tessa queried.
“Because she said French braids look babyish.”
“They do not.”
“I know they don’t. That’s why I wouldn’t talk to her.”
“Are you talking to her now?”
“Yeah. She apologized. She wore one yesterday, actually.”
To Tessa’s chagrin, Makayla circled back around to the topic of Dillon as she ate. “If Dillon’s working through something, are you also?”
“I’m always working through something. It’s my job as a grown-up.”
“Is that why you’re still in your bathrobe?”
“Yes,” she answered honestly.
Makayla took another bite of cereal. “You don’t have to tell me what it is. I just wanted to know.”
Tessa at eleven had never been allowed to ask her own mother anything of the sort. Good for me. I am parenting differently. No idea if I’m doing it well, but at least I’m not my mother.
She crossed the kitchen and kissed the top of Makayla’s head. Her hair smelled like the strawberry shampoo that reminded Makayla of summer.
“I’m okay,” Tessa said into her daughter’s hair. “I promise. Eat your cereal.”
“It’s cold.”
“Cereal is supposed to be cold.”
“The milk is warm.”
“Of all the tragedies to befall this household, Makayla Lawrence.”
Makayla grinned up at her, milk mustache and all, and for one small, unguarded moment the world felt like it might hold.
The bus came and Makayla waved to her from inside it. Brown Dog ambled onto the porch to take up his morning vigil, and Tessa gave him a biscuit because Arlo said Fern had declared a treat the correct and honorable outcome of Brown Dog appearing on a porch.
The house was too quiet when she went back inside.
She stood in the kitchen with her hand on the table Mick had built and her heart twisted at the idea of leaving it behind. Thing was, it belonged in this room. In this house he’d grown up in and called home till the day he died.
She had until Friday to decide—stay or go. Hold firm or cave in. Her mouth twisted. Or more accurately, Montana, happy, and poor or New York unhappy and rich.
And as much as she’d wanted to talk it through with Dillon to make sure she wasn’t missing anything important that she ought to be considering, maybe it was better that he was avoiding her.
She had to make this decision for herself and Makayla.
It couldn’t hinge on a possible but as yet unexplored future with a man.
Even if that man was already in her life and she was already more than half in love with him.
The question could not be, would I stay if Dillon and I were a couple? The question had to be, would I live in Montana, stay on this farm, choose this exact life for me and Makayla if Dillon never spoke to her again?
I’m going to pick this place, this life, or I’m going to leave it. But either way, I’m doing it for myself.
It might be, she realized as she climbed the stairs to dress for work, the first important thing she’d ever told herself that started with the word I and included no one else in its grammar.
Tessa pulled on the gray wool trousers that had survived, so far, every calamity the farm had thrown at them, and the last silk blouse in her closet that had not yet been eaten, trampled, mauled, stained, or otherwise ruined. It was, at this point, something of a museum piece.
She went downstairs and out through the kitchen door carrying her camera bag and a garment bag over her shoulder with Charlotte’s newest gown in it.
The light in the workshop would be perfect in about ten minutes, and she had just enough time to shoot pictures of the dress before she had to leave for the store.
She draped the garment back over the porch rail, turned around to lock the kitchen door, and when she turned back, Loretta was standing not ten feet from the porch.
She hadn’t heard the donkey coming. That was the thing about Loretta. She had the stealth instincts of a hunting tiger and the instincts of a criminal mastermind.
Loretta looked at Tessa.
Tessa looked at Loretta.
Loretta took a very deliberate step forward and fixed her gaze, with the focused serenity of a monk at prayer, upon the cuff of Tessa’s last remaining silk blouse.
“No,” Tessa declared forcefully. “Absolutely not.”
Loretta took another step.
“I mean it, Loretta. This is my last good blouse.”
Loretta’s ears swiveled forward and Tessa saw unmistakable mischief glinting in the donkey’s dark eyes.
“Don’t you dare.”
The donkey’s head stretched forward. Her upper lip began to move.
Tessa looked down at her sleeve. Looked up at Loretta. Looked down at her sleeve again. And for reasons she couldn’t articulate, she started to laugh.
It bubbled up out of her chest like a hiccup and by the time it escaped was a full blown cackle.
She laughed at Loretta. She laughed at the silk cuff.
She laughed at herself for believing two months ago that it would survive farm life.
She laughed at the pig on her sofa and the chicken in her hat and the cat who dispensed contempt every morning like clockwork.
She laughed at how her coffee always went cold before she could finish it, at her mother’s outrageous behavior, and most of all she laughed at herself—thirty-three years old, standing here arguing with a donkey determined to eat her blouse. It was all so completely, totally absurd.
Loretta, unsettled, took a step back.
“Oh, now you’re not so tough,” Tessa said, wiping her eyes. “It just takes the human having a mental breakdown to back you off, does it? Well, I’ve got your number now, bucko.”
She dissolved into a fit of giggles.
She really had lost her mind.
Loretta turned and trotted back to the pasture with the injured dignity of a socialite to whom a salesperson had just been rude.
Tessa watched her go with a mix of triumph and lingering humor. She wiped the tears from her face, feeling worlds better after her mini-meltdown, if that’s what that had just been.
I am not the same person I was two months ago, that’s for sure. Truth be told, she’d changed a lot over the past four years. And she had no idea who she was going to be in a year. But she knew who she was not going to be anymore.
She was done worrying so much. Life was too short to let it pass her by while she fretted over the small stuff.
She wanted to hang on to the feeling she’d gotten today when she laughed at all of it.
Laughed at being tricked into moving out here, laughed at her mother, and most of all laughed at herself.
She was done taking herself so seriously.
This relaxed, free attitude felt good. Really good.
She picked up the garment bag and walked across the yard to the workshop, only vaguely noting that she didn’t automatically think of it as Mick’s workshop anymore.
That, too, wasn’t a bad thing. Life was also too short not to move on after loss and grief. There was a time for sadness, of course. But afterward, she’d forgotten to make time for laughter. And joy. And living.
Inside the workshop, she unzipped the garment bag and hung the gown on a hook Mick had put into an overhead beam for some purpose and turned to set up her tripod beside the workbench.
And that’s when she saw the rocking chair.