Chapter 17 #2
It was larger than Fern’s but had the same scooped oak seat, shaped arms, and gently curved back.
The piece looked finished, but the wood was still raw.
It hadn’t been oiled yet. Which meant it had been built recently.
Only Arlo and Dillon came in here, and Arlo hadn’t been here near enough to have created this beautiful piece.
She walked over and put her hand on the back of the chair. The wood was silky smooth under her palm. The joins were tight. It was sized for a woman about her height.
She sat down in it very carefully, and it fit like it had been measured for her. Even though its curves were delicate, feminine, it felt solid. Made to last for generations. She gripped the curved ends of the chair’s arms and made herself breathe.
Dillon had been building her a rocking chair.
He’d come out here, night after night, to build her a chair that would sit on her porch beside her daughter’s.
But he hadn’t been here since the day her mother called. The chair was almost but not quite done, and he hadn’t been back to finish it. Was he ever coming back to oil it and seal it?
Tessa looked up at the beam where she had hung the gown, and at the window where the morning sunlight was just peeking through, and suddenly knew, with a cold, accurate clarity, that he was not planning to finish the chair. Ever.
He’s not going to finish it because he thinks I’m leaving.
He thinks I’m leaving, and he’s protecting his heart against that.
He would rather lose me now than lose me later.
She sat in the unfinished chair for a long time, embraced by the work of his loving hands while she absorbed the enormity of having lost his heart.
She photographed the gown.
She did it because it needed doing, and because she had learned, at some point in the last few years, that the work itself kept her going when nothing else could.
She did not look at the rocking chair while she worked. The chair belonged to the man who’d stopped building it, and she was not going to presume to touch it again.
She got the shots needed, packed up the gown, broke down the tripod, and carried everything back to the house. Arlo was on his porch across their adjoining pastures, with Brown Dog at his feet. He lifted one finger off the arm of the rocker. She lifted hers back.
Ten minutes later—about the length of time it took him to decide he had a pretext—he wandered over to her place.
“Seen a yellow-handled screwdriver anywhere around the shop?”
“No.”
“Hm.” He stood on the porch steps. “Figured.”
“Did you actually lose a screwdriver?”
“Been a while since I last saw it.”
“How long?”
“Oh . . . twenty years or so.”
She laughed despite herself, which was, she understood, the point.
She also understood that Arlo did not wander over with such a thin excuse unless he’d decided she was in need of company.
Maybe Fern had whispered to him, from wherever she was.
Maybe he’d watched enter the workshop with a spring in her step and leave without it.
Maybe he had simply looked at her face and known.
“Sit a spell if you’ve got the time, Arlo.”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
He sat in the wicker chair, and she took the rocker, her knees sticking up a little and her elbow not hitting the arms just right. Dillon’s rocker fit her so much better than this one.
For a while, they didn’t talk.
They just looked at the lake. A pair of red-winged blackbirds argued belligerently in the cattails at the edge of the water. Behind the barn, Bonnie and Clyde honked at something.
“Pretty day,” Arlo said eventually.
“Yes.”
“Willows have greened up nicely.”
“They have.”
A pause.
“You know what I like best about spring out here?” he said.
“How loud it is. Back east, spring snuck up on a soul. You’d be walkin’ to work and notice there were buds on a tree and then leaves.
Out here, spring arrives.. Blackbirds. Frogs.
Critters poppin’ out of holes. Like Spring just pops up and yells, Here I am, across the whole valley.
“Mm.”
“It’s the only honest season in the year.”
“The others aren’t honest?” she asked in mild surprise
“Summer’s shows off. Fall lies about what’s coming. Winter’s a liar all the way through—insists it’ll last forever.” Arlo rubbed Brown Dog’s ears. “Spring just shows up. Says what it is. Don’t apologize for itself.”
“Arlo.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Did you know about the chair?”
He didn’t pretend not to understand. “I showed him all he needed to know to make it.”
“When did he start it?”
“’Bout a month ago. He was out there four, five nights a week. Took his time. Boy does good work.”
“Why did he stop?”
Arlo looked at her for a long time before saying, “You’d have to ask him that.”
“He isn’t answering his phone and hasn’t stopped by all week..”
“Mm.”
She hesitated, then blurted, “Do you think—”
Arlo held up a hand, but gently, the way a man stops a skittish animal.
“I don’t think as much as I just watch. I watched Fern for sixty-some-odd years.
Never once saw her be mean. I’ve watched Dillon ever since he moved to town.
Never once seen him let down the folks who depend on him.
And I’ve watched you since the day you first showed up in Cobbler Cove.
Watched you and Mick make a life together.
Watched you lose him. Watched when you thought you were gonna die of the grief, and I watched your daughter save your life.
I’ve got a lot of watchin’ under my belt. ”
“And?”
“And I think Dillon Steele is a fine man who has decided, because of something a mean, fool-headed woman once told him, that he’s not allowed to be happy. And I think you’ve spent her whole life not knowing who you are, but I also think you’ve almost got it figured out.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you’re sittin’ still.”
Tessa blinked at him.
“Two months ago,” Arlo said, “if you’d had a big decision starin’ you in the face, you’d have taken action.
You’d would’ve packed the car. Or hired a lawyer.
Or flown to New York to confront your mother.
You’d’ve done something. But instead, you’re sittin’ on a porch with an old man, lookin’ at a lake.
Which is a fine way of making up your mind about something, by the way.
But you’re a completely different person than the one who moved into this farm against her will two months ago. .”
She didn’t trust herself to answer.
Arlo hauled himself up out of the wicker chair. His knees creaked, and he grunted a little as he got his limbs moving again..
“I’ll be on my porch,” he said. “In case you need to ask me anything else.”
“Arlo?”
“Mm?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For coming over. For being here. And for being family.”
He waved a dismissive hand, the way he always did, and shuffled back to his house, Brown Dog trailing after him.
She sat on the porch until the sun had moved past noon. Then she went inside, put the kettle on, and called Judith.
Her mother answered on the second ring. “Tessa. I’m glad you called.”
“I’m calling to tell you no.”
A beat.
“No to what, dear?”
“No to Whitmore. No to moving back east. No to the trust, if that’s what Father’s will really says. No to living close to you again. No to all of it.”
“I see.” Judith’s voice did not change. “May I ask how you intend to support yourself and my granddaughter?”
“You may not.”
“Tessa—”
“My current business endeavors are profitable. My mother-in-law left her farm to Makayla with me overseeing it until she’s older. I have work I enjoy doing, I have a home to live in, and I have a child who has been trying for eleven years to tell me who she is. I’m going to listen to her now.”
“This is very brave of you.”
“No, Mother. It isn’t. Brave is what Arlo does when he sits on his porch alone every day of his life and doesn’t let the grief of losing his best friend stop him from noticing when a neighbor needs a visit.
Brave is what Dillon does when he reaches his arm inside a laboring cow up to the shoulder to save a calf nobody else thinks will make it.
Brave is what Makayla does when she puts on pink cowboy boots and a cowboy hat after I spent eleven years dressing her in ballet flats.
What I’m doing isn’t brave. It’s just long overdue. ”
A very long pause on her mother’s end.
“You sound like your father used to,” Judith said.
“Before what?”
“Before he learned better than to go against me.”
“Maybe he didn’t learn better. Maybe he just got tired and gave up on himself.”
Judith did not reply to that.
“Goodbye, Mother.”
“Tessa, wait—”
She hung up.
She stood at the kitchen holding the phone, her hand shaking, but she was also—she realized, with some surprise—smiling.
Hamlet, who had followed her to the kitchen in hopes of scoring a snack, nosed her ankle gently.
“I did it,” she told him in a wondering voice.
He grunted skeptically.
“Yes, I still have to figure out the money. And yes, I still have to talk to Dillon. Thank you for managing my expectations.” She handed him a grape from the fruit bowl on the counter.
He grunted again as if everything was settled to his satisfaction and wandered off to resume his midday nap.
She set the phone down on the counter and called Reno next.
“I’m not selling the farm, and I’m not going back east. I said no to my mother and I’m saying no to whatever the oil company tries to offer me.
I would like you to cause them as much trouble as you possibly can and cost them as much money in lawyer’s fees as you can force them to rack up.
Be an almighty pain in the neck and make them bleed. ”
There was a beat of silence on the line.
Then Reno said, very mildly, “Ma’am, yes, ma’am.”
She laughed again. Twice in one day. She was going to have to start keeping score.
Tessa was sitting on the porch step when the school bus dropped off Makayla after school. She waved to the driver and ran up the drive with Brown Dog, who’d met her at the road, today.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, sweetie. How was school?”
“Fine.” Makayla sat down on the step beside her and asked carefully, “Are you still working through something?”
“I figured a bunch of it out today.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Some of both. But mostly good.”
Makayla leaned he head against Tessa’s shoulder, and Tessa looped her arm around her daughter’s waist. They sat there in silence, watching the light change over the valley, shifting from the bright light of afternoon into the golden hour that preceded sunset.
Across the lake, Sik-sika Mountain was faded from gray to blue and then to purple.
After a while, Makayla said in a small voice, “Are we staying?”
“Yes, baby. We’re staying.”
Makayla nodded without moving her head off Tessa’s shoulder. “Good.”
They sat like that for a long time.
Whereas Mick had been all eager energy—constant motion, endless noise, a life built on momentum that had kept Tessa from ever having to sit still long enough to notice what she wanted—Dillon had a stillness about him she had soaked up like a parched plant soaked up rain.
She didn’t know where he was tonight, and she didn’t know whether he was going to let her say what she wanted to say to him, and she didn’t know how or if the not finished rocker in the workshop was going to find its way onto this porch.
But she knew it belonged here.
She knew that much.
The small rocker sat empty at the end behind them. Since they’d arrived, it had been the only good chair out here. It had felt incomplete the whole time, as if waiting for something.
It still felt that way. As if it was waiting for a version of life here that hadn’t quite arrived yet. This porch needed three chairs. For three people. A family.
A pair of mallards skidding in for a landing on the lake. A logging truck rumbled past and then it went quiet again.
Makayla’s breathing slowed against her shoulder. She was almost asleep.
Tessa looked out at the water and the mountains and the willows that were every color of green at once, and she thought, very quietly, to no one in particular and also to one person specifically—
I’m trying, Gramps. I’m really trying. I think I’m finally figuring out how to be brave. For me.