Chapter 15
Fifteen
H is mouth opened, but she could see him rolling it around in his head. Could see him realizing that what he was doing was actually gratifying himself, and yes, he was showing love, but he was showing it in a way that made himself feel good.
“So, I think I get it. I’m saying ‘I love you,’ and you’re hearing…nothing?” he said, sounding uncertain and then puttering off at the end. Like he wasn’t sure.
“Yeah. I can see that you’re doing it because you love me, but it doesn’t mean as much to me as if you would have come home from my mother’s funeral and said, ‘I’ve taken a two-week vacation, would you like to go somewhere, or would you like to just sit here on the couch together?’”
“You really wanted me around for two weeks after your mother died? I felt like you got irritated if I spent more than five minutes in your presence.”
“I was irritated. Sad. Just little things brought memories back, making me cry. I wasn’t crying because of you. I was crying because I felt okay and comfortable in front of you.”
“I wondered about that, because you couldn’t shed a tear at the funeral. It was weird that you didn’t cry at all, and then we got home and were alone together and you couldn’t stop. It kinda made me feel like it was my fault that you were crying.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel like anything was your fault.”
She did understand how he might have gotten confused. And maybe if she had told him why she was crying, that would have alleviated some of his confusion.
“If you had known that I wanted you to stay, I’m pretty sure you would have stayed. But what I really wanted was for you to know that I wanted you to stay without me telling you that I wanted you to stay.”
“That is messed up,” he said, and despite the seriousness, to her anyway, of the subject matter, she laughed.
“It’s not that hard. I feel like it says that you care about me if you know what I want without me having to tell you.”
He took a deep breath then and blew it out.
She waited for a bit, and then she said, “When you see a problem at work, the problem doesn’t come up to you and say, ‘hey, this is what the problem is, and this is what you need to do to solve it.’ No, you have to think about that problem, you have to figure it out, you have to try something and maybe that doesn’t work, so then you try something else, and then you finally figure out a solution, and you’re pretty pleased and proud of yourself.
It was fun for you, you were engaged, you cared about it, you showed that it was important to you by sitting there and figuring it out until it was solved. ”
“Yeah,” he said slowly, cautiously, maybe because he heard the anger in her voice. She tried to modulate it.
“But when you see me, you see me crying, you’re like ‘oh, I gotta get away from that, I gotta go to work and get away,’ and you don’t think ‘hey, I need to figure out what’s wrong.
I need to figure out what I need to do.’ You don’t spend one extra second thinking about anything that you could do for me.
You just go bury your head in things you enjoy and expect me to take care of myself. ”
“Well, you are an adult,” he started.
“And you’re my husband. What’s the point in having a husband if I don’t have a partner?
Someone who cares about me? Someone who sees a problem, and instead of trying to figure out what he can do to alleviate the situation, he just flees.
Wouldn’t I be better off here in Raspberry Ridge, opening my mother’s bakery and taking care of myself, since I’m an adult? ”
There. That was really what she wanted to say. There was no point in her staying married, because he didn’t care. That’s what she saw.
He blinked. And then nodded. And then, she knew he was thinking about what she’d said, because he said, “Is it cheating if I ask someone for help?”
She wanted to cry. And then she remembered sitting on the porch with Skyler, who’d helped her open her eyes.
“Kind of. After all, if you were figuring out a problem at work, you’d spend a little bit of time on it, but you might call someone and say, ‘hey, have you ever run into this before,’ and they’d give you a hand.
So… I guess that’s still putting some effort into it.
Okay. So asking for help is a little bit cheating, but okay.
” She huffed out a laugh despite herself and then shook her head. “This is not funny.”
“You’re the one that’s laughing,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and putting his hands up like he was innocent.
“You’re the one that made a joke.”
“You’re the one who said you couldn’t decide whether you preferred intelligence or a sense of humor, and you were glad I came with both.”
“That was then. Not in the middle of a serious discussion. I want your intelligence, and your sense of humor can come… Actually, you’re right.
A sense of humor and intelligence are equally important, and when you have intelligence along with a sense of humor, sometimes it makes a sense of humor even better.
” She really did like his sense of humor.
She kind of forgot about it. She hadn’t been on the receiving end of it for quite a while.
“I was afraid to make jokes after your mother died. I…saw you crying and thought you wouldn’t appreciate my jokes.”
“I think I needed your jokes more than ever then. And when have I ever gotten seriously mad at you for making me laugh? Even if it was a bad time?”
“True.”
“I’m sad about the miscarriages too.” She said it, then looked at him.
He looked down. “I feel really helpless about that. I can’t fix that.
Just like I couldn’t fix your mother dying.
I want to fix things. I don’t want to sit around and think about them.
And… I understand that you want me to sit and hold you, but do you understand that the same way that me not holding you makes you sad, me having to sit and do nothing is hard for me? Right?”
“Sometimes I do hard things for you. Don’t you remember that time you had me dangling off the top of the ladder, right beside those live electrical wires, when you were trying to get that first big security system in, before you had any kind of decent help or any knowledge about little tricks you can do to avoid that stuff? ”
“I do remember that. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, because I can see you falling backward into those wires, and I think, ‘what in the world was I thinking?’”
“That’s funny. I’ve never lost any sleep over it at all, but you know, there were a few things I did that I didn’t enjoy.” That would be at the top of the list.
“All right. I suppose if you can climb to the top of ladders near live electrical wires, I can sit with you for a while.”
“Gee. Thanks. I really feel like you love me now.” She didn’t even try to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.
But he laughed. He had liked her sense of humor once upon a time too. She wondered if she had completely lost it. Sometimes it felt like it was buried so deep she’d never get to it again.
They stood looking at each other for a bit, and then she looked down at his plate which had been empty for a while.
“If you come by in the morning, I’ll be making sticky buns. But there’s no dessert tonight.”
“I was thinking I probably should start giving up dessert. I thought I might ask Matteo for some advice on getting back in shape.”
“What?” she asked, pausing as she reached out for his plate.
“He asked me for some advice on his business venture, and I told him some hard things. He…seemed appreciative.”
“Hard things? You were nice to him, right? Please tell me that you were nice to him? Because he is my neighbor.”
“Yeah. I just told him straight up my best business advice, and he really seemed to love it, even though it wasn’t easy advice. ”
“You’re scaring me, Cannon.”
“And I’m wondering why you’re so defensive about this dude. He looked to me like he’s more than capable of taking care of himself.”
“I just want you to be nice to him. There wasn’t anything going on between us, and you were already really rude. I just didn’t want you to be rude again.”
Was he jealous? Was that why he was so rude? Or was he just upset that he thought that she was cheating on him?
That was probably it more than anything else.
“I wasn’t rude. I just told him I thought he ought to open a gym rather than a used bookstore.”
“You are brilliant,” she said, meaning it entirely.
“Go ahead, say it again,” he said, grinning a bit.
“You don’t need me to tell you that you’re brilliant. You already know it.”
“I don’t feel that way right now. Not with my wife a thousand miles from where she’s supposed to be, where I want her. And she’s telling me that for a long time I haven’t been a very good husband. That definitely doesn’t make a man feel brilliant.”
“I’m sorry.” She didn’t mean to make him feel bad. But how else was she supposed to get her point across?
And the answer came, which was basically what Skyler had said earlier, that she should have talked to him about it a long time before this.
“Some of this is my fault. I should have talked to you about it.”
“If you would have just told me?—”
“That’s just it. It’s like what we were talking about earlier, when you see a problem in your business.
The problem doesn’t tell you what you need to do as a solution, you have to figure it out.
That means you care enough to take the time to think about it, to see that there is a problem, and to work on fixing it.
I wanted you to do that with me. That, to me, would say that you cared enough about me to see that there was a problem and figure out what you needed to do in order to fix it. ”
“Yeah. I can see that.”
She took the plate off and washed it in the sink while he sat there. She dried it and put it away, along with his fork and glass. And then she scrubbed the skillet.
Finally, when she was done, he was still sitting there. She walked back over in front of him.
“You really don’t need to sit in your truck all night guarding the door. I promise, nothing is going to happen.”
“That’s not a promise you can keep. I’ll sit there.”
She pressed her lips closed, but she didn’t argue anymore, and as much as she wanted to, she did not offer to let him sleep inside.
She…wasn’t sure quite why. They were getting along fine.
They’d hardly ever argued or fought. She just didn’t know what he was going to do.
Didn’t know if he thought that she was worth the effort to try to figure out.
That was what she wanted. To be worth his effort.
But he needed to be worth hers. She needed to make the effort to see what he did as showing her that he loved her, and what if he never changed?
What if she was married to a man who would listen to her talk but wasn’t interested in changing, and he wasn’t going to do what she felt like she needed, although Skyler had had a good point about that too.
If she needed it, God had promised to supply it, so if He hadn’t supplied it, she must not need it.
Still, would she be able to live with a man who wasn’t willing to change?
She hoped she would be. But if Cannon said that he was willing to change, and he wanted her to come back anyway… She’d have to think about that, but she was pretty sure that biblically, she was required to do it.
“Make sure you lock the door after I leave, okay?” Her husband stood at the door, his hand on the knob, looking over his shoulder at her.
He wasn’t making a request exactly, but he wasn’t issuing a command, like he didn’t care whether or not she agreed.
She appreciated the fact that he was making it clear that he wanted it done but wasn’t treating her like she was two.
“Okay,” she said. “Good night.”
He nodded, one lip pulling back, as he looked down. “Good night.” He opened the door and walked out, and she walked over immediately and locked it. Noting that he stood on the other side, watching until she did.
He mouthed “thank you” before he walked to his truck and got back in.
This time, he got in the passenger seat, which she imagined would probably be a little bit more comfortable.
She didn’t watch as he settled in, but instead, she pulled the blind down again and slowly walked back through the bakery, to the steps, and ascended into her apartment.
She felt like she was able to get some of the things that had bothered her out in the open. And she had done what Skyler had suggested, which was tell him instead of expecting him to figure it out.
There was still a part of her that really wanted him to work at having her, the same way she worked at trying to figure out what he wanted.
Like if they were home, she would never have eaten spaghetti and garlic bread.
She would have had meat with it. Because that’s what he wanted.
She would never not set an alarm or not arm the security code because that’s what he wanted, even though she didn’t feel like it was necessary.
And she would always lock the door, because she knew that’s what he wanted.
Maybe she should allow him to work as much as he wanted, because she knew that was what he wanted, but… Shouldn’t there be a line drawn when what he wanted directly interfered with putting his wife ahead of everything except for God?
She wasn’t quite sure the answer to that, and she was tired of thinking about it for one day.