Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
“I can’t do this. I don’t know which ones to pick. They all have something wrong with them. I’m not a professional. And this is stupid.” Lara narrowly resisted kicking one of the canvases propped up against the wall of the attic.
Grandma surveyed her from the door. “Is it stupid if it gets Ty to take that job we both know would serve him well?”
Lara wanted to stick her tongue out. Stamp her foot. Do something childish in response, but Grandma was always one step ahead of her.
“Don’t be a petulant child, Lara. It doesn’t suit you.”
Lara wished it did. She wanted to throw a bit of a tantrum. Because she felt foolish and nervous and bad. But she’d made a deal, and if it got Ty to consider that coaching job… She’d suck it up.
But maybe she’d suck it up petulantly.
“I’m giving you fifteen more minutes, and then I’m sending Ty up to just grab the first five he finds.”
Lara scowled at Grandma’s retreating back. What would she care if Ty grabbed a random five? None of them were good enough to sell.
Sure, the rock scene she’d done the other day with Jack on the rock was pretty enough. Some tourist might like the depiction of their vacation spot, and the man out of time in the middle.
Thinking of it from that perspective was a little easier.
A tourist who’d come west for cowboys might like the one she’d done last year depicting Clementine riding her horse, her white hair flowing behind her.
And someone who liked small town history might think the one of Floyd’s famous speech on the courthouse steps, or Josie in her flapper girl finery hanging out a window was fun.
Lissy, pregnant and weeping wasn’t fun, but the emotion in the painting was good.
..considering she wasn’t a professional.
As Lara stepped back to survey the five, she realized they were all her ghosts from the museum. It almost made her smile.
They weren’t perfect depictions of the real-life people she’d taken a hand at putting into pictures. Lara had imagined and painted them in her own right and imagination, but still, the paintings embodied the stories she’d grown up hearing and telling at the museum.
There was no way they were worthy of being displayed and sold in a gallery, but they weren’t embarrassing. The gallery would likely give her a polite no and then she could say she’d tried, and Ty would never be able to bother her about it again.
As if thinking of him conjured him, he appeared at the top of the stairs. “Mary Lou said I’m supposed to prod you along. Hey, these are great.”
She only grunted in response. He sounded genuinely pleased, but he didn’t know anything about art. Lots of people could paint what they saw. There was nothing particularly special about what she did, and that was fine. It was a hobby. A release. It wasn’t meant to be something to stress over.
“You can grab those three. I’ll carry these two,” she told him, probably sounding a little too irritated to be fair, but she wasn’t feeling particularly fair.
They hefted the canvases down the stairs and out to Lara’s car.
Which made everything feel ten times more real.
And ten times more annoying. Once he closed the trunk, she turned to face him, hands fisted on her waist. “I still don’t know why I should go up there now when you haven’t had your meeting yet. ”
“I’m meeting Mr. Stolt up at the school at four. We’ll both have our mutual pain and suffering over with by tonight. Now, I’ve got a reservation for six-thirty, so make sure you’re ready.”
“A reservation?”
“Sure. It’s a celebration. It should be special.”
The idea of special left her…unsteady. Unsure.
But this was all to get him to meet with Mr. Stolt. She’d suffer through whatever unsteadiness to make sure he ended up where he belonged, and she really believed he’d be just the best coach in the world. He’d experienced too much and was too good and kind and great with people not to be the best.
“You want me to go with you?” he asked, gesturing at the driver’s seat. “Moral support?”
“No.” No, if she was going to suffer through this, it was going to be on her own without an audience.
“All right, but I need you to promise me something.” He took her by the shoulders, gave her a playful kind of shake, but then his expression…changed, transformed into something more serious. And the hands on her shoulders moved up.
Sliding up her neck to cup her jaw. Causing a few personal earthquakes as her body registered the gentle, intimate touch.
“You don’t have to be Miss Confident, but don’t sell yourself short.” He said it earnest, his big, calloused hands on her face. Again, somehow. They weren’t unaffectionate, but this was…different than usual.
Everything felt different than usual.
She stared into his blue eyes, that same old feeling she’d long ignored taking up residence in her chest. A fluttering kind of yearning. She was reminded of that moment in the museum the other day. She’d been so sure…
And it didn’t matter. Wrong or right or something in between, it did not matter because this was not what she wanted. This change. This different life. Even if her body was trying to tell her otherwise.
Her body didn’t seem to understand that too much was changing. Too much felt…unsteady and different and out of her control. She couldn’t survive under the weight of it.
So she stepped away from him. Turned away from him. That’s all it took. Just a little distance.
Of course that distance wouldn’t last, because as she got into the driver’s seat, Ty said, “Good luck! I’ll see you tonight.”
Ty left the meeting with Mr. Stolt uncomfortable and out of sorts. Mr. Stolt had acted like Ty was the Second Coming. No matter how often Ty had reminded the principal that a few hitless games in the majors didn’t mean anything, Mr. Stolt had argued and fawned all over him.
It was disorienting.
Nothing was official—there were some hoops he’d have to jump through in order to be employed by the school—but they were easily jumped.
The problem was…did he want to jump them? Mary Lou and Lara wanted him to, but what did he want? Aside from to make them happy.
He’d lived his life trying to make someone else be happy or proud or anything positive, and now that he was letting that go, he realized it was a hell of a lot harder to make a decision when it wasn’t in response to an overwhelmingly controlling force in his life.
On his drive back to the cottage, he tried to ignore what everyone else thought and focus on himself. Picture himself…coaching a team. The same team he’d played for all those years ago.
High school ball had been probably his favorite time. His dad hadn’t been able to exert much influence there, so it had really been about the coaches and the teammates and the baseball.
Mr. Crooks, the varsity coach at the time, had been his favorite coach. Tough but kind. High expectations, low intensity.
Ty could picture being a coach like that.
If he really thought about it, really settled into the realities of it, he could admit to himself that the idea of it…
excited him. He’d spent a lot of time failing, yes, but that meant he knew how to usher these kids through their own inevitable failures—because baseball was a game of failing and coming back and giving it another go anyway.
He… He actually really liked the idea of being the adult in the room who encouraged the kids to have grit, without tearing them down, without instilling fear or shame. He could be a positive impact on someone’s life, beyond just baseball, just as Mary Lou had said.
And if he didn’t like it? If it sucked? What was the harm? He’d quit. He’d find something else. Failure wasn’t fatal.
God, he was still alive after failing just about everything, wasn’t he?
The coaching position wasn’t a full-time job, though Mr. Stolt had mentioned some support staff openings at the school that he could potentially apply for. Maybe if he got one of those positions and liked working in the school, he could go back to school, get a teaching degree or something.
He’d been careful with his money—wanting to differentiate himself from his father. He could take his time to find the right thing. There was no driving need to have it all figured out now. If there was one thing his life had taught him it was that he was resourceful, flexible.
He pulled up to Mary Lou’s cottage. Stared at it. In a lot of ways, this was home. At least a homebase. But he was nearly thirty, and if he was serious about staying, he needed his own home. His own place.
Hell, a bed instead of a couch.
He could start looking at rentals, but it felt too temporary. The interview with Mr. Stolt had brought home the fact that he wanted some permanence. He wanted to plant some roots and watch them grow.
He could maybe afford a downpayment on a house—it’d deplete his savings, but if he got one of the support staff jobs on top of the coaching position, he could swing it.
Because he wasn’t going anywhere this time around.
No matter what.
With that thought firm in his mind, he got out of the car and marched into the house. It was quiet when he entered, but there were a pair of dress slacks and a button-down shirt laying over the back of the couch—his clothes. Perfectly pressed.
“Ty? Are you back?” Lara was fastening an earring to her ear as she walked in, concentrating on that. “Grandma was adamant we get dressed up,” she told him as she came into view. “She rummaged around in your bags and ironed that. I hope you don’t mind.”
He wasn’t sure any of her words penetrated, because she was…
stunning. He was used to seeing her in her museum outfits—skirts and sweaters, or her more casual wear for beach walking or grabbing a pizza.
She always looked pretty or beautiful. She always looked like a breath of fresh air to him, so he didn’t know what struck him as different.
Maybe all these choices he was making, and that her hair was curled, and whatever makeup she’d put on made her look like some mystical ocean siren. The dress she wore in a pretty pink that seemed to tease out the reddish hue of her hair skimmed the lines of her body, and he…
He was damn tired of pretending. “You look beautiful.”
She paused a little, as if surprised by the compliment. She didn’t meet his gaze. “Well, you said celebration and Grandma was insistent, so…”
“It’s perfect.”
It was going to all be perfect.