Chapter Fourteen
Beth
Caleb Monroe walked back into my life on a Tuesday afternoon, three weeks after I cut my hair, smelling like sawdust and looking for flowers for a dead man.
I heard the bell, and I came out of the cooler wiping my hands on my apron with the customer smile already loaded, and there he was—filling up my doorway the way he always had, broad through the shoulders, sawdust still ground into the creases of his knuckles from whatever he'd been tearing out at his granddad's that morning.
For a second neither of us said anything.
He looked at me, and his face did this slow, surprised, warming thing, and he said, "Well.
Look at you. You went and cut all your hair off. "
"I did." I touched the back of my neck, which still felt naked even after three weeks. "You came back to town."
"Few months ago, yeah." He stepped in and let the door swing shut. "I'm fixing up my granddad's place out on Cedar Lane. He passed in the spring."
"Oh, Caleb. I'm sorry. I liked your granddad." I had, too—he used to come to the farmers' market and tell me my prices were criminal and buy a bunch of sunflowers anyway, every Saturday, for fifteen years, for a wife who'd been gone a decade. "He still doing the sunflowers, right up to the end?"
Caleb's whole face cracked open at that, the surprised grateful look of a man who didn't expect anyone to have kept the small true things.
"Right up to the end," he said. "Which is—that's actually why I'm here.
It's his birthday Thursday. I wanted to take something out to him, and I figured—" He shrugged, suddenly a little awkward, a big man made shy by a small errand.
"I figured he'd want them from you. He always said you were the only honest florist in three counties. "
So I made Earl Monroe a bunch of sunflowers, the good tall ones, and I wouldn't let Caleb pay for them, and we argued about that the way you argue about something that isn't really about the money, and while I wrapped them in brown paper we talked.
I should tell you, because I've been honest with you about everything else: there was no flutter.
None. I want to be clear about that, because of what people in this town decided later, and because of what it did to a certain someone when he heard.
Caleb Monroe is a good-looking man—he was a good-looking boy and he aged into it the way some men get to—and once, a long time ago, in our early twenties, I'd loved him in the soft, low-stakes way you love your first serious person.
We'd been together a couple of years and we'd ended it gently, the way you end a thing at that age when you both quietly know it's not the thing but neither of you can say exactly why.
No blood. No villain. Just two kids who grew in slightly different directions and were kind about it.
He'd left after, and made a real life of it somewhere else—he was a veterinarian now, which wasn't the surprise it might sound like, since Caleb was the boy who once made me pull the car over on the highway to carry a snapping turtle the size of a hubcap out of the road—and now here he was, back, picking up volunteer shifts at the animal clinic on the county road while he put his grandfather's old house back together with his own two hands.
And what I felt, standing at my own counter wrapping sunflowers across from him three years later, was not a flutter.
It was something better than a flutter, and quieter, and I didn't recognize it for a second because I'd forgotten the feeling existed.
It was the absence of bracing. For twenty minutes my shoulders came down from around my ears and my stomach didn't drop once and I didn't have to read anybody's face to find out how I was allowed to feel.
It was just easy. He was just easy. After the months I'd had, easy felt like the most beautiful thing a person could be.
"Can I ask you something," I said, taping off the paper. "You've been back a few months. Why's this your first time in my shop?"
He scratched the back of his neck. Looked at the sunflowers instead of me. "Honestly?"
"Honestly."
"'Cause we kind of stopped talking, you and me.
After you started seeing the Vargas guy.
" He said it without an ounce of accusation, just laying it down flat like a board he was measuring.
"I figured a fella doesn't go hanging around his ex-girlfriend's flower shop when she's got a serious thing going.
Didn't want to make it weird for you. So I just—kept my distance.
Drove out to the place on Route 9 a couple times when I needed something, if you can believe it. "
He'd been buying from Marigold Lane. To spare me an awkward feeling. The decency of it landed somewhere under my ribs and ached.
"Caleb." I had to put the scissors down.
"I owe you an apology, then, because I think I did the same thing from my end, and I never said so.
When I started seeing Alonzo I sort of—I pulled back from you.
On purpose. Stopped texting, stopped finding reasons to run into you.
And it wasn't that I was avoiding you, exactly, or that I didn't—" I stopped, restarted.
"It's that we'd dated. And even though it'd been almost a year since we broke up, once I was with somebody serious it just didn't feel right to me to keep that much of you in my life.
Like it wasn't fair to him. So I did what I thought was the right thing, and the right thing turned out to be losing a friend I liked, and I'm sorry for it. "
He nodded slowly, the way he nodded at a wall he was deciding whether to keep. "That's a stand-up way to think about it," he said. "Not everybody'd bother."
And that—not everybody'd bother—is when the laugh came up out of me. It wasn't a nice laugh. It was short and a little bit cracked and it surprised both of us.
"What," he said.
"Nothing." I shook my head, smiling at the brown paper.
"It's just—the irony's a little thick today, is all.
I gave up a perfectly good friendship because I thought that's what you do when you commit to someone.
Hold the line. Keep some distance from the people who used to matter that way.
" I looked up at him. "Turns out the man I was holding the line for never read the same rulebook.
Kept his own old friend nice and close the whole time.
So." I lifted one shoulder. "Mine was a real generous gesture, in hindsight. Wish I'd known it was optional."
Whatever Caleb had or hadn't heard around town, he had the grace not to make me explain it.
He just looked at me for a moment with something steady and a little sad in his eyes, and he said, "His loss, Beth.
I mean that as plainly as a man can mean a thing.
" And then, because he is who he is and he could see I was about three seconds from my eyes going hot over a counter at four in the afternoon, he changed the subject and saved us both.
"So listen," he said, "since I'm in here anyway.
The granddad's house. I've got it about half torn apart, but I'm putting it back the way it ought to be—and the front of it's just bare and sad right now, window boxes all rotted out, the bed along the porch gone to weeds.
I keep thinking it needs—I don't know. Living things.
The kind of thing that makes a place look like somebody loves it again.
" He finally looked at me straight. "That's your whole job, isn't it?
Making a place look loved? Could I hire you for that?
Properly, this time. I'll pay full freight and I won't argue. "
I thought about it for about half a second, which is how long it takes to recognize a good idea.
"Yeah," I said. "I'd like that. I do a lot of weddings and funerals; it'd be nice to do something that just—keeps growing, for once."
"Good." He grinned, and it was a nice grin, an easy grin, a grin with nothing underneath it that I'd have to brace for.
"And while we're at it—" He nodded past me, at the cooler, where the door had been catching on its own frame for the better part of a year, so that I had to hip-check it shut forty times a day.
"That door's hung wrong. Has been since I walked in; I've been watching you fight it.
Frame's racked. Take me twenty minutes and a level.
Let me fix it. Friend rate." He held up a hand before I could open my mouth.
"Which is free, and that's not negotiable either, so don't start. "
And reader, I want to flag this for you, because at the time I genuinely did not: a man had just walked into my shop, noticed the one small broken thing I'd quietly been living with for a year, and offered—easily, without being asked, like it was nothing—to set it right.
I'd spent two years with a man who could fix anything, who fixed things for the entire world, and my cooler door had stuck the whole time, and he had never once seen it.
I didn't think about that, standing there. I just said, "Okay. Thank you, Caleb." And he came back Thursday with a level, and fixed my door in twenty minutes, and took his granddad his sunflowers, and that was the beginning of it.
The friendship, I mean. Only the friendship.
I need you to hear me on that, because by Friday the Hartsong Buzz had me practically engaged to him—Sherry Dukes saw his truck parked out front two days running and apparently that's all it takes—and I'm sure that by the weekend it had reached a certain kitchen on the other side of town, and I'm sure of what it did there, and we'll get to that.
But that part's not mine to tell yet. The true part, my part, is just this: that fall, for the first time since the parking lot, somebody walked into my life who made me feel like good, easy company instead of a problem to be managed—and asked for nothing back but flowers and the chance to fix what was broken.
I wasn't in love with him. I wasn't anywhere close.
I was a long, long way from in love with anybody, and I had a lot of crying left to do over a different man before I'd be fit for it.
But I'd forgotten my shoulders could come down from around my ears.
It turns out that's a thing worth remembering.