Chapter 25
It was Bree’s father who asked to speak to Pax. The first post-trouble workshop had just wrapped up when he came into the back room and found Pax.
“Got a minute?” Mr. Leeland asked. Pax immediately nodded and followed the old man to the small office at the back of the store.
Mr. Leeland settled into the desk chair, comfortable in his own territory, and looked at Pax with the steady brown eyes that had been reading people across his counter for decades. He didn’t bother with preamble. He never did.
“You’re staying,” he said plainly.
“Yes, sir.”
“In town. Not just until your leg heals or the trouble passes.” He tilted his head slightly.
“Yes, sir. I’m staying for good.”
Mr. Leeland nodded. “And you’ve claimed my daughter. Your Alpha called her family, right there in my store.” There was no accusation in it. He was laying out the facts the way he laid out a project before starting it. “Your people mean something specific by that word, I gather. Mate.”
“We mean forever,” Pax said. “She’s it for me, Mr. Leeland. There’s no version of my life from here on that isn’t built around her.”
“That’s what I thought.” He folded his hands. “Good. Then you should hear some things.”
Pax waited.
“What happened to your family in South America. What your people lost.” Mr. Leeland held his gaze.
“I know a little of it. More than your father thinks I know, probably. I’ve been watching that community on the edge of this town since before you were born, Paxton.
I know what survivors look like, and I know what coming here, away from everything they knew, cost them.
” He paused. “Herman told me once, years ago, that his boys were going to bring some of it back. That you and Ari would be the ones who went out and came home with what the Clan needed.”
Pax kept quiet.
“Herman was right. Not about how it would happen, maybe. But he was right about you and Ari being the ones who would restore your people.” Mr. Leeland’s regard was steady.
“You’re doing it. The workshops, the Clan kids coming through this store, and what Rodrigo told me about the young people learning real skills and finding real work.
That’s all on you, Pax. It all started with you coming through my back door because you needed a hinge. ”
“I think it started with your daughter putting me on the stair lift,” Pax joked.
Mr. Leeland’s mouth moved. Not quite a smile, but the start of one. “She has always been better at starting things than she lets on.” He looked at the wall, at the shelves he’d built himself. “My wife started this store. Did you know that?”
“No, sir.”
“Eleanor’s Hardware. That was the name on the sign for the first dozen years.
She was the one who saw what it could be.
I just kept it going after she was gone.
Bree keeps it going too, but Bree has her mother’s eye.
She sees what it could become.” He paused.
“I think she’s starting to see it more clearly now, with your people in it. ”
Pax thought about the town map on the counter, and Bree’s pencil marks, and her talking through the Clan’s economic future while he’d been memorizing license plates.
“She sees more than she says,” he agreed.
“Always has.” Mr. Leeland met his gaze directly.
“I’m telling you these things because I want you to understand what you’re taking on.
Not just her. The store. What this place is to her, and what it was to her mother.
She would never say any of this to you herself.
She’s too practical for her own good, sometimes.
She’d give you the square footage and the profit margins. ”
Pax almost smiled. “She would.”
“So I’m telling you.” Mr. Leeland leaned forward slightly.
“She stayed here for me. She’s told herself different stories about that over the years, but the truth is she stayed because I needed her, and she is not the kind of person who leaves when she’s needed.
That’s not a burden. She loves this place.
She loves the work. She’d have come back eventually regardless.
But I know she gave things up. She made choices that were about me more than about her.
” His eyes never wavered. “I need to know that you know that.”
“I know it,” Pax said.
“And I need to know you’re going to make sure she stops doing it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she’ll shrink herself for you if you let her.
” Mr. Leeland said it flat out. “She’s done it for me.
She’ll do it for anyone she loves if they don’t pay attention.
She’ll file down her own edges and tell herself she chose to do so.
” He held Pax’s gaze. “Don’t let her. Whatever she wants to do with this store, with her ideas about your Clan and the town, with whatever she’s building in her head that she hasn’t told you about yet, make room for it.
Make sure she knows she’s allowed to spread her wings and grow. ”
Pax thought about that. This old man had just handed him the operating manual for the most important person in his life, and he knew it for the gift it was.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I understand. You have my word.”
Mr. Leeland studied him a moment longer, then sat back, and the formality went out of the room.
“You and that brother of yours were good to this store when you were young,” he said. “You worked hard, you didn’t complain, and you showed up on time.” He paused. “I’ve always thought of you as mine, in a way. Both of you. The boys I didn’t have.”
The words landed gently, but hit deep.
“Herman and Estelle have been good neighbors,” Mr. Leeland went on. “Good people. This Clan of yours, the ones I’ve met, they’re good people, too. I’m glad you’re staying. I’m glad she’s got someone worth staying for.” He paused. “Don’t make me regret saying that.”
“I won’t, sir,” Pax said.
“Good.” The old man rose, his old bones creaking a little.
Pax stood too. “Mr. Leeland.”
The old man looked back at him.
“Thank you.”
Mr. Leeland put his hand briefly on Pax’s shoulder, the same gesture of care as before, the same brief pressure, then went back to his chair at the front of the store.
Pax stood in the little office, warmed all the way through.
Then he went back to work, his heart both lighter and fuller at the same time.
He told Bree a little about his conversation with her father that evening. Not all of it. Some of it belonged to him and her father alone. But he told her what her father had said about Eleanor’s Hardware, and about her mother’s eye for what things could be, and Bree went quiet for a long time.
“He talked about Mom,” she finally said.
“Yeah.”
“He doesn’t do that often.” She gazed at the desert.
“He loved her so much, and losing her cost him so completely. He protects the memories now. He keeps them very close. I think he’s worried about upsetting me, sometimes, if he talks about her, but it’s really the opposite.
I didn’t have enough time with her and sometimes I want to talk about her and hear what it was like when she was still here. ”
“He told me because he wanted me to understand what I was taking on,” Pax said. “He wanted me to know what the store means to you both.”
She turned to him. “He said that?”
“He was very thorough about it.”
“He worries about me, though he never says so,” she admitted.
“I know.”
“He thinks I’ve made myself small in order to stay here with him.”
Pax said nothing.
She turned to him. “Did he say that?”
“He said you’d file down your own edges for the people you love, if they let you.” He held her gaze. “He told me not to let you.”
She absorbed that, and he watched the knowledge move over her lovely face.
“He’s not wrong,” she said finally. “I have done that. Not with you, but I have done it on occasion.” She looked down at her hands.
“I had plans once. I’ve told myself for years that I chose not to follow them.
That I wanted exactly what I have. And I do want what I have.
That’s true. But there were things I put aside. ”
“Tell me about them,” he said.
“Just like that?”
“Just like that,” he replied, nodding.
She thought about it. He waited.
“There’s a program at the university,” she said slowly.
“Business and community development. There’s a track for rural economic sustainability, how small businesses and community organizations rebuild a local economy after it’s been hollowed out.
” She paused. “I looked into it years ago, before Mom got sick. I meant to forget all about it.”
“But you haven’t forgotten,” he said.
She held his gaze. “No. I haven’t.”
“Then we figure out how to make it work.” He said it simply, because it was just that simple.
“The store isn’t going anywhere. Your father isn’t going anywhere.
You’ve got Tomás, and a dozen Clan members who can learn how to stock shelves and run deliveries, and a mate who fixes things.
” He took her hand. “You don’t have to put things aside anymore, Bree. Not ever again.”
She looked at him for a long time, fully open, no guard left at all.
“My father told you to say that,” she said.
“Your father told me to make room. The words are mine.”
She laced her fingers through his and held on, and she didn’t say anything else for a while. She didn’t need to.