Chapter 26
“All I’m saying is, someone should have warned me. You know I’m lactose intolerant.”
“Babe.” Mallory shook her head at Quinn, affection all over her face. “We told you it was a dairy festival. I’m not sure what you expected.”
“I expected dairy to be present,” Quinn huffed. “Not”—she motioned around the table to RJ’s grilled cheese, Mallory’s cheesy fries, and the beer and cheese soup that Penny was sharing with Zander—“ubiquitous.”
RJ sighed. “We tried. Didn’t we, Pen?”
Penny shrugged and stirred her soup, congealing in her bread bowl. It was a lot of cheese. “We did tell you the Dairy Festival goes hard.”
Zander laughed beside her and drew a hand along her spine. It had been his idea to do “festival espionage” by attending as many festivals in the surrounding counties in one weekend as they could, so Penny and RJ had joined them all at the Dairy Festival after the morning farmer’s market.
Penny knew the espionage plan was Zander’s way of distracting her from her anxiety as their own festival approached.
The nights they slept together, Penny tossed and turned, her mind spinning with last-minute details and a parade of what-ifs, until Zander interceded.
He’d wrap an arm around her waist and tuck her into him, running his hand through her hair and shushing her gently.
More often than not, his touches turned more demanding, and he’d scatter Penny’s thoughts by snaking a hand between her legs, suggesting that if she still wasn’t asleep, maybe it was because he hadn’t fucked her hard enough earlier, and he better try again.
“Well,” Quinn mused, drawing Penny’s mind out of the gutter, “I preferred the Kite Festival. Less tummy troubles for me.”
“It was the gnome thing for me,” Mallory chimed in. “What was that called?”
RJ spoke through a mouthful of bread and cheese. “Gnome Knob.”
Which was less of a festival and more of a display of garden gnomes, but Penny wouldn’t argue the point. After Zander had dragged Winter to that one, he’d begged off the Dairy Festival, especially when Adam invited him fishing for the day.
Zander’s palm spread across her back like it belonged there.
In the weeks they’d been seeing each other, his touch had come to feel as natural on her skin as sunshine.
And since their argument in the orchard the week before, it was even more present, like Zander was holding on to her like a kid with a balloon, worried she might float away if he let go.
“You okay?” Zander’s voice was soft by her ear. “Don’t tell me you’re lactose intolerant, too?”
“No,” she said lightly. “Bring on the dairy. I’m just tired.”
“You’re working too hard.”
But it wasn’t the work exhausting her. The beehives relaxed her and the markets gave her energy.
Penny herself drained her own energy, hurting herself with the secrets she kept.
A secret made real by the weight of the simple piece of paper in her back pocket, the one that had arrived in yesterday’s mail.
RJ stood and circled his hips in a stretch. “Pen. I need more food, come with me.”
“That was your third sandwich,” she answered. Not that she hadn’t seen him consume far more over the years.
His eyebrows lifted. “Penny, friend, come with me for a minute.”
Which meant she was about to get a lecture. One that started as they walked toward a food truck specializing in cheese curds.
“I love you, but you look like hell.” At least RJ cut to the chase. “You have shadows under your eyes and a drag in your step.”
“Wow, thanks.”
“I know Zander is keeping you up at night, but sex is supposed to make you glow, not”—he motioned to her—“look like this.”
“Please,” she muttered. “Don’t hold back.”
“Are you guys fighting? I know you had that lovers’ spat about the culinary station—which, by the way, I’m glad you folded on, because it’s going to be amazing.”
“I didn’t fold.” They joined the back of the food truck line behind a dozen people also angling for fried cheese. “We compromised. And no,” she continued. “We’re not fighting. That’s a thing that a couple would do, and we aren’t—”
“Oh, you so are. You two are attached at the hip, and he looks at you like you’re a big jar of honey he wants to gobble up.”
“I’m just being realistic about what’s going on,” Penny said. “Whatever it is, it’s not going to last. I’m not going to expect anything more.”
He tsked. “Because people keep disappointing you.”
“RJ, can we not? Let’s just buy more cheese.”
“I will buy more cheese, thank you very much. But I will also say this, Pen. That man—” He nodded back to the table, where Zander laughed as Mallory talked and waved her hands in the air. “He isn’t the kind of guy who disappoints people. He’s not your dad, or his dad, or Henry.”
“Maybe not,” she admitted. Looking back, Penny knew she’d lashed out at Zander in the orchard to all but challenge him to walk away. And he hadn’t. “But that doesn’t mean he won’t still be back in Boston in a couple of weeks.” Her stomach twisted at the thought, and not just because of the soup.
“I know. And if you guys go your separate ways then, I get it. But you said you’d be real with each other while he was here, and you haven’t been.”
“That’s not true,” she shot back.
“He doesn’t know what you’re really going through right now, so he doesn’t know how to support you. It doesn’t take a genius to know how much Zander wants to be trusted and needed.”
“So, what? I’m supposed to lay out all my dirty laundry so he gets to feel needed?”
“No, Pen.” RJ shook his head, like he was so, so tired of her bullshit. “You lay out your dirty laundry because you actually need him.”
She glanced back to Zander, now on his phone as Quinn and Mallory chatted, faces close together. He had a couple of days’ worth of beard growth and a smile on his face.
When her phone buzzed in her pocket, she pulled it out to see a text from him.
ZANDER B Can your line move any slower? I need you. These two are being SO gross.
Penny typed back Sorry, you can’t rush good fried cheese.
She slid the phone back in her pocket, shuddering when her fingers brushed the paper folded there. She’d read it enough times the day before to know it word for word.
NOTICE OF DEFAULT
You have thirty days to remedy past-due payments before we will be forced to formally begin the foreclosure process.
She’d shoved the notice in her pocket this morning so it would be unavoidable, stuck with her all day. So that just maybe she’d find a way to pull it out and show it to Zander, to come clean and shed the last barrier between them.
But so far she hadn’t mustered the courage.
Penny sighed, looking back to RJ. “He really thinks I’m great.
He thinks I’m smart and pretty and he gives me credit for making everything work.
” She hated thinking about how Zander would look at her if he knew that she’d made a stupid decision and put Becker Farms at risk, or that she still hadn’t worked past the semipermanent boulder in her throat to tell her family about it.
“We can just finish the festival, and then he can go back, and I can be sad here. Whatever happens after, whatever I have to do about the farm and whatever I have to tell my mom and Mimi, he never has to know.”
From the look RJ gave her, Penny wondered if there was cheese on her face. “I love you, Penny, but that’s a really stupid plan, and it doesn’t do either of you justice.”
She willed back the heat behind her eyes.
“I want to be better and I want to be honest, but I don’t know how.
I’ve spent all this time trying to keep everything together, telling my family, telling Zander, telling everybody that everything is fine.
They all think I have my shit together. That’s kind of my thing. ”
His eyes narrowed. “Having your shit together is your thing?”
“Yes! It’s who I am.” Who she’d always been, from the early days of showing her mom and Mimi how useful she could be, how much she was worth the work.
RJ’s hands landed on his hips. “You’re defined by having your shit together?”
“Don’t you think so?”
He shook his head stubbornly, having the gall to look angry at her. “No, I don’t. I think you’re defined by a hell of a lot more. I wish you could see that.”
Penny sighed and shuffled ahead in line.
RJ wore his heart on his sleeve and saw the world through rainbows, but that wasn’t real life.
“I love you, RJ, and I know you’ve been around forever, but you don’t really know what it was like when I was a kid, how stressed out everyone was.
And my mom would joke sometimes, you know?
About how if only my sperm donor had stuck around, we’d have more hands to help. ”
“Pen—”
“And she was kidding. Because she always joked like that, like it didn’t mean anything.” Like Penny might not have feelings about knowing nothing about half of her DNA. “But what if he had stuck around? Wouldn’t it have been easier on them? Easier than being stuck with—”
“Penny, stop.” RJ’s big palms cupped her shoulders, squeezing hard. “I’m not going to even let you say that shit, okay?”
She blinked up at him, her words catching up to her.
They’d come spilling out in frustration, pouring through the fissures that were creeping through her as the festival approached.
And even though she’d been the one to say them out loud, the words were like strangers to her, appearing at the door for the first time.
RJ leaned close, speaking quietly as the festival action milled around them. “You know that’s bullshit, right? They would choose you over keeping that deadbeat around any day of the week. And you don’t have to work your ass off to prove you’re worth it.”