Chapter 29
I go to my mom first, when Jack’s eyelids get too heavy and he finally drives himself back to the cabin to sleep. He makes me promise to come over this evening, and I relent, knowing I’m not strong enough to resist him.
I don’t call before I show up at my parent’s house, and when I arrive, I’m surprised to find them both there and my grandma gone, until I remember Mom mentioning signing her up for a bingo night at church once a week. So it’s just us in the house, like it always used to be.
They’re sitting at the kitchen table, drinking mugs of decaf like they do every night after dinner. When they see me, their heads turn in tandem, matching looks of sadness on their faces.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey, Stevie girl,” Dad says, getting up to give me a hug. I catch a wince on his face when he stands, but for once, I don’t comment on it. He will let us know if he needs help.
“Hi,” Mom says, looking up at me from beneath her lashes.. Her voice is soft, hesitant.
A part of me withers at the sound of it, thinking I should have come sooner this week, talked things through. But another part of me feels proud I kept my distance long enough to gather my thoughts and work through my emotions.
“Want to sit?” Dad asks. “I can get you a cup of coffee.”
I nod and settle into my old chair at the table, watching as Dad moves around the counter, unsteadily, gripping it as he passes.
I catch myself worrying my lip as I watch him, but hold my tongue.
Mom’s eyes are on me when I finally return my attention to her.
Her expression is forlorn as she trails a finger around the rim of her mug.
“How have you been?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I tell her honestly as my dad returns to the table, coffee mug in hand. It’s one I made in an elective pottery class in high school, the handle off-center and wonky, but when I brought it home, you’d think I had been a child prodigy.
He slides the mug across the table to me and lowers himself into his chair slowly. His eyes, so similar to my own, latch onto mine. “Your mom told me about the conversation you had.”
I nod, knowing they keep nothing from each other.
“I didn’t mean to upset you.” Mom’s voice is sandpaper. “I just wanted…” she trails off, shaking her head. “I’m sorry I talked about you with Wren. She wasn’t trying to talk about you behind your back. She just wants the best for you too.”
A lump forms in my throat, thick and painful.
“But I realize that it’s up to you to decide what’s best for you,” Mom says.
I don’t know what to say, how to tell her that I do want to decide what’s best for myself, but that I’m so lost, so unsure of what I want or how to get it.
Instead, I say, “Helping you two and Grandma doesn’t feel like a chore for me. I’m happy to do what I can.”
“And we’re so thankful for that,” Dad says, reaching out to pat my hand.
His is calloused and rough, dotted and wrinkled from all his time in the sun.
“But we also don’t want you to sacrifice time with your friends or time to do things that fill your cup in order to take care of us.
I think maybe we can find a balance, eh? ”
I nod. “Yeah, I think we can do that.”
“That’s what I was trying to say the other day, but I don’t think it came out that way,” Mom tells me.
“I know. I don’t think I took it very well either. I blew up on Wren, and we said a lot of terrible things to each other.”
The words we flung back and forth have been playing on a loop in my head the past four days.
Wren is my oldest friend, and it’s not the first time we’ve fought, nor the first time we’ve said things out of love that came out with venom.
But this argument in particular has stuck to me like a virus I can’t shake, attacking all my most vulnerable spots.
“I need to fix things with her,” I say. The coffee in my mug has finally started to cool so I take a sip and try to hide my wince from my parents.
Despite my culinary skills, I’ve never been too picky about my coffee until living with Jack the last month.
I’ve become spoiled by fresh ground beans and his moka pot, and my parents’ bulk decaf isn’t cutting it anymore.
Dad wrinkles his nose. “What’s wrong with your coffee?”
Guess I didn’t hide it as well as I thought.
“Nothing,” I tell him. “Jack just got me hooked on fancy coffee.”
“You two seem like you’ve gotten close,” Mom says, eyes fixed on me.
Flashes from this morning flit through my memory.
Jack in my Airstream and on my couch, his shoulder pressed to mine.
His eyelids growing heavier with every passing minute.
The moment he drifted off, and the few I allowed myself to watch him before I woke him up and made him a cup of subpar Keurig coffee to keep him awake on the drive home.
I drag my fingertip along the bumpy handle of my coffee mug, tracing its texture. “He’s become a good friend.”
“When does he leave?” she asks. I think I can hear a faint current of concern in her voice, and I know I’m not fooling her, that she can see past the walls I’ve built around my heart to protect myself when he leaves Fontana Ridge.
“A few days before Thanksgiving.”
She nods. “Soon.”
“Soon,” I agree.
Time used to feel endless, like this town had its own calendar that was somehow slower than the rest of the world. Days felt like weeks, and the off-season would stretch on for so long that by the time spring arrived, my body would ache with the need for sun and work and movement.
But it’s changed now. It’s moving at breakneck speed, threatening to bowl me over, and I’m unable to catch my breath.
I know the next couple of weeks are going to be gone in the blink of an eye, and so will Jack. Everyone and everything will go back to how it was in September, and I’ll be alone again. It will be worse this time, though, because I had a taste of what life could be like if things were different.
“Do you think you’ll keep in touch?” Mom asks, pulling me from my thoughts.
I meet her eyes, a blue that’s as familiar to me as the back of my own hand. Summer sky blue, unlike Jack’s lake water blue. Different, but no less intense. Both able to see right through me.
“I hope so.”
Wren is the one to answer the door this time, and when she sees me on the doorstep, she throws her arms around me.
“I’m so sorry, Stevie.”
Her hair is in my mouth, copper ringlets stuck to my tongue, and although she’s barely tall enough to ride a rollercoaster, she has the upper body strength of a woman who is used to carrying around a ninetieth-percentile toddler all day.
Her grip on me is steel, but I don’t try to pull back.
I breathe her in, her familiar scent, the feel of her arms around me. My very first and very best friend.
“I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t have blown up.” The words are garbled by her hair.
She pulls back. “You had every right. I was stupid, and I shouldn’t have gone to your mom. You were right about everything.”
A grin quirks my lips. “That’s hard to argue with.”
She smiles, too, but there are tears in her eyes, and I can see that this has been weighing as heavily on her as it has on me.
“Can we go inside?”
She nods, moving out of the doorway to allow me inside. “Holden has the kids at his mom’s, so it’s just us.”
I lift a brow. “I’m interrupting your solo, child-free time?”
She points at the shoes on her feet, the ones she’s kicking off. “I was just about to drive to the cabin to find you. I tried giving you space, but I couldn’t do it anymore.”
Warmth glows in my chest, spreading outward and chasing away the cold that’s seeped into my soul.
I follow her into the living room and we take a seat on the wide, leather couch.
Outside, the sun is just beginning to set, arcing through the windows that stretch from the ground all the way up to the two-story ceilings.
They open onto a deck that faces the mountains.
In the distance, when the haze isn’t too dense, you can make out the river that winds through the valleys and deposits into the lake.
It’s a stunning view from the coziest, most beautiful home that Holden designed and built himself based on the dreams Wren had in her head.
I love it, but it also makes me ache for something I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on.
I’ve always considered myself independent, able to take care of myself and be the person others can rely on instead of the one who needs to rely on others.
But this house makes me feel like it wouldn’t be so bad to let someone in, let them do something for me, take care of me in a way that feels intricately entwined with my deepest desires.
“You wouldn’t have found me at the cabin,” I tell Wren. “I’ve been staying at the Airstream.”
Her brows lift, disappearing beneath the fringe of her curly bangs. “Did something happen between you and Jack?”
My bottom lip catches between my teeth, and I gnaw at it. “Nothing happened, but it almost did. And we both wanted something to happen.”
Her eyes widen. “Tell me everything.”
So I do, and it feels so good to get it off my chest, to tell my best friend about the guy I have a crush on as she sits across from me, her feet tucked under my legs, her hand pressed to her lips.
When I finish, she says, “Stevie, I’m so sorry about what I said the other day. Everything happened with Jack and then I bombarded you at the worst possible time. You should have hit me in the boob.”
I chortle, and it bounces around the house. “We haven’t had a boob fight since middle school.”
“I haven’t acted that stupid since then either,” she says.
A sigh heaves out of me, and I nudge her with my foot.
“You weren’t stupid. You were right.” The realization came to me last night as I was staring up at my glow-in-the-dark stars, the ones I had taken down and restuck, now forming actual constellations on my ceiling.
I have let my world shrink, and I’ve let go of things that make me happy in my need to feel needed.
She moves so we’re sitting side by side, pressed together from shoulder to thigh. Her hair is in my face again, but I don’t mind. “I could have said it in a nicer way.”
A smile tugs up the corners of my lips like marionette strings. “Okay, I’ll give you that one.”
Her expression grows serious. “Stevie, can I ask you something? At the risk of starting another argument.”
I swallow, taking in her grave eyes. “Go ahead.”
She’s silent for a moment, chewing on the inside of her cheek. “Are you actually happy here? I know you love your family and your friends and your job and your land. But are you really, truly, incandescently happy?”
“Incandescently happy?” I ask, bemused.
She nods, serious. “Yes. Because as hard as being a working mom is, and as boring as it is to plan what we’re going to eat every day for the rest of our lives, and as frustrating as it is to balance school, work, and extracurricular schedules, I still wake up every single day wondering how I got so lucky.
Sometimes, Holden holds me and I just cry because I can’t believe this is my life, and I’m so outrageously happy to have it.
It’s like I have imposter syndrome, like I can’t believe that I could deserve all of this goodness.
It’s overwhelming.” She says all of this in a rush, her words tripping over themselves to come out.
“And if that’s how you feel here, then please, hit me in the boob for suggesting otherwise, but sometimes I look at you, and you have this faraway look in your eyes, and I wonder. ”
I blink at her, throat thick. It feels like a band is tightening around my middle, cutting off my oxygen. “Wonder what?”
“If you would have chosen a different life if you hadn’t felt like you needed to stay here.”
Wren knows I had planned to leave Fontana Ridge after high school, that I wanted to go to school somewhere other than North Carolina and travel when I wasn’t studying.
That this town and this life had never been The Plan.
But things pivoted when my dad got hurt, and I was happy to stay.
I tried not to dwell on what could have been.
So maybe that’s why I’ve never given her question much thought. I allow myself to think about it now, though, to think about how things would have turned out if I had left.
Despite trying, I can’t picture where I’d be, or who I’d be with. If the life I once imagined would be any better than the one I’ve built now.
“I am happy,” I tell her. “My life may be different than what I wanted when I was seventeen, but whose isn’t?”
She looks at me, really looks, as if she’s trying to find a crack in what I’m saying.
She won’t though, because I’m telling the truth.
I am happy, even if it’s not the sparkling incandescence she described, because if I’m being honest, I don’t think that most of us get that.
I think shooting for the stars will often leave you on the ground looking up at them.
“Okay,” she says finally. Her hand wraps around mine and gives it a squeeze. “I won’t ask again then.”
I leave an hour later when Holden returns with the kids. I watch as Wren’s face changes when she sees them. Despite getting to have a child-free, responsibility-free evening, she transforms when they show up, lighting up like a Christmas tree. Incandescent.