Chapter 16
The next morning, Rebecca settled into the passenger seat of Cort’s truck with two take-out coffees in hand.
As she did up her seat belt, she noticed a children’s book tucked into the side pocket of the door.
The Wind in the Willows. She smiled as she remembered it from her own childhood.
“Pip left his cute little pipe cleaner turtle at the diner on Thursday; you’ll have to take it back home to him,” she said.
“He meant to leave that for you. He thinks the diner is so cool. He’s even started drawing his own plans for our future. Apparently, we’re going to someday open a business called Adams and Son Pumpkin and Gourd Gardens.”
“I have no idea what goes on there, but I would definitely want to go to Adams and Son Pumpkin and Gourd Gardens.”
“You should come over sometime and see our actual garden,” Cort said, taking a left on a country road. “Our giant is really something this year.”
“Your giant?”
“Giant pumpkin. This is our third year growing one. They take so much work I joke with Pip it’s like he has a sibling now, but it’s nice to have something to work on together.
” He was thoughtful for a moment. “Wow, never thought I’d be driving through the streets of Bramley Hollow with you, telling you about my pumpkin garden. ”
“Well, I often wonder what my teen self would think of me now,” Rebecca said. “She probably wouldn’t have believed me if I told her this was in our future.”
“What do you think your teen self might find most surprising about you now?”
Rebecca thought for a moment, bit her lip.
“Probably that I still love books just as much,” she said slowly.
“But that sometimes it feels like I’m circling the same conversations, the same ideas.
Like I’ve stopped discovering new things about books and started managing them instead.
” She smiled ruefully. “Like I’ve somehow made books boring for myself—and I worry a lot that my students are bored, too. ”
Cort glanced at her. “That sounds…disappointing. Especially for someone like you.”
She shrugged a little too quickly, knowing it wouldn’t be so easy to shed these feelings, especially now that she had named them. “It’s not terrible. I still like teaching. I like my students. I just—” She paused. “I guess I thought it would feel more expansive.”
“Like there’d be more room to breathe?”
She smiled at him, surprised. “Exactly.”
He was silent a moment, the country road unfurling under the wheels of his truck. “What if you could do anything, be anything you wanted, anything at all? What would you be?”
It wasn’t a real question, or at least not one with an answer that had any bearing on her life as it was, but she still took it seriously.
She had always, she realized, taken the things Cort said seriously, and knew he was the same with her.
“I’d work in a bookstore,” she finally said.
“I’d press my favorite books into people’s hands, all day long.
I’d find new books to love, and share those with other readers, too. ”
She could hear the smile in his voice, even though she was looking out the truck’s window, at the brilliantly colored leaves on the trees lining the side of the road, and not at him. “That sounds perfect for you.” Cort glanced sideways at her. “Well, you could work at a bookstore, couldn’t you?”
But she shook her head. “I need to find my way in the life I do have. It’s too early to give up.”
“But if you’re not happy—I mean, life’s too short, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know if it’s as drastic as being officially unhappy,” Rebecca said. “I’m just in a slump.”
He nodded. “Maybe being back here for a little while is the break you need.”
“Maybe,” she mused. The conversation felt like it had opened something inside her, but she didn’t know what to do with these feelings, these dreams. The silence in the truck suddenly felt loud. “Do you have any music?” she asked him.
“Sure.” He turned on the stereo. “Anything in particular you feel like listening to?” He paused and smiled at her sidelong. “Do you still have that indie folk obsession from high school? I distinctly remember you defending Fleet Foxes at a party when everyone else was into much louder stuff.”
Rebecca turned to him in surprise. “You remember that?”
Cort grinned now. “You were pretty passionate about it. You cited the final verse of ‘Helplessness Blues’ as…” He paused, searching for the word. “Transformative.”
She laughed. “Guess that’s why I really wasn’t invited to many parties. Great song, though.”
The gentle opening notes of it filled the truck. “Wow. This one really takes me back,” she said.
Cort’s eyes were fixed on the road ahead. “You loaned me your CD after one of our tutoring sessions. Said it might help me focus on studying.”
“And did it?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“Not really,” Cort admitted with a laugh. “It mostly just made me think about you.”
There it was again: the patented Cort Adams Effect. But she kept her pulse in check, and she wondered if he was even aware he was doing it. She decided to focus on the song instead, one she hadn’t listened to in years. She closed her eyes and let it wash over her.
“This song is really just so Bramley Hollow, right? The side of it I knew. Not football games and homecomings, but…” She still had her eyes closed.
“This,” she said, not able to put it into words, but she could see it behind closed eyes.
The road, the pickup truck, the farmland she knew was on either side of them.
She opened her eyes and it was there, exactly as she had seen it in her mind over the years.
The last lines of the song faded out, and so did her certainty of what she had been about to say.
Another song had started: “I Was a Fool,” by Tegan and Sara. “Oh my God,” Rebecca moaned as the song flowed from his stereo. “I am seventeen again, truly. I used to listen to this song on repeat while going on…like, angsty walks through town.” She laughed at the memory.
“Angsty walks,” Cort repeated with a laugh in return. “I think I saw you on those walks and never wanted to disturb you. But your expression was so intense, I think I always assumed you were listening to…like, Beethoven or something.”
“Nope. It was always, always Tegan and Sara.”
They were pulling into a gravel lot before a massive weathered barn.
“This is it,” Cort said, cutting the engine, and Rebecca felt relief.
These songs she hadn’t listened to, had maybe avoided, for more than a decade, had brought up so much emotion.
But she also felt regret, like she wished their car ride down country roads could have gone on forever.
He was already out of the truck, though, and coming around the side of it to open her door, a disarming act of chivalry she tried to tell herself was old-fashioned, not charming.
“Looks unassuming, but wait until you see inside.”
She followed him toward a weathered clapboard barn with a simple hand-painted sign above the wide double doors reading Kingman’s Salvage there was the family business to consider.
I had a bunch of dreams in my head, and then…
” He trailed off, his gaze still pinning her in place, just a few feet away from him now.
“They just kind of disappeared. But sometimes I thought about what my life would have been like if I had gone to school.” He shook his head now.
“I mean, I wouldn’t change anything. Not in real life.
I have Pip; I would never want that to be different. But…”
She stared up at him. “I get it,” she said. “Your life can be your life. But there’s always the path not taken. You always wonder about it.”
Another customer walked into the room then, breaking the spell between them. Their words felt like they were hanging in the air, though; like, if Rebecca wanted, she could pluck them from between the dust motes and keep them to pore over later. She turned away from him to compose herself.
“I just love all this stuff. I don’t even know what it’s perfect for, but I love it,” she murmured.
“Not everything has to make sense, Becca,” Cort said softly behind her.
As the hours passed in happy browsing, she found vintage glass doorknobs with a subtle apple pattern etched into them, a set of antique brass hooks shaped like little books, and a weathered wooden sign whose ornate lettering spelled out Literature & Libations.
When they brought their selections to the front counter, Mr. Kingman nodded approvingly. “You’ve got good taste,” he told Rebecca.
“Now to head out to the barn to look at the salvage wood,” Cort said. This took them about half an hour, and they soon had a truck bed loaded with wooden boards ideal for the ceiling beams.
After the truck bed was loaded and Rebecca’s other purchases carefully stowed in the back seat of the truck, Cort checked his watch. “Hungry?”
“Starving, actually,” Rebecca admitted, suddenly aware that the piece of toast she’d had for breakfast felt like too many hours ago.
“There’s a little café about ten minutes from here,” Cort suggested. “Best sandwiches ever.”
“Perfect. Let’s go.”