Chapter 27 – Juliette
TWENTY-SEVEN
JULIETTE
Juliette
In the end, it was Peasy who saved me.
She needed to eat. Her stall needed to be mucked. She needed some exercise. Way more activity than Patch required.
So I got up and did all those things.
After a few days, I took the truck into town for groceries and bought a bunch of boxes of Kraft, some cat food, and a bag of apples and carrots for Peasy.
When I handed over my debit card I had no idea what was going to happen. But I assumed when the bank account ran out of money, something would beep to let me know.
I had the thought to walk over to the bank and see if I could get the ATM to give me a balance on the account so I would know exactly how much money I had left. But that felt like exerting too much energy.
It would run out when it ran out. If he’d left me a horse as a parting gift, he probably left a couple of thousand dollars for me and the animals to eat. At least, that’s what I figured.
After a week, April drove one of her family member’s trucks over to the farm.
I didn’t have my phone anymore so it’s not like I knew she was coming.
Although I’d tried digging through the mud again to find it.
Just in case, maybe, Creed might have texted me something important. Even though I knew he hadn’t. Besides, even if I found the damn thing, it’s not like it was going to work.
Read the letter.
I thought about it. I just didn’t do it.
“Hey,” she called out from the bottom of the porch.
“Hey.”
I’d heard the truck pull up so I stepped out onto the porch. But I didn’t go any further than that.
I thought it might be Jackson with some more hay for Peasy, but this time I was paying for it.
Hay didn’t come free around these parts.
I still had my stash of cash in the floorboards. That would keep us maybe a month or so. I kind of hoped some lawyer would have sent a letter by now about how this all ends. It’s not like we could just walk away. We were legally married.
But so far, nothing.
“Thought you might want some company.”
I shook my head. “No, thanks.”
“Come on,” she urged me. “I brought ice cream.” She held up a brown bag over her head.
“What did you do that for?”
She rolled her eyes. “Because you’re going through a break up. I think. Jackson won’t say what Creed told him, but I know he left. And I know how excited you were when you bought that dress. So I’m thinking you’re sad, and when girls are sad they need ice cream.”
“They do?”
She huffed. “Damn, you’re stubborn.”
She didn’t wait for an invitation and just walked up to the porch and stood directly in front of me.
“Good thing for you, stubborn is one of my favorite character traits. Let’s eat.”
The ice cream was Ben and Jerry’s and had too many flavors/toppings/snacks mixed in to even identify. She’d brought two, so we each had a pint. I was sitting on Creed’s new couch, not caring if I spilled anything on it, and April was sitting in my chair across from me.
“What did he say?” she asked me. “Before he left.”
I thought back to that night…
Baby, the last thing I will think about before I leave this earth is how good you suck my cock.
Yeah, that was it. Because after that, we’d fucked. I’d fallen asleep almost immediately and he’d snuck out to the barn to go build a horse stall and hang a few shelves.
And found time to write a letter.
“Nothing,” I shrugged. “About him leaving, anyway.”
“Asshole,” she said, plopping a tablespoon filled with chocolate ice cream into her mouth. “What did his letter say?”
“I haven’t read it,” I admitted, poking through the ice cream to get to a mini-peanut butter cup.
“What? You have to read it. What if he’s like…coming back?”
I snorted, having found hidden treasure in my pint container. “He’s not coming back. Why would he leave if he was just going to come back? I’ll read it eventually. I’m sure there’s stuff in there about how…” I tripped over the word. “How the divorce will go.”
“You think you’ll sell the farm?” she asked.
AP was climbing up the couch in an attempt to get to my ice cream. I plucked him off my chest and set him on the floor. “Chocolate’s no good for you.”
“Mine has some vanilla,” April told me. She dabbed some on the pint lid and set it on the floor by her feet. AP bolted for the treat.
Yahm-yahm-yahm and it was gone in seconds, but he seemed satisfied, because he curled into a ball.
“Yeah, we’ll sell,” I answered. “Losing the crop will cost us with buyers, but people will always want land out here. Maybe you’ll get some famous Hollywood people to be your neighbors.”
“But we just got to know each other,” April pouted.
“You’re going to college in a few weeks anyway,” I reminded her.
“True,” she said. “You should come with! It’s not too late for you to go to college.”
“I always kind of thought maybe I could be a nurse,” I admitted.
“Can you handle the sight of blood?”
“Nope.”
“Then, totally, you should be a nurse!”
April laughed and I managed a smile.
“You really liked him, didn’t you?” she pressed me.
“He was alright,” I sighed.
The heaviness in my heart was unlike anything I’d ever felt. Suddenly, I wanted to go back to bed.
“You should read the letter,” April told me. “Not reading it…well, it’s not going to make it go way, and it might be the only way you get to have closure.”
I stood in front of the closed door to Herb’s study. I remembered I hadn’t cleaned up the broken lamp.
Probably should do that. But all of that felt like too much effort.
“I’m just going to go in, snatch up the letter off the carpet, and come back out.”
“Yeooww!” AP was perched on my shoulder and seemed to be in full agreement. If he missed Creed, he didn’t show any sign of it.
I’d taken to bringing him out to the barn with me so he could get used to Peasy and Peasy could get used to him. There was no point in anyone getting too close, though. Peasy would have to be sold back to the Talleys, but I figured I could take Patch with me wherever I went.
Did I still want to go to Seattle?
Seemed pretty far away at this point. At least that’s what I told myself, and not the fact that if I went that far away and Creed did come back, he would never find me.
Maybe April was right. Maybe I should think about enrolling in college around here. I did know a lot about agriculture and farming. I wasn’t sure what kind of degree I could get, but maybe I could end up working on another farm?
No clue.
I only knew that I couldn’t keep moping around this house for another week hoping that what had happened hadn’t happened.
Eventually, the money was going to run out. Eventually, I was going to have to make the decision not to be so damn sad.
April had been right and wrong about the ice cream. It had helped…but only in the moment. As soon as the pint was empty, all I’d felt was sad and sick to my stomach.
“Are you a man or a mouse?” I asked myself.
“Yeoowww!”
“Not you,” I said to AP. “Me. I’m asking myself if I have the courage to do this.”
But, what choice was there?
I opened up the door to the study, saw the mess of everything sprawled around on the floor. Shards of broken glass. A leather blotter. Pens and a desk calendar a year out of date. Fortunately, the computer was kept on the credenza behind the desk, so I hadn’t trashed that.
The letter was on the floor right in front of the desk.
Shit. It hadn’t disappeared.
Avoiding the side where I’d broken the lamp, I approached the envelope like a feral animal. Cautiously reaching out for it, in case it might bite me, I snatched it up and then bolted from the study like it was enemy territory.
The door shut behind me and I lifted Patch off my shoulder as he was safely out of harm’s way now.
Where was I supposed to read this thing?
Don’t make it too important.
If I had mattered to Creed, he would have sat me down and told me he was leaving. Maybe he thought sending me a horse was some kind of nice goodbye, but without any real way to afford it, in some ways it was kind of cruel.
Here, have this horse. You’ll probably have to give it back.
What kind of gift was that?
No, the fact that he left the way he did. No real goodbye. No real conversation about what he’d even been thinking…
I think I have a plan.
If we’d been in a real marriage, he would have told me what that plan was.
“Marriages require communication!” I shouted to a nearly empty house. “I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts about this.”
And it was definitely not our strong suit. For either of us.
Sex had probably been our closest form of communication.
But it hadn’t been enough.
Standing in the middle of the living room, I took a deep breath and opened the envelope.
The first thing that fell out was his bear necklace. I didn’t think about it too hard, just pulled it on over my head and felt the weight of it settle around my neck.
He wrote in a sort of weird capitalized print.
Jules,
You’re going to be pissed I did this in a letter, but I thought it was the simplest way. No fuss or drama. No sad goodbyes.
A few things you need to know. You’ve been added to both bank accounts.
Checking and savings. Logins and passwords are below for online access.
You can check in with Walt Healy at the bank if you have any questions.
You want to move around two thousand from savings to checking each month for expenses.
I’ve accounted for the horse feed in that.
Her name is Peasy, btw.
I’ve also included a letter from my lawyer.
You’re probably not going to believe it, but I had this drafted right after we got married.
It’s just a simple will that in the event of my death, the property and house are left to you, along with everything else in my name, including my military pension.
I make sure my mother’s people get money every so often, so if you would take care of that for me, I’d appreciate it.
Couldn’t tell you that right away because I knew you would kill me. (If you’re showing this to anyone, that’s an inside joke. Jules would never kill me. She loves me something stupid.)
I had an idea that might pull us out of the hole from the crop failing.
If it works, I’ll be back. If it doesn’t, you’ll be notified of my death and the will should make it possible for you to move on if you want to sell.
But you’ll have all my savings and my pension to fall back on if you want to try and keep the place. It would be a shame to let it go.
Other than that, not much else to say.
“NOT MUCH ELSE TO FUCKING SAY!!! YOU DICKWAD!” I shouted, at the top of my lungs.
I would have ripped the letter into shreds in that very second if it didn’t include his will and the logins and passwords to our banking information.
Stomping on the floor, the paper dangling from my hands, I couldn’t contain how pissed I was.
“You motherfucker! Mother. Fucker!”
I needed to break something. I needed to throw something.
What the fuck did that mean I would be notified of his death?
Death!
He was just supposed to have left me. Taken his truck and his things and…
Wait. This entire week I hadn’t even…
I ran back to our bedroom and threw open his dresser drawers.
His shirts, his socks, his fucking underwear. It was all still there. Maybe a few pairs of each were missing, because the drawers weren’t as stuffed with his shit as they normally were when I put away the laundry.
All this time, I’d hadn’t taken off his stupid t-shirt because I hadn’t wanted to lose his scent.
Now the smell of him practically punched me in the face.
He hadn’t taken his shit. He’d left me all his money.
I lifted the letter which was still clutched in my hand to try and make sense of this.
I had an idea that might pull us out of the hole from the crop failing. If it works, I’ll be back. If it doesn’t, you’ll be notified of my death…
What did that even mean?
Holy shit. Project work. From when his old boss had been in town looking for him. That’s what he called it. Project work.
That’s what he’d done. He’d taken a job. A job he hadn’t wanted to even know about.
An obviously dangerous job if the only two options were coming back or…
DYING!
Motherfucker!
I looked at the letter again. I saw the logins, the passwords.
His name at the bottom. And more parentheses.
Creed (I love you stupid, too)
What the fuck was with this guy dropping all the good stuff in between parentheses?
Stripping off his stupid shirt, I walked into the bathroom. I was so mad now, I didn’t even want to be sad about losing him. I turned on the water in the shower, waited until it got really hot, then tried to burn his smell off my skin.
The only thing I was sure of in that moment was that if he did come back, alive, I was going to kill him.