Chapter 29 – Juliette
TWENTY-NINE
JULIETTE
It was mid-October. Wasn’t really sure of the date because when I thought too hard about what the date was, it made me count back to the day he left.
It had been one thing to think he was gone for a few days, but when you started to put a number to it, it became real.
Four days.
Ten days.
Two weeks.
A month.
We were sometime beyond two months at this point, so I didn’t think about the date too much. Pretty sure it was a Thursday, but that was all I would think about.
Because if I got started on wondering whether he was alive or dead, it would suck me into the vortex of overthinking, sadness, rage, more sadness. Worry.
And nothing would get done.
Instead, what I was doing was trying to keep busy.
Today, I was digging through the garden my mom had attempted years ago and seeing if there were any perennials left to be salvaged. Something under the weeds and overgrowth that just needed to see the light of day to grow again.
About halfway through digging I was pretty sure there was nothing there. I could rip it all out by hand, but maybe what made the most sense was to hook up the plow to the back of the tractor and just pull all of it out and start with fresh dirt.
For the record, I was getting pretty competent about getting that thing on and off by myself.
It was all about alignment. I would use Peasy to help me move the plow to the spot I needed it, where the land was a little raised, and back the tractor right up to it.
Then it was just a question of getting the hitch from the plow secured on to the tractor.
It was heavy, but it was doable.
So suck it, Creed.
I could hear a truck in the distance and thought nothing of it. A few weeks ago, sure. Any time the sound of an engine came close to the property it was enough to send my heart racing and have chills breaking out over my body.
Because I didn’t know if it meant he was coming back home or if I was about to be told he was never coming back home.
It got so bad, I had this idea that I needed to buy ear pods so that my hearing was always muzzled and that way maybe my reaction to the sound of a truck engine wouldn’t be so Pavlovian.
Except today was hay day, so at least this truck engine made sense.
Sam Talley, the Talley’s middle child, was home on a break from vet school and would be delivering my hay drop off for the next week, according to Jackson.
Which explained why Jackson hadn’t been here first thing in the morning.
He usually did his drop offs before dawn.
It took some doing, but we’d negotiated a fair rate for the hay and Peasy seemed to be doing well with it, so for now she could stay with me.
I needed her for the heavy lifting.
Which was a joke.
I needed her and AP like I needed air. Sometimes it felt like talking to them was the only thing that kept me sane.
It was the truth that I had to start thinking about the future at some point. Whether or not staying on this farm long term was good for my mental health. With the cash Creed had left me, I could start over anywhere I wanted, really.
Just like the deal I’d tried to make with him at the beginning, when this all started. Give me the cash and let me be on my way.
If at some point I learned about his…death, well, then I could worry about selling the land then.
But for now, I had to consider there was another scenario. Another few scenarios actually. Where no one ever told me what happened to him. Where he decided not to come back after all. Maybe he scored a bunch of cash from whatever this last job was and just decided to take another job.
And another job.
Maybe distance didn’t make the heart grow fonder. Maybe it just dried it all up.
I pressed my hand over my heart, my fingers touching the chain around my neck like it was a living, breathing thing. Like it wasn’t my heart beating beneath my palm, but his. Ours.
Was it dried up?
I didn’t cry so much anymore. Only sometimes when I’d remember something he said or…
“Jules.”
When something sounded like how he said my name, like wind hitting the barn door hard.
“Jules.”
Yeah, just like that.
I brushed my dirty hands off on my overalls and turned around. Sam would have started hauling the hay off the truck and the least I could do was offer him something to drink.
Except no fewer than fifty feet away from me, standing there like he had all the right in the world, was Creed O’Mara.
He had a beard that was pretty scraggly, his hair was too long, and he had dark circles under his eyes so thick I wondered if he hadn’t gotten punched in both eyes.
The air left my body so fast I was afraid I might pass out. To say I hadn’t thought about this moment would be a lie and ridiculous. I’d thought about it a hundred times. A million times, if it was even possible to count that high. Still, when the moment came, I couldn’t think at all.
Not about all the speeches I’d practiced on Peasy or AP. Not about anything.
My mind was completely blank.
I had this strange idea I might be dead. Maybe he was, too. Maybe we both died and this was heaven, which meant he would have been wrong about everything because apparently he was my fucking soulmate.
I’d never loved another person the way I loved him. I’d never thought it was possible. So the removal of him was a pain I couldn’t have imagined, either. Which meant the return of him…this was unknown territory.
The sudden cessation of pain. Like all my body parts were suddenly coming to life again.
But I thought I was dead?
“Are we in heaven?” I whispered.
“No, Jules,” he said, and I watched him swallow a few times. His Adam’s apple running up and down his throat.
“Okay. Then wait here,” I said. Pretty calmly, actually.
I just walked around the house from where I’d been in the garden, walked up to the porch, stepped into the house where I knew I’d left it…
oh yeah, right there. I grabbed it by the handle, (in hindsight it was a good thing I’d thought about this all those times so I was more prepared than I realized), walked back out to where I’d left him standing, and swung that shovel at his head with all my might.
“YOU ASSHOLE!”
He avoided me easily, although I noticed he winced when he dodged the first blow.
“Calm down,” he said.
I swung again. “I’ll calm down!” I shouted at him. “I’ll calm down when you’re dead! I get your fucking pension if that happens.”
“Pretty sure you don’t, if you’re the one to kill me.”
“Peasy and I will bury the body just fine!” I screamed, swinging again. He caught the end of the shovel with his right hand, winced again, and pulled it out of my hands.
I didn’t hesitate. I formed my right hand into a fist and swung at his face.
I heard a crack and wasn’t sure if it was his nose or my fingers, but it didn’t matter. It sounded good.
“Ow!” I screamed. “Motherfucker, that hurts,” I said, cradling my right hand.
“Tell me about it,” he said, pinching off the tip of his nose. “I told you hitting me would only get us both hurt.”
I bent over my stomach and tried to flex my hand. It hurt, but I could move it, so likely it wasn’t broken.
“You need ice,” he said, walking around me toward the porch. “I need ice, too.”
He was around the corner of the house before I came to my senses. I started chasing after him. “Don’t you go inside the house, you’re not welcome there. I’ll throw the ice out to you.”
“Patch! You miss me, buddy?”
“Don’t you talk to him! I’m getting full custody in the settlement!”
“Buddy, I think your mom might have gone batshit while I was gone.”
I followed him into the house, my traitorous cat already perched on his shoulder, as Creed made his way to the kitchen.
He was favoring his right side.
I’d have to be blind not to notice that.
He pulled out the bin full of ice cubes and stuffed a Ziploc bag for me and one for himself.
He walked over to the kitchen table and sat down with the heaviest sigh I’d ever heard.
Like he’d just dropped a hundred pounds of weight.
He pressed the bag of ice to the bridge of his nose and man spread his thighs.
“Jules, come here.”
“No, way,” I told him, wrapping the bag of ice around my knuckles.
“Jules,” he said again, and dropped the bag of ice on the table. “Please.”
“Fine, but it doesn’t mean anything,” I grumbled.
I sat on his left thigh, assuming something was wrong with the right side of his body, and he wrapped his arms around me. I held my body as stiff as I could until he buried his face against my neck and started inhaling me like I was oxygen.
Because the silence was getting a little awkward, I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and squeezed him.
He made a sound then, it might have been a sob, but he didn’t lift his head so I couldn’t confirm if there were tears.
Maybe I had more of that mom schooling in me than I realized, because the words just came to me.
“It’s okay, big guy. You’re alright now. You’re home. I’m not really going to kill you.”
Eventually, he lifted his head and I slid off him.
“Shower. Then talk. Yeah?” he said.
I had a thousand snarky answers to that until finally I just nodded and said, “Yeah.”
I followed him into the bedroom and watched him strip out of his clothes. A bandage was wrapped from his ribs to his waist, from the right side of his chest to the middle of his back. That’s what was causing his wince.
I didn’t ask. I just watched him half step under the spray of water.
Wash his hair and face and then step out and dry off.
Patch followed his every motion. Eventually, when Creed looked like he was ready to stretch out on the bed, I grabbed him a pair of clean underwear out of his drawer and handed it to him.
He raised his eyebrow.
“I’m too mad at you to get distracted by your penis. Put them on.”
He did and then carefully stretched out on his left side, which was the wrong side of the bed for him, but left room for me to lay down and face him.
Patch climbed up the comforter and settled onto the pillow above his head.
Traitor.
In quiet, soft, muttered words, he told me about something called a high profile extraction. Surveillance for weeks in a jungle, ultimately leading to a successful mission, however, he was shot in the process.
(THAT’S RIGHT! HE WAS SHOT!)
I held my opinion on that and instead listened while he explained the reason he’d been gone longer than expected. It was because he was held up in a hospital in Mexico City before he was able to make it back over the border.
“Kay,” I said, when he was done.
His eyes were starting to shut and I could tell I was losing him to exhaustion.
“You sleep. Talk later, yeah?” I said, echoing his previous sentiment.
He knew what it meant. I had some stuff I had to get out and he needed to listen, but also, as I rolled off the bed quietly to my feet, I knew I had to make a decision.
Was I going to trust him again not to leave?
I suppose I wouldn’t be sure of that until we said all the stuff we had to say. I left him and Patch sleeping in the bed and went back to my momma’s garden because it was something to do with my hands while I cleared my thoughts.
It might have been an hour or two when he finally emerged. I could sense him behind me.
Maybe…I could even smell him.
“You eat?” I asked him, without turning around.
“Yeah. All you had was Kraft Mac & Cheese.”
That was true.
I turned to face him. He had his ball cap on but he hadn’t shaved his beard yet. I remembered Tank making a big deal of it that he had.
“You going to shave your beard?”
He huffed, folded his arms carefully over his chest, and looked out over the fields. “That’s what you want to ask me. Did I eat and am I going to shave?”
“No. Had all sorts of stuff to ask. I’ve got this list I’ve been keeping on my phone.
But I think…none of that matters now. Not really.
At first I was real mad. Then sad. These past couple months, I mostly thought of you every day, even though I didn’t want to.
Afraid you were dead. Afraid you’d decided not to come back.
Afraid you might come back and then I’d start feeling the way I do about you all over again.
Only for you to leave without a word again. ”
“Jules-”
“No,” I said, cutting him off. “Hear me out. This whole marriage was fucked from the start. But after that, before you left…well, I guess there’s no other way to say it other than I fell in love with you.
Never really done that before with anyone, and I have to say, I don’t like the empty feeling in my chest when it’s gone.
So, for all those questions I was going to ask, I guess there’s only one that matters. Are you staying? For good?”
He took a step forward.
He bent his head, then lifted it so he was looking at me.
“I made sure I didn’t think about you at all,” he began.
For the record, I wasn’t thrilled. “Made my decision, figured it was the best one for both of us, and when I drove my truck off this farm I didn’t even fucking look in the rear view mirror.
That’s how it had to be, Jules. Because if I thought about you, if I let you in my head, I would have turned around. I would have come back.
“Never really fell in love either. Would have told you it was a bunch of nonsense and sappy movies. My life, since the day I was born, has been grounded firmly in reality. And love…well, that was about as unreal as a thing could get to me. But there you are, right in front of me. I had a couple of scary moments when I didn’t think I would ever see you again.
I let you in my head then. Remembered how fucking stubborn you are.
How angry you made me sometimes. How much fun you are. ”
He took another step closer.
“I told myself…if I live through this, I’m going back to Jules. She wants to sell the farm, we’ll sell it. She wants to raise six kids on this land, we’ll do that, instead. But, no matter what happens, I’m never leaving her again. Not if she’ll take me back.”
“Wow. That’s the most you’ve ever said to me.”
“Probably,” he admitted. “Most I’ve ever said to anyone.”
I gave it a second. After all, I didn’t want him to think I was too easy.
“I guess I believe you then.”
He let out a big sigh first. Then he moved closer and wrapped his arms around me. I didn’t squeeze him too hard.
“I love you,” I whispered into his ear.
“I love you, too,” he said, and he wouldn’t admit it, but his voice cracked a little.
“Now tell me they paid you a shit ton of money.”
He laughed into my neck and brought me as close as he could. “Yeah, baby, they paid me a shit ton of money.”