Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
If Eleanor was taking just a touch more care than usual with her appearance, it was not because Garrett was on his way over to help her install her new oven.
It was… it was a celebration of the oven!
Yes, that was it. Eleanor had always been a good cook, and it had taken mere weeks for the ancient oven in her new kitchen to drive her to distraction.
She was putting on lipstick because she was excited about the oven!
“Don’t take up lying,” she advised her reflection. “You’re not any good at it, not even when you’re doing it inside your head.”
Before she could get any deeper into conversations with herself, which were probably not a good sign about her roiling nerves, she was saved by her phone buzzing happily on the countertop. She looked over and beamed when she saw that it was Jeremy calling her.
“Hey, honey,” she said as she answered. “This is a pleasant surprise!”
She and her son communicated regularly, but she didn’t often get calls from him on weekday mornings.
“One of my classes got cancelled, so I thought I’d give you a buzz,” Jeremy said. “I’m glad I caught you. You’ve been so busy with all your cool new friends lately that there’s no guarantee.” His words were teasing, but his tone was warm. “Anyway, how is everything?”
Eleanor bit her lip. She had spent recent phone calls regaling Jeremy with tales of her new friend group.
He especially found Miriam’s antics hilarious, as she’d known he would.
But, in the spirit of giving up lying to herself, she had to admit that this had been a distraction from the real news, which she was nervous about sharing.
“Well,” she said hesitantly. “I actually have something to tell you.”
There was a pause during which Eleanor could picture the way his face would grow serious as he concentrated.
Jeremy looked a lot like his father when he got that look, and it was those moments that reminded Eleanor that she could never hate Brian, no matter how shabbily he’d treated her at the end of their marriage.
She’d always be able to see the good in her ex-husband by seeing the qualities that he shared with their son who, in Eleanor’s not at all biased opinion, was the greatest young man ever to live.
“Is everything okay, Mom?” Jeremy asked cautiously.
“Oh yes! Yes!” she said hastily, tearing herself out of her ruminations to reassure him. “Yes, sorry, I didn’t mean to spook you!”
“Phew,” he said, lightness reentering his tone. “Okay, what’s up?”
“Well…” She took a deep breath. “I’m opening a bookstore.”
A tiny pause and then. “Wait, that’s your news? Mom, that’s so cool!” He sounded genuinely excited.
“Yeah?” she asked, a grin spreading across her face as relief suffused her.
“Yeah!” he exclaimed. “That’s actually so perfect for you. Because, no offense, Mom, but you’re kind of a nerd about books.” The teasing was warm.
“Yeah, yeah.” She feigned irritation. “Anyway, yes. There’s no bookstore in town here, and this house ended up having a lot more space than I needed, so I thought, why not?”
“It’s a great idea,” he said encouragingly. “Why did you act like you were going to tell me that something terrible had happened?”
Ninety-nine percent of the time, Eleanor was grateful to have such an observant, kind, thoughtful, caring son. The other one percent of the time was when he wasn’t letting her get away with her nonsense.
“I might have been a little nervous,” she admitted. “I didn’t want you to think that I was taking on a foolish risk. I’m your mom! I’m supposed to be the steady figure you can rely on.”
He laughed, not unkindly. “Mom, I can still rely on you. But consider it this way. You’re also showing me how to do something brave and scary. Did you ever think of that?”
“Whoever let you get so smart?” she asked with mock sternness.
“Oh, you know,” he said airily. “I had this great mom. And, don’t tell her, but I’m really, really proud of her for doing something for herself. That takes guts.”
Eleanor couldn’t answer right away, not without giving away the tears that had come to her eyes at his words. She cleared her throat.
“I love you,” she said with feeling.
“I love you too, Mom,” he said. “Now, give me more details on this book thing.”
Eleanor felt like a great weight had lifted off her shoulders as she explained her vision to her son. He enjoyed a good laugh at the tale of her trying to fix the sink, just as she’d intended.
“That handyman sounds like he’s more than earned his fee,” Jeremy joked.
“Oh, it’s worse than that,” she said, blowing out a huff of air. “He was just doing it to be nice. He didn’t even charge me!”
“Oh?”
The note of curiosity in her son’s voice made Eleanor hurry on. She and Jeremy were close, but she wasn’t about to explain that she had developed the teeniest, tiniest crush on Garrett.
“Yeah, everyone here is so nice,” she hastened to add. “Anyway, how’s everything on your end? You’ve let me blather on enough.”
Fortunately, this distracted her son, who shared his own tales of classes, friends, and extracurriculars.
“I’m going to have to break it to Dad that I think I’m going to major in Engineering, not something that will set me up for law school,” he said.
“He’ll be cool, I think, but he’ll also do that secret sad thing where he pretends that he’s fine but suddenly has to very urgently go mow the lawn, even if it’s, like, ten at night. ”
Eleanor barked out a laugh.
“You have the two of us totally pegged, don’t you?” she asked fondly. “Well, let me know if you need any help breaking the news. Just because your dad and I split up doesn’t mean we can’t have family conversations.”
“I know, Mom,” he said. “But I’ve got this.”
The confidence in his voice nearly made her tear up again. How did her baby get so grown?
They chatted until Eleanor saw Garrett’s truck pull into her driveway. She quickly bid her son goodbye, which made him tease her about how her social schedule was far more packed than his, these days. Even so, she could tell he was happy for her.
Eleanor was feeling pretty darn happy for herself too, as she opened the door for Garrett.
“Hi!” she greeted. “Thanks again for coming.”
He gave her one of those looks that wasn’t quite a smile.
“You know,” he told her, “if you keep thanking me, I’m going to take offense. We’re friends now, aren’t we?”
“Friends can say thank you,” she said primly, struggling to hide how pleased she was at the idea that he considered them friends.
“Hm,” he said, giving her a narrow-eyed glance that spoke more than words could have.
Garrett waved off her offer of tea or coffee while he unpacked his tools and assessed Eleanor’s new oven, which had been delivered the day prior.
“This looks pretty straightforward to hook up,” he said, craning his neck to look at all the back panels. “But I’m going to be extra careful. Always good to be cautious when you’re working with gas.”
“That’s part of why I was too nervous to do it myself,” she confessed.
He gave her a pointed look. “Yeah, you don’t get to touch the gas.” His tone was stern, but Eleanor detected a playfulness beneath it. “That comes way after you manage to get the water working.”
“I would have figured it out eventually!” she protested.
“Hm.”
“I would have!”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Yes, well, you said nothing very loudly,” she accused, working hard to smother a laugh.
For a while, Eleanor puttered on her laptop while Garrett worked.
There were a million and one things to do when it came to getting a business up and running, she had learned, but the one she found the most fun was selecting which books she would stock in her little shop.
Eventually, she found her focus drifting to the man deftly tightening bolts and checking connections.
“How’d you get so good at all of this?” she asked him.
“At ovens?”
She shook her head, although he was looking at his work, not at her. “Not just ovens. All the odds and ends stuff. You seem to know how to make it all go just right.”
“When my hands aren’t busy,” he said dryly, “I’m going to need you to say that again so that I can record it and send it to my parents. It’ll remind them that there actually was a point to me taking apart everything when I was a child.”
Eleanor covered a smile. “I note that you said, ‘taking apart’ but not ‘putting back together,’” she observed.
He shot her a faux affronted look. “Well, I tried,” he insisted. “And I got good at it… eventually. But that part’s a lot harder, isn’t it?”
She laughed.
“Yeah, yeah,” he teased. “Laugh it up. I was that kid. The one who needed to know how everything worked.”
“And look where it’s gotten you now,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Badgered by everybody who doesn’t know a hammer from their right elbow.”
“You’re not badgering. I like helping you,” he said gruffly. Then, seemingly embarrassed by this little slip of kindness, he asked, “If you weren’t the take-stuff-apart type, what did you want to be when you were a kid? Bookstore owner?”
Her laugh was a little sadder, this time around. “Oh, no,” she said. “I was the kid who wanted to be a mom. I had about a million dollies, and I had to take care of each of them just so.”
“Well, that dream came true.”
“It did,” she confirmed, trying not to sound melancholy. “I’m just being a total mom, thinking about how big my son has gotten and all that stuff. He and I were just on the phone and he’s so mature and…” She cut herself off. “Sorry, I’m boring you.”
“You’re not,” he said. “My sisters have kids, and they talk about the same kind of stuff. Parenting sounds real hard. It seems like you did a good job, though.”
“Thanks,” she said, feeling a warmth in her chest at the praise.
“I suppose it’s weird to feel like I have empty nest syndrome when I’m in a new house, but part of me is adjusting to a form of motherhood that’s…
less constant than what it was. Although I won’t miss constantly driving back and forth to soccer practice and play dates,” she added with feeling.
“Or all the times he forgot this or that at home and I had to rush it off to school!”
“See? Silver linings. And now you’re doing something new.”
“Yeah,” she said, mostly to herself. It was intriguing, how Garrett’s straightforward way of saying things seemed to resonate so clearly with her. When he said it, it seemed so simple. She was doing something new, and that was in no way a conflict with what she’d been doing before.
He stood and checked all the knobs on the new stove, clicking each one to life and then extinguishing it.
“Stove’s good,” he said when he was finished. “How’s the sink holding up?”
“It’s good,” she said. “Which I’m sure is no surprise, since it’s your handiwork.”
He shot her a glance that she thought might indicate he was pleased with her subtle praise. “It’s just practice, is all,” he said. “No great trick to it.”
“Don’t underestimate the value of steadiness,” she told him as she stood to join him near the sink.
He turned on the water to test that everything was fine, then waited for it to get hot.
“It might be exciting to make a sudden move and open a bookstore, but wild decisions like mine work because there are reliable people like you. It’s a skill, a talent. ”
“Well, thank you,” he said. Then a hint of slyness crept into his tone as he said, “But you know, just because I’m reliable doesn’t mean I can’t surprise people.”
“Oh yeah?”
And that was when he grabbed the sprayer and shot her directly in the chest with a shower of water.
For a split second, Eleanor was so shocked that she could only stare at him. A flicker of doubt passed Garrett’s expression, as though he was about to apologize…
This expression vanished the moment that Eleanor wrestled the sprayer away and shot him back.
He looked down at the spatter of droplets that covered his flannel shirt. “You shot me!” he said.
“You shot me first!”
The two of them paused for one second longer and then, in unison, burst into gales of laughter.
“Give me that,” Garrett demanded, trying to wrestle the sprayer back from her.
She hid it behind her back. “Never!”
He wrapped his arms around her, using his greater reach to try to get the sprayer, bringing them close together. Eleanor’s breath hitched, as did Garrett’s, but they only hesitated a moment before he bent down and she pressed up until their lips were pressed together.
The kiss was like fireworks, Eleanor thought.
And then, How interesting. His beard is soft.
When they both pulled away a moment later, Eleanor knew she was blushing. Garrett looked as though he too, might be hiding a flush beneath his beard.
“I, um,” he said, clearing his throat rapidly. “Everything works. So, I’d better go.”
Part of Eleanor wanted to grab him, make him stay so that they could kiss some more. But the cooler part of her recognized that it would be the smart and mature thing to think this through.
"Right,” she said. “Okay.”
He held on for a moment longer before releasing her.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. He took a step back, then another. “I’ll see you around?” he asked, a note of hope in his voice.
The question reassured her.
“Yeah,” she told him. “I’ll see you soon.”