Chapter Thirty-Four
Thirty-Four
A Pearl of Wisdom
from Tenn Greenlee
“Take notice. If bees are staying close to their hives, rain is coming.”
Tallulah
I woke up early and couldn’t fall back to sleep.
I wasn’t the only one who was up before the sun. I’d heard Juliet moving about, then talking with Papaw downstairs, their voices just murmurs and mumbles yet somehow soothing.
I’d stayed in bed, hoping for just a little more sleep ahead of what was going to be a busy day, but it wasn’t happening.
My thoughts were spinning. Thinking about Mary Joy and eggs.
About the new house. About Katy’s nightmares and how she seemed to be through the phase.
About the MLIS program and its application deadline.
About Scott and how I still didn’t know why he was here.
About Jake. And about what Evanthe had said.
Does it hurt more having him far away?
Or not having him at all?
Well, right now it was both, so the pain was off the charts.
However, I could see the wisdom in her words. The compromise.
Long-distance dating.
I wasn’t sure I could do it. I wasn’t sure he’d be interested.
But maybe I wanted to try.
I wasn’t sure what had happened to the person who longed for stability, for routine. Because dating long-distance threw that right out the window. It was constant flexibility. It was travel.
It wasn’t circling the globe, but still.
Yet I was willing to do it. For Jake. For us.
I fully recognized that I hadn’t been willing to do the same for Scott, and it confirmed something I’d been suspecting for a while now.
My marriage had been over long before Scott and I split up.
With that thought, I threw back the covers and popped out of bed.
I watched the rise and fall of Mary Joy’s chest as she slept deeply in her crib.
Her face was slack, her dreams peaceful if her countenance was any indication.
I wanted to smooth her hair, kiss her chubby cheeks, but I also didn’t want to wake her, so I backed slowly away.
I grabbed a summer robe and my laptop and headed downstairs. Where there was no sign of Juliet or Papaw. I found him easily—he was puttering around the garden. Juliet was harder. I finally spotted her down at Vera’s, standing on the front porch with her mom and sister.
At a little past six in the morning.
Shaking my head, I went to make some coffee, then remembered the coffee maker was broken.
Sighing, I headed out onto the back porch.
The sun had just started its climb in the sky, bathing the yard in a pink glow.
I’d seen in the forecast that there might be storms later on today, and I hoped the bad weather held off.
For the sake of the festival. For Juliet’s sake as well.
I sat on the wicker couch, pulling my legs up beneath me. I fired up my laptop and opened the PowerPoint presentation I’d been working on. The Trivia Night proposal. It was due next week, and I wanted it to be perfect.
But no sooner had I opened the file than I closed it again. I clicked open a blank document instead and quickly typed out the words, the wisdom, that had been replaying in my mind all night.
When the heart is involved, time and distance don’t matter.—Evanthe Kilburn
Then I added lines from Nettie, Isabel, Aunt Maeve, and Uncle Renny as well. All I could remember.
I didn’t know what I was going to do with this collection, but sometime during the night, I had realized that these shiny pearls of wisdom should be documented so they’d never be forgotten.
The philosophical and the practical and even the whimsical.
There was so much to learn from those older, wiser.
My phone, in the pocket of my robe, buzzed. I pulled it free and saw a text from Scott.
You awake?
“Nope,” I said, putting the phone on the table.
It was too early to be dealing with him.
He’d spent every minute he could with Katy yesterday right up until her bedtime. Mary Joy would only play with him if I was nearby, and every time he tried to hold her, she cried. He was a stranger, and the only stranger I’d ever seen her take to straightaway was Juliet.
On his way out last night, he’d given Papaw’s couch the side-eye, and I didn’t feel the least bit guilty waving goodbye. I’d locked the door behind him, still not knowing why he was in town. Yet knowing instinctively he had a reason for being here, beyond seeing the girls.
I told myself to stop thinking about it, because guessing what was going on with him might snap the fragile threads holding my sanity in place. He would tell me sooner or later.
As I typed out Isabel’s feelings about credit card debt, I heard the front door open, then close. “Hello?” I said, just loud enough for my voice to be heard—and not wake the girls.
Footsteps neared; then Juliet appeared. She held a travel mug. “I hoped you’d sleep in but brought you coffee just in case.”
I reached greedy hands toward the mug. “I could kiss you.”
Stepping onto the porch, she smiled. “It’s Vera we should be kissing. She’s already made three pots this morning.”
I took a blissful sip of the hot liquid and asked, “Your mama and sister sleep well?”
“Really well. Amy, especially, is enchanted with Forget-Me-Not. She loves it here.”
“Well, it is enchanting.” I smiled. “Maybe her car will break down on the way out of town.”
Juliet rubbed a finger along the arm of the chair. Her eyebrows knitted together. “I thought that was just romantic love.”
“I mean, yes, but who’s to say rules can’t be bent from time to time?” Then I opened up my heart a little, letting her inside, as I said, “Maybe your car will break down.”
A smile spread slowly across her face. “Maybe it doesn’t need to.”
My eyes widened and I scooted to the edge of the couch. “Does that mean what I think it means?”
She nodded. “I’m going to stay.”
I let out a squeal that was bound to wake the girls and gave her a big hug. “I know I’m not the only one who’s going to be happy with this news.”
And as she hugged me back, she said, “No one’s happier about it than I am.”
It was an odd, surreal moment to walk up to the admission gate of the Flour Festival with Scott and the girls. Like we were still a happy little family.
He’d shown up at Papaw’s at seven this morning, saying Nettie had told him he was wasting daylight, moping around her kitchen. That his time would be better spent with the girls.
She’d texted me he was on his way, which I was grateful for because he hadn’t.
He’d spent the time between then and now with the girls, reading, playing. Katy had been ecstatic, Mary Joy less so, but as long as I was around, she tolerated him.
He still hadn’t confessed why he was really here.
He pushed the stroller as Mary Joy watched everything go by with wide blue eyes. Katy danced to a song only she could hear as we paid the festival’s entry fee and received ten tickets each that we could trade in for dessert samples.
Tents lined one side of the park pathway, tucked between trees and flower beds, their colorful canopies bright against the backdrop of cloudy skies and evergreens.
Because of my shift at the library tent, we were here earlier than Juliet and her family and even Papaw, who were all planning to arrive in the early afternoon.
I hoped there’d be treats left by then because the park was already packed with people.
We were barely twenty feet inside the gate, and already the path was bottlenecked as everyone oohed and aahed at displays.
As we pushed onward, Katy put her hand on Scott’s arm, as if she simply needed to touch him to make sure he was really there.
It made me want to yell and scream at him about priorities.
Couldn’t he see how much she loved him? Missed him?
How was he letting this happen? Letting her grow up without him?
Letting Mary Joy grow up thinking he was a stranger?
It boggled my mind, hurt my heart. It was an old argument, though, and I refused to have it once again.
Katy soon came to a standstill, captivated by the macaron tent, her blue eyes shining with eagerness as I handed her a ticket to swap for a raspberry macaron.
As she skipped off, I spotted Georgia in the distance and waved. When I thought I saw another familiar face, my breath caught.
Jake?
I stepped forward, toward him, and stumbled over my feet. Once I righted myself, he was gone, and I realized it must’ve been a trick of the eye. The heart.
I promised myself I would text him later tonight. Send out a feeler. See how he felt about compromises.
A moment later, Katy returned and showed off her macaron, how pretty it was, before she started nibbling. We carried on, making our way along the path. It was crowded, loud, and muggy. The morning sunshine had given way to clouds. I’d stowed umbrellas in the stroller basket just in case it rained.
“Mama,” Katy said, wiping crumbs from her lips, “do you know if Miss Vera won?”
“I don’t think the judging is until later,” I said, figuring that right about now, Vera was probably wringing her hands, worrying about her entries: two pies; her thick, gooey kitchen-sink cookies; cinnamon cupcakes; and a banana-caramel cake.
I crouched and pointed. “Do you see that big white tent on the soccer field? That’s where the baking competitions are taking place.
Maybe your dad can take you over there while I’m at the library tent and you can look at all the entries. ”
Katy looked up at Scott.
He smiled. “Of course we can do that.”
He was being quite amiable today, which also tipped me off that he was going to spring something big on me. What could it possibly be?
As we headed for the library tent, I cataloged the desserts I wanted to try once my shift was over. Like the churro cheesecake, toffee cookies, and a pepper jack scone.
The path split, and we went left, to the library tent, where I saw that people were lined up for Jed’s bourbon-pecan bars. He was all smiles, chatting and taking tickets left and right, while Nettie was selling Forget-Me-Not Library tote bags and water bottles.
I glanced at my watch. It was time for me to take over for her.
“Please remember, no treats for Mary Joy,” I said to Scott, who’d be solely in charge of the girls while I was working my shift. I’d already warned him about eggs, and he’d seemed concerned enough that I felt I didn’t have to warn him again. “I packed her some snacks.”
There was barely restrained impatience in his eyes when he looked at me. “I remember. You’ve told me three times.”
I wanted to tell him a million times more. He tended to disregard what I thought in favor of what he thought was best. It had driven me crazy when we were married.
Instead, I clenched my jaw and said, “If you have any issues, you know where to find me.”
“We’ll be fine, Tallulah.”
I wanted to believe it, but something was gnawing at me, deep within.
“We won’t go far,” he added. “We’ll check out the baking competition, get some snacks, and find a picnic table not too far from you. We’ll check in from time to time.”
I recognized that he was giving in, just a little. “Thank you.”
Trying to push aside any fears, I told the girls I’d see them soon.
As I watched them walk away, however, I was unable to shake the feeling that by letting them go, I was making a huge mistake.