Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Jake
I’M OUT IN the field, pulling weeds with Hattie, when a vehicle comes up the driveway. I hear a door opening and then closing. Several seconds later, Sawyer appears around the corner of my tool shed.
“Hey,” she says.
“Morning.”
“I hope you don’t mind me coming over without—”
“I never mind, Sawyer. Come on out here and help me pull some weeds.”
She looks relieved, walking across the grass to join Hattie and me in a strawberry row.
“There aren’t that many,” I say. “Just these that pop up right around the vines. The black paper keeps almost everything else from growing up, but I like to pull any I see just because I feel like they take energy away from the plant.”
“That makes sense,” she says. “Where should I start?”
“Anywhere you like,” I say.
She walks ahead of me, Hattie by her side, tail wagging hard. Sawyer rubs her head, once, twice, three times, and then drops onto her knees and begins pulling weeds from the base of a plant. We work like that for a while in silence.
I figure when she’s ready to tell me why she’s here, she’ll do so. And it’s not long before the questions come.
“How did you live through all of that, Jake?”
I consider my answer, wanting to be accurate.
“It wasn’t easy,” I admit. “Not for a long time, actually. I got on board the pity party boat, drank myself into more hangovers than I care to admit and despaired of ever figuring out what I was going to do with my life. I started with getting a dog, Hattie, something I’d always wanted, but never felt like I had the time for before.
That turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
She kind of let me see that I must not be such a bad person if she could have such a high opinion of me. ”
Sawyer smiles at this, searches out another weed and gives it a hard yank.
“May I ask you something?” she says without looking at me, keeping her gaze on the task at hand.
“Sure,” I say.
“Was there any truth at all to the accusation?”
Coming from anyone else, I might take the question as an insult.
But coming from Sawyer, that’s not it. There’s something in her voice that tells me she needs to know if I’m who she’s always thought I was, or if I might turn out to be just another one of life’s disappointments.
I think about my answer, giving it the pause it deserves.
When I speak, my voice is low and even. “It’s true that I should have picked up on what was happening before I did.
I knew she was stopping by my office on a regular basis, but she did have some difficulty with the class I was teaching, and she told me she wanted to make a good grade to prove to her parents she was taking school seriously.
That went on for six weeks or so. Until one afternoon, when she came by the office after a quiz to see if I had graded hers yet.
She kissed me, and I guess I was so surprised that I didn’t know what to say for a moment.
But the look on my face must have told her what I was thinking, and she left the office before I could say anything.
I decided to pretend it hadn’t happened, thinking that would save her the embarrassment of talking about it with me.
But then, the next day, she started posting stuff on social media, telling her friends not to take any of my classes because I had tried to assault her in my office.
Honestly, I thought it was a joke. I didn’t know whether to keep silent or attempt to address it.
As you can guess, it didn’t go away. It took on a life of its own, students sharing her post, until it went viral, and the truth didn’t matter.
I got an attorney that same day because I had a feeling that things were going to get worse.
And, of course, they did. What I figured out was that it didn’t matter whether I was guilty or not.
All that seems to matter these days is doubt.
If there’s any doubt about your reputation or something you’ve been accused of, that’s enough to turn your life upside down. ”
Sawyer is standing now, looking at me. I see the empathy in her eyes, feel it emanating from her like waves washing in from the ocean.
“I’m so sorry that happened to you, Jake,” she says. “It’s terrible. More than terrible.”
“It was. But I don’t question it now. I guess I’ve come to believe that things happen to us for a reason.
And if that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be here.
” I consider my next words, wonder if I will come to regret them, but say them anyway.
“If that hadn’t happened to me, I might never have seen you again. ”
Surprise registers in her eyes, immediately followed by something I’m less inclined to interpret.
“I’d like to see life like that,” she says. “I’m having trouble doing that, though. Maybe that’s something I can learn from you.”
“How to make lemonade out of lemons?”
“I don’t know how you were able to do it.”
“I didn’t want to live my life marinating in bitterness over something I couldn’t change.
I grew up watching my mom do just that, and at some point, it seemed like a terrible waste of life.
I didn’t want to give someone else the power to do that to me.
I always wondered why she couldn’t reject the label she thought my dad had put on her, acknowledge it as his shortcoming and not hers. ”
“It’s not easy to raise children alone,” Sawyer says. “Not now. And not then, either.”
“No, it isn’t,” I acknowledge. “And I always admired my mother for having the courage to make the decision she did. She certainly could have made another one. But I always felt like she could see herself through the lens of his rejection and never opened herself up to letting someone else give her another interpretation.”
“That’s painful,” Sawyer says.
“Yeah, it is,” I agree.
“Does your mom still live here?” Sawyer asks.
“She’s in a care facility in Roanoke,” I say, in as even a voice as I can manage. “She has dementia.”
“I’m so sorry,” Sawyer says.
“I considered bringing her here to stay with me,” I say, “but she had a stroke. And for now, at least, she’s getting the care that she needs.”
“I’m so sorry, Jake. That’s an excruciating decision to have to make.”
I put my attention on a particularly deep-rooted weed.
“We think we have all the time in the world to fix the things in our lives that need fixing. And then, one day, we wake up and realize that we don’t have that kind of time at all.
In my case, I let too much of it go past without saying things that I wish I had gotten around to saying to my mom.
I lived too many years focused on the things I thought she neglected to do for me, instead of realizing all the things she did right.
And there were plenty. I know that now, as an adult who’s had to figure out how to make it in the world.
It’s not an easy thing. And certainly not for someone who started out as my mom did, with a baby and no one to help support her. ”
“You can still say those things to her, Jake. She may not hear you as she once would have, but some part of her will know.”
“You believe that?”
She looks up at me then, meets my questioning gaze with sincerity in her eyes. “I do.”
“I’d like to.”
“You need to say the things you need to say, Jake. For her, but for you as well. She’s still here. That’s what matters. There are so many things I wish I’d said to my parents that I’ll never have the chance to now. Regret is an awful pill to swallow.”
The sun has moved higher in the sky, and Sawyer wipes the back of her hand across her forehead. “It’s gotten warm out here,” she says.
“Yeah, it has. How about a glass of water?”
“Sounds good,” she says.
“Come on. I’ll fix us both one.”
We walk through the field to the grass that leads to the house. Hattie follows us, tail wagging lazily. We take the stairs to the deck and step through the French doors of the kitchen.
“Do you mind if I wash my hands?” Sawyer asks.
“Of course not. The guest bathroom is just down the hallway there.”
“Thank you.”
She disappears from the kitchen, and I pull a couple of glasses from the cabinet, fill them with ice and then with water.
When she returns a minute later, I hand one to her.
She takes the glass with both hands, like she’s steadying herself, but there’s something quieter in her face than yesterday. Not ease, exactly. Just… less fear.
“Thank you so much. That looks wonderful. Your house is beautiful. Did you do any of this?” she asks, waving a hand at the decor of the kitchen.
“Yeah. Actually, I kind of did a complete renovation of the place. It needed an update, and I needed somewhere to put my focus.”
“You did a great job,” she says. “I love the colors, and the cabinetry is beautiful.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Have you thought about keeping your parents’ place?”
“No,” she says, shaking her head and glancing down. “I haven’t.”
“You could, you know. It’s a good place to live. I mean, I think it’s a good place.”
“It’s okay, Jake. I know what you meant.”
She walks over to the glass-paned doors that look out across the lake, stands there, silent, before saying, “How are you not angry about what happened to you, Jake?” She turns to look at me then. “I mean, you essentially had your life as you knew it taken away from you.”
“I was, for a while,” I say. “I’m not going to deny that.”
“What changed?”
I don't need to think about my answer. I remember the exact moment. “I came across this interview with a psychiatrist, a Holocaust survivor. She was in her late eighties at the time but full of life and purpose. She talked about being sent to Auschwitz with her mother and sister, about how the guards separated them on arrival, promising they’d be reunited soon. Her mother was gone that same day.”
Sawyer watches me, barely breathing.
“Listening to her talk about finding a way to go on after something like that… it made me see what happened to me differently. Just more clearly. And that maybe everything wasn’t ruined. Maybe I could still make something of what was left.”
Sawyer’s eyes darken and become liquid, tears falling, one by one, down her cheeks.
I don’t think about what I’m doing. I just cross the room and pull her into my arms, wrapping myself around her with a desire to give her what she needs in this moment—complete understanding of her pain.
Her shoulders shake against my chest. I rub her hair, not offering any words of comfort, just the silent communication that I’m here for her, that on some level, as best I can, I do understand where she is and what she is feeling.
I know better than to question the place she has found herself in.
I know the only person who can decide to leave it is Sawyer herself.
And then she slips her arms around my waist, hugging me tightly, as if she might absorb her body into mine.
We stand there, and that’s okay with me, because I would be content to hold her like this forever, to be the one from whom she seeks refuge and comfort.
When she pulls back and looks up at me, I see something in her I haven’t seen yet.
I could be wrong. Maybe I am, but I swear there’s a glimmer of hope there.
After Sawyer leaves, I stand in the kitchen with my coffee cooling in my hand.
The house is quiet. Too quiet.
I set the mug down and lean against the counter, hands braced on the edge like I’m trying to keep the world from tilting again.
It’s been years, but there are still days when I miss it, the classroom. The cadence of my lectures. The way a student’s face would light up when something clicked. The sense that I was doing something that mattered.
There are nights I still dream about it. About the last lecture I never got to finish. The hallway I never walked again.
Some mornings, I wake up half-expecting to pack my briefcase and drive to campus.
Then I remember.
And the shame comes, quiet and heavy.
I lost everything because someone told a story louder than I could tell the truth. And I’ve told myself I made peace with it.
But sometimes I still wonder who I’d be now if that hadn’t happened.
If I would have been stronger.
If I would have fought harder.
The truth is, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life explaining myself.
So I disappeared.
And maybe that’s what hurts most.
Not the loss of my job.
But the loss of my voice.
I grip the counter a little harder.
Then Hattie pads into the room, sits by my side, and rests her head against my leg like she’s reminding me of what I still have. Of what I’ve built. Of who I’ve become.
And slowly, the tightness in my chest loosens.