Chapter 35
THIRTY-FIVE
“I’m still not sure why he chose me but I never asked. I was afraid if he thought about it, he’d wonder, too.”
—excerpt from the unpublished memoir,
Darling, I Must Say by Gloria Hayes
“This is taking forever,” Hallie said.
“They just took our order five minutes ago. It will be here soon,” Abe said. “Patience, grasshopper.”
Hallie’s face scrunched up in annoyance. “I’m hungry now though.”
He pushed the coloring page and crayons the server had left on the table toward her. “Color.”
“Fine.” But she picked up the crayons and started to color a dancing hamburger hot pink.
Before we’d driven into Houston for dinner, we’d swung by the house for Hallie to change and Abe to shower off the day’s work. His hair wasn’t quite dry and hung in waves to just above his shoulders. He hadn’t shaved for a few days, and the scuff was doing all the right things for his jaw.
Hallie whooped when the server arrived with our food.
“Can I get you anything else?” the server said to Abe. She was a cute blonde with bouncy… everything. She knew it too.
I frowned at the side salad I’d ordered with my burger and curly fries. It had tiny, diced tomatoes, the kind that were impossible to pick off. I was pretty sure I’d said no tomatoes.
“Actually, is it possible to get the salad without tomatoes?” Abe said, nodding toward my bowl.
“Of course.” She winked. At Abe. “I’ll be right back.”
I stared at Abe in disbelief. “How did you know I don’t like tomatoes?”
“It’s probably on his list,” Hallie said around a bite of her hamburger. “He keeps lists on his phone.”
“What kind of lists?” I asked, confused.
Hallie shrugged. “Like for places we want to go for vacation one day or Halloween costume ideas. But then there’s lists for people, too. There’s one for me and Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Ali and Uncle Theo and—”
“I think she gets it,” Abe said. His eyes darted to me and then back to his plate like he was almost… nervous?
“Is there a list for me?”
Hallie stuffed a French fry in her mouth and nodded. “Show it to her, Dad.”
“Thanks, Hal. I’m going to make you eat broccoli for every meal tomorrow.” He ducked his head. “It’s not a big deal. What are the chances we could forget this conversation?”
“Zero. Definitely zero.”
Reluctantly, Abe handed over his phone. “It’s not weird. It just to help me remember things. That’s it.”
A list with my name at the top and several bullet points looked up at me from his phone. I read them aloud. “Likes pickles or maybe just jars of pickles?” I paused and shot him a smile. “Hates tomatoes.”
“When we were at that barbecue at your sister’s house…”
“You noticed that?”
He shrugged, looking vaguely uncomfortable.
“Must eat chocolate daily which she keeps hidden in stashes everywhere.”
“I found the one under the kitchen sink,” he said.
“But not the other one?”
“There’s another one?”
“Or two.” Or three. “Favorite color, yellow. Hates crowds. Favorite movie, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Loves old movies. Has never seen Casablanca. Takes her coffee with three sugars, one cream.”
It kept going. Apparently, I’d once mentioned I wanted to take a Thai cooking class.
Another time, he’s overheard me tell Hallie that I wanted to see a Broadway musical one day.
More than once, I’d brought up my desire to adopt a tiny dog with a huge attitude that I could carry in my purse and scare people with its ferocious bark. That also made the list.
“It makes buying gifts easier,” he said. “Hallie’s always telling me some new thing she wants.”
I only half heard him because I’d reached the bottom of the list where it took a turn towards more personal information. These, I did not read out loud:
Has the prettiest blue eyes
Always smells like maple syrup
Has a freckle that looks like Italy on her right arm
Makes me laugh
Takes care of the people she loves
I stared down at the phone and fought the lump lodged in my throat. Had anyone ever taken the time to learn this much about me?
I realized something I liked very much about Abe: he didn’t pretend.
Not when it came to the important things.
He said what he meant, but he also listened.
Truly listened. I’d spent a good part of my life feeling like my voice wasn’t ever heard.
My father hadn’t even bothered, my mom had been so busy and stressed and then sick, Mae was always right even when she was wrong, and Aidan was just Aidan.
But Abe was different.
“I smell like maple syrup?”
“I like maple syrup.” His smile was small, even a little shy, as he reached over and gently pulled the phone from my hand, his fingers brushing against mine and making my breath catch.
Suddenly, Hallie jumped up from her seat. “Can I have money to play the games? Please.”
Abe pulled a ten-dollar bill from his wallet. “That’s all you get.”
“Yes!” Hallie snatched the bill and turned to me. “Tell him about the thing.”
Without waiting for my reply, she scampered to the back of the restaurant where there was a decent-sized arcade.
“What’s the thing?” Abe crossed his arms and drew my eyes.
The sleeves of his t-shirt should get an award for their work in containing his arms. Best Strength of Material.
I’d never thought much about a man’s arms. Aidan had always been long and lanky, like noodles.
But Abe’s muscles were hard at work just existing.
My eyes snagged on a tattoo that started on the back of his hand, a tree with root tendrils that slid around his arm. On the trunk, there was a heart with TH in the middle of it. Something about that tree felt familiar to me.
I let out a small gasp when it came to me. “Is that a tattoo of the Legacy Tree?”
“Yeah. I’m surprised you noticed that.” He stretched out his arm and I took that as permission to look at it more closely. “That’s the first big one I ever got when I moved away. Wanted something to remind me of home, I guess.”
“T.H.” I traced the letters with a featherlight touch. His skin was warm, a few shades darker than my pale shade. His arm tensed. I pretended not to notice. “Two Harts.”
“I traded with the artist, this tattoo for a brake job on his car.”
I glanced up at him. “Very resourceful.”
He huffed a laugh and pulled his arm back. “Probably really stupid. Money to do things like eat would have been better, but…”
“But this will live with you forever. What’s a few missed meals considering that?”
“I guess so.”
“Do all your tattoos mean something?”
He pushed his plate aside and laid both arms on the table. “A lot of them.”
Hesitantly, I reached out to trace the words on his other forearm.
I moved slowly, giving him plenty of time to stop me.
My fingers slid across his skin. It was warm, sprinkled with dark hair, and utterly touchable.
Maybe addictively so. At his wrist, I could see his pulse beating fast. His breath caught but when my eyes darted to his face, it revealed nothing. Must have been mistaken.
“‘It is still a beautiful world.’ I like that,” I said, my voice breathier than I’d ever heard it.
“It’s from a poem called ‘Desiderata.’ I like the reminder, especially when life knocks you down.”
He let me look a little more and ask questions, patiently explaining each one. When I’d exhausted all the tattoos I could see, I pulled my hands away.
“Are you done stalling? You going to tell me what’s going on now?”
“There’s been some issues with girls in her group at camp.”
“What kind of issues?”
He looked ready to storm out of the restaurant and ride his white horse into town to take care of business. It was adorable.
I shushed him. “Keep your voice down. She doesn’t want you to know. I wasn’t keeping it a secret and I thought they’d moved on to someone else. But today the group leader pulled me aside.”
“What are their names? I’ll talk to their parents.”
“You cannot. She would die before she asked for her dad to get involved.” I narrowed my eyes. “You weren’t picked on as a kid, were you? Please tell me you weren’t the bully?”
“What? No, I was… a regular kid.” He paused. “I guess I didn’t really have to deal with being picked on.”
“Because you were popular.”
“I got in trouble a lot,” he said defensively.
“For what? Talking too much?”
“I… Well, yeah, when I was younger. Skipping school when I was older. Bad grades. Missing curfew.”
“And yet, I’ll bet you got away with everything. Just flashed that dimple and talked yourself right out of trouble.”
The dimples made an appearance just to prove my point. “I guess they don’t hurt.”
“Sounds like high school was just torture for you.”
“If we’re going to play this game, I bet you were the girl with too much black eyeliner who sat in the back of the room and pretended to hate everything and everyone. But secretly, you had the highest grade in English class and wrote terrible emo poetry in your secret journal.”
“Not true. I had a secret file on my phone and those poems were good.”
He smirked, looking much too pleased with himself. A whoop of victory came from the arcade that sounded suspiciously like Hallie. Concern replaced amusement. “Why was she so upset?”
“The girls are all entered into that stupid Founder’s Day pageant. Hallie isn’t.”
“Yeah.” He frowned. “What happened?”
“Audrina is the worst of the girls. Her stepmother, Megan, is in charge of Little Miss Two Harts and at lunch today, Audrina repeated some things she’d heard and they were not nice. When Hallie didn’t come back from lunch, her leader found her crying in the girls’ bathroom.”
“They made her cry.” His dark eyes flashed. “What did they say?”
“That Hallie wasn’t pageant girl material and she would be an embarrassment if she was entered.”
He smacked the table and I jumped at the sound. “What in the—”
“I saw Megan in the parking lot and confronted her.” I grimaced. “And I’m not sure how it happened exactly, but I told her that Hallie and I were going to enter in the pageant and prove them wrong.”
“I’m sorry? What did you say?”
I winced. “I told her that Hallie and I were going to enter the pageant and prove her wrong.” I crossed my arms on the table and dropped my head on it. “I don’t want to be in a pageant. But she looked so smug and self-righteous, and I didn’t want her to win.”
“I don’t know what to say. What does Hallie think about this?”
“I haven’t told her yet.” I straightened. “I thought, hey, Abe would never let Hallie participate and then I could bow out too.”
“You want to chicken out?”
I leaned across the table until I was about a foot from his face. “Yes, I want to chicken out. I cannot get in front of the town and do all those pageant things.” I grabbed his shirt and yanked until I was inches away now. Overkill? Maybe, but the panic was real.
“Then they win. You aren’t going to let them win, are you?” He tapped the end of my nose and smiled, his dimple making an appearance. Which seemed unfair. I knew that thing was diabolical.
I whimpered. Because he was right. I couldn’t let them win. It was a matter of principle. I didn’t want to win the damn thing, I just wanted my presence to irritate Megan. “I hate you for being right.”
He carefully uncurled my fingers from his shirt. “No, you don’t.”
Staring at him in disbelief, I plopped back in my seat. I couldn’t even think of what to say, so instead I dug around in my purse for chocolate, but I’d used it all over the weekend and hadn’t refilled. With a groan, I tossed the purse on the chair next to me and crossed my arms.
A hand appeared, a chocolate kiss in the center of the palm. I snatched it and unwrapped it.
“They win. You aren’t going to let them win,” I repeated, sounding more like a snotty twelve-year-old than a grown adult. I was glaring at him in silence when Hallie slid into her seat, smiling and a little sweaty.
“Hal, Iris told me about the pageant,” Abe said carefully. “And how all the others are in it.”
Her grin slipped. She picked up her napkin and ripped off a tiny piece. “Yeah.”
“Would you like to be in it, too? It could be fun.”
Her shoulders slumped. “I don’t think I’m really a pageant kind of girl.”
I cut her off, feeling anger surge again at this sweet little girl thinking she wasn’t good enough. Not on my watch. “You remember when I talked to Audrina’s stepmom today?”
She nodded.
“Well, I might have told her that you and I were entering the pageant.”
Hallie’s mouth dropped open. “We are?”
“It’s up to you,” Abe said. “Whatever you want to do.”
“But…Audrina said…”
“I don’t care what Audrina said. We can enter if we want. We might not win but we can sure show them they are so wrong about us.” Revenge was as good a reason as any to do this pageant.
She swallowed. “I sort of want to, but I’m kind of scared.”
“You know what?” I said. “I’m scared, too. We’ll be scared together. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Abe smiled. “That’s my girls.”