I bury my face in my hands. Within a few seconds, I feel strong, familiar arms come around me. One hand strokes my hair as my father soothes me. “Shhh, baby girl. It’ll all work out. I promise. Just let it happen like it’s supposed to. Don’t fight it.”
The problem with that advice is that I’m afraid I already know how it’s supposed to work out. I’m just not sure I can live with it.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN- Rusty
I guess that’s what happens when you’re a total as**ole to pretty much everyone—they stop coming to see you. I was blaming my grouchy mood on being confined in a twelve by twelve room with one window, a door and a lot of machinery, but now I’m beginning to see what the problem really is. Every person that walks through the door who’s not Jenna pisses me off. Instantly.
Trick was coming to see me every day at first and staying for a couple hours at a time, but now he stops by once and never really settles in. I can tell he’s anxious to leave five minutes after he arrives. It doesn’t help that, two weeks ago, after his first visit back from his honeymoon, I told both him and Cami that I didn’t want to talk about Jenna. So we don’t. Ever. They never mention her. And, of course, I never ask. I guess she’s gone and gotten her a great job somewhere. And I guess I’ll never know unless I swallow some damn pride and ask.
But, then again, do I really want to know? Do I really want to know how happy she is, living somewhere else, without me? No, not really. That feels an awful lot like twisting the knife .
With Trick’s visit for the day already over and done with, the only thing I have to look forward to is PT. They tell me that I’m doing so well with my deep breathing, my range of motion exercises, and my ambulation (a fancy word for walking) that I’ll soon be discharged until my arm cast comes off. Then I’ll start PT all over again.
That’s all fine and good. I just want out of this place. A.S.A.P. I need to get on with my life, too. Whatever kind of life that may be.
CHAPTER NINETEEN- Jenna
“So, how is he? Is he getting stronger? Did he get a discharge date yet?” I pound Cami with questions the instant she answers the phone. I know Trick was supposed to go for his morning visit and should be back by now.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Give me ten seconds to answer each one. Sheesh,” she moans. I give her absolute silence as I wait. “Trick’s still calling him a ‘grouchy bastard’ if that tells you anything about how he is. Still not happy about being in the hospital. Yes, he is getting stronger. He’s aced all his PT stuff and is up walking the halls at all hours of the day and night, evidently. And yes, he got a date. Well sort of.”
I feel a gasp stick in my chest. “What do you mean he ‘sort of’ got a date?”
“They’re saying within the next couple of days. I have no idea what the date is contingent upon.”
“Well why didn’t Trick ask?”
“Jenna! He doesn’t think like you do. He’s a guy. Remember?” She sighs.
“I know. I’m sorry. I’m just so curious.”
“I know,” she says, her tone quiet. Somber.
I pause, debating the wisdom of asking my next question. I’ve asked it a couple of times before and the answer always upsets me. But still, I can’t seem to help myself from holding onto hope.
At least for a little while longer.
“Did he ask about me?”
There’s a pause.
“No.”
Although, yes, there’s a stabbing pain through my heart, I also get irritated. How the hell can he just move on like that?
“So he hasn’t mentioned me, not one time, since y’all have been back?” Static crackles on the line between us. And my heart drops through the floorboards of my bedroom. “Tell me, Cami. I need to know. I’m driving myself crazy, and if something has happened, I need to know.”
“Nothing has happened…” she says vaguely.
“Then what was said?”
“The second time I went to see him, he said he didn’t want to talk about you, not to bring you up.”
“But why?” I ask, my voice small even to my own ears.
“He said he was tired of hearing about it.”
I can hear the pain in Cami’s words. She hates to tell me something so hurtful, but I cornered her by asking juuuust the right question. Otherwise, she’d never have told me, never have hurt me with this.
But I needed to know. As much as it hurts, I needed to know.
I look down at my hand, shaking where it rests on my thigh. The air around me feels thick and unbreathable. My head throbs with the need to scream. Or cry. Or come apart.
I clear my throat then take a deep breath, refusing to let my best friend see how deeply wounded I am. She’s seen enough, heard enough. I won’t continue to do this to her.
“Well, in that case, I guess I have some phone calls to make.”
“Jenna, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what… I really thought…”
“Don’t be sorry. We both hoped. And we were both wrong. Turns out neither of us know Rusty very well.”
“Wh-what are you going to do?” she asks carefully.
“I’m calling human resources at those two places I’ve been putting off. If they’ve still got openings, I’m going to set up an interview again. Only this time, I’m going. There’s nothing holding me here. Nothing and no one.”
And, for the first time since I met Rusty, I feel that’s absolutely, one hundred percent true.
“Why don’t you come over tonight? I’ll rent some movies and we can hang out. Or we could go to Lucky’s. Whatever you want to do.”
I smile. Even though I’m hiding it from her, Cami knows me well enough to know I’m dying on the inside. And, no doubt, she’s worried about me.
“Nah. I’ll leave you two newlyweds to your perverted sexcapades. I think I’ll stay here with Daddy. I need to spend some quality time with him since I won’t be here much longer.”
“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.”
She sounds a little hurt by my choice.
“Because you know as well as I do that he won’t be visiting me when I move, like you will. The man refuses to leave home.”
“Yeah, what’s up with that? What’s so fabulous about staying in Greenfield all the time?”
“Well, it’s not really Greenfield, it’s this house. It’s where he spent time with Mom. I don’t think he’ll ever love another place as much as he loves this one.”
Cami sighs. “That’s so sweet.”
“I know. Unless it ruins your life.”
“Yeah, love can go either way. If you let it.”
“I guess so. I suppose sometimes you just have to cut your losses.”
“Sometimes you do,” she agrees.
The question is: How?
CHAPTER TWENTY- Rusty
I glance up at the clock on the wall. It’s after seven in the evening. “What are you still doing around here?” I ask Mom when she wanders in. Normally, she visits me several times throughout the day and then goes home to do stuff around the house around six or so.
She doesn’t answer me right away. She just walks toward me, arms crossed over her chest, and sits on the edge of my bed. She looks like she’s deep in thought.
“Did I ever tell you that your father came back after he left that last time?”
I feel like shaking my head to clear it. Talk about out of the blue!
“What? What are you talking about?”
She looks off into the distance, a wistful smile on her face. “Your father had big dreams. And he was a very determined man. Stubborn. A lot like you. He thought there was more to life than small town living.”
I grit my teeth. It aggravates me to think of him, to think of what he did to Mom, to us, much less talk about it. “I know. He was an asshole. You deserved better.”
“You’d get so excited when he’d come home. You were on cloud nine, right up until he left again. Then you’d be depressed for days. Sometimes you wouldn’t eat. I’d get letters from your teachers. It was a cycle. It was hard on you.”
“But once he left for good, we did just fine without him.”
“You’re right. We did. But he came back once, once that you didn’t know about.”
I shrug. “So? What’s one more time?”
“He asked me if we’d go with him. He’d gotten a job with a country singer, on the road crew. Unloading equipment from the trucks. He just knew it would be his big break. And he wanted us to come with him.”
I’m not sure how I feel about this new information, but I’m confused as to why she’s telling me this now. “Obviously you told him no, right?”
“Right. I told him no. I knew nothing would make you happier than to have both of us together, but he wasn’t thinking about you like he should’ve. He wasn’t thinking like a parent. What about school? What about stability? You can’t raise a child on the road, as a hired hand for a country singer.”
“So he left us for his big dream. I already knew that, Mom, even if I didn’t know he came back that last time.”
“Yes, the end result was the same. But you know, I could’ve asked him to stay. And he would’ve. And things would’ve gone on like they always had. But I still loved him, and I wanted him to be happy. I knew he could never be happy around here. And I knew you needed more than sporadic visits or life on the road. So I made the only choice I felt like I could. I told him to stay away. I told him to go chase his dreams, to find what happiness he could out there, but I told him to forget about us. I knew you’d never have a chance to heal if he kept coming in and out of your life.”
Even though I understand why she did what she did, I’m not certain I can see why she kept it from me all this time. She let me think he abandoned us because he loved his dreams more than he loved us. In a way, that was true. But he would’ve kept coming around if she hadn’t told him not to. And I’m just not sure how I feel about it now, how I feel about him. And her.
“Mom, why are you telling me this now?” I ask, my tone rife with frustration.
“Because I could always see how it hurt you when he would come and then go, but I never saw how much it hurt you that he left and never came back. But I’m seeing it now. And I don’t want you to live your life based on a single event when you don’t have all the information.”
I don’t even know what to say to that. I want to ask her what the hell she’s talking about or if she’s been taking someone else’s meds. But I don’t. Because the more I think about it, the more I think I know what she’s trying to say. And the more I think she’s trying to help me not lose someone I’ll regret losing for the rest of my life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE- Jenna
A loud bark at my right ear provides me with a very rude awakening. After spending a nearly sleepless night tossing and turning, agonizing over the situation with Rusty, I’m not entirely surprised when I roll over to look at the clock and see that it’s almost noon.
Einstein, my eerily intelligent, solid white Labradoodle, barks again, throwing his muddy paws up on the side of the bed and scratching at me with his blunt claws.
“Einstein, no!” I chastise.
He stares me down for several seconds, panting heavily. Finally, he slides his feet off the bed then turns and trots to my closet. He brings back one tennis shoe, drops it on the floor beside the bed and barks again.
“It’s too early to walk,” I tell him, flopping back down on my pillow. I hear his toenails on the hardwoods and a few seconds later the thonk of another shoe hitting the floor. Another bark. “Einstein, I said no!”
Another scrape from a big paw has me up and out of the bed. Angrily, I grab his collar and tow him toward the door. That’s when I hear the sound of a loud engine pulling up in front of the house.
I stop and listen. Einstein is absolutely still as he watches me. He’s a very smart dog and this behavior isn’t like him. A little thread of alarm snakes its way down my spine.
I hear the engine shut off. Then a door slam. Then another. And then someone is shouting, “He’s in orchard. This way.” The voice is heavily accented and unfamiliar, making me think it’s one of the pickers.
But if someone is hurt out in the orchard, why is a picker at the house doing the talking rather than my father?
Apprehension brings me fully awake. I reason to myself that it’s probably because Daddy is still in the orchard. He’s not the type of person to leave someone who’s hurt. He’d send someone else for help. He probably called 911 from his cell phone and then told one of the pickers to go wait for the paramedics to arrive.
Jumping out of bed and rushing to the window, I pull back the pale pink sheer curtain and peek through the slats of my blinds.
There’s an ambulance in my driveway. I catch the departure of a dark-haired guy, dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt (obviously the picker) leading two uniform-clad emergency workers through the gate and into the orchard. Something is obviously very wrong; they’re wasting no time as they disappear into the trees, carrying the supply-laden stretcher between them.
Again, Einstein barks at me, urging me toward the door. His persistence is making me more nervous than anything, so I hurry downstairs to the kitchen and grab the walkie talkie from the counter. It stays in the same spot at all times. Everyone knows never to move it.
I press the button and speak into it. “Daddy? Is everything okay?”
I hear a crackle of static followed by silence. I wait several seconds for a response. When I get none, I call again. “Cris Theopolis, what’s your twenty?”