A Heart of Time (11 page)

“I shouldn’t have had that knee-jerk reaction,” I tell her.

“Yes, you should have,” she corrects me. “That was like the best first kiss I’ve ever received in my twenty-nine years of life.” I wasn’t expecting to hear that after nearly forgetting how to use my damn lips.

“Now what?” I ask her. There doesn’t have to be an answer to this question but I need to know what she’s thinking.

“Now, we’re still Hunter and Charlotte. We’re still whatever you want us to be, even if that’s just friends who kiss and
whatever
,” she says fervently.
Whatever
. What does she mean by whatever? When would we even be able to arrange “
whatever
” with the girls running around? Is any of this even possible? “No rules. No expectations. No labels.”

“‘
Whatever
’ works for me,” I tell her. “But right now, I should probably get back home.” I point over my shoulder to the window that overlooks my front yard. Why am I pointing at my house like she doesn’t know where I live? I’m so out of my mind right now, and it feels nice.

She reaches over and pinches both of my cheeks. “You’re looking a little pale. They’ll know.” She gives me a cute wink before giving each of my cheeks one more slightly painful pinch. “There, now your cheeks are rosy again,” she says. The moment makes me feel a bit giddy as I yank myself off the couch. Rearranging my clothes so they fall correctly, she stands up and smoothes her fingers through my hair once more. “Couch head.”

“Worth it,” I tell her, wrapping my arm around her back as I pull her in to me once more. She’s small in my arms and I have to lean down quite a bit to close the space between us, but she presses up on her toes and finds my lips with hers. I grip her tighter, needing to hold on as hard as I can while I inhale everything about her. A quiet moan pulses against my lips and once again, she brings me to another point of losing all control from the waist down.

“I—I might not be able to wait forever for ‘
whatever
’, so I just need to put that out there,” I whisper into her mouth.

“Well, maybe you both can come over tonight so the girls can watch a movie, and we can just do ‘
whatever
’,” she says.

I pull away, gauging the look on her face, taking pride in the flush of her cheeks as well as the lustful look in her eyes as she pinches her lower lip between her teeth. “Okay.” My eager agreement comes without much thought. “I’ll see you later, Lana,” I yell into the other room. “Thank you for letting me
talk
to your mom.”

“You’re welcome,” she squeaks.

“Tonight then. Six?” I confirm once more.

“
Whatever
,” she says with a quick wink.

CHAPTER NINE

The problem with
brothers is that there is no hiding information from one another. It only takes one look from AJ when I walk in, and I know my face is redder than a Maine lobster. He stands up from the couch with a shit-eating grin from ear to ear as he starts toward me with a slow clap.

“Don’t be a douche,” I tell him.

“I’m so proud of you, bro.” His arms stretch out in front of him, reaching for me. “You’re going to make it after all,” he continues crooning with obnoxious baby-talk voice. If I were him, I wouldn’t take another step closer. His condescending words are quickly eliminating every happy endorphin I walked in here with.

“I should have just stayed there,” I say under my breath. Stepping away from AJ in order to hold myself back from punching him, I make my way into the TV room and find Dad still asleep, Mom folding a load of Olive’s laundry, and Olive tearing outfits off of each of her Barbie dolls.

“Is everything okay with you and Charlotte now?” Mom asks.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” I say, kneeling down next to Olive. “Want to have dinner with Lana tonight?”

“Yay!” Olive shrieks. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She hops up and jumps on top of me, locking her arms around my neck. “Can I wear a dress?”

“If that’s what makes you happy, of course you can,” I tell her.

“She has school tomorrow,” Mom says, keeping her eyes locked on the pair of pants she’s intricately folding into quarters.

“Yeah, I’m aware. I can take care of her, believe it or not.”

“What crawled up your pants, Hunter?” she asks.

Besides the obvious, how can she not know what’s bugging me? “Am I the only one who sees how much you all consume yourself with my private life?” I stand up with Olive still attached to my neck, giggling like a hyena. She makes it hard to have a serious conversation with Mom, but this needs to be understood.

“It’s only because we all worry about you, sweetheart.” Mom finishes folding the last of the clothes and lifts the stack up. “And Ellie’s death has been difficult for your Dad and me, too. Not only was she precious to us, but seeing our son lose his wife has been heartbreaking. We love you very much and have done our best to help you through the past five years, but it’s been a continual learning experience for us too. There’s no manual for how to help your son through something like this. Plus, all mothers pry. If I didn’t pry, it would mean I didn’t care about you. Someday, I won’t be here to make sure you’re happy and you’ll miss this.” She brushes by me to head up the stairs, leaving me with her motherly version of a punch to the gut. This is why I normally keep the peace and let her and everyone else take part in my sad little life.

AJ finally meanders in and pulls Olive off my neck. “Sorry, again.” He sits down on the couch beside Dad, cradling squirmy Olive in his arms. “You should be smiling.”

“You should be looking for your wife,” I retort.

“She’s at home,” he says.

“You should be there, too, then.”

“I want a divorce.”

And there’s the mic drop. Can’t say I didn’t see this coming the day he spent his life savings on a three-carat diamond only because she wouldn’t accept anything less for a proposal, or so AJ said. “Have you thought this through or are you just afraid to fix this problem you caused?”

“Oh!” Olive shrieks. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” AJ turns his attention to her, clearly avoiding my question.

“The mail is here. Mail, mail, mail!” she says, running through the house.

“Where are you going, Olive?” Mom shouts from upstairs.

“Mail!” Olive shouts. She is half way down the driveway before I reach the front door and she is already running back with a stack of mail in her hands. “I knew it!” She runs in past me, dropping the mail on the coffee table, keeping one small envelope against her chest. “It’s her, Daddy!”

“Who?” Mom asks, walking down the stairs into the living room. “Who’s her?”

“Mommy’s heart,” Olive says, as if it would make sense to anyone but Olive and me.

“Excuse me?” Mom says. I never exactly told Olive to keep these recurring letters between this woman and myself a secret, but I never intended to let anyone else know about them either. “Why are you getting mail on a Sunday?”

Uh. We don’t get mail on Sundays. I didn’t grab the mail yesterday, but why would she have thought the mail just arrived. “Olive, did you see the mail carrier?”

“No, I just heard the mailbox.” Bionic hearing? Jeez.
Wait a second
. Running out the door, letting the wind slam it shut behind me, I make it to the end of the driveway just in time to hear a car engine, but whoever it is has already gone over the peak of the hill. Even if I ran down the street, I wouldn’t have a chance at seeing the car.

Defeated as always, I walk back into the house and take the envelope from Olive. “Did you see the person who put this in the mailbox?” I ask her. Has she been delivering these letters all along? If so, she’s obviously from around here.
But, what about the mountains?

Olive shakes her head, her pigtails flopping around. “Nope.”

“Did you see a car drive away?”

“Yup,” she says. Her one little word makes my heart stop beating for a brief second.

“What color was it?” I ask.

Olive places her finger over her lips as her gaze floats to the ceiling. “Ummmm, hmmm. I think—I think it was green—or maybe it was brown. Gray, yeah it could have been gray, like gray and white maybe.”

I kneel down in front of her and take her hands into mine. “Olive, I need you to think real hard. Was it a big car like mine or was it small like Grammy and Grampy’s?”

“It was—kind of in the middle I guess. You know what, it could have been a blue car,” she says with a large smile. “Yeah...I like blue cars.”

This is absolutely not helpful. “Hunter, would you like to explain any of this?” Mom asks me, like I’m a teenager who she just caught hiding weed in his top drawer.

“A lady writes Daddy notes all of the time. She has Mommy’s heart,” Olive outs me a little more.

“What?” Mom croaks with anger tinting her cheeks. “You know the recipient?”

“No,” I correct her. “I don’t know who this woman is. I just receive letters from her.”

“She obviously knows you and where you live!” Mom says, exasperated. “Well, open it!” I don’t want to read this out loud. Not to her. Olive doesn’t understand much of what these letters ever say, so I don’t mind reading them to her, but this is all I have left of Ellie, and it feels like it should be private.

“Mom, I need this to be for my eyes only,” I try to explain, though, I know she won’t understand. She loved Ellie as if she were her own daughter. And for that reason, there are tears welling up in Mom’s eyes.

She doesn’t respond with an argument, just a look like I’ve hurt her. “Okay,” she says. With Olive locked tightly between her arms, she presses her cheek down on Olive’s head, her eyes close and a single tear escapes.

I open the envelope, carefully slipping the paper out. I unfold it, finding more text than normal.

“
Dear Mr. Cole
,” I read out loud, succumbing to the guilt trip. Mom’s eyes open with surprise, elation, and a plea for more.

Four weeks have passed since my last note to you. In that time, the weather has grown cold and I have spent a great deal of time indoors, reading, cleaning, and writing a bit. I’m afraid her heart feels a bit empty these days and I feel guilty for not doing more to fill it.

I swallow against the tightness in my throat while bearing a sharp pain in my chest. I don’t want her heart to feel empty...ever. I spent my entire life warming her heart, filling it with as much love as I could offer. Needing a break from the ice-cold words, I glance up at Mom, assessing her thoughts by the look on her face. Confusion is all I see, though.

I met a man, a man who doesn’t know of my weakness, losses or gains. I think he saw me for who I am and wanted to learn more about me, but I fear what he would think or do if he were to learn of my fragile state.

I want to tell her no man is worth the fight if he doesn’t love a woman for everything that makes her who she is, but I can’t tell her that because I don’t know who she is and I probably never will.

Anyway, I hope you and your daughter are doing well. Ellie once told me she dreamed of having a daughter. I know this isn’t the way she wanted it to happen, though. I’m sorry I have let Ellie’s heart down this past month, I will do what I can to bring back some of the warmth that has slipped away. Maybe this man I met will be different. Maybe he will be the first to love a bird with a broken wing. We can always hope, right? Take care and I hope the holiday season brings you everything you wanted this year.

Sincerely,

Her Heart

I have always thought she might know of Ellie considering she knows who I am and now, where I live, but this is the first time she has mentioned Ellie’s name or the fact that she knows Ellie and I have a daughter. That information would have remained private in any donor exchange of information, especially since I have no information about her.

My only thought right now is that she knows Ellie—she knew Ellie, which means I must know her, or I’d like to think I know her. Ellie and I had the same group of friends, aside from some of the faculty she worked with at the school, but she wasn’t very close to any of the other teachers.

“Hunter,” Mom interrupts my thoughts, tears now spilling out, one after another down her wet cheeks. “This woman knows you and Ellie. This wasn’t a random donation, was it?” She’s asking me as if I have purposely kept information from her, details I’ve been dying to find out for myself.

“It seems it, but I have no information about her. I never will unless she reveals herself to me.” Mom leans forward and takes the envelope off of the coffee table, flipping it back and forth, looking for the return address I’m always in search of.

“She doesn’t want you to find her,” Mom says.

“I know.” But that won’t stop me from trying.

“I’m heading out,” AJ says, walking into to the living room. I almost forgot about the atom bomb he dropped on me a few minutes ago.

“Where are you going?” I ask him.

“Home to work things out with Alexa, I hope,” Mom interrupts.

“Nah, I’m going to Lion’s for a bit,” AJ says, brushing her off.

“Oh, AJ, I hope you aren’t drinking again. You’ve come so far.”

“Jesus, Mom. I think you and Dad need to hit the road. You’re spending way too much energy worrying about Hunter and me today. For your information, I never had a drinking problem. I just like to unwind and enjoy myself sometimes. There is nothing wrong with that. Plus, maybe I’m just going for the bartenders’ company.” He knows he’s crawling under her skin and AJ has always been one to enjoy doing that to her.

“I did not raise you like this, AJ. You should be ashamed of yourself. You need to make things right with your wife, not go down to a—a,” she curls her lip in disgust. “Grungy, dirty bar where the girls all have ta-tas bigger than the state of Texas.”

AJ lets out a loud belly laugh before placing his hand on Mom’s shoulder. “Oh, Mom. Their breasts aren’t quite that big, but they sure are something to look at, huh?” With that, he grabs his coat from the couch and leaves without another word.

“Where have I gone so wrong with the two of you?” she asks in a shaky voice. “You want to die alone and he doesn’t know how to keep it in his pants.” While I know she didn’t mean what she said, it still feels like a slap across my face. I never said I wanted to die alone. Yes, the thought has crossed my mind, but I never admitted to it out loud.

“That’s not fair,” I tell her.

“You’re right,” she agrees. “But don’t look something good in the face and walk away, Hunter. Don’t do it. That’s all I’m going to say.” Except, that’s not all she’s going to say. “That girl over there, Charlotte, she’s a keeper, so don’t mess it up. Make yourself happy, even if it’s only for Olive’s sake.” Now, she’s done.

“Daddy always makes me happy,” Olive chimes in, avoiding eye contact with Mom. “Always.”