Heart and Home (31 page)

I pursed my lips against the
chills of emotion that rippled through me. “You’re not a failure, Troy.”

“It doesn’t matter,” his
hand slid along the bare skin of my shoulder. “When I’m with you, none of that
matters.”

Before I was able to insist
it did matter to me and should matter to him, that it mattered more than
anything in the world that he realize the truth about how amazing he was and he
wasn’t a failure, he drew me into his waiting kiss and made the world and all
its crazy notions disappear for the time being.

I fell asleep beside him,
but woke alone a couple of hours later, only to find him standing in the window
watching the snow fall over the city. I walked over and slipped inside the
blanket he’d wrapped around himself and he lowered an arm over my shoulder.

The quiet world surrendered
to the wind and snow, and for the moment so did we. The unbroken cover on the
streets below would soon yield to daybreak and a world that didn’t stop to take
a breath, but we did.

Chapter Thirty

On Monday I planned to drive
into North Hills to do some shopping at the mall there, but the weather did not
let up and we wound up staying in. While I committed myself to a couple of
hours in front of the computer, Troy flipped through the TV channels repeatedly,
until at last I disappeared into my bedroom closet and brought out the book I’d
bought for him on Black Friday.

“I was going to give this to
you for Christmas.” I held it behind my back at first, part of me afraid of how
he might react to it. “But maybe it’ll give you something to do right now while
I’m trying to get this idea onto paper,” I handed it over and drew my arms away
uncertainly.

I watched as he studied the
front cover’s stark primary colors, and then he flipped it over to peruse the
back. “You didn’t have to give this to me now,” he insisted. “I would have
found something to watch eventually.”

I shrugged one shoulder and
bent to kiss his cheek, “The only thing on at this hour is trashy talk-shows
and soap operas.”

“So, I’m not going to find
out today if Miranda is carrying Dylan’s baby?”

“I saw that episode last
month. Miranda’s not even really pregnant,” I said.

He already opened the cover
and was flipping through the pages. Occasionally he would pause to read,
creasing his hand along the curved page to hold it in place. He barely noticed
when I slipped behind my desk in the dining room and started typing again.

Occasionally I glanced out
from behind the screen and watched him tug on his bottom lip while he read.
Though it may not have seemed like much, my reservations about giving him the
book itself turned out to be false, and so I felt inside as if I’d already
achieved a small victory in a war he hadn’t even realized I was about to wage.

By Tuesday the city turned
the snow to ash. Salt trucks stained the streets, cars and sidewalks with
off-white splatters, and even though the expanse of clouds threatened to tear
open and dump another mountain of white over the world, we took off for the
North Hills Village Mall to do some holiday shopping. I hadn’t had a boyfriend
shop with me for so long that I almost forgot how much it seemed to take out of
them, and when he started to just nod and agree with everything I showed him, I
knew it was time to grab lunch.

With piles of bags packed into
the trunk, we stopped at a small pizza shop on the way home and tucked into a
cozy booth near the window. After placing our order and receiving our drinks, I
finally reached across the table and took his hands into mine.

“Isn’t this nice?”

“It was a mall,” he laughed.
“We do have one of them back home,” and he exaggerated the words back home with
a mock-country twang.

Laughing, I leaned further
across the table, “Not the mall, this, us just being together out in the world
without any cares or responsibilities.”

“Oh, yeah,” he nodded. “It’s
been good. Nice even.”

“Do you feel relaxed at
all?”

“I guess, a little.”

“Relaxing is good,” I
pointed out. “I know you work hard, but sometimes you need to stop and take
care of you. You need to relax more.”

I sensed discomfort in him
as he drew his hands away from mine and reached for his drink. “Have you
thought anymore about what you’re going to do at the end of this month?”
Cleverly played, I thought, him drawing the attention toward me and my
inevitable situation.

“No,” I admitted. “I did
tell my landlord that I wasn’t going to renew my lease, so I guess I better get
busy and start packing.”

“So, you’ll be moving then?”

“It looks that way, but
where to is still up in the air.”

He folded his hands together
and looked down at his knuckles, “You’re not still thinking about staying here
in the city, are you?”

I shook my head, “No, I’ve
more or less decided I’ll be coming back home. I’ll probably just move all my
stuff to Dad’s before Christmas and figure out where to go from there after the
holidays. I’ve even been talking with Amber Williams about making an offer on
the
Standard
building, but I want to
take a walk through it first, see how much work needs to be done.”

He stared at his hands a
moment, silently incredulous that I hadn’t mentioned such big news before then.
“You’re really thinking about reopening the
Sonesville
Standard
?”

“I’m considering my options,
that’s all. I want to do what I know in my heart I was meant to do, on my
terms, you know?” I half-hoped phrasing it that way would give him a little
hint I wished he would do the same, but my subtlety went completely over his
head.

“I know maybe some people
might think it’s too soon, probably even you, but I was being serious when I
said you could move in with me.”

I didn’t quite know what to
say, so at first I drew my purse onto the table and spent a few seconds rooting
through it in search of lip balm. After coating my lips in a shiny layer, I
dropped it back in and returned my purse to the bench beside me.

“I know you were serious,
and to tell the truth I would love for us to move in together.”

“I sense a but coming on.”

Hesitant, I rubbed my lips
together to smooth the gloss over them. “But I don’t know if that apartment is
big enough for both of us. I worry that it’d only be a matter of weeks before
we started to cramp each other’s style.”

“What if we moved into the
house? There’s a perfect room in the attic I could turn into an office for you,
a private place for you to write.”

His thoughtful offer touched
me unexpectedly. He was thinking of my space, how important it was that I have
my own private room to exercise my creative muscles in. “What about your mom? I
mean, is it really fair to her if we just take over her house like that? She’s
spent the last thirty years in that house.”

“She’s not happy there,” he
admitted, returning his gaze to his uncertain hands. He seemed fascinated by
the fading scar on the back of his hand from the cut he’d received just weeks
earlier. “She’s been after me for two years about how much she hates wasting
that space. She’d rather move into one of those communities or something. She
even talked for a little while about me selling the farm entirely.” A heavy
breath deflated his chest.

“That’s not something you’d
ever consider, is it?”

He finally lifted his stare
to meet mine, an almost cold and bitter hue lingering in the blue. “I told you
already, that farm is in my blood. I could no sooner give it up than I could
learn how to fly. I’ve accepted it, and hell, a part of me even loves it. I
thought about having her move into the apartment, but there’s the matter of the
stairs.”

It unnerved me how quickly
he changed the subject, as if talking about a day when he didn’t work the farm
was completely out of the question.

“You could put in a ramp,
maybe even one of those lifts,” I suggested, playing along. “If she really
wanted to move up there, that is.”

He shrugged, “It’s an
option, yeah. I think she just wants something more accessible. She’s taken to
sleeping in the downstairs bedroom, and no one’s really used the second floor
in years. Every couple weeks my cousin Carrie stops by and goes up to dust and
vacuum.”

I nodded, and withdrew to my
side of the table when the waitress approached and placed our order in front of
us. For the first few minutes afterward we focused on the food. I was grateful
for the distraction, as I wasn’t quite sure how to treat the subject of Troy
and I moving in together. Despite knowing in my heart that for me there wasn’t
anywhere in the world I’d rather be than with him, there was still the whole
issue of my healing task. While I was somewhat unsure, part of me was certain
moving in before it was addressed would mean ignoring it, or even worse, facing
it later and feeling helpless as it tore us apart.

“Troy, I’ve been thinking
about the whole thing with you and getting your degree at school,” I admitted.
I dared not look up for fear of the accusation I was sure awaited me in his
stare. “I know you have a commitment to your family and you’ve resolved yourself
to the farm. I accept that, but…”

“If you accept it, then why
are you bringing it up?” There was the slightest hint of disbelief tangled with
betrayal in his question, like he felt as if his admission just nights ago that
he’d come back to town feeling like an absolute failure and I’d just thrown
that back in his face like everyone else.

“Because I just think that
not finishing school has really been a lot harder on you than you like to let
on,” I said. “You can say that it meant nothing to you, that the world out
there was no different than it was at home, but can you really convince
yourself that it didn’t change you just a little bit.”

“Yeah, it changed me,” his
tone was bitter. “It made me realize that it’s better to not ever know what you
were missing, than to have a taste of something you can never have.”

“But what is stopping you
from making it yours?”

“Where do you want me to
start?”

“You’ve already said that
you can’t turn your back on the farm, and you won’t leave your mom,” I said.
“Those are your two biggest excuses, right?”

“They aren’t excuses,
Janice, they are facts.”

“But what if there were ways
to work around those two things, Troy, for just one more year so you could
finish your degree?
 
Your cousin
Ernie would help work the farm, and I would do whatever I could to make it
easier on you. I could help with your mo—”

“Stop it, all right? Just
stop.” He dropped his slice of pizza, half-eaten, onto the plate and pushed it
away from him. “Life doesn’t always work out like you want it to, Janice, and
even if I did go back and finish, what would it matter anyway? It’s not like
I’ll ever put it to use.”

“It would matter,” I
insisted. “I’ve seen how much passion goes into the things you create, how much
you love putting that knowledge to use in everything you do. Even if you only
put it to use in redesigning your apartment or making a cabinet for your
mother, it would matter.”

“I don’t want to talk about
this here.”

“Troy…”

“No, Janice.”
 

After that, he wasn’t in
much of a mood to do anything else and feeling defeated I drove us back to my
apartment where he spent the remainder of the afternoon brooding in silence.
Even when I announced that I cooked dinner, he said nothing, only joined me at
the table and pushed piles of rice around the smoked salmon filet on his plate.

“I know I’m not exactly chef
material, but I think the salmon is pretty good.”

I swallowed against the lump
that sat lodged in my throat like an aching cancer. The truth was I hadn’t even
tasted the food during the few bites I’d actually managed. Guilt and the fact
that he hadn’t said a word to me in about five hours made everything taste like
ash on my tongue.

He lowered his fork beside
his plate, “It’s not the salmon.”

“He speaks,” I tried at
humor, but could tell by the dour look he still wore that I was probably not
going like much of anything he might have to say now that he opened his mouth.
“Troy, I know you’re mad at me…”

“I’m not mad,” he admitted.

“You haven’t said a word to
me since we left the mall,” I pointed out. “If that’s not mad...”

“Not mad,” he said again.
“Confused. I mean, I don’t understand why it matters so much to you whether or
not I get a degree. Does it really bother you so much that I’m some uneducated
hick? Too rough around the edges for someone of your intellectual high
standards and educational background?”

I breathed in slowly through
my nose in an attempt to steady my heart rate, which suddenly doubled its pace.
“It isn’t like that, Troy.”

“Isn’t it?” He lifted his
gaze to mine for the first time in hours and I was taken aback by the bitter
cold I saw in his eyes. “I mean if we go back to the real root of things,
that’s the reason I never asked you out to begin with back in high school. I
wasn’t smart enough for you, but at least back then I was smart enough to keep
that in mind, to keep from embarrassing myself.”

The chill of his tone
trickled down my spine like melting ice.

“Please don’t do this,” I
laid my own fork down now. Sludge-like dread sunk into the pit of my stomach,
replacing the mild sense of hunger that lingered just moments before. “You’re
angry, and I understand that, but don’t turn this into something it isn’t. I
love you,” I told him. “And I only care about your happiness.”

Startled by the heavy palm
of his hand against the table, the silverware clanged and leaped in the wake of
his accusation. “If you gave a damn about my happiness you would have let it go
the first time I asked you to and never brought it up again.”

“Is that what all the other
people who care about you have done, Troy?” I swallowed my fear for the moment.
“Ignored the fact that you were tied down to a choice that wasn’t your own
until the grief and misery was too much to bear? Well guess what, your
suffering matters to me. Your pain tears me apart inside, and I can’t just sit
idly by and watch you act as though you don’t deserve the one thing in your
life that brings you happiness.”