by McLean, Jay
Mia
My grandpa once told me that memories change based on the last time you remembered them. You don’t recall the solid, fact-based events, and so memories of the same occurrences change over time. When “Midnight Train to Georgia” plays through the speakers, I remember being on that water tower with Leo the final summer I spent with him. I was watching him, his profile, but he was so caught up in the lyrics he had no idea I was looking. When the song ended, he turned to me and asked, “Do you think you’d leave everything behind for love?”
I was fourteen.
He was fifteen.
I’d never experienced love before, but the way he looked at me then… I questioned whether I was experiencing it now.
I didn’t get a chance to answer before he added, “The man in that song, he moved to LA thinking he was going to be a star or something, and when he realized that it wasn’t going to work out, he wanted to go back to his roots. Back home to Georgia. And the woman… she just followed because she didn’t want to be apart from him.” He paused, his mind working. “He was going to leave with or without her, and she—she chose for herself.”
I thought about it a moment. “I think it’s love,” I told him. “I mean, she loves him enough to follow him.”
He nodded at that and didn’t say more.
It was the day after he asked me to stay, to go to school with him. When it was happening, I remember thinking it was his way of telling me he really wanted me to stay. Now, when I look back, I realize it was something else entirely. He was going to be there regardless, and he was going to live his life, with or without me. It was my choice whether I followed him or not.
“You want to break for lunch?” Leo asks, pushing me back to the present.
I glance up at him and shake my head. “I’m good.”
“All right,” he says, taking a screw from between his lips. He lines it up with a pre-drilled hole on the decking board and says, “I was going to work through anyway. I wanted to get past the front door so your grandpa can at least come out and sit on the porch. I know he’s been missing it.” He drills the screw in as if he’s done it a thousand times. He probably has. When he’s done, he looks up at me. “You okay?”
I fake a smile. “Yeah, why?”
He says, stretching out his back and shoulders, “You seem like you checked out for a little bit.”
We’ve managed to lay out enough of the porch to kneel on it while we work, so I scoot over to the next set of holes and take the drill he’s offering me. “I’m fine.”
Holden’s truck pulls into the driveway, and I’m grateful for his presence. “What’s good?” he calls out, making his way toward us.
“Just working,” Leo responds while I drill in a screw. When I look back up, Holden’s sitting on the same beam he was on yesterday. He doesn’t bother to help. He won’t.
“Hi, Holden!” Papa calls from somewhere in the house.
“Hi, Papa John!” Holden yells.
I put another screw in.
Holden asks, his voice low, “Mia, how many of those screws have you done?”
I look back at the boards already in place. “Like half of them.” I turn to him, notice the smirk on his lips. Hesitantly, I ask, “Why?”
He points to me, my chest specifically. “Every time you bend over to use the drill, I can see down your top.”
I gasp, scrunch the collar of my top and hold it to my chest.
Holden chuckles as he shakes his head. “I’d have never picked you as a black-bra kind of girl.”
I glare at Leo, and he’s looking anywhere but at me. He’s chewing his lip, trying to fight a smile, his face reddening from the force of his withheld laugh. I stand. “I hate you!” I stomp my foot, ignoring their joined laughter. “Both of you!”
Leo speaks up. “I thought you didn’t hate anybody.”
My eyes narrow. “First time for everything.” I spin toward the door and push it open. “I’m going to change,” I tell them.
Before I can slam the door shut behind me, I hear Holden say, “Sorry, man.”
And then Leo laughing. “All good.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
MIA
“Can you put it on the Preston Construction account?” Leo says into the phone as I step out onto the almost finished deck of the porch the next day. “Yeah, you can call Dad to confirm.” He rolls his eyes as he takes the glass of iced water from me. “I’ll be picking it up on Friday.” … “Okay, see you then.” He hangs up, thanking me for the drink and then devouring it in two gulps.
“Are you ordering material?” I ask.
Leo nods as he marks something off in a notebook I’ve seen lying around. “Yeah, just the timber for the railings. It’s cheaper to get them from our supplier back home, so I figure I’ll pick it up while I’m there.” He’s sitting on the deck, legs out in front of him as he leans back on his outstretched arms. I try not to look at the way the muscles in his forearms and biceps shift with every movement.
I sit opposite him, cross-legged, while Papa sits in his rocking chair behind me. “Philip’s here,” Papa says, standing up when a truck pulls into the driveway.
Turning to him, I ask, “Where are you going again?”
“He wants my help to buy some calves.”
Leo laughs under his breath. “That’s a sentence I never thought I’d hear.”
“Long drive,” Papa says. “I’ll be back late.”
I get up and walk with him to Philip’s truck. “Be safe,” I tell him, kissing his cheek. Then, to his friend Philip, “You bring him back in one piece, okay?”
Philip winks at me. “You got it, Miss Mia.”
I wait in the driveway until the truck is long gone, then make my way back to the porch. “You and your grandpa say the same thing when either of you leaves,” Leo says.
“The ‘back in one piece’ thing?” I ask, and he nods. “I don’t even know how it started.”
Leo’s quiet a moment before saying, his voice soft, “He loves you a lot, you know?”
Sitting back down, I start lining up the screws. “Well, it goes both ways,” I tell him, shrugging.
He doesn’t respond, and when I glance up at him, he’s watching me. And when Leo looks at you, really looks at you, it feels as though every muscle, every cell, every single part of you becomes bare, exposed, unprotected.
I ask, subconsciously crossing my arms to shield myself, “So… you think we’ll be done with the deck today?”
He doesn’t take his eyes off me. “What’s your grandmother’s name?”
I swallow the knot in my throat, ignoring the thumping of my heart as it fills the silence between spoken words. “Mackenzie. Why?”
“Like your middle name?”
“How’d you know?”
The muscles in his jaw tick, but his words are expressionless. “Your mom said it once. I figure that’s why people call you Mia Mac.”
I nod, pretend to focus on the screws again. “Why do you want to know?”
A beat passes.
Two.
And then he exhales, so loud and so harsh, it’s as if he was just coming up for air after almost drowning. With a single headshake, he picks up the notebook beside him, puts pen to paper, and starts writing something down, saying, “I wanted to do something on the railings for your grandpa. I thought I might etch some names into it. Something sentimental…”
Now I’m the one staring at him, wondering how it is he can be so sweet, so everything I mistakenly thought he was…
“Your dad?” he asks, glancing up at me with a slight grimace. “Yes or no?”
“Yeah,” I breathe out.
“His name?”
“Joseph.”
“P H or…?”
I blink, try to clear my mind of teenage boys and the false promises they come with. “Um. Yeah. That’s the English spelling.”
Leo nods, licks his lips as he writes. “And your grandpa? Should I use his English name or…?”
“English is fine.”
Leo sets the notebook beside him and tucks the pencil between his cap and temple. “It’s kind of cool that János Kovács translates to the most common English name.” My eyes widen in shock, and he must pick up on my surprise because he says, “You mentioned it at the hardware store, and I got curious, looked it up.”
He gets curious a lot, I’ve realized.
“What about your mom? Should I put Virginia on there?”
I snort, which is super attractive. Not that I’m trying to be. “Not unless you want to put ördög nő on there.” Papa says Leo asks a lot of questions, but he doesn’t ask them to me or of me, and I’m not quite sure how to feel about it. Leo watches me, waits for me to elaborate. “Papa calls her the Devil Woman.”
His quiet laughter sends a jolt to my chest. And now it’s my turn to watch. To wait. Minutes pass. Nothing. He lowers his head between his shoulders, looks down at his lap. My impatience, and maybe my own curiosity, get the better of me. “How come you’ve never asked about my parents?” I blurt out.
He doesn’t seem phased by my question, just does that lazy shrug of his that he seems to have mastered. “I figure if you wanted me to know, you’d tell me.”
Huh. I stare him down. “No one at the diner has mentioned it?”
He glances up, then right back down again. “Miss Sandra may have mentioned a scandal involving you that happened sixteen years ago, then again thirteen years ago, but she caught herself quickly and didn’t say anything else.” He looks up, fixes his eyes on mine. “I didn’t ask for more, and she felt bad about saying anything at all, so please don’t be mad at her.”
The boy is an enigma, and this soft spot he’s showing for Miss Sandra only amplifies that notion. “Did you know that my dad and Holden’s mom dated all through their teen years?”
His eyes widen, just slightly, and he shakes his head. “No.”
“Yep.” I get comfortable—as comfortable as one can be sitting on a wooden deck with tools all around them. “They started dating when they were twelve and were completely inseparable. If you ask any of the older folk around here, they’d tell you that they believed the two of them to be destined, as if God put them in the same place at the same time for reasons far greater than anyone could know.” Leo’s all ears, and I clear my throat, adding, “Even when they went off to high school, the townsfolk were scared that something might break them up, you know? But high school isn’t what broke them, at least not really. My dad—he got this internship working for a tech startup in New York the summer before his senior year. He was there two weeks when he called Tammy and ended it. He’s never spoken a word of this to me, so I only know what Papa and Tammy have told me. They don’t know if another girl was involved or if it was the city or the lifestyle that he got caught up in. Either way, he didn’t want this life, and he didn’t want Tammy.”
Leo snorts. “Your dad’s the guy in that song, that ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’...”
My brow dips. “I guess I never picked up on that.”
Leo’s eyes harden as he watches me, and I can hear the hesitation in his voice when he asks, “So… what happened then?”
“So then… Tammy was heartbroken, but she was—is—beautiful, inside and out, and she had so many guys waiting on the sidelines just for a chance at dating her, but she’d always been my dad’s. By the time he came back toward the end of summer, she was already dating Big H.”
“Big H?”
I nod. “Holden Senior. He’s known as Big H around here, because… well, he’s big. Anyway, she was seventeen, and he was older, twenty-five, and already running the family business. He was safe for her, and he offered her the kind of security that my dad had just stripped from her.”
Leo nods, taking all this in.
“My mom,” I tell him, “was just passing through. She knocked on the door one day, and Papa offered her a job as a seasonal.” I point to the barn behind me. “She stayed in there.”
Leo peers over at the barn. I don’t know if he knows what’s in there, or has seen inside, but he doesn’t ask anything more about it, and I’m grateful. “So, your mom and dad met, and then...”
“Papa says that as soon as that Devil Woman set eyes on my dad, he could tell something was off. She was twenty-seven, ten years older than him, but she… she wanted him, or something from him, and my dad...” I take a breath. “Papa says he was pathetically heartbroken about Tammy, especially since she seemed so happy with Holden’s dad. But Dad was also stupidly proud and never told her how he felt. Soon, Papa would hear him sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night, and he knew what was happening. He could sense it.”
“Jesus,” Leo murmurs, pushing out a breath.
“It gets worse,” I say.
“I’m scared,” Leo replies, his freckled nose wrinkling.
“A month into the school year, Tammy announced her engagement.”
His face falls. He knows where this is going.
“A week later, they were married, a month after that, Tammy was already beginning to show.”
“Holden?” he asks, and I nod.
“Tammy never went back to normal school, and my mom—she didn’t leave at the end of summer. Mom and Dad stopped hiding their relationship from Papa, and it wasn’t long until…” I point to myself.
Leo looks like he’s been sucker-punched right in the gut. And I get it. I wasn’t created out of love, and he realizes this now.
“Holden and I were born three months apart. But I was nothing more than a revenge plot from my dad and a sinister one from my mom. She had her claws in him, thinking that he’d stay for her, that he’d inherit the farm and all the money that came with it once Papa died... at least that’s how Papa sees it.”
After removing his cap, Leo runs a hand through his hair, tugging at the ends. “And they were both still in high school—Tammy and your dad?”
I nod. “Scandalous, right?”
Leo’s eyes are everywhere, all at once, as if searching for missing pieces of a puzzle.
“Papa forced Dad to do the right thing and marry my mom.”
“No way,” he breathes out.
Nodding, I say, “Technically, as far as I know, they’re still married.”
Leo’s chewing his lip, still trying to process everything, and while he’s doing that, I continue. “Holden and I were born, but in the meantime, Mom moved into the main house, and Dad got a full-ride scholarship to MIT.”
“The MIT?”
Another nod. “The very one.”
“And?” Leo urges, his eyes wide, waiting.
“And when it was time, he left with the promise that he’d get a job, send as much money as he could and that he’d come back as often as possible. He convinced Papa that it was the best thing he could do for my future. Only he never planned on coming back, and my mom—she must’ve sensed it—because a week after he left, so did she. With me. And she didn’t tell anyone. Not even Papa.”
Leo’s eyes drift shut, his hands balled on his lap.
“Three years later, she came back. The way Papa tells it—he opened the door, and every single muscle in his body turned to jelly.” A knot forms in my throat, and I do my best to push it down. “He says if he hadn’t been holding on to the door frame, he would’ve fallen to his knees, right then and there. He thought I was an angel, this little three-year-old girl with pigtails and brown eyes so light, he swore he could walk right through them and straight into heaven.”
Leo’s single, quiet laugh is almost painful.
“Mom told him she had a job interview and that she had no one to watch me and that she’d come back in a couple of days. She left me right here, on this porch, with a backpack half-filled with clothes and diapers.”
He sighs. “When my darkness returned,” he mumbles.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Nothing.” He shakes his head. “Did she come back?”
“No,” I say, leaning back on
my arms. “Papa waited a few days. He says—” I laugh this time, out loud. “He says those few days were the hardest of his life. He didn’t know me—not really—and he had no idea how to take care of a child, especially a girl. My grandma did all that stuff for my dad. One day, he found himself in the baby aisle at the grocery store, trying to figure out what size diapers to buy when Tammy appeared. His other angel—he calls her. She had Holden’s hand in hers like mine was in Papa’s, and… Tammy says that she’d never seen him so lost, so scared, not even after his wife passed…” I rub at my eyes, at the sudden tears welling. “Tammy once told me that there was never a choice when it came to looking after me. There was right, and there was wrong. And I’d been wronged enough to last a lifetime…” I trail off, my voice hoarse from the number of words spoken and the weight those words carry. “See?” I say, attempting a smile as I look up at Leo. “Scandalous.”
“It’s not scandalous, Mia,” he breathes out. “It’s fucking heartbreaking.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Leo
I’m almost finished hand-sanding the last of the decking boards when John returns just after 10 p.m. I wanted to complete it before I went home tomorrow so that when I got back next week, I could focus on the railings.
The delicate, complicated, Mia-railings.
I only had one sanding block, and by the time the boards were laid, the hardware store was closed. I told Mia she didn’t have to stay outside with me, but she insisted. Even though we didn’t talk much, I have to admit it’s nice having her here. Having her close. It’s far better than the whole ignoring thing we tried and failed to do.
When John gets out of his friend’s truck and steps on the porch, I put a finger to my lips and point to the porch swing where Mia is sprawled, fast asleep. She looks so at peace; I didn’t have the heart to wake her.
John halts on the first step, his smile instant as he looks over at her, his head tilting in that way adoring parents look at their children. “You try waking her?” His voice is deep, loud, and not on purpose. That’s just the way he speaks no matter what he’s saying.