The Tea Chest

by Heidi Chiavaroli

  “Yeah . . . well . . . how’s your mom?”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t talked to her since I joined up.”

  He whistled, long and low. “Yikes.”

  Something like hot ash smoldered in my chest at the judgment in his tone. “I went to see her today,” I ground out. “She’s in Barbados, apparently with her most recent exploit.”

  He made a familiar sound—part understanding, part acknowledgment.

  “What?” I stopped walking.

  He laughed. “Nothing.”

  “That sound—that sound means you want to say something but probably shouldn’t.” I’d forgotten about the small characteristic until now. How many other nuances of him had I not held close?

  “I was just thinking that the military hasn’t served to heal any old wounds, I guess.”

  I wanted to be mad, but staring into his face—slightly older, slightly more weathered than I remembered but at least five times more appealing—I couldn’t summon up anger. Instead, I stuck my tongue out at him. “I should get back to my apartment. Nice seeing you, Ethan.”

  He chased after me. “I didn’t come here to pry into your life or make calls on it, Hayley. I’m sorry. I came to thank you for what you did yesterday.”

  “You’re welcome.” I stopped walking, tried out a smile. My heart beat faster when he returned it, his white teeth reflecting the light of a window across the way, the same slight dimple I remembered from high school creasing his cheek like the curve of a quarter moon.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said. The soft words came saturated with past regrets, and I tried to erect a buffer around my heart so they would not be granted entrance. He had a family. A child. Nothing good could come from this vulnerability, for either me or him.

  I’d come here for closure. With Lena. That was it.

  Ethan Gagnon wasn’t on the list.

  And after six years, one thing hadn’t changed:

  Anything that rooted me to this place, I couldn’t afford to love. Because, quite simply, in opening my heart back up to Massachusetts, I was only opening it back up to hurt.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Hayley

  THE VIBRATION of my phone woke me from a dream I hadn’t wanted to leave. I was standing proud in my Navy whites, a Trident held out to me by one of my BUD/S commanders. I’d been just about to take it when . . .

  I put my forearm over my head, the sun bright behind the shades. I groaned, swung my legs off the bed, and sat, swiping the drapes of the bedroom open. Outside, bright morning sun soaked Revere Beach. I thought of Ethan’s appearance on that same stretch of sand the night before. He’d walked me back to my apartment, offered me a tour of his antique shop after I mentioned my book purchase.

  And before I closed the door on his presence, he’d given me a hug. The friend kind. I hated to admit it, but it was kind of nice, the faint scent of day-old cologne pulling me back years earlier to other nights. Nights where something magical interlaced with the naiveté of young love, where we’d vowed to be so much more than friends.

  And while I knew he’d meant nothing by it, something about his arms around me made me think that maybe he wasn’t attached to anyone after all. Ethan was loyal, almost to a fault. Probably why it had been so hard for me to be faithless all those years ago. If he were married or had a girlfriend, I couldn’t imagine him allowing himself to walk me home in the dark, to admit that he missed me, to give me a hug that lasted just a second too long. Yet that didn’t explain Braden or whatever history lay behind the child.

  I hadn’t asked. It wasn’t that I was afraid, exactly. Just that it seemed better not to know.

  My phone vibrated again and I scooped it up.

  When Ethan had asked for my phone number last night, I hadn’t truly expected a text. Not this soon, anyway.

  Want to come by the shop tonight? I can show you around. I have something I think you might like. Anytime after five.

  He gave me an address that was just down the street, across from the beach.

  I didn’t reply until noon, after I’d completed an eight-mile run, a long swim, and a series of core training exercises in which I recited the SEAL code to myself no less than a dozen times, each recitation ending with those four determined, beautiful words: I will not fail.

  When I’d completed my regimen, I could think of absolutely no excuses why I couldn’t go. And truth be told, I wanted to see Ethan again.

  I thought of that hug last night, the danger of spending time with a guy I knew riled me up, a guy I had so much history with.

  And what about the kid? What was the story behind him? I imagined a possible other child, a wife or girlfriend, a diaper bag by the door, Ethan spooning mushed-up baby food into an infant’s mouth.

  Ethan with kids. Unthinkable. These were questions that should have gotten answered before I agreed to spend more time with him, but I couldn’t very well shoot them off in a text now.

  I will be there, I wrote back.

  I spent the afternoon listening to motivational speeches by SEALs. By the time I finished, I felt strong enough to spend some time with an old boyfriend, strong enough to go see Lena, strong enough to stare all of my past in the face and come out victorious. I would get the mission done. I would do what I’d come to do.

  I dried my hair, donned some capris, a periwinkle-blue T-shirt, and flip-flops. I brushed on some mascara and lip gloss, grabbed a zip-up gray sweatshirt, the bold lettering of NAVY printed across the front.

  Once outside the apartment building, the sea stretched before me. Its steady endlessness and strength soothed like nothing else.

  I headed toward the address in Ethan’s text, arriving in just ten minutes.

  I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t an old two-story farmhouse with a lopsided porch filled with rocking chairs, a sign that said simply, Revere Antiques.

  I couldn’t help but feel a pinch of disappointment. I convinced myself it was for Ethan’s sake. I mean, he was a good guy. Intelligent, handsome, a heart of gold. Back in high school, he’d wanted to be an archaeologist. I remembered sitting with him on an abandoned lifeguard chair at the beach, gazing at the stars, his arm around me. He spoke of traveling to far-off places, discovering ancient civilizations, piecing together puzzles of the past. I spoke of traveling with the Navy. Back then, for one summer anyway, we didn’t bother to think about how our different desires would inevitably separate us.

  Now, looking at the shop, I wondered how he’d ended up here. Had he gotten a girl pregnant after I’d left, felt obligated to stay close to home? Had he fallen in love and accepted this place as his own? This place that seemed so . . . beneath him?

  The sign read Closed, but after climbing the well-worn steps to the porch, I opened the door to a merry jingle of bells.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey!” Ethan, dressed in a Red Sox T-shirt and khaki shorts, came from a back room, carrying what might have been an old war helmet. He put it on a counter where a laptop sat. “Glad you could make it.”

  I put my hands in the pockets of my sweatshirt. “Sure.” I looked around. Now that I was inside, I could almost make out a strange kind of order to the place. Wooden furniture seemed prevalent—and not all of it looked antique. Some of it looked refurbished or perhaps brand-new but with an antique finish.

  Vintage lamps, a colonial sofa, pottery, advertising posters, and knickknacks galore. My eyes landed on a set of small stairs with intricate scrolling woodwork and wheels, likely once used for a library.

  I wondered where the stairs came from, who had used them in the past. I suppose I could see the draw of being around so much old stuff. But all the time? As a career?

  “You have quite the place here.”

  He looked around the room as if trying to see it through my eyes, something akin to pride in his gaze. “It’s my home away from home, especially during tourist season.”

  “I never pictured you an antique kind of guy.”

  He shrugged. �
�I always loved old things. You have to remember that much about me.”

  “I do. I mean, I remember you wanting to travel, right? Dig up artifacts. I don’t remember you wanting to sell them.”

  He opened a glass cabinet beside the counter, placed the helmet with care amid an array of military paraphernalia—flasks, buttons, swords, photos. “Life happens, I guess. Sometimes our dreams take a different form. I’ve tried to accept the form mine have taken.”

  There were a thousand different circumstances in his life that could have caused him to make such a statement. I tried not to ponder each too much. Instead, I looked at my unpolished toes, my thoughts flying to my own circumstances, my own dreams. I’d been so certain they would happen. For the first time, I thought of the possibility of failure. Would I be able to move on, to not allow defeat to eat me alive, as Ethan said?

  “Want a tour?” Ethan’s words broke through my thoughts, his grin lifting the mood, his obvious desire that I share in this . . . thing with him both intoxicating and endearing all at once.

  “Yeah, definitely.”

  He led me to another room in the back. For areas with so much stuff, they really were bright and airy. The wide plank of the hardwood floors, the large windows on either end of the shop, the faint smell of pine—it all gave off a merry feeling instead of the stale, musty feeling of the few antique shops I’d been in before. And clearly he was proud of it.

  Old instruments and pictures having to do with music graced one corner. Another section featured everything gardening—rusty watering cans, pottery and vases, birdhouses, worn books about flowers. I let my gaze roam over the room, each section organized but full. Suitcases and signs, wooden benches and wardrobes, irons and food scales, and an entire section devoted to tea—cups, saucers, kettles, even an ancient-looking wooden chest.

  “Wow . . . how did you find all of this? And more importantly, who dusts it all?”

  He laughed. “I have some help during the day. I find the stuff; Ida handles the upkeep of it. A lot of it was here when I took it over from Allison’s parents, but I find a lot online, at yard sales, or other shops. Most of the furniture I’ve redone or built myself.”

  I ran my hand over a bureau with a curved face, stained a deep rustic mahogany. “Beautiful,” I whispered, thinking of Allison, knowing instinctively she was important to him, that likely she was Braden’s mother.

  “Thanks. That means a lot to me.”

  I looked up to see him smiling at me, and though we were ten feet apart at least, I felt that forbidden crackle—part passion, part tension—that seemed forever between us.

  Allison. Braden.

  Who was I kidding? There was no passion between us. It was all in my head, and it shouldn’t even be there.

  He gestured to the staircase. “There’s more.”

  I followed him to the second level, where smaller objects—easy enough to carry down the short flight—were on display, including several table-and-chair sets for children, crates and soda bottles, figurines and decorative letters one could make words from, old windowpanes, and countless books.

  When he led me back down the stairs, he cleared his throat. “So I’m not sure if you’re going to write this off as lame, but ever since you . . . helped out Braden the other day, I wanted to say thank you somehow.”

  He was so blasted cute—his uncertainty, the way he kicked the side of his foot against the leg of a nearby table, then looked up at me with those familiar eyes, the color of an ocean on a cloudy day.

  “It wasn’t anything, Ethan. I was there, I have the training—what’d you want me to do, let your son drown?”

  He stared at me, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You never were good at accepting thank-yous and compliments. And Braden’s not my son.”

  “Oh. I thought—”

  “He’s Ida’s grandson. The lady who dusts all this stuff. Ida was cleaning and asked me to take him for a walk. Last time she does that, I bet.”

  I tried to breathe around the tightness in my chest. Ethan didn’t have a son.

  The thought set something free within me, and I tried to capture it before it could blossom into a feeling I would regret, tried to rein in the musings that if Ethan didn’t have a child, perhaps he didn’t have a someone.

  “So the accepting compliments thing. Keep working on that,” he said.

  I laughed and rolled my eyes.

  He stepped closer, and when I realized how much I wanted him near, some gut reaction tried to get me to back away. “Remember when I used to tell you how beautiful you were? You always brushed off that compliment too.”

  The words sent my heart pounding like I’d just run a 10k. He smelled like that same hours-old cologne, mixed with some pine-scented furniture polish. I stopped myself from leaning into him, knew how easily I could be in his arms, where I used to find myself. I could allow things to go further than they should, all for the sake of old times. But I knew what would happen—I would leave Ethan again. And pulling him close only to run away was one mistake I was not willing to make a second time.

  His gaze lingered. Almost as if he were studying me, trying to see my thoughts. Why was he doing this? Why did he bring us to this place? And he was totally right. Not about me being beautiful, but about me not taking compliments well. Beautiful . . . it just wasn’t a word I thought to describe myself. Sure, I wasn’t hideous to look at, but most of the time I didn’t put too much effort into my looks. Lena had been beautiful at one time. That’s what made her feeble. The guys came, and then our lives flew out of control.

  Beauty was dangerous. Beauty made you fragile. Pathetic.

  I’d choose muscle over beauty any day.

  I swallowed, pulled away from him. “Tell me about Allison.”

  He straightened, rubbed the back of his neck, and turned to walk toward an old wardrobe. I thought of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe then. How I’d read it as a six-year-old, how I’d hidden in Lena’s closet, pressing myself to the very back of it, where her winter coat hung, the scent of cigarettes heavy in the fabric. I’d close my eyes, try to reach past the wall, expect the cold snowflakes of Narnia, but always . . . nothing.

  By age eight, I’d stopped believing in magical worlds where a perfect, mystical lion king reigned. I stayed out of her closet and instead started wishing I could stay away from Lena as well. Here, waiting for Ethan’s answer, I had the childish urge to fold myself within the depths of the wardrobe. Maybe this was a magical cupboard—one that could whisk me back to a different reality, one where I was with my crew on the Bainbridge.

  “Allison was my wife.”

  Ouch. I hadn’t expected the words to hurt so much.

  “She died . . . a boating accident, just a couple months after our wedding.”

  I opened my mouth, looked longingly at the wardrobe, then back at my flip-flops. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks.” He sighed. “It’s been three years. Not that I’m saying it still doesn’t hurt, but things were definitely . . . complicated between us.”

  I wanted to ask what he meant but pressed my lips together instead as I did the math. He’d gotten married three years after I left. How long had they dated? Surely more than a year.

  I ground my teeth at my callousness. His wife had died and all I could think about was how long it had taken for him to get over me.

  He cleared his throat. “Anyway, back to my thanking you. If you don’t think it’s too lame, I wanted to offer you anything here as a thank-you gift. After you told me about your book purchases yesterday, I thought that maybe I’m not the only one who still has an attachment to old things.”

  I smiled. “So not lame.”

  He broke into a grin that caused my heart to trip over itself.

  I started perusing the antiques along the wall. “So anything, huh?”

  “Anything. Though I guess you’d want to be able to take it on your ship, huh? If you’re goi
ng back, that is, with being a SEAL and all.”

  I tried to ignore the pride I felt at him imagining me a SEAL. It would happen. I could practically taste it. And yet there was something in his voice that sounded a whole awful lot like . . . regret? Or maybe sarcasm? I chose to ignore it, instead continuing my survey, trying to pretend his comment didn’t bother me.

  I gravitated toward the section of tea paraphernalia. A cup and saucer would likely be the most practical thing to take on the ship—or even to training—with me. I scanned the many options, paused over a royal-blue tea-for-one set with an Oriental picture on it. Beside it lay bamboo tea scoops, tea infusers, and books on tea, all perfect for the tight confines of my travels.

  My flip-flop bumped into something and I backed up a step, squatted to see what it was. A beautiful but very old chest with a flower on it. Something foreign yet beautiful stirred within my spirit, and I reached for the object, unable to escape its beckon.

  “The bottom of a chest. Likely for tea if we go by the Oriental design.”

  I pulled it out. The base seemed reinforced with extra wood for stability. Definitely sturdy, despite the many splinters in the ancient wood. “Where’d you find it?”

  “An estate sale in Medford, just last week actually.”

  The chest drew me somehow, though I wasn’t sure what characteristic. Certainly not its town of origin—our hometown. Perhaps the sturdiness of the thing, still strong after so much obvious wear and tear. I liked its solidness, its testament to bearing weight and trials and still finding usefulness.

  Wow, I might be more into this antique stuff than I originally thought.

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Kind of big for your suitcase, isn’t it?”

  I hefted it off the ground. “I’ll ship it wherever I need to. I like it. There’s something about it . . . Besides, it’s a sturdy place to store the books I bought yesterday and should fit under any bunk.”

  “Okay. I can bring it by for you tomorrow.”

  “No need. I can carry it home.”

  “Really? That’s kind of unnecessary, isn’t it?”