“Key words: gets paid. You can have plenty of patience, for the right price.”
Ford laughs and loops his arm around my waist, a motion so smooth I almost don’t notice his fingertips pressed into my hipbone until my heart kicks up.
“God, get a room,” Bram mutters as he passes. Ford taps his cup before he can drink, almost making him spill.
When he’s gone, I nudge Ford. “Not a bad idea, though.”
“I thought so, too. But I can’t let him know that.”
We stay long past the end of the party, when the only guests left are their aunt and Hudson. My parents stopped by briefly, long enough for Dad to swipe some frosting off my piece of cake—and for Mom to check her anger with a few good breaths.
Things between them have improved a lot, the last year. It’s still not perfect: Dad sneaks the occasional bit of sugar, but he is sticking to his diet and taking charge of his own health, so Mom can focus on Grandma. And, with Grandma’s hip healed and her neurology visits showing a molasses-slow decline—her stubbornness, hard at work—that job is becoming simpler than expected.
Helpful to all of them, of course, is the fact that Mom now babysits Bentley five days a week while Caroline’s at work, in exchange for some help with housework and cooking on her days off. The only thing more astounding than how much a baby in the house has energized and pacified my family, is the fact Caroline can convince Dad to eat just about any healthy dish she and Mom make.
“Your mom told me the house is on the market again,” Ford says now, crouching in front my broom with the dustpan. We sweep up the wrapping paper shreds and cake crumbs, then start collecting the paper cups littering the kitchen counters. “The last couple didn’t like how ‘quiet’ it was out there.”
“Quiet?” I laugh. “Cicadas at night, birds at dawn, Grandma in between—something’s always squawking out there.”
Ford chuckles, too. “They lived in the city, first. I guess Hillford would seem too quiet, to folks like them.”
“‘Folks like them.’ Listen to you, talking like you’re one of us small-towners.”
He drags his fingers through some Sprite on the counter and flings it at me. I fling some back.
“I wonder if the new neighbors will stick around.”
“Hope so. Your mom needs somewhere to send all those leftovers, every night.”
As he says this, I open Caroline’s freezer to put away the ice cream—only to find it completely stocked with storage bags and Tupperware. A quick glance in the refrigerator has us laughing all over again; it’s just as full.
“He’s opening it!” Ford’s aunt calls from the living room. “Come on, you two.”
Caroline sits behind Bentley on the rug. He tears the paper off in fistfuls.
It’s a cigar box.
“This isn’t the one from Dad’s room,” Caroline comments, glancing at Ford for confirmation. After he shakes his head, as confused as she is, she lets Bentley lift the lid.
Inside are a row of old tin toys: a train, a robot, and a soldier.
“Wow, look at these!” Caroline lifts each from the velvet lining carefully, passing them to Bentley. He immediately starts slamming them together.
“Don’t worry, he can’t hurt them.” Their aunt crouches on the floor and takes Bentley into her lap while Caroline uses a little key, taped inside the lid, to wind the train. “Reese and I had tin toys sort of like these when we were little, passed down from your great-grandpa. So they’ll hold up to anything.”
The train squeaks its way to my foot. I pick it up, wondering why it looks so familiar—why the weight of it in my hand reminds me of something from years ago.
“These were in the attic,” Ford says suddenly. He picks up the robot and turns it back and forth in the light. “When we moved into the house. The landlord didn’t know where they came from, so Mom and Dad said I could keep them. But I could never find the key.”
“As I recall,” I tell him smugly, “you called these things ‘crappy.’”
“I did not.”
“You did. You also said they wouldn’t work, because they were probably full of rust.”
“Well, if I said that—which I’m pretty sure I didn’t—I was wrong.” He watches Bentley crawl after the charging train. “Clearly.”
“There’s a card, too.” Their aunt pulls an envelope from her purse and hands it to Caroline. “I haven’t looked at it, so I don’t know if it’s something you’d rather...read privately.”
This might be code for “something that will make you sob,” but Caroline bites her lip, stares at the envelope a minute, and opens it.
“Bentley, listen,” she coos, and Ford scoops the baby up to return him to the rug. Caroline clears her throat and reads the outside: “‘Happy birthday, one-year-old!’” She lets Bentley feel the raised lettering and glitter before opening it to read the rest.
“‘To my grandson, on his first birthday: I found these old things in my attic years ago, right before your mommy was born. They didn’t work very well”—she laughs with a sniff as she glances Ford’s way—“but I fixed them up for her. I never....’”
Caroline’s voice softens. The room shifts.
“‘...never got around to fixing them all—until the day she told me she was pregnant with you. The best part is that these toys never need batteries. As long as you’ve got the key, you can start them over and over. So hold onto it. All my love, Grandpa.’”
For the first time in history, I think, Caroline is the only one in the room with dry eyes, even if it’s just barely.
“It’s not that important. Just return it tomorrow.”
“Your mom gave me this Tupperware over a week ago,” I tell Easton, while she rests her arms on my open window, “and I still haven’t given it back.”
“Because it took us over a week to finish all the lasagna she put in it.”
I kiss her, already shifting into reverse as we pull apart. “It won’t take long, I promise. I’ll be home way before you fall asleep.”
“I hope so.” She winks as she steps back from the truck onto the curb, then waves until I leave Caroline’s complex.
“Ford!” April grins at me through the mesh of their kitchen door, as though she didn’t see me just a few hours ago. “Come in, quick, the mosquitoes are awful tonight. What are you doing here?”
“Tupperware return. The usual.” I look around. “Jason home?”
She pauses, a little caught off-guard, then nods. It’s not every day I ask to speak with him, at least not for anything as mundane as food storage. “Jason, honey,” she calls, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, “Ford’s here, come join us.”
The creak of their stairs as he approaches makes my stomach ache; my heart starts thundering when we’re all standing there around the island, both her parents just staring at me. Waiting.
I swallow and push the Tupperware closer to April. “I, uh...I brought something inside it, for once.”
She gives another smile as she cracks the lid. “Ford, sweetie, you didn’t have—”
If there’s one thing I never forgot about April Lawrence in all the time I was gone, it’s that she gasps like people on television: both hands clasped over her mouth, then down to her chest, eyes wide. Which is exactly what she does when she sees the ring box.
Jason, by contrast, is eating a carrot, and barely gives any reaction as he points to it—with said carrot—and asks, “What’s that?”
“This,” I tell them, and set it on the island I’ve sat at more times than I can count, in a kitchen that’s now fed me more times than my own, “is the ring I’m going to give your daughter tonight.” I look at Jason and stand as straight as I can under the weight of my own nerves. “If you’ll give me your blessing.”
Finally, he smiles. April studies the ring in the light, the tears in her eyes glittering as much as the diamonds.
“Of course,” he says, then laughs as he steps around the island to clap my back, and pull me into a hug.
The townhouse Ford and I rent is the closest to the city I’ve ever lived. Technically, if you zoom in really far on the map, we’re just outside of Hillford.
Most of our lives still happen there, though. Besides our families living in town, there’s our friends, the stores we know...the places where so many of our memories were made, for better or for worse. But mostly better.
Ford, now a full-time mechanic at Barkley Automotive, likes the distance. He calls it “being in Hillford, not of Hillford,” only partially joking. The small-town gossip and ennui of a town that never changes—or, rather, does so incredibly slowly—still gets to him, but living just past the line helps. From our bedroom window, you can see a Now Entering Hillford sign. Its green reminds me of how Sting’s songs used to look.
I don’t worry anymore that when I wake up, I won’t find Ford. He’s always there, right beside me in our bed. Our proper bed, at that: no more elbowing and kneeing each other on twin mattresses. Though, in a weird way, I kind of miss that.
We still fight now and then, like anyone else. His dad dying was harder on him than he expected. I had a feeling it would be. No matter what he said about being prepared and the strange relief it would bring, when his dad no longer had to suffer...I knew it would hurt. I knew he would break, at least a little, when he realized how bittersweet that relief was.
Yes, the funeral would be over. The medical care, the worry—the arguments he still got into with his father over the dumbest things, up until Reese simply couldn’t catch his breath to argue anymore.
But the memories would never go away. He had to face them.
“Talk to me. Please,” I begged him, the day before closing on his father’s house, when things seemed to hit their peak.
He wasn’t sleeping. All week, I’d wake to find him cleaning the living room in a frenzied, arbitrary way that did anything but calm him down. That night, I found him going over the tracks for our closet bi-folds with a cotton swab and can of WD-40.
“We are talking,” he said as he crouched, then lay down completely, for an ant’s-eye-view of the track. “You asked what I was doing up at this time of night, and I told you: I’m taking the squeak out of this door.”
“Ford.” I sat against the wall beside him. “It’s not healthy, the way you’re acting. You should see someone.”
“I’m fine. Caroline already tried her ‘Go see Dr. Marshall’ speech on me, it won’t work.”
“If Caroline is seeing someone, don’t you think you might need it, too?”
“Caroline,” he said slowly, “still bursts into tears anytime someone so much as says ‘Reese’s Pieces’ or ‘Lean Cuisine’ too close in the same sentence.”
“Which, if you ask me, is way better than not crying at all.”
“And how do you know whether or not I’ve cried? Huh?” He looked up. That cool, reserved look of steel I still associated with him at eight years old settled into his face. “You don’t know how I’m grieving.”
“I know that this kind of behavior isn’t normal. If it interferes with your life—”
“It isn’t interfering with my life. You’re interfering with my work, right now.”
I snatched the cotton swab and threw it behind me. “Don’t do this, okay? Don’t—don’t shut me out.”
Ford cursed and sat up, his back on the wall opposite of mine, arms resting on his knees.
“I’m not shutting you out,” he said, quieter now. “At least, not on purpose. It’s just.... Why does it feel like this, you know? Why does it feel so much like...like losing my mom did, like it’s coming from nowhere? Like it isn’t fair?”
Ford’s muscles strained as he ran his hand down his face, breathing hard. “I had plenty of warning, this time. And it is fair. He did this to himself.”
“He did it to you, too,” I say softly, “and Caroline, and Bentley. And it doesn’t matter that you had warning. You couldn’t fully accept it until it happened.”
He shook his head, but didn’t disagree. Didn’t shrug my hand off his shoulder as I scooted across the distance and joined him.
In the morning, he consented to one therapy session. “But a group thing, with Caroline.”
“Promise you’ll go on your own, too?”
“No. But I promise I’ll…stay open to the possibility.”
I was relieved. Ford no longer made promises he didn’t know he could keep, completely and absolutely, so this condition still held a lot of potential. “Deal.”
As for me shutting things out, I think I’ve improved. My headphones are still my go-to when the world gets too loud or too quiet, too unpleasant, too much.
But I’m getting better at slipping them off when Ford is nearby, pausing my escapes to let him, if no one else, in for a while.
* * *
On my way home from Bentley’s birthday party, my iPod shuffles to a song from Ford’s playlist.
Once, I let him listen to it. He took my iPod and the new headphones he’d given me for Christmas—a deep hunter green—down to the garage. I sat in his bed and waited.
“Glycerine,” “Casey’s Song,” “Walls”: I didn’t know which one he was on when I looked outside and found him pacing through the snow with a cigarette. He was trying to quit, so this was a step back. But just one.
The list was over two hours long, so I expected him to listen to a few songs, skip others, and scan titles—just enough to get the gist.
He listened to every single track.
When he came back up, I closed my book and held my breath. He slipped the headphones to his neck.
“I remembered a lot of them,” he said, after a moment. He sat on the bed with some distance between us. “You said you kept adding to it even after I left, though?”
I nodded. “If a song reminded me of you at all...I added it.”
“So you’d know not to listen to it again?” he asked, just a hint of a joke in his voice. The hint of pain was stronger.
“I thought so, at first. Now...maybe I did plan on listening to them again, someday. Otherwise I would have deleted them altogether.”
Ford turned the iPod in his hands. It was ancient in tech years, basically a relic, but I liked the heft of it in my palm, and the fact it was only filled with music. No calls or texts could interrupt a song at its best, strongest part; nothing could distract me from distracting myself.
“I played them in order,” he said. “I expected it to be this, like, progression, or arc. Of us.” His mouth pulled to the side. “Some love songs and stuff, the happy songs first, then the angry ones. But it wasn’t like that at all. They were all over the place—back and forth.”
“That’s how I felt about you. Back and forth, all the time.”
“Even when I was gone?”
“Especially when you were gone.”
Ford lifted the headphones from his neck and passed them to me with the iPod. He kissed my forehead, his hand on the back of my neck rendering me stone-still as he trailed his mouth to mine.
“I’m sorry I ruined so many things for you,” he whispered. I wanted to tell him the songs weren’t ruined anymore, until I realized he wasn’t just talking about those.
And, even if he had been, I couldn’t truthfully say those words yet. Ford and I were back together, and doing better than we ever had—but those songs still hurt to hear. No matter how much I loved them, they held memories. And sooner or later, I’d have to face them.
So tonight, when the song from Ford’s playlist starts to hum inside my car’s stereo, I reach for the Skip button, like I always have.
“I will find you, outside the old days…I go where you go, always.”
I set the iPod back in the cupholder. These lines used to stoke fury, summon tears, and make me curse Ford McLean for ever making me believe in a love like that—and then just taking it away.
But now, they bring the faintest smile. Instead of seeing only what we lost back then, I’m seeing what we have now.
I reach for the ste
reo, find the volume button, and turn it up.
* * *
“Nice try. No way you’re asleep, already.”
I pretend to yawn as Ford undresses in the darkness of our bedroom. “Sorry, you were gone too long. I’m tired.”
“I’ll show you tired,” he mutters, and I see his eyes flash before he lifts the comforter at the foot of the bed and climbs under.
His fingers, calloused from months of building and fixing engines, graze my hipbones until they snag inside my underwear. Inch by inch, he tugs them off me.
I feel his kiss on the inside of one thigh, then the other.
His breath skates over me. I know the game he’s playing—exactly what he wants from me.
“Ford,” I beg, “baby, please....”
His voice rolls at me from underneath the blanket. “Please, what?”
“Please eat me out,” I finish, the tremble of my voice revealing how badly I want it.
He’s smiling, arrogant. I don’t have to see his face to know.
The circle his tongue draws around my clitoris acts like a key; I open my legs wider for him, surrendering myself to every trick and spell he’s about to cast. The burn of his stubble on my skin makes my thighs twitch.
His tongue pushes into me, deep and devouring. When his hands slip under my ass and lift me, holding me to him, I get so hot I have to struggle out of my T-shirt while he works. My hands shake the entire time.
Once he’s satisfied with how wet I’ve become, and convinced by my whimpers for more, Ford slips his tongue out of me and focuses on my clitoris again. His fingers enter me easily—three at once, drumming my G-spot with unfathomable confidence. Every touch Ford ever gives me is like that: he knows, even before I do, it will bring me pleasure I can’t comprehend.
“Ford,” I warn, unable to say the rest before my orgasm rises and breaks across me, hips rising to meet his face in desperation. My thighs clamp his ears, muscles catatonic until the rush has tumbled through me.
“Damn, Easy,” he laughs, when he appears from underneath the blanket. “Practically boxed my ears with that one.”
The Midwife’s Playlist: A Now Entering Hillford Novel Page 26