by Julia London
“Well, I wish her luck.” He looked at his wristwatch. He didn’t want to prolong this. It had been hard enough as it was.
“I was hoping that maybe you would come, too.”
Luke looked up.
“To Orlando.” Luke started to shake his head, but Madeline quickly stepped forward. “Just hear me out,” she said before he could speak. “Please just hear me out.”
God, but she looked so hopeful. “Maddie, baby—”
“Don’t talk, please don’t talk,” she said, and stepped even closer, her blue eyes locked on his. “I have to say this now or I will lose my nerve.”
“So say it.”
She took a deep breath and a rush of words came forth: “I love you.”
Those words knocked the wind right out of Luke. He had wanted to hear them, and yet had believed he’d never hear them.
“I love you, Luke. I do. I love you, I think I loved you the minute you saved me on Sometimes Pass.”
Her declaration slid right into his heart. But it did not make him feel all the things a man should feel when a woman professes love—they made him feel uncertain. Luke pushed his fingers through his hair and tried to process this. He wanted to trust her. He wanted to forget everything that had happened and sweep her up in his arms. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it, because he knew, deep down, that nothing had really changed between them, except that her words now hung between them.
“That was not what I was expecting you to say,” he admitted. “I don’t even know what to say to that, Maddie. I’ll be honest, I have felt so disappointed the last couple of days.”
“I know. And you don’t have to respond,” she said quickly. “But I had to say it. Because, Luke, you opened up a whole world to me. You’ve shown me things I never knew—” She paused, like she wasn’t sure what else she should say. “You taught me how to let someone in and it feels so perfect and right. Do you know for the first time in my life, I know what love is? I am full of it, full of love for you.”
She looked so sincere, and Luke’s heart went out to her. He touched her face, and she turned her head, kissed his palm, and pressed her cheek against it, her eyes closed.
Luke felt the same way about her, of course he did. But he couldn’t say those words out loud, not now, not knowing she would go back to Orlando. He was afraid what those words opened him up to, afraid of what would happen if he actually said them a second time in his life. Especially to Madeline, especially her, because she meant more to him than anyone ever had. If he said I love you to Madeline, it should mean something more than good-bye. It should mean that this was it, they were going to be together forever, they were going to make it work. It should not mean good-bye.
And that was all it would be, because he was fairly certain that nothing would keep Madeline from leaving.
Madeline opened her eyes, big blue eyes gazing up at him, full of raw emotion like he’d never seen in her.
“If you feel that way, then stay,” he said, testing her. And he held his breath, a tiny pinprick of hope in him.
Madeline’s face fell. “I can’t,” she said softly, and all his hope evaporated. “I have to go back to Orlando. There’s my work, and my mom.”
He started to glance away, but she caught his arm. “Luke, I made a phone call to a guy I work with. He is willing to take you on.”
“Take me on for what?”
“To be an architect. He has a firm there, and he said he would love to talk to you. He builds these big office buildings.”
“I don’t design office buildings.”
“Right.” She nodded. “But you could.”
“And you could sell houses here,” he pointed out. “Or in Denver.”
She bit her lower lip.
He already knew her answer, he’d known it all along. At least she’d been honest about that. And he guessed that he’d known his answer, too. He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her into his body and kissed the top of her head. “Madeline Pruett, you put the I in irony. For someone who fears being left… you sure do a lot of running.”
“It’s not that. You don’t understand my work or my mother—”
“I’m not talking about just Orlando,” he said. “I’m talking about your life. You run, Maddie. You ran from Stephen. You ran from me after we got together in Denver. You just told me you loved me, and yet you’re about to run again.”
“I’m not running, Luke! I’m trying to take you with me.”
“But, Maddie, you knew before you asked me that I wouldn’t come.” He interlaced his fingers with hers. “Here’s the thing, baby. You can’t live on your little island waiting for things to be perfect. Relationships, families—they come with lots of flaws and nothing is ever going to be perfect. And if you are going to stand around, hoping that all the kinks and hurt and messy stuff will go away, you’ll never know the joy of any of it. You’ll be waiting alone for a very long time.”
He suddenly realized that in his own way, he’d been doing that, too. He’d escaped from his less-than perfect family, from the issues that seemed to crop up like weeds, when in reality, he was needed here more than anywhere else. Maybe, Luke thought, he’d been searching for perfect when it had been right in front of him all along. He had a family who loved him and needed him, right here, in this ugly little green house.
That’s why he couldn’t go with her, Luke realized. Maybe he’d known it organically, understood it in his soul while his heart had longed for something else.
But whether he’d faced it or not, he’d always known that he loved his family too much to leave them behind again.
“Don’t misunderstand me. I am grateful you told me how you feel,” he said sincerely. “I know it took a lot of courage to say it. But I don’t think you understand that saying ‘I love you’ and loving someone are really two different things.” He was learning that himself. He let go of her, leaned down, and picked up his bag. “I’ve got to go. I’m going back to Durango to see about Leo, and then up to Denver.” He caught her by her braid and pulled her to him, then leaned down to kiss her. “You’re one of a kind, Maddie,” he said softly, and kissed her again. “I am going to miss you something fierce.” He kissed her one last time, dropped her braid, and stepped around her, walking out to his truck, leaving her standing in his family’s house.
Madeline stared out the screen door and watched Luke walk across the yard. She couldn’t catch her breath as she watched him get into the Bronco and leave. Her stomach roiled with disappointment and regret, and her vision blurred as his Bronco turned the corner onto Main Street.
She’d ruined it. She’d ruined the one true thing she’d ever known.
Madeline looked blindly around her, at the collage of photos on the wall, at Leo’s wheelchair and video game console. She tried to catch her breath as she walked outside and carefully shut the door behind her, then moved woodenly down the porch steps.
Everything that had happened to her here, everything she’d felt, that she’d become, was churning inside her. Every moment with Luke, every moment at Homecoming Ranch, with Libby, with Leo—it all churned. In the middle of the yard, the churning brought Madeline to a halt. She suddenly fell to all fours and vomited in the grass, as her body tried to purge the pain and disappointment of losing the only true love she’d ever known.
When her body could not expel anything else, she stood up, dragged the back of her hand across her mouth, and walked to the car.
She had lost everything, but the dull, bone-aching pain of her loss had only begun.
THIRTY-THREE
On a stifling hot and humid day in Orlando, the DiNapoli sale closed. That afternoon, Madeline’s brokerage firm gathered at the local watering hole to toast her. Madeline nursed a warm beer. It was the biggest payday in her life thus far, a milestone reached, and her broker predicted many more sales for her.
He based that on the fact that Madeline had picked up three new listings of big, ugly houses. That wasn’t exactly what M
adeline had hoped would happen in selling the DiNapoli property, but suddenly, owners of ugly houses were calling her to sell them.
“A sale is a sale,” Bree said, when Madeline had taken another call for an ugly house in a bad location. “If you don’t want it, I’ll take it.” Bree had just obtained her realtor license and was hungry for listings.
Madeline invited Trudi to her celebration happy hour. Trudi was in fine form, taking center stage and telling stories about Madeline as a girl that were only loosely based in fact. But they were entertaining, and Trudi had Madeline’s office mates laughing. Madeline sat at the end of the table with her beer and quietly mused that it had always been this way. Trudi was the star in their relationship and Madeline was the support behind the scenes. The only time Madeline had shone on her own was when she stepped out from under Trudi’s light, in Colorado.
When she and Trudi drove home afterward, Trudi, who had imbibed a couple of chocolate martinis, put her foot on the dash of Madeline’s car and said, “You know who would have been fun to have there? Stephen.”
“Oh my God,” Madeline moaned.
“I saw him the other day,” Trudi said. “He’s selling his SUV. He bought a Lexus. That guy is going places.”
“Trudi, why do you keep bringing him up?” Madeline asked. “We are over, we are done. It’s like he’s paying you.”
“No, actually,” Trudi said cheerfully. “He was pretty upset with me for bringing you up. He says a lot of the same things you do. But I can see how great you guys would be together.”
Madeline rolled her eyes. She hadn’t even thought of Stephen in the last couple of weeks. She rarely thought of anything or anyone other than Luke. Of course she hadn’t heard anything from him, and she wasn’t naïve enough to have expected that she would. The only thing she knew of him until recently was the one phone conversation she’d had with Libby since leaving Colorado. Before Madeline had departed Homecoming Ranch and Colorado, Libby had reluctantly accepted her apology, and Madeline suspected she had only because Madeline was leaving. When Madeline called a week or so ago, Libby mentioned, in the course of her spirited description of the wedding that would take place at the ranch next month, that Luke had been out to add some showers to the bunkhouse.
“Oh,” Madeline said, trying to sound as casual as she could. “He’s been home?”
“I think he moved home,” Libby said.
“Moved home? Are you sure?”
“Yeah, that’s what I understood,” Libby said.
What about his houses? What about all that he’d hoped to accomplish with them, his dreams? “Well… how was he?” Madeline asked.
“He looked great!” Libby had said.
Fantastic. Luke was great while Madeline was splintering apart a little more every day, a little piece of this and that falling away from her.
She couldn’t seem to shake the blues. She couldn’t seem to find her happiness in Orlando, and she was beginning to wonder if she’d ever had it. Now that she had been out of her bubble, as Trudi would say, Madeline could see just how much she’d isolated herself from the world. The only friend she had was Trudi. She had no real life—she moved between work and late hours, and her mother’s house, and back to her condo with her streaming movies.
Soccer was Madeline’s only solace, and while she was excited to see the girls again, Teresa gave her the news that funding to Camp Haven had been cut, and the soccer league would be folded into the city park and recreation program.
“What does that mean?” Madeline asked as she handed out CapriSuns to the girls.
“It means that there is going to be one soccer league. A smaller one. And about twice as many volunteer coaches.”
Madeline understood her. There would be less opportunity for girls to find soccer as an escape from their lives, and less opportunity for her to coach these girls. It felt like the final slash of the knife. Madeline looked up through the haze of heat and humidity on that sweltering afternoon and longed for mountains and crisp air. She missed having a purpose that was shared with others. Even if the other was Libby, a sister who could scarcely tolerate her.
Madeline could scarcely tolerate herself.
She’d done a lot of thinking about her three weeks in Colorado, and she would give everything she had for the opportunity to do it all again.
It wasn’t as if her homecoming to Orlando was appreciated, either. When she’d arrived from Colorado, Madeline had gone straight to her mother’s house to check on her. She found her mother in a caftan, smoking a cigarette. The place was littered with beer cans, and some man was sleeping in the back room.
“Who’s that?” Madeline whispered.
Her mother glanced to the back room. “Ron,” she said. “An old friend. So? What’d you find out about that back child support?” she asked. “I’ve got some things I’d like to fix up around here.”
Madeline had looked at her mother—really looked at her. “It’s going to be tied up in court for a long time.”
Her mother took a drag of smoke from her cigarette and blew it at the ceiling, then shrugged. “Stupid bastard,” she said.
Madeline had left her mother’s house, resigned that she’d lost the best thing that had ever happened to her, and for what? For a job selling ugly houses? For a mother who cared more about child support for a thirty-year-old daughter? Yeah, this was the life.
But then, out of the blue, she got a text from Leo. He said he had a new texting machine, and that Libby had given him Madeline’s number. He asked if she followed the Florida Marlin baseball team.
No.
The next day, she got another text from Leo asking if she had ever heard of Javon Walker, who once played for the Florida Marlins.
No.
Look him up.
That night, Madeline looked up Javon Walker. He was a talented athlete, she guessed, because he had played for the Florida Marlins before turning to professional football and playing for the Denver Broncos, among others. She texted Leo back. Looked him up.
Leo fired back almost instantly. He thought he knew where he belonged, where his talents fit in best. Turns out, he was wrong. His talents fit a whole other game better. So he CHANGED GAMES. If he’d stayed with baseball he would have fallen into obscurity and would probably be shooting crack in some back alley by now. Get it?
No.
You will.
Madeline shook her head.
But she kept thinking about it. What was he trying to tell her? That she shouldn’t play baseball?
It so happened that Madeline was checking on her mother one afternoon when Leo texted again. Are you still thinking about baseball?
No.
Think about it!
“What’s that?” her mother asked.
“Oh,” Madeline said with a shrug. “Someone in Colorado.”
“Yeah, who?”
Madeline looked at her mother. She had been complaining about Ron, and how she was ready for him to take a hike, but that she had an insurance payment coming up. She had not once asked Madeline about how she’d felt about Colorado. Not once. “He is the brother of someone I fell in love with,” Madeline said curtly.
Clarissa’s brows rose to her hairline. She was speechless for a moment. “Well, well, well,” she said, a smile spreading across her face, “Maddie isn’t a robot after all.”
“Hey!” Madeline said.
“Well? It’s not like you ever have boyfriends for more than a week.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Madeline said. “Maybe that’s because I’ve seen how well you’ve done with them.”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “You watch how you talk to me, miss. I never said I was no saint.”
“No, you never said that,” Madeline agreed.
“If you love some guy, what the hell are you doing here?” her mother asked, waving her hand at her daughter.
Madeline gaped at her; anger surged like a tidal wave through her—she wanted very much to punch a wall. “Good question. What am
I doing here? Oh that’s right—taking care of you.”
“Me!”
“Yes, Mom—you. I am always taking care of you! Someone has to, because you damn sure don’t.”
Her mother looked surprised. And then she laughed. Laughed. As if the joke was somehow on Madeline. “No one asked you to take care of me, did they? Look here, Madeline Grace, what are you, twenty-eight?”
“I’ll be thirty next month, Mom.”
“Okay, you’ll be thirty. So think about how long you’ve been trying to make us into something we’re not, some cutsie mother-daughter story. Don’t you get it? I’m not going to change, I’m not going to miraculously turn into the kind of mother you’ve always wanted. I don’t want you taking care of me. I do all right on my own!”
Madeline wanted to argue that point, but kept silent.
“I’ll tell you this, though. I’m still your mother, and I may not be a very good one, but I love you, kid. I want you to be happy. So go be happy! Go be in love! Don’t do what I did—find a good man, settle down, have kids. And stop feeling like you need to take care of me, because you don’t.”
It was the first moment of genuine clarity in her mother that Madeline could remember. She was shocked by it. Her first instinct was to argue, but a second, stronger instinct took hold. How funny was it that in that moment, she thought of Javon Walker. He figured out his talents fit another game better than the one he was playing. Maybe it was time Madeline figured out she didn’t fit in so well taking taking care of a mother who didn’t want her help. If she kept on this path, she might end up like her mother—entirely incapable of maintaining a lasting relationship. The thought made her shudder. Madeline had to change, and her mother was giving her the freedom to do it.
Madeline suddenly smiled. She stood up, kissed her mother. “Thanks, Mom. For the first time in my life, I can say with all sincerity, thank you.”