“Aunt Betsy!” Addie called from the other room. “Is it time to go yet?”
Ty closed his eyes. Betsy stood on her tiptoes and kissed his lips softly. “Later,” she whispered back.
Ty drove to the picnic with his hand on the gearshift, as he always did. At the beginning of their marriage, as soon as Betsy would slide into her seat next to him, she’d cover his hand with her own, and his fingers would lift and curl over hers. It became habit, their hands finding each other like two puzzle pieces. It had been a while since she’d done that, so she did it now.
It felt good, memory meeting reality. Ty looked over at her and she didn’t look away. Without a word he lifted his fingers and curled them around hers. Behind them, the girls chattered and giggled. A warm breeze and the sharp, fresh scent of grassy fields entered the car through the lowered windows, filling the air like a promise.
The community park was abloom with banners, balloons, and tables of food stretching across the grass. The high school jazz band had set up under a small pavilion, and folks were splayed out on blankets and folding chairs. Elsie Roberts hurried around to each group warning of the coming rain and urging them to eat first, talk later. No one listened, this being the only time in the whole year everyone in town came together. When it began to sprinkle a half hour into the picnic, no one cared but Elsie.
Addie and Walsh ran nonstop with dozens of other kids whose combined feet made a giant mud pit on one side of the damp field. After a few minutes of keeping her eyes on the girls, Betsy relaxed, eating and chatting with other farm owners and neighbors. When Walsh crossed the field toward their blanket—crying, tears dripping off her chin—Ty jumped up and ran to her, dodging paper plates and cups on his way.
When he reached her, he knelt low and put his head close to hers. She pointed to her knee and cried fresh tears at the sight of whatever scrape was there, real or imagined. Ty blew on her knee, then whispered something to her that made her laugh.
Linda Daily, sitting next to them, tapped Ty on the shoulder and held out a Band-Aid she’d fished from her purse. Ty smiled his thanks and spread the bandage on Walsh’s knee. Walsh responded with a teary smile, then bounded off to rejoin the other kids.
Back at their blanket, Ty sat down and exhaled.
“You’re good at that,” Betsy said.
“What? Putting on Band-Aids? Same as putting it on me or you.”
“Not that. Calming her. Making her feel better.”
Ty shrugged. “She’s a kid. Just needed a little attention. Someone to tell her she’d be okay.”
It never rained hard, but the steady sprinkle ensured no blanket, plate, or article of clothing stayed dry or clean. By the time the band packed up their horns and drums and Betsy tossed their empty plates and cups, everything was mud streaked, especially Addie and Walsh. Betsy and Ty herded them toward their car.
“Do we have to go?” Addie squirmed in Ty’s arms.
“Yep, we do,” he said. “You two are splattered head to toe with mud, and Walsh has potato chips in her hair. It’s time to take this party home.”
The girls had been wound tight right up until Betsy buckled them into their car seats, but as soon as they were secured, their energy leaked out, leaving wet noodles behind. During the silent drive back home, Betsy glanced behind her. Walsh was already asleep, and Addie’s eyes were at half-mast.
The heavy rain they’d been looking for all evening finally began as they pulled down the driveway. Ty carried Walsh inside and Betsy ran with Addie through the downpour. Even in the rain, the cicadas’ wild vibrations in the trees sounded electric. Addie stuck her fingers in her ears, but Betsy had always loved the sound. Their loud, scratchy symphony made her feel almost hopeful. It was the sound of summer, familiar and safe.
After cleaning up the girls and settling them into bed, she pushed open the bedroom door expecting to find Ty, but the room was empty and dark. Downstairs, only a single lamp was on, the TV off. Through the back window above the kitchen sink, she saw light in the barn. She took a deep breath and opened the door to the porch, slipped her shoes back on. She held the screened door so it wouldn’t slam shut behind her and ran through the rain that fell harder by the second.
That evening, during the picnic, laughter, and conversation, the air between them had been tense. Not unpleasant but taut. Waiting, wondering. As she stood in front of him in line for Solo cups of iced tea and sat next to him on the blanket, their shoulders close but not touching, the space between them felt warm and thick, almost alive. All she wanted to do was reach over and touch his cheek, his neck, his hair. Anything to bring him closer, to erase their separation, to prove they were okay.
The prospect of being alone with him now, though, was unnerving. She’d pushed away so much, for so long, she wasn’t sure how to pull closer now. But she had to try.
By the time she got to the barn door, her skin was wet, her hair damp, her clothes soaked with rain. She tried to wipe some of the water off her face and hair, then gave up the effort and looked around in the dim light for a clean towel.
“Hey.”
Betsy looked up. Ty stood at the back of the barn, the light from his office glowing out from the open door. In the half-light, he was only curves and angles. Shapes and shadows. Her heart was a knot of wires in her chest, each wire coming alive in succession.
She forgot about the rain on her arms and face and crossed the floor toward him. A moment later she was in front of him and all thoughts of speaking, of explaining herself, escaped into the night. She pulled him close and pressed her lips to his. Expecting to feel his arms around her, his lips moving in response, she was surprised when he gave her a small kiss, then stepped back.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered.
He gave a brief smile. “Wrong? Nothing, I just . . . I was working on . . .” He glanced behind him toward his office. “I was kind of in the middle of something. Can we talk later?”
“I . . .” Betsy stammered and no more words came. Heat crept up her cheeks and her heart hammered in her chest.
“Oh, were you wanting . . . ?” He chuckled, but stopped when she put a hand to her forehead. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long day and I’m exhausted. I don’t think I can . . .” He smiled. “Were you thinking we’d just . . . ?” He gestured toward the open door to his office. “In there?”
“No, I—I just thought . . .” Her whole body, fingertips to toes, tingled.
He waited, eyebrows raised in confusion. The fatigue, the strain, was right there on his face, but at the moment, she didn’t care. Anger ripped through her desire, and all thoughts of intimacy, of connection, evaporated. They might as well have been on opposite cliffs staring at each other across the divide.
“Forget it.” Without meeting his eyes again, she turned and strode through the barn and out into the rain.
“Betsy, wait,” Ty called behind her, but in her embarrassment, she didn’t stop. She stomped across the grass and pumped her arms, pushing against the downpour to get away faster.
On the porch, she kicked off her shoes and took the stairs inside two at a time. At the top, she remembered the girls sleeping in the room across from her bedroom and slowed her steps in response. She entered her bedroom and leaned against the counter in the bathroom, calming her racing pulse, trying to slow her hot, angry breaths.
Downstairs, the porch door opened. She closed her eyes and waited. A quick moment later, Ty blew into the room, wiping water off his face and breathing hard.
“Why’d you run? We need to talk about this.”
“Talk about what? How I came out there and you completely embarrassed me?”
“I embarrassed you? How?”
“Well, I . . . but you didn’t . . .” She was so frustrated, she couldn’t even form a sentence.
“Babe, this is not me rejecting you. But you’ve been all over the place lately. Now you decide you want me and you expect me to just drop everything? I have stuff going on too.”
She
exhaled hard and covered her face with her hands, then pulled them down again. “I don’t get why you’re making this so difficult.”
“I’m the one making it difficult?” His voice was tinged with a brittleness he rarely, if ever, directed at her. “I’m trying here, Betsy, but I cannot figure you out. I don’t even know how to just be with you anymore. Lately, it seems like you’re happier around the girls than me, like I’ve done something wrong, but I have no idea what that is.”
He inhaled and turned around. Paced a few steps away, then came back and faced her. When he spoke, his voice was low and controlled. “I’m out there working every day, trying to provide for us, fixing broken machines, watching for storms, and now I’ve taken your sister’s kids in—what else can you possibly want from me?”
“You’re going to make this about the girls?” But she knew he was right. Not just about the girls—about all of it. She turned and grabbed a hand towel off the hook by the sink. She pressed it to her face, breathed in and out, then wiped her shoulders and arms.
“Well, I wasn’t going to, but sure. Let’s talk about them. I love them, you love them—we agree on that. But you should have asked me about keeping them here for the summer. Don’t you think I at least deserved a chance to think it through first?”
She tossed the towel down and turned back to him. “I didn’t know it would be this long. You know that. It was supposed to just be two weeks. And you think this is easy for me—to spend my days accompanied by two little reminders of what my body can’t do? My sister, who didn’t even want kids in the first place, can do it perfectly. You think I wanted that thrown in my face all summer?”
She pushed past him into the bedroom. Rain slapped the windows and pounded the roof like a thousand tiny fists. She stood in the center of the room with her back to Ty, her hands clenched, her fingernails digging into her palms.
“I’m sick of wanting,” she said. “I want to be able to go through my days like you do, with all the crap from the last two years gone and behind me. I’m tired of wanting something I can’t have—wanting it so badly I can’t breathe sometimes.”
A sharp cry from the girls’ room pierced the air and they both stopped, waiting. Betsy pleaded in her mind for the cry to come again so she could escape the suffocation of the room and the storm swirling in her heart and mind, looking for a place to make landfall. But nothing came. Just quiet.
She sat on the bed, tucked her hands under her thighs. Neither of them spoke. The quiet stretched so long she finally looked up at him, but she couldn’t read his face.
“That’s what all this has been about?” he asked. “Us not having kids?”
Betsy made a sound that was supposed to have been a laugh, but it came out somewhere between a cry and a snort. “All? You say it like it’s nothing. Like it’s not everything.”
Ty knelt on the floor in front of her so their faces were at eye level. “That’s the thing, Bets. It can’t be everything. I get it. It’s disappointing, it hurts, it’s not what we imagined for our life.” He stopped, looked down, and swallowed hard. “But whatever happens or doesn’t happen in our life, I’m here to stay.”
He reached up and ran his hand through his wet hair. “When things get rough, we have to deal with it. We talk, we fight, then we make it okay. We make it better. That’s what we do. But it has to be both of us together.”
In the glow from the lamp on the other side of the room, Betsy could see every tired line around Ty’s eyes, each freckle across his nose, the patch of gray hair at his temples. She wanted to believe his words. Wanted to soak in his strength and pain, his joy and sadness, and let them carry her.
He rested his forehead on her knees for a moment, then sat on the bed next to her. “You have no idea how much it kills me not to be able to give you children, to do something to make it happen for you. For us. But I wanted you long before kids were even a thought in my mind, and that hasn’t changed.” He put his hands on the sides of her face. “It doesn’t matter if we have a dozen kids one day or if in forty years it’s just me and you, sitting in our rocking chairs out front. You are enough for me.”
She breathed in all of him, deep into her lungs. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I should have asked you about Jenna and the girls. And I should have talked to you about all this before it boiled over.”
He shook his head. “You said you were good, and it seemed like things got somewhat back to normal.” He stopped, hung his head, and rubbed his forehead. “You know what though? I knew you weren’t okay. Deep down, I knew. But it seemed easier, better for you somehow, if I just let it go. Or maybe that’s a cop-out too. Maybe it was just easier for me.”
“It’s better that you did let it go. Before tonight, I probably would have said I was fine. I thought everything was good. In my mind, I’d moved on, but having Addie and Walsh here . . .”
“I know.”
“But it’s been good too, in a way. Hasn’t it?” She looked up at him.
He nodded. “We’re going to be okay.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder and he wrapped his arm around her, kissed her head.
“It’s late,” he whispered after a moment. “Let’s go to bed.”
Under the sheets with the lights off, they remained on their own sides of the bed, as if separately digesting their argument, mentally rehashing all that had been said. It felt good to let some things out in the open, but Betsy knew there was more to come. She wanted to turn to him, to curl herself around him, but she didn’t. Finally, she turned to her side and closed her eyes. Sometime later, he rolled toward her, the warmth of his body radiating into her back. Then she could sleep.
twenty-seven
Jenna
Jenna sat at a corner table and rested her laptop on her knees. Out the window the afternoon sun glimmered on the Gulf waters, just across the street from the coffee shop. Halcyon may not have offered Wi-Fi, but that didn’t stop the artists from seeking it out on their own when necessary, and Sunset Coffee was the closest place that offered a steady stream of Internet connectivity.
She tapped her fingers on the smooth cover of her laptop. Since mentioning her old Etsy shop to Gregory that first week in the darkroom, she hadn’t been able to quit thinking about it. She’d once had several hundred people following her site—both loyal customers who came to her whenever they had a specific idea in mind for their home or office, and new customers who found her through the site or heard of her through word of mouth. Back then, she’d been an entrepreneur, a shop owner, even if that shop was just online, and enjoyed a decent side income from her prints.
She used to daydream about where her photography could take her. Maybe a celebrity would find her site and order one of her prints, setting off a firestorm of orders. Or maybe a travel magazine would notice her work and give her an assignment to some exotic locale. She’d had so many ideas, so many desires. So much possibility. But it had all changed with the appearance of two pink lines on the plastic stick, the boyfriend who hit the road, the life that had altered so dramatically within such a short span of time.
She hadn’t checked her Etsy page in years. A few of her frequent customers had continued to contact her after she stopped posting new inventory, asking for more prints or new arrivals. She’d wanted to say yes, but exhausted and scared and trying to keep life going for herself and her new daughter, she had no spark left to offer to her photography or her customers. Finally, the requests dwindled, then stopped, and she set her camera on a shelf in the closet.
But that was then, and possibilities were again opening themselves up to her. Since she’d been at Halcyon, she had amassed a collection of photos she loved, shots she could hardly believe she’d captured herself. It seemed the longer she was here, the more she saw the unexpected dignity and grace of the world around her. Not the “beauty shots” she attempted when she first arrived, but the grit and strength of life that refused to be snuffed out.
Gregory was just as pleased with her progress
—more even, if that was possible. A few days before, he’d contacted editor friends of his and talked up the “new talent” he’d discovered. They’d all been interested and said they’d take a look at her new online portfolio.
“Good things are coming for you,” he’d said.
And she believed him. But at the same time, she didn’t want to sit around and wait. Etsy was familiar to her, a way to ease back into the art world without diving headfirst. She chewed on a fingernail as she waited for her computer to power up. Would she have any followers left, or had they all moved on to other photographers who regularly posted new product? When she arrived at her page, she scanned until she saw the number next to the little heart. Seventeen.
It doesn’t matter. You’re starting now.
The first thing she did was change her shop description, noting that she’d been gone for a while but was back and posting a new collection called Ray of Light. She’d thought about it a lot this week, the idea that light can seep in—through cracks and around corners—at the most unexpected times. The idea comforted her. Then she scrolled through Etsy’s “Top Tips for Shop Success” and read the new seller rules and follower etiquette, Google analytics and search engine optimization. It was enough to make her head hurt, so once she posted her new collection and added prices, she pressed Save and closed her laptop. A smile crept up her cheeks. Who knew what could happen?
Her cell, practically bursting with phone service, sat in the side pocket of her bag. She pulled it out and walked to the front porch swing. As she sat down and pressed the button, a brisk gust of wind rattled the palm fronds along the edges of the porch. That morning she’d overheard the kitchen staff talking about a storm out in the Gulf. Apparently it didn’t have a name yet, and therefore wasn’t anything to worry about. She breathed in the scent of salty sea spray and a faint hint of coconut on the breeze.
“Let me guess,” Max said when he answered. “You’ve decided to stay forever.” They’d sent some texts back and forth, but this was the first time they’d actually spoken.
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