“It’s what family does, Sarah. They step in, they take care of each other. I can see where you have a problem with that.”
Sarah pressed her lips together so tight, the skin all around them turned white.
“Sam,” Des warned. “Back off. Right now.”
“No. It’s okay, Des. He can say what he wants. What do you want to say, Sam?”
Sam pushed his forehead into his palms. “Dad hadn’t even been gone for a minute, Sarah, and you’re riding illegal races in the dark? On freeways? Tell me how that’s caring about this family. Explain to me how that’s caring about anyone but yourself. Enlighten me about the fucks you think you give. You were hit by a car, on a fucking exit ramp for no good reason other than the most important person you’ve ever thought of is you. Just you. And fuck anyone else who gives a good goddamn.”
Sarah breathed in, almost a gasp, long and deep.
Des felt her hands go numb and her heart slow down in a way that was painful and sharp in her chest. Sam’s voice hadn’t yelled. It had been soft and choked and broken, like it was what he was really thinking and could never say because it would hurt his throat, his voice. Like all of his yelling was just to cover up his real voice.
“Sam,” Des whispered. “Please—”
“No, Desbaby. It’s okay.” Sarah turned to her. “He’s needed to say that for a while, I think. You better go.”
“I can’t, not now.”
“Please go,” Sarah whispered.
Des stood up and walked to the doorway. Sam still had his hands to his forehead, leaning over, but he couldn’t be crying, could he?
She walked out into the hallway, the noise from the unit suddenly loud, like it had turned itself back on after going quiet to hear what Sam had to say.
She’d been asked to leave.
Now she could only think of one place she could possibly go, and he wasn’t even a place, just where she was starting to feel like she belonged.
Chapter Twenty-six
Hefin watched Phil tap the last panel into place.
Looking at the panels of rich and glossy carvings that would greet visitors to the library where they were sunk against the expanses of marble cladding, he felt that he had managed something good.
The project was done.
He would always be here.
He was as proud of the panels he had restored, and he had kept a catalog of the signatures he found behind the carvings as they came off the wall, to make sure that at least one of the works of each previous carver was returned. So that they would always be here, too. In his project notes, notes that would be archived with the library and the Ohio Historical Society, he had explained his rationale for preserving the work of every carver who had contributed to the panels.
It was preserving their histories, their human presence. It preserved the chance for their ancestors to find them again. Who knew which of these carvers might have left some evidence with their families that they had contributed to these panels, and Hefin wanted those families to find them if they looked.
He wondered how many of the carvers lived and worked here, how many, like him, were from somewhere else.
Even though the professional photographer was busy taking hundreds of photos for archives and had promised to send Hefin the files, Hefin took photos of his own with his phone.
He’d been sending his dad photos all along; his dad loved them.
Every careful tap from Phil meant he was that much closer to his departure.
That much farther away from Destiny.
And they’d spent almost every moment possible the last three weeks with each other. She hadn’t told him what she had decided, and every day she didn’t, it seemed more impossible to count on it. They’d talked about her visiting, about his making treks back once he’d determined how his potential work would be managed, about what a long-distance relationship would look like.
It looked kind of abysmal.
He was worried about Destiny, too. He had the uncomfortable feeling last night, when she came to his door clearly tired and upset, that he was, for lack of a better thought, on her rounds.
She hadn’t shared with him what had upset her though he suspected it was Sam, mainly because it had been Sam the few times she would mention it. Instead, she wanted to help him fucking pack. She wanted him to talk about the end of the project. She wanted to know more about how he was going to present his portfolio in Beijing.
It hadn’t been conversation, it had been her duty to him. He recognized it in how she talked to her siblings and talked about them. He’d ask her questions about the new business Web site she was building, how she was going to campaign for new projects, and she would give him a few maddeningly vague details and move on.
She wasn’t here.
What he loved about her was she was always right here, and that presence kept him anchored, too.
He would not be on her list of people to check in on, to keep inventory of. She was a woman who thought of domes and looked up maps and foreign languages and made love in the back of limousines.
Her mother had not named her Destiny so that she could make sure everyone was playing nice for the rest of her life.
He hadn’t thought that once Destiny understood where he was going with this, where he believed them to be going, that she would retreat. He had been prepared if she looked at him straight and told him no, that she knew she belonged here. He would know, if she told him in the way she always told him everything she was sure of, that she was right.
He wanted to see the world with her because even the bits of it he’d seen would look different with her along.
His home was with her.
He was certain of this, and he knew, now, that if he stayed here, he would feel home—but their chances were something more than that.
He had a chance to make the kind of meaningful adult relationship with his parents that would make all of their lives fuller.
He had the chance to make things that were beautiful and good.
He had the chance with a woman who held him accountable for his percent but no more so that he had something left with which to risk.
She had a chance to take in the world.
She had the chance to really understand that the reason so many depended on her was because she could depend on herself.
She had the chance to be present with him, a man who would make tea for her and make love to her with all the sweetness he could manage for as long as she would possibly let him.
Because he was a goose person, for fuck’s sake.
He was losing her. Or she was losing herself. He didn’t know. He hadn’t worked out a way to get her to talk about it. Last night, when she had drifted through his evening, frustrating him with how far away she was, he had asked if he could properly meet Sam. Paul, too. She had grown quiet, and a short time later asked if they could go to bed.
They hadn’t made love until later. She woke him with her hands over his chest and her leg tangled through his. She had been with him, then, there was enough light from the streetlights shining through his bedroom window that they made eye contact. She’d straddled him and tucked her shins close to his sides. When she moved, he could feel all the muscles working in her hips, working him. She’d come and kept her gaze connected to his, touching his mouth with her hand, rubbing his face.
She’d kissed him after, both of them breathing hard.
And then she told him she needed to go home.
He sat at his workbench, his rolls of tools stacked in front of him ready to be taken home and packed. A lot of them had been his dad’s tools at one time. Many were those he’d bought new, here, but now had handles varnished with the work of his own hands.
He looked at the panels. They were beautiful. All together, the fine detail looked effortless. Just as it should. No reason at all to think they wouldn’t hold up another one hundred years or longer. Likely longer, as the library had incorporated his suggestions for reworking the supporting w
all so that it would stay dry and so the ducts that ran through it were rerouted, preventing hot and cold changes.
So his mark was here, in more ways than one—not just in pencil behind the panels he’d carved.
“It’s beautiful.”
He turned around, and Destiny sat next to him at the bench.
“It turned out very well.”
She reached out and fiddled with one of the leather ties on his tool roll. “Are you—”
“How’s Sarah?” He always asked now. Not, hello but how’s Sarah?
“She got up on the walking bars today at PT. Mostly pain-free. Her MRI yesterday was reviewed, and the surgeon thinks he can revise her original repair and save her hip. She’ll work on gaining back some muscle in PT before they go in, but it will still be a long road.”
He put his arm around her, held her tight against him. “That’s wonderful news.”
“It is.” She sat quietly for another moment, and he wondered why she didn’t sound happy. He ignored an atmosphere of dread that crept around him. “Can I touch them?”
“For a bit longer. Tomorrow, they’ll have the ropes up already.”
She walked over to the panels and looked back at him. “Come here, show me every one that’s yours.”
He came next to her. “There are eight panels, divided into five carvings arranged vertically. The moldings between them are all mine and meant to show off the skills of the carver who was in charge of the project.”
She ran her finger over the designs. There were four wide moldings separating the panels. The first was a repeating pattern of Celtic loops, to commemorate the kind of carving he’d learned in Wales. The second and third, the centered moldings, featured buckeye leaves, seeds, and cardinals to commemorate Ohio.
The last. Well.
“Are these … twigs?”
He put his hand over hers as she rubbed the interlocked relief of twigs along the molding. “Yes. And here,” he pulled her hand down to a medallion in the center that connected the two rows of twigs. He moved her fingers over the relief carving.
“A Welsh love spoon,” she whispered.
“I made the spoon bowl a heart, so the finial could be the captured balls, see—six wooden balls captured in the handle. The Burnsides. So no matter what, you’ll be together, always. In your heart. But the twigs, those are from me.” He put his hands in his pockets. He’d meant to present this to her better. Bring her here with something better prepared to say.
She turned to him, her face red and tears at the corners of her eyes. “You said that these panels would be here always.”
“Yes.”
“You made my family part of this beautiful work, part of Lakefield, for always.”
She rubbed her hands over her face.
“How I feel about you, too. I put that up there for always, too.”
“You did.”
She touched the love spoon again. “I wanted you to show me the panels and tell me which ones were yours so that I would know how to find you.”
His middle clenched, and he shoved his hands into his pockets even harder. “Don’t.”
“Maybe if we’d had more time, or maybe if we could just have a little more time. I think I could make a trip at the end of the summer, sometime before Sarah has her surgery, before you go to China.”
He shook his head.
“I know we decided that long-distance was too hard, but you know how it is right now.”
“How will you know?
“How will I know what?”
“When it’s a good time for you to leave?”
“That so hard to know, exactly, but we could figure it out as we went, I don’t want to—”
“Leave. You don’t want to leave, Destiny.”
“You can’t tell me what I want. You can’t just tell me what I want. You can’t just decide you want to keep me and take me with you and tell me it’s for the best. Maybe no one has ever needed you, but I’m needed, I—”
“I don’t want to be needed, Destiny. I want to be wanted. I want you. You’re right, though. No one needs me. I’m going home because it’s been too long. Because I let myself believe I would just make my mom and dad sad. I could have lost them, in the meantime, like I almost lost myself, buried in my thoughts about what I thought everyone in my life needed. Putting together a team and starting on this project was the first beginnin’ of something I wanted. The second was approaching you.”
She traced over his carving for her, pressing her fingertips into the heart-shaped bowl of the spoon. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to tell you, coming here. That’s what I’m waiting for, to be sure. It’s not just being needed, it’s not just that. It started like that, but I know I can’t try to keep everything together. But shouldn’t I be certain? Shouldn’t I think about it and feel like it’s the best thing that could possibly happen, or like I can’t imagine doing anything else, or that it’s the beginning of everything and I can’t wait to start?
“I keep going over everything. Over and over it. I feel the happiest, I do, when I’m with you. But when I imagine being with you somewhere else, somewhere I’ve never been, somewhere no one I know has ever been, I just can’t. It’s not just that I can’t imagine the place—it’s that I can’t imagine us together. I can’t imagine it. My mind goes all blank even as everything else, everything, starts to hurt. And I don’t know what’s hurting. I don’t know if it’s my heart, or my conscience, if it’s just guilt for hurting you, or the potential guilt of hurting my family.
“Shouldn’t I figure that out before I leave everything? I feel like you’ve gone someplace without me, already. Like you came to this idea, this idea where I can’t follow you. This big, big idea. You want me, you want these big things from me, this big thing, and if I can’t give it to you, nothing else will do. I can’t believe it’s just one thing or the other. Your big idea or us never ever getting a chance.”
Hefin took his hand out of his pocket and picked up her hand. Stroked over the back of it and realized he already knew the pattern of freckles on this hand. Had memorized them. “I do,” he said. “Have big ideas about us. You’re right, I can’t tell you what you want. I don’t think our choices are one thing, or the other, not exactly. I have learned that even when you want things very badly, life has a way of going on.”
One of her tears landed on his thumbnail where he was holding her hand. “I don’t really want life to go on without you, Hefin, I don’t. I just don’t know what kind of life I want to go on. I want to be two places at the same time. With you, and with where I understand myself the best. I know that one day, I won’t have the option to hold you in one hand and the life I’ve always known in the other.” More tears fell, and he rubbed them into her skin. “I can’t decide which one I would grieve less. And I’ve done so much grieving, I can’t stand to do any more. I’ve lost so much, I can’t stand to lose any more. In my most selfish moments, I demand that you stay here and just stop this decision from happening. But then I would grieve that, too.
“I would think about your parents and your sticky toffee pudding and I would think about all those people who are interested in what you have to say about making saving the planet look pretty and your new job making important things in important parts of the world and then I would be ashamed of myself. I know I could ask you to, and you would. And I think it’s that. Right there. I would ask you to stay, and you would, but you’re asking me to go, and I’m crying in the library again and won’t give you an answer.”
She was looking out one of the windows of the atrium, so he reached up and touched her cheek so she would look at him.
He loved this woman who had lost so much and was fighting so hard to figure out how to stop from losing any more.
If he had to spend the rest of his life softening her blows, he supposed he would.
He wasn’t sure how, but now, at least, she had a phone. She had the dome to look at and think of him every time. Mrs. Lynch was driving her limousine
around her neighborhood, and he’d like to think that every time Destiny saw it, she would remember the love they made in it.
Baseballs were common objects. So were donuts and tea. Wet grass and pancakes. He would be here, reminding her. And his love spoon would be here for longer than either one of them could imagine.
He would call her, and he would call her back to him. He didn’t have to take her. They were both already taken.
The world could be made small enough, and God knows he knew how to wait.
He rubbed the tea-stain freckles gathered at her temple with his thumb. He knew those, too. “I love you, Destiny Burnside. You can right count on that for a long time. You can even put away in your heart that I’ll wait for you because here’s the thing, I likely will. Maybe knowin’ that about me is the insurance you’re buyin’ against your fear of leaving. I can live with that, I guess. I’d rather live with you, though.”
She closed her eyes.
He kissed her, then, and she kissed him back, but it wasn’t a pancakes kiss, or a limousine kiss, and it wasn’t a dome kiss. It wasn’t a kiss stolen inside a childhood memory.
It wasn’t a good-bye kiss, either. He made sure of it.
It was a come back to me kiss.
He knew it was because it was the first one he’d ever given.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The storm was getting serious, and she wished she’d remembered to replace the windshield wipers in Marvin’s car.
The late spring since she’d let Hefin leave without her had been stormy, and the wipers made a bigger mess than they cleared away. She peered through the greasy-looking rainwater, pulling back on her speed, and finally breathed when she turned into the frontage road that led into her neighborhood.
When she pulled into her drive, she was surprised by Lacey, who was standing under the tiny porch roof over the stoop, her arms wrapped around herself. Destiny parked and ran out to meet her.
“Why didn’t you use your key?”
“It’s hanging up inside the house, and the babysitter’s still there with Nathan, and if I went in to get it, he’d want me and I’d never get to talk to you.” Lacey had to yell over the noise of the rain.
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