by Rebeca Seitz
Yet tonight they sat having a discussion about the limit to their days. He pulled in a deep breath and fought a sadness that rolled over him in gray waves. There would be no intimate conversation tonight. No laughter. No watching her eyes dance.
Tonight he’d have to settle for that small smile on her face before he’d opened his mouth.
Nine
A week after her visit to Meg’s house, Tandy pulled her van into Kendra’s driveway and marveled at the changes in this sister’s life. Gone was the apartment in a converted antebellum home. Kendra now called a two-story townhouse home. Bright red and purple petunias waved at Tandy from their window boxes beside a plum-colored door. White porch railing encircled the small stoop and a mat out front welcomed visitors.
Tandy smiled at the outward changes that reflected the love of her sister and Darin and knocked on their door. She waited a second, then turned the knob and walked in. “Yoohoo! Anybody home?”
“Upstairs.” Kendra’s voice drifted down from above. Tandy passed through the small living room and kitchen to the stairway at the back.
She found Kendra in the hallway at the laundry closet. “Hey, you.”
Kendra looked up from the towel she’d been folding. “Hey, yourself. Ready to pick some strawberries?”
“Yeah. I haven’t called Wells though to see if they’ve got any to pick.”
“Tandy!” Kendra shot a reproachful glare. “If I got out of bed at six in the morning for no reason, you’re in big trouble, lady.”
Tandy waved a hand. “They were out picking yesterday, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
“You’re not going to call at all?”
“Like I said, they were out yesterday. Zelda told me she picked a ton.”
“She’s probably not the only one. Better call and see if there are any berries left.”
“If we get out there and they’re closed, we’ll just go to some yard sales.”
Kendra tossed the last towel into a basket with several others and carried it down the hall. Tandy followed her into the bathroom. “I don’t understand why we can’t just call.”
Tandy blew out a breath. “Because I don’t have the number and I can’t remember his first name to look it up.”
“Well, why didn’t you just say that?”
“I did!”
“No, you didn’t. You said you hadn’t called and that we weren’t going to. That’s not the same.”
Tandy transferred her look to the floor. “Okay, I meant—”
Kendra smiled. “Yeah, yeah.” Picking up the now-empty basket, she balanced it on a hip. “Let me grab the paper in case we’re forced to spend the morning at yard sales.”
“Great.”
Tandy went to the top of the stairs and looked down. When had Kendra become such a … mom? Before Darin she’d never have pushed the issue of calling before leaving. Kendra lived by the seat of her pants—the carefree artist. Unsure if she liked this new development in Kendra’s personality, Tandy nibbled a lip while descending the stairs.
“Okay.” Kendra waved the paper in the air as she caught up with Tandy. “All set.”
“Perfect. Where’s Darin, by the way?” They made their way back through the house. Tandy noticed what she hadn’t before—perfectly ordered stacks of magazines and barely a tchotchke out of place. Strange.
“Still asleep. He thinks we’re absolutely nuts to be up this early purely for the sake of picking strawberries.”
“Did you tell him to go to the grocery store and check out the price of food these days? If we don’t pick it ourselves, I’m not sure we’re going to have it at all anymore.”
They stepped onto the porch and Kendra turned to lock the door. “I told him to roll over and go back to sleep.”
“Probably a wiser choice.”
“I thought so.”
They sprung down the steps and over to Tandy’s van. The morning sunshine already shone brightly across a bright blue sky studded with big, puffy white clouds. On days like this, she missed the sunroof of her old Beemer.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
Tandy frowned and put the van in gear. “I’m afraid they’re not worth a plug nickel.”
“At least you haven’t lost your grasp on reality.”
“Very funny.”
“You gonna tell me what has you so lost in thought?”
“I’m … adjusting.”
“To?”
“Life.”
“Specifically?”
“All these changes we’ve been making. I mean, think about our lives just two years ago and look at them today. I’m married. You’re married. I have a kid and drive a van, for goodness sakes. Joy has a kid. Daddy’s married. You’re in a townhome where everything looks like a set from The Stepford Wives. Meg’s recovering from brain surgery. Isn’t it all just a bit much?”
“The Stepford Wives?”
The van bumped over loose pavement as they left town and headed for the country. “Yeah.”
“Why does my house look like The Stepford Wives?”
Her voice didn’t hold offense, just curiosity, so Tandy answered. “Your magazines are in stacks whose edges I could hold a ruler against. There’s not a speck of Miss Kitty fur anywhere. I checked. Every glass surface gleamed and your kitchen counters didn’t have a smudge on them. For a while, I wondered if Joy had been by but she’s as busy with Maddie as I am with Clayton, so that couldn’t have happened.”
“Tandy, my apartment was always clean.”
“Not like that.”
“Well, no, maybe not as clean as I keep the house, but I lived by myself then. I kept it as clean as I wanted. Darin happens to like it a little more clean. What’s the big deal?”
Tandy sighed. “I don’t know. It’s not a big deal, really. It’s just another change, and I’m about to my change limit.”
“How about a dollar?”
“You’re a riot.”
“I try.”
Tandy worried her bottom lip as the county road zipped under the tires. Truth be known, she wished she knew why all the changes left her feeling so out of sorts.
“You know this is just the control freak in you coming out, right?”
“I am not a control freak.”
“Mm-hmm. Keep saying it, honey. Somewhere, somebody’s going to believe you.”
“Okay, I like to know what’s going on. Doesn’t everybody?”
“Oh, please. You like to control what’s going on and a whole bunch of stuff has happened outside your control but inside your world, and it’s throwing you for a bit of a loop. Perfectly understandable.”
Tandy mulled over that a moment. She did like to plan or know an outcome before it came. Kendra had always been the more spontaneous one, dragging her out of bed in the middle of the night to sneak out of the house only to hang out in the barn talking until the sun came peeking over the hill. It hadn’t been about breaking the rules so much as trying something different to see what would happen. It drove Tandy crazy then, but a whole lot crazier now.
Except now Kendra was the one calling before leaving and grabbing the paper as a backup plan.
“I think you’re becoming a control freak too.” Tandy nodded toward the newspaper.
“I am as far from a control freak as a June bug from a horse fly.”
“Says the one who can’t believe I didn’t call the berry patch first?”
“That’s just common sense.”
“And grabbed a newspaper so we had a backup plan?”
“Again, good sense. I don’t want to waste my morning.”
“But you would have wasted it two years ago! We’d have taken off and if our plan didn’t work out, we’d have figured something out then. But now we think everything through and make contingency plans and pack diaper bags and buy parent cars and it’s just a little much.”
“Parent cars?”
“I offer you Exhibit A.” Tandy swept an arm around the van.
“Is this because
you’re missing the Beemer? I told you not to get rid of it.”
Kendra’s sensible tone did nothing to calm Tandy’s nerves. “I had to get rid of it, Ken. I wasn’t bending myself into a pretzel ninety gazillion times a day to get a car seat into the back of a little sports car.”
“You could have kept it for things like today.”
“And where in that car would we have put flats of strawberries?”
“You’re right. Somehow, when we weren’t looking, we became adults.”
“Now tell me why that bugs me. I was an adult before. I had a career, a life, an apartment. I was adult.”
“Yeah, but not adult like Momma and Daddy. No husbands. No babies. No other people in our life to have to live with, compromise for, love. It’s different now.”
Tandy swung the van onto a gravel driveway with a big strawberry sign at its entrance. “That’s my point. We’ve got a lot of different right now.” She braked to a stop and unbuckled her seat belt.
Kendra laid a hand on her arm. “You’re right, T. It’s a lot. And this thing with Meg has us all on edge. But different can be good. We’ve had a lot of the good kind of different, right?”
“Right.”
“Then let’s focus on that.”
Tandy sucked in a breath. “You’re right. I know you are. I don’t know why I’m so out of sorts lately.”
“Well, get back in sorts because we’ve got berries to pick, sister.”
Tandy grinned. “Beat you to the patch.”
“You know, some things never change.”
“And praise God for that.”
Tandy pushed open the door and raced across the grass over to the stacks of baskets under a green awning.
It wasn’t long before the sisters chose two rows side by side and began pulling plump red berries from plants. Other women were spread out in various spots along each row, bent over plants and intent on their work. A silence broken only by the sounds of birdsong and rustling plants blanketed them and Tandy let it soothe her frazzled senses.
She had almost gotten back to a point of peace when a voice from a couple rows over floated to her.
“I heard she’s completely different than she was before the surgery. Angry all the time.”
Another voice tsked. “That poor Jamison, having to live with a totally different woman than the one he married.”
Tandy considered turning around and telling these two gossips to leave her family out of their conversation. She loved Stars Hill, but the part about having everyone know her business chafed a lot of the time. She stopped at the first woman’s continued words.
“Billy told me he saw Jamison down at Cadillac’s Saturday.”
“Really? Drinking?”
“Nope. Just sitting there, staring into space, hand wrapped around a glass of water.”
“At least she hasn’t driven him to drink yet.”
“Somebody better tell that woman to get her act together before she loses a good man.”
Tandy clamped down on the anger threatening to spew out all over these biddies. What made them think Meg and Jamison were any of their business? What gave them the right to judge? Like they’d never had to deal with a difficult thing in life. If they hadn’t, then they hadn’t had much of a life in the first place. Tandy glanced up to see if Kendra had heard.
Kendra stood stock-still in her row, staring behind Tandy in the direction of the voices. Tandy stepped over the plants and joined her sister. “Guess you heard.”
“I think half the berry patch heard. It’s not like they’re trying for secrecy, talking in voices they can hear all the way on Lindell.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to go smack them upside the head and toss those full baskets all over the place.”
“But instead we’re going to … ?”
“Stand here like good Christian girls whose Daddy preaches the forgiveness of Jesus and trust that God will take care of the likes of them.”
“I really don’t like this option.”
A muscle in Kendra’s jaw worked. “I don’t either.”
“We could at least let them know we’re here. Maybe shame them into shutting up.”
Kendra turned back to the plants in her row. She bent and began picking berries again. “One thing Momma taught me that stuck—you can’t change the behavior of adults.”
Tandy looked at Kendra’s back, then over at the gossiping women. She’d always thirsted for vengeance and justice. That’s why becoming a lawyer had held such appeal and arguing in court had given her a thrill like nothing else. She stepped back over to her row and knelt down at the plants. This wasn’t Orlando. She couldn’t just rail at those women and think the entire town wouldn’t be talking about it by dinnertime.
She sighed. What she should really be focusing on here—what an adult would focus on—was Jamison and why he’d been at Cadillac’s. The thought appalled her more than the gossip. What could he be thinking? He knew Stars Hill’s grapevine as well as any of them. Did he think he could sit at a bar and not have anyone in the family find out? So what that he’d only been drinking water. He could have gotten a glass of water at his own kitchen sink.
Unless what he really needed was to get away from Meg.
Tandy’s fingers paused on the strawberry plant. She hadn’t been by to see Meg in nearly a week. The sisters’ idea of taking turns being with Meg hadn’t exactly been followed through. That left Jamison handling the bulk of the recovery time. If Meg still walked around in the same angry funk she’d been in last time Tandy sat with her, Jamison had as good a reason for a break as any high school senior in May.
She pulled the berry at her hand, tossed it in her basket, and stood. “Hey, Ken, I think I’ve got enough. You about ready?”
Kendra turned and eyed Tandy’s basket, then the others in the flat at Tandy’s feet. “That’s all you’re picking?”
“I thought we might go out and check on Meg. It’s been a few days since I saw her.”
It took only seconds for Kendra’s eyes to take on a knowing gleam. “Gotcha. Let’s go.”
Ten
Jamison snatched up a stuffed turtle from the living room floor and tossed it across the room toward the toy bin. Today, he promised himself, he would find a housekeeper. Taking care of a wife whose temper tantrums seemed as close at hand as his next breath was exhausting enough. He simply didn’t have the energy to pick up after three kids.
He thought through their family budget. Paying a housekeeper, especially if he asked her to stay half a day every day to get him out of cooking meals as well, would require a severe tightening of their belts. Medical bills had begun pouring in and, even with insurance, Meg’s surgery costs ate away at their savings faster than a deer on fresh corn.
Still, he could either hire some help or find himself sitting at a bar again. He shook his head and pitched another toy. It landed on top of the turtle.
What had he been thinking? By now, the entire family probably knew he’d been to Cadillac’s. Seeing Billy Baird there had secured his spot on the Stars Hill grapevine more certainly than the sunrise tomorrow morning. It wouldn’t matter that he’d been drinking water the entire night. It would matter that he’d been drinking water at Cadillac’s.
He could have had a nice glass of wine at home, but it wasn’t the numbing effect of alcohol he’d been after. It was the silence. The anonymity. The joy of being left alone for a few minutes with his own thoughts. Here at the house the only things he did were listen to Meg, help Meg, wait on Meg, cook, clean, and take care of the kids. Sitting at his desk he answered call after e-mail for clients, making certain their financial needs and concerns were met in excellent fashion.
Before the surgery his sweet Meg had given him a half hour of wonderful silence when he came home from work. It was as if she knew he needed a buffer between the office and the family and she’d given it to him without his having to utter a word.
He missed his wife. Because he had
to admit it to himself now: She wasn’t his Megan.
She still smiled sometimes. She still loved to have her feet rubbed, even though she couldn’t feel it as well on her right side. But she’d taken to criticizing him and the kids with every other sentence. She didn’t approve of his clothes choices for the kids, she didn’t like the way he cooked their chicken, she thought he took too long at the grocery store, she couldn’t understand how he could live with dust on the tables—the litany began each morning as he opened his eyes and didn’t stop until sleep overtook her.
He didn’t know how much longer he could go on like this.
A better man than he would last longer than a few measly weeks. He wanted to feel bad about his own lack of patience, but he wanted her to get better more.
The doorbell rang. He kicked a small car under the couch and went to see who had come to witness his horrendous housekeeping habits now. Tandy and Kendra came through the door just as he approached it.
“Yoohoo!” Tandy called.
“Hey, we’re here.” He cringed. His voice sounded like an old man’s. The sisters eyed him up and down and he mustered up enough energy to paste on a smile. “What brings you two out this way?”
“We were at Wells picking berries when we heard about your … um … visit downtown.” Kendra ran a toe along the floor.
He’d hoped it would take a little longer for the family to find out. But, like pretty much everything else in life right now, things weren’t going his way. He let his shoulders slump. “Wow, news travels fast.”
Tandy closed the door behind them. “As you well know. What’s going on, Jamison?”
He spread his hands wide. “I wish I could tell you. I just needed a little time to myself and I knew that was the one place I wouldn’t run into anyone I had to talk to.”
Silence met his statements and he felt a spurt of anger. Of course they wouldn’t understand. They hadn’t even been by to see Meg for days. They had no idea what he was going through.