Breakup in a Small Town

by Kristina Knight

  “We’ll see how it goes. It’s only a first meeting. The dogs might not even like me.”

  Jenny didn’t see how anyone wouldn’t like Adam Buchanan. The man was handsome, loving, strong. He’d gotten lost, but seemed to be finding himself. “I’m sure the dogs will like you just fine.”

  “So you’ll take me? I can ask my dad, or Aiden if you’re too busy.”

  “I can clear my afternoon.” The sound of the boys’ clattering feet filled the house. Her husband had gone to a physical therapy appointment, all on his own. Jenny ordered herself not to read too much into the changes in Adam. This could all be an act, a way to get out of the RV and back into the house. Back into the wheelchair. Back in front of that damned window, where he could watch the world go by and wait to die.

  She put the boys’ plates on the table, then offered a third to Adam. He sat with their sons, talking to them about school. Jenny filled her own plate before joining her family at the strong oak table Adam had built for her before they’d started renovating this house.

  Their conversation about the strength of water balloons versus regular balloons was a bit nonsensical, but it made her smile. It had been a long time since she’d smiled. She didn’t know how long this change in Adam would last, but as inconvenient as it would be to rearrange her afternoon, she would do it. Because if he were willing to make this concession, she was darned sure going to meet him halfway.

  * * *

  ADAM LOOKED OUT the window of the Mustang, watching closely as a man close to his father’s age exited the white farmhouse with black shutters. The dog trainer lived just outside Springfield, and Adam was already regretting asking Jenny to bring him here. Of doing this at all. On the one hand, he knew the dog would give Jenny another reason to believe he wanted to change—a definite bonus. On the other hand, getting a service dog was so...permanent. As if by even considering it, he was giving up his hopes of ever being a normal person again.

  Adam wanted to be normal. So badly.

  “Ready?”

  He wanted to offer a clever quip, but his mouth was too dry. What if the dog didn’t like him? What if it did? What if getting a service dog somehow signaled his brain to go crazy again? What if he’d already had the last seizure he would have, and this dog was meant to go to someone who really needed it?

  “Sure.” He got out of the car, pain shooting through his knee and hip when he forgot how low the Mustang was to the ground. He held out a hand to the handler. “Adam Buchanan.”

  “Dave Wheeler. Nice to meet you. And this is Sheba.”

  The dog was a golden Lab, with soft yellow fur and curious eyes. She sat patiently beside Dave, as if waiting for permission to do something. Adam waited, but Dave didn’t say anything more.

  “Am I supposed to ask it to shake or something? Introduce myself?”

  The trainer laughed, and his eyes crinkled at the corners. Somehow, his amusement with the questions wasn’t reassuring. “Why don’t I take you through some of the things Sheba can do? Then you can get a feel for her yourself.”

  For the next half hour, Dave and Sheba went through a series of instructions, everything from typical sitting and walking, to how the dog would behave if Adam had a seizure. It was fascinating, and a little scary. Jenny stood beside him as they watched the dog go through its paces.

  “It’s different than I expected,” she said at last.

  “I wasn’t sure what to expect,” he admitted. “I know it isn’t a pet, but doesn’t some of this look like pet stuff?”

  “It’s probably meant to. Less scary that way,” she whispered. Her shoulder brushed his and Adam felt that familiar zing of attraction. It was funny—before she’d asked him to move out of the house, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d allowed these little zings of attraction for his wife free rein. This time he was going to enjoy it, to feel it from his shoulder all the way to his toes. If he could, he would bathe in it, and hope that maybe, if he changed enough, she’d allow herself to feel it, too.

  He wanted to hold her hand again. To kiss her and not have her draw away from him. Make love with her. Hell, he wanted to sit with her at the kitchen table and just be. Wanted to walk with her along the lakeshore or downtown to get a cup of coffee. He hadn’t allowed any of those little moments into their lives in...too long. Maybe since before the tornado, even.

  Adam squeezed his eyes shut, trying to remember the last time they’d gotten a babysitter for the boys so they could have time together as a couple. Maybe Christmas? Was it a date if he took his wife Christmas shopping for their sons? Adam had a feeling Jenny wouldn’t think so. Hell, he didn’t think so. Eating at the mall food court in Springfield wasn’t a sunset sail on the lake. It wasn’t even a quick dinner-and-a-movie evening.

  He needed to add “take Jenny on a date” to his to-do list.

  The dog handler headed in their direction.

  “Do you think there is a trial period with these dogs?” Adam asked her. “Or once we take it home, it is ours, regardless?”

  “It’s a she,” Jenny corrected, but there was a hint of amusement in her voice, not annoyance. “She seems like such a sweetie, I doubt there is anything to worry about.”

  Adam frowned. “Being nice with the trainer might not be the same as getting along with an eight-and a five-year-old.”

  “And it might be just that easy.”

  Was she trying to come up with the simplest answers? Or was he being deliberately opposed to the possibility that he needed a service dog? He’d finally read all the literature last night, after he’d gone to bed, alone, in the borrowed RV. He’d been sleeping in there only a couple days and already he was sick of it, despite the creature comforts his mother had made sure it held.

  Jenny stood so close to him he could feel her heat. He wanted to take her hand in his, but didn’t want to overstep the boundaries she’d put up. Winning her back would have to be a slow process.

  “How does this work?” Adam asked Dave, once he and Sheba came to a stop. “Do I need to take classes so I know what to do with it?”

  “With her,” the trainer correctly mildly. “You don’t need classes. The basic commands are simple. The most important thing is to make the dog a part of your life. Take her to the store, on walks. Let her know she is a member of your family, not just an employee, for lack of a better word. She’ll do the rest.”

  Adam looked at Jenny. She nodded, almost imperceptibly. If the dog made her feel more secure, maybe he should just go ahead. He watched the animal closely for a long moment. It stared right back at him with big, chocolate-brown eyes. No barking, no slobbering. No antsy pacing. It just sat, waiting. The way he’d done so many times since the tornado struck Slippery Rock. They waited for different things. The dog for her next order. Adam for...oblivion.

  He didn’t want to wait any longer—it would only make things harder. “When can we pick her up?”

  “Give us a week, just to make sure Sheba is fully prepped. We’ll do some owner-specific training, anything you want her to learn that will be helpful in your situation. I have the basics of what you’re facing, but not every detail.”

  “I—well, we—just want to make sure she’ll be okay with our boys. They’re eight and five, and they’ve never had a pet.”

  “It’s important to remember Sheba isn’t a pet, not the way most people think of it. Although she likes a long walk, she doesn’t play fetch, and you should keep her to a schedule. Whatever you do, wherever you go, she does and she goes.”

  They talked a bit more with the trainer, then scheduled a time to return to pick up the dog the following week. In the car, Adam considered what he wanted to learn from the dog, or teach her. Or how to just deal with her.

  “For what it’s worth, I think this is a good decision.” Jenny began speaking once they were on the highway leading back to Slippery
Rock. Adam didn’t want her reasoning for getting the dog. He wanted to show her that, dog or no dog, he was the same man she had married.

  Maybe it would be better, though, to show her that he could be the man she wanted now. He needed to figure out what that was, but in the meantime, it couldn’t hurt to remind her how things had been before.

  “When I saw you at lunch the other day, at the pizza place—”

  “During your jaunt around town?” she said, a smile on her face. She looked so happy, he almost convinced himself not to say anything more. But if he were to show her he had changed, that he was changing, he had to be honest. She needed to know how he felt, and maybe that would give him a clue how she felt. About him.

  “I didn’t like it.” Her hands were at the perfect ten and two positions; he thought she was the only person he knew who drove with their hands at the precise positioning taught in driver’s education courses. It was kind of cute.

  She shot him a questioning look.

  “It made me feel like...” He waved his hand between them, as if she might understand what he was trying to say through the motions, but Jenny only glanced at him, then back at the road. “Like I wanted to march in there and drag him out by his perfect hair.”

  Slowly, she turned her head to look at him. “It was a business lunch,” she said after a long moment.

  “I know. Seeing you there, happy and laughing, after you’d been so unhappy and sad with me... I don’t want to make you unhappy, Jenny. I think I’ve been making you unhappy for a lot longer than these past three months, though.”

  Jenny swallowed. Her knuckles were white with tension. Adam didn’t think she was going to answer, then she pulled the car off the road and parked on the shoulder.

  Despite the early afternoon hour, the road wasn’t busy, only a few cars whizzing past. When Jenny finally looked at him, there was pain in her gaze, and Adam wanted to do something, anything, to make that pain go away. He didn’t know how.

  “I wasn’t,” she began, but then shook her head. “You didn’t make me unhappy. The tornado didn’t make me unhappy. I made me unhappy.”

  Adam didn’t understand. She said he wasn’t the same, and he knew he’d been withdrawn since the tornado. Just how far back was this going to go? “How did you make yourself unhappy?”

  “I don’t know. I think by not paying attention to what I want for myself all these years.”

  “The business? You can have it.” He would sign all the papers over to her today, if that was what would make her happy. He couldn’t work there anymore, anyway. The thought of never going back to Buchanan’s, though, stabbed at his heart a little bit.

  “It isn’t the business. Or the kids or your parents or mine. It isn’t even you, at least not entirely. It’s me, Adam.” She put her hands to her chest. “It’s me. I went from living with parents who never allowed me to have an opinion on anything, to living with you, who never asked my opinion on anything. And that doesn’t mean I didn’t want the things we built together. I did want those things, and I did like my job.”

  “You planned our wedding.” And she’d done it perfectly, getting them out of town and married before either set of parents knew totally what was going on. She’d avoided dealing with her mother’s pretentious wedding plans, while also not hurting his mother’s feelings. Nancy had always wanted a girl she could spoil. Their wedding would have been some kind of cross between bad chick flicks and The Beverly Hillbillies.

  “Elopement,” she corrected, and she smiled. A real smile that eased the panicky feeling in Adam’s chest. Having good memories about their past had to mean something, didn’t it? “What I’m trying to say, and doing a bad job of, is that as much as I like the responsibilities of work and at the house, I don’t want to be the only responsible adult.”

  “I can be responsible.” Adam wanted those four idiotic words back as soon as he said them. He sounded like Frankie trying to get fifteen extra minutes at bedtime. “What I meant was that we can work out responsibilities for the house, the kids, work.”

  “I’d like that,” she said. “You know, that lunch? I pitched him our plan. The one we were working on before...” She trailed off.

  Before. Before the tornado. Before she realized she wanted more than Adam in her life. Before he decided she was better off without him. Before everything went crazy.

  “Before,” she said, and this time there was a note of defiance in her voice. “He liked the plans, and he’s presenting them to his partners in the next week. If he wants to move forward, we’re going to need a designer. Or two. I already told him to call my cell and not the office line, because if you mother keeps telling him Buchanan’s is only a cabinet shop, he might believe her.”

  “A cabinet shop is a good living, especially with Buchanan’s reputation.” If she didn’t want him back, and since he couldn’t work there in his condition, going back to cabinetmaking was the safe bet. Duane in the warehouse was as good a cabinetmaker as Adam had been.

  “Yes, it is. But furniture making could be so much more. If this partnership happens, it could be that last support that makes the cabinet part of Buchanan’s the small end of the revenue line.” Revenue line? Support? Partnering? She sounded serious. Like she’d put a lot of thought into the business. Adam was both awed and humbled.

  She pulled back onto the road. “I know your parents aren’t thrilled with the changes we were making to the business, but that doesn’t make the changes bad decisions. They’ve been really helpful, in their own way. Your dad still runs a tight ship in the warehouse, and people love talking to your mom on the phone. It would be good, though, if you reminded them the business is ours now. Yours and mine. Nothing stays the same forever.”

  Jenny kept talking as she drove, about returns on investment, pricing structures, delivery models. All the arguments he’d used to convince her to consider this expansion months ago. The more she talked, the more queasy Adam felt. She really was moving on. Without him. Adam’s head swam with the information she shared in the hour it took to finish the drive from the dog trainer to Slippery Rock.

  “Is this expansion what you want?” he asked.

  Jenny nodded as she pulled the Mustang into their driveway. “It’s exciting and scary. It’s what we talked about.”

  “You said earlier that your parents didn’t let you have an opinion, and that I never asked for your opinion. I’m asking now. Is this expansion what you want? Not because it was something I dreamed up a couple years ago when I was making our kitchen table or the bed, but because you want it?”

  Jenny put the car in Park, then shifted in the seat to look at him. He wondered what she saw. The broken man she’d brought home from the hospital? A guy she used to love? “It’s what I want for the business, yes. I just have to figure out how to make it work, now that things are different between us. For you.”

  Adam watched her for a long moment, trying to merge the image he’d held on to, of his sweet, small-town love, with the savvy, smart woman who had just spent forty minutes talking in business terms about the plans he’d tried to convince himself were no longer possible. She made those plans seem possible, though, and he realized he still wanted the plan, too. He wasn’t ready for it. He couldn’t work with his tools. He couldn’t build a three-tiered shelf, much less a set of patio furniture, but the thought of his furniture in homes around the state made that hot lick of ambition he hadn’t felt in months fire back to life.

  He wasn’t ready for this kind of life, but apparently life wasn’t waiting for him any longer.

  “Would you mind sharing those profit margins with me?”

  She nodded. “Of course. It’s your business, too.”

  He’d wanted to take her hand at the dog farm, for reassurance. As a reminder of who he was, who they were together. He hadn’t then because he didn’t want her to think getting a service do
g was him faking to get in her good graces or something. Now, Adam reached across the car and took her hand in his. Not to reassure himself that she was here with him, but to show her that he was here with her.

  “I think it sounds like an amazing plan, and I don’t know how I can help, but I’d like to learn more about it. If you wouldn’t mind sharing.”

  He needed to add one more thing to his to-do list: figure out how to be part of their business again.

  * * *

  LEGO FIGURES RAN across the TV screen, fighting with one another as they offered up sarcastic jibes. Jenny shook her head, seeing the rapt faces of her boys as they took in the cartoon movie. Frankie and Garrett had seen this film at least a dozen times, and yet every time President Business appeared on the screen, it was as if they’d never seen him before. She curled into the corner of the sectional, pulled her legs up under her and rested her head on her palm.

  Adam returned from the kitchen, holding a bowl of freshly salted and buttered popcorn. Instead of the recliner that he usually chose, he sat next to her in the corner, with only the cup console between them.

  “This is my favorite part,” he whispered, nodding to the screen as President Business made his first appearance on the screen. The boys shushed him, making Jenny grin. Adam shrugged, an exaggerated what-did-I-do expression on his face. He pushed the bowl of popcorn in her direction and Jenny shook her head and patted her stomach.

  Between the hamburgers and potato salad and the first round of popcorn, she didn’t think she would eat again for at least a week. Adam took a handful, then put the bowl between the boys on the floor. Neither seemed to notice.

  This was nice. The four of them used to watch movies together every weekend. It was one of the family events that Adam always made time for, although he was usually with the boys on the floor or in his recliner and not on the sofa with her. He ate the last of his popcorn. Jenny’s hand started to tingle so she shifted, settling her back into the corner of the sectional and stretching her legs along the side.