My stomach twisted over a few points in that information dump. Pretty serious and married being the big ones. I dropped into the rocking chair across from her and folded my arms over my stomach.
“Anyways,” Rose waved her hand, “she stopped by to see you. She mentioned she’d somehow convinced you to go to the big ol’ honky tonk next weekend and was just double checking to make sure you hadn’t gotten cold feet.”
“I doubt even if I tried to back out, Josie would let me,” I replied, wondering why she’d showed up in person. There was a great invention, only about two hundred years old, known as the telephone she could have used. But I knew why she’d stopped by. Why she’d probably wasted fifty gallons of gas in that gas-chugging machine of hers to drive from her place to this place.
It was because she was driving to his place.
I wasn’t a fool. Josie might have been the nicest girl I’d ever met, but she was still a young woman. That meant she was the most saint-like of sinners.
Jesse had been hers for a couple of years. I’d only spent a couple of weeks with him, and I knew he wasn’t the type of guy a girl got over. He was the type of guy a girl spent her whole life asking herself, What if? He was the type of guy a woman thought about when she sat across the dinner table from her second husband.
All drama aside, Jesse was the guy a girl didn’t get over. End of story. Truest story ever told.
I knew because I felt the same. I’d never get over Jesse Walker.
“You’re probably right. Josie doesn’t take no for an answer too often.” Rose’s expression changed. It eclipsed from carefree to worried. I’d rarely seen that shift on her face. “That’s why I was so surprised when she took a no from Jesse when she tried to get back together with him. She didn’t push back. She didn’t fight. She didn’t plead her case. She just . . . let him go.” Rose’s forehead lined as she studied the planks of the porch, like perhaps, within their cracks and crevasses, she could find the answers. “I don’t know what happened between those two, lord knows Jesse’s lips are sealed, but you don’t go from all but walking down the aisle to not even wanting to say each other’s name without something pretty big happening.”
What happened between Jesse and Josie seemed to be the million dollar question. No one seemed to know.
“I tried to be strong for Jesse after they broke up. Even though he tried not to show how much he was hurting, I could tell. A mother always knows when one of her babies is in pain.” I bit my tongue and kept my opinions on the matter to myself. “But I think my heart was just about as broken as his.” Rose gave a sad smile and sniffled. “I was so sure Josie was going to be my daughter-in-law one day, I’d started treating her like a daughter without even realizing it.”
“You miss her,” I said. It was obvious from Rose’s expression that she did.
“I do. I did a lot when they first broke up, but time, like anything, eases the hurt,” Rose said, grabbing hold of the swing’s armrest. “What I find I miss the most now, though, is the reassurance of knowing my baby had found himself a good person to spend his life with. When he was with Josie, I knew he’d be well taken care of and loved. At the end of the day, that’s all a mother can ask for when her little birdies leave the nest.” Rose exhaled slowly through her nose. “That they’ll find another nest as loving and warm as the one they flew from.”
My eyes closed. My heart dropped. My shoulders sagged.
I knew Rose wasn’t saying any of that to hurt me—she didn’t have a clue how I felt about Jesse—but her speech, coming hot on the heels of Garth’s speech, was the tipping point. That last wooden block slid out of the tower and made it crumble.
I’d been living a dream. I’d gotten lost inside of it and mistaken it for reality.
And I’d just woken up.
I stood and found my legs were stronger than I would have thought. I guessed after waking up, I could accept my fate bravely. “Rose? Would you mind if I took the rest of the day off?”
Her face flickered with concern.
“I’ve had this nasty headache all day I can’t seem to shake,” I said, drilling my finger into my temple. The real pain ran a couple feet lower. “I’m just going to find a quiet place to park it under a tree and hope some fresh air and rest does the trick.” I hated lying to Rose. I hated lying to her more than I’d hated lying to anyone else, but it had to be done. I couldn’t make it another nine hours of holding myself together. She’d see right through my act, or I’d lose it in front of her, and I didn’t want her to know about Jesse and me. I didn’t want her to ever know. I didn’t want to give her a reason to be ashamed of her son and awkward around me.
“Did you take some pain reliever, honey?” she asked, rising from the swing.
“Only about a hundred,” I exaggerated, “but this thing’s beyond medicine right now.”
“You poor thing,” she said, looking like she wanted to wrap me up in a giant hug. “Of course. Take the rest of the day off and just give a holler if you need anything.”
Guilt made its debut when I saw how quickly she’d agreed. How easily I’d pulled the wool over her eyes. “Are you sure you and the girls will be all right? I can check back in around dinner time to see if you need a hand.”
“Please,” she said, waving me off, “the girls and I have been cooking meatloaf for so long we could do it in our sleep. Go find yourself a shade tree and get some rest.” She pointed at the old trunk on the porch where she kept pillows and blankets. “Grab a blanket and pillow, and I’ll check in on you later.”
“Thanks,” I said as I opened the trunk and grabbed the first blanket.
“You’ve got your phone with you?”
I patted my back pocket. “For your checking-in-on-me pleasure.”
Rose shook her head. “Go get some rest, silly girl. You must have a headache. Your humor is off this afternoon.”
I flashed Rose a wave before heading down the porch steps and bee lining for the field. My lungs weren’t working right. Not since Garth’s, and Rose’s, words. I felt like I could barely fill them halfway up. I had a theory: the farther I got from Willow Springs, the better I could breathe again.
After hoofing it through a field of grass up past my shoulders for more than a half hour, I realized my theory was wrong. It didn’t matter how far I got or how fast I walked. I still couldn’t breathe quite right. My heart felt like it was shriveling to the size of a raisin, and my head felt like it might explode from everything running through it.
After another fifteen minutes of traipsing around some nameless field, I practically stumbled into something anything but organic. It was an old trailer, and old was putting it generously. It was basically a rat-infested looking, once-upon-a-time human dwelling so rusted out it made Old Bessie look shiny and new. More windows were covered by plastic sheeting than actual glass, and the front door—or was it the back?—looked as if a gentle breeze would blow right off its hinges.
Sweet pad.
Not.
Other than a run-down pickup that looked like it hadn’t been started since Clinton was president, the place gave no indication any humans had ever lived there. Even in the trailer’s prime, imagining people living in it was hard. It was so far gone, imagining it had been anything useful in its past was hard.
I tip-toed away until I realized I was tip-toeing when no one was around to hear me. After that, I continued to step away, but I didn’t turn my back until the trailer was out of sight. It wasn’t the kind of place a person turned their back on.
After I’d put a safe distance between me and the trailer, I spread the blanket under the next closest tree, turned my phone off because I didn’t want anyone checking up on me, laid down, and was lights out a few heartbeats later.
THERE WAS NOTHING quite like being woken up by the toe of a shoe tapping against your shoulder. It had happened to me a handful of times, and I remembered each one. I recalled each shoe that had nudged me awake since kneeling down and using a hand was apparently just too much work. That time, it wasn’t a loafer, or a wedge, or a sneaker. It was a boot. A black one.
I groaned before I looked at the boot’s owner. When I did, my groan deepened.
“What are you doing lurking around here?” Even in the dark, I made out Garth’s twisted smile.
“You know me.” I shoved his boot away and sat up. Stiff, stiff, and more stiff. “I’m good at lurking.” I grabbed the corners of the blanket and wrapped it around my shoulders. If it was dark and cool enough to need a blanket, it was late.
That meant Rose was probably worried sick. That meant Jesse probably was, too. Jesse . . .
The reminders flooded my mind as the sleep cleared from it. I had no future with Jesse. In both the immediate and distant sense.
The pain had been bad that afternoon, but something about the night and being so close to the anti-Jesse brought on something else entirely. I almost reached for my chest, half-expecting to find the handle of a dagger protruding from it.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked, trying to distract myself. I didn’t care. Not really. Some girls might freak out if a creeper like Garth Black stumbled upon them late at night in the middle of some random field, but I wasn’t. I’d been around enough real creepers to know the difference. Garth was a creeper, make no mistake about it, but a harmless one.
Harmless save for the nasty comments he wielded like a damn samurai sword.
“I live here,” he said, like it should have been obvious.
My eyebrows knitted together.
“What? Did you flatter yourself by thinking I’d come looking for you?”
I didn’t like the way he looked down at me, so I stood and tucked the blanket tighter around me. “Of all the people who’d come searching for me if I needed to be found, your name wouldn’t be anywhere on that list. Least of all first on that list.”
Garth couldn’t have looked anymore unfazed. “And who’d be first on that list?” From the curl of his smile alone, I knew who he would name before he did it. “Jesse? Your precious, infallible, ivory tower Jesse Walker, eh?” Garth extended his arms and did one slow turn. “Well, I hate to tell ya, honey, but that white knight of yours isn’t here. He wasn’t the one to come find you when you got yourself lost.” His dark eyes shone. “Looks like you’re stuck with me.”
I glowered at him as hard as I’d ever glowered at anyone. “I. Am. Not. Lost.”
Still the unfazed expression. I wanted to smack it right off of his face. “Rowen, you’re so damn lost you’ve forgotten how you got there in the first place. It’s just become who you are. Rowen the Lost.”
Before I knew what I was doing, I shoved him. Hard. So hard he fell back a step. But even at that, he didn’t look any more concerned than if he were dealing with a litter of mewing kittens.
“I’m not lost!” I balled my fists at my sides. “You are, you dickhead! You’re the lost one—not me!”