Heart and Home (28 page)

I tucked the envelope inside
my jacket as I started out the door, distracted and withdrawn as I slipped in
behind the wheel.

“Everything okay?” He asked.

“Fine,” I nodded, pulling
out of the driveway and into the alley.
 

I didn’t say much on the
drive to the farm. Troy and Lottie good naturedly argued through the details of
a Thanksgiving past, though I could feel his curious gaze on me more than once
throughout the trip. We both helped Lottie into the house, and I promised to
stop in after I returned from shopping the help her do some baking the next
day.

Playful and just a little
bit drunk, Troy started to chase me before we were even off the porch, and
managed to friskily pursue me up the stairs and into the apartment. We hung our
coats on the backs of the kitchen chairs, and while he flopped down onto the
sofa and propped his feet up on the ottoman, I slipped into the bedroom and
tucked the envelope with that check into my suitcase.

I returned to the living
room and as I walked toward the television to grab the remote, he grabbed for
my back pockets and pulled me down into his lap before I could escape. “No TV,”
he said.

“You’re in a good mood,” I
noted, sinking down into his lap as I turned to stretch my legs along the
length of the sofa.

“Yeah,” he laid his head
back along the sofa and stared up at the ceiling. “Today was good.”

“It was, wasn’t it?”

“Even Mom had a good time,
not that she’s hard to please, but…”

“I think my dad was okay
too,” I nodded. “It was hard, having a holiday without my mom.” His hand
smoothed down the center of my back in an act of comfort. “She was there in
spirit though,” I said. “I could feel her.”

“I worried you might be
depressed today,” he said. “The first few holidays are hard. I don’t think you
ever get used to it.”

“I was a little bit.” I
looked out the window behind him, the flurries of snow like white moths against
the darkness. “But when you’re in good company, it’s hard to stay sad.”

“Becky and Marty are good people,”
he sighed. “I like them.” As adorable as it sounded, the simplicity of his
admission made me wonder just how much he actually had to drink. “And you’re
good too,” he added, lifting his head. “I like you.” I was surprised by the
intensity and focus of his kiss just then, lips pausing to linger over mine,
and then stealing in again. I was even more taken aback when he drew away to
look into my eyes, heavy lidded as he said, “I’m in love with you.”

“Troy,” I whispered, not
sure if it was the alcohol talking, or if it acted as a kind of freeing agent,
giving him the strength he needed to admit a difficult truth.

“No, really,” he went on.
“You’re the first thing I think of in the morning, the last thing I see when I
close my eyes at night. I dream about you, and when I wake up alone I feel
empty inside. It’s like I hold my breath every time you leave, and can’t
breathe again until you come back. If that’s not love…”

It had been just a little
more than a month, but I was feeling it too. I’d been feeling it for weeks, and
trying to deny it. I turned in his lap so we sat face to face, me with a slight
advantage over him that allowed me to look down into his eyes. Before he could
say another word I kissed him with such intensity that I felt it tingle all the
way down in my toes.

“I love you,” I whispered
against his lips.

The playful side reared
again. I could feel his grin broaden as we kissed. “No, I love you.”

I laughed and shook my head,
retorting, “No, I love you,” for the first of many times to come before the
night was out.

*****

The field was empty, the only evidence left behind that it
had once been filled with corn were the scars of harvest drawn like lines upon
the frozen earth. The icy wind cut through my nightgown, which felt paper thin
as a defense against it no matter how closely I drew it around me.

It was the same field I’d met with my mother in, I was sure
of it, but I wasn’t sure how I knew. Was she there somewhere? I scanned the
vast emptiness, listened hard for some sign of her, but the only answer I
received was the wail of the wind swirling patterns of snow all around me. It
stung my skin, and every step I took seemed to numb my bare feet so that I
could hardly feel them at all.

“Mom?” I called out to the night. “Mother?”

The sound of the alarm clock
rent through the fragile fabric of the dream, and within seconds Troy’s arm
shot across my back to stifle its cruel bleating. He stretched and groaned
beside me before his body instinctively curled into the back of mine. “Hey,” he
whispered, the coarse curl of his beard drawing along my neck. “I love you.”
His voice was serious, as though he felt he needed to reaffirm his confession
without the alcohol there to back it up.

“No,” I grinned, drawing his
arms tighter around me, “I love you.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Seriously though,” Becky
noted. “It’s so sweet you’re actually making me sick.”

Laughter bubbled between the
two of us as we slipped in and out of department store piles of mayhem. We’d
been out since dawn, both of us managing a few good bargains, but with the noon
hour drawing nearer the wind had been knocked out of most of the sales, leaving
behind a trail of torn or mediocre goods.

“Yeah, well, thank Marty for
me later for stocking the fridge with beer. I seriously don’t think he’d have
said it if he hadn’t been a little buzzed.”

“He might have,” she
shrugged. “I noticed that he seems a little bolder when you’re around than he’s
been known to be in the past. Not that he wasn’t confident. Even in high school
he seemed pretty sure of himself, but you give him a bit of an edge. Like when
he first came back after his dad died, he withdrew a bit, got all shy.”

“Shy?” I turned a
questioning gaze in her direction. “I haven’t noticed a shy bone in his body,
except for the whole talking on the phone thing, but he got over that pretty
quick too.”

“Of course he wouldn’t be
shy around you,” she said. “You empower him.”

“You make me sound like some
kind of talisman.”

“Well, didn’t he say himself
after crushing on you in school all those years, he wasn’t going to let another
opportunity pass him by while you were here?”

“More or less.” I unfolded a
sweater I’d been considering for my dad, but dropped it back down into the
pile. “I just hope things keep going as well as they have been. I’ve never felt
the way I feel right now, and it’s scary.”

Becky held a shirt out at
arm’s length and squinted at it, as if she were trying to picture someone
inside it. “Is that a hint of doubt I detect in your voice?”

I shrugged, “Maybe a
little.”

“Well, I am no psychic, but
I can tell you right now that I have a good feeling about you two. I have since
the very beginning.”

“Hearing you say that would
make me feel a whole lot better if you actually
were
a psychic.”

The barren field from my
dream had been rolling in and out of my thoughts all morning and I wondered if
it was somehow related to the dream in which my mother spoke to me. Where had
the crops gone? What about the strange faceless children and my mother herself?
I could almost feel the brittle wind breaking like glass against my skin, but
what did it mean?

She hung the shirt back onto
the rack and sorted through a few more. “I told you Lydia knows that psychic in
Montoursville. Maybe we can get an appointment with her.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I shrugged. I
stepped back, giving up on the picked over clothing in front of me and let my
arms hang with the weight of my score of purchases. “Hey, did I get to finish
telling you about that dream I had yesterday?”

“No, you never got a
chance.” She stepped back from the rack as well. “These are all picked over.
Let’s get outta here.” We started for the nearest exit that led back into the
swarming mall. Becky hollered over the hub-bub, “Did you want to go anywhere
else out here?”

“Just the bookstore.”

On the way to the bookstore
I managed to relate the first dream about the strange children, the open crop
circle and my mother’s words of wisdom regarding healing a weary heart.

“And then this morning,” I
continued, stretching upward to reach for a book two shelves above me. I drew
it down along with a heavy volume on the history of urban modernism and
architecture. “This morning I dream I’m in the same field, only now it’s
nighttime and freezing. It’s been harvested and my mother is nowhere to be
found.” I scanned the back cover of both books, leaving the heavy tome on the
lower shelf.

Becky flipped through a
scrapbooking magazine while the store bustled madly with Black Friday shoppers
and hordes of teenagers in search of entertainment. It was a small wonder we
even managed to hold a conversation without passing a megaphone back and forth,
I realized.

“I don’t know a lot about
dreams, but with everything that happened while you were staying at your
parents’ house...” She flipped the magazine shut.

“That’s what I thought too.”
Turning the book in my hands to study the artistic front cover, I proceeded to
check the publication date. Having only just come out that year, I was almost
positive it was a book Troy didn’t have in his collection. “And maybe I’m dead
wrong, but I swear she was telling me I have to somehow help Troy heal this
guilt he feels inside since his dad’s death.”

“Maybe,” she nodded. “What
the heck are you reading?” She drew the book out of my hands as we started
toward the checkout counter and read over the back cover.

“Le Corbusier,” I said. “He
was a famous urban modernist. Troy has pictures of this guy’s greatest
achievements on his living room walls, and he even hand crafted his own
furniture based on Le Corbusier’s designs.”

“You’re such a clever girl,”
she nodded.

“Yeah, though I’m a little
scared to give it to him.”

“Why?”

“Because when it comes to
anything else talking to him is like the easiest thing in the world,” I
admitted. “I can tell him anything, ask him anything and he’s open and willing
to share himself, but whenever it comes down to talking about architecture or
the man he stopped being when he came back here, he gets really defensive.”

“Well, under the
circumstances that’s to be expected,” she agreed. “You don’t go as far as he
did and then get yanked backwards without feeling the tug.”

“What do you mean?”

Becky and I were momentarily
separated as a pack of rude teenagers raced through the aisles chasing each
other with Chinese yo-yos. I shrugged when we came back together, and we burst
into laughter at the chaos.

“What do you mean, what do I
mean?” she asked.

“That far? You mean the
whole act of leaving and then having to come back?”

She stepped aside and
regarded me with one eyebrow arched slightly higher than the other. “He didn’t
tell you everything, did he?” She asked. “Like that he only had two more
semesters to go when his dad died, and that he was halfway through the first
one when Lottie had her accident?”

“No.” A cold feeling
trickled through my blood and my stomach felt suddenly heavy, as if I’d
swallowed a brick. “I thought maybe he’d gone a year, but he never mentioned he
was so close to finishing.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have said
anything,” she noted, as we slid up to the counter.

“Well, he obviously wasn’t
going to bring it up anytime soon.” I handed my credit card to the cashier and
tossed Becky’s magazine on top of my books. “The last time I brought up the
possibility of him finishing school he told me to drop it in his nicest mean
voice.” I shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe it’s none of my business, really.”

“God, that is the worst part
about a relationship being new,” she threw up her arms in exaggerated
irritation. “You invest such strong feelings in each other, and care about
every little thing that happens because it’s like their life is a part of your
life, but when it comes to telling the other person they are being a complete
and total idiot, you feel powerless.”

“Yeah, I think he might take
even more offense to the word idiot.”

“They always do,” she rolled
her eyes. “But that’s just the thing about men. I don’t think they try to be
idiots on purpose. They’re just so damn proud.”

“And stubborn.”

“Yes, and stubborn,” she
agreed as I grabbed my bag and started away from the counter. “And that is what
makes them idiots.” We slipped back into the hustling mall crowd. “God, I
remember when Marty and I first started to get serious, and he was thinking
about asking me to marry him. He was all messed up because his mom had this
whole sob about me not being Jewish.”

“Marty’s Jewish?”

“Non-practicing, but yeah,”
she nodded.

“I didn’t know that.” I
admitted. “That explains why I never see you guys at church the last few
Sundays dad managed to force me into a pew.” I realized. “I never even thought
to ask.”

“Yeah, well, like I said, we
don’t practice or anything, but I’ve never been big on going to church anyway.
My grandma always said if God couldn’t hear our voices outside of a manmade
construction there was something wrong with his hearing.”

“Hmm,” I nodded. “I like the
way she thinks. Maybe I should use that excuse next time Dad gets pushy.”

“But yeah, so Marty had a
hard time coming to terms with the whole proposal because his mom really messed
up his head. Truth be told,” she paused to admire a sweater in the window of a
boutique, “We almost didn’t end up together at all. I finally told him that if
he wanted to marry his mother, that was fine by me. There were plenty of other
guys in the world who already cut the cord, and I’d just find one of them!” Her
tone was so serious that I couldn’t help but laugh. She flashed a grin of fire
in my direction. “Needless to say he proposed the next day with a full
confession that the thing he loved most about me was how much I was not like
his mother.”

“Man, the things parents do
to their kids,” I sighed.

“Yeah, it makes you want to
dive right into motherhood, doesn’t it?”

“Totally!” I rolled my eyes.

It was just after noon when
I pulled in and parked beside Troy’s truck. The opened garage door revealed two
dressed deer hanging, a buck and doe, but no sign of Troy or Marty. Leaving my
shopping bags in the trunk, I hiked the stairs and found the two of them
huddled around the television watching a college football game, still dressed
for the hunt.

 
“Who shot the buck?” I lowered my purse beside the sofa and
sat down by Troy.

“Marty.”

“Becky’ll be so proud.”

Marty’s face lit up with
pride. “I haven’t shot a deer in fifteen years. This morning was amazing.”

I sat by and listened to
their combined story, how Troy shot his doe first thing, and then as they were
dragging her back they’d come across Marty’s buck. I almost forgot in my years
away how animated hunters got while recounting the hunt. My dad hunted while I
was growing up, and Mom and I spent many a night listening to his close
encounters or near misses at the dinner table, and a ripple of nostalgia
quivered through me.

After a few minutes it was
more like the two of them were recounting the story to each other, so I just
smiled and nodded when one of them happened to look my way with that self-satisfied
gleam of hunter’s achievement.

Finally Marty stood up with
an elated sigh and held a hand out to Troy. “Thanks a lot, man. I really had a
great time this morning, but I should probably get going.”

“Hey, you’re welcome to come
back and use a couple of them farm tags I promised. Bring your brother, and
we’ll make a day of it.”

“Definitely, I will.”

I stayed behind and flipped
through the channels while Troy walked Marty down to his car. I heard them
talking just below me, but tuned it out. I was still preoccupied with what
Becky told me that morning about Troy only having one year of classes left. The
notion that he had been so close to finishing his degree, but refused to even
discuss the possibility now was just further testimony to how much he sacrificed.
So loving and giving, it broke my heart when I thought about how willing he was
to set his own life aside forever, if need be, to fulfill a promise he’d never
even wanted to make.

His last girlfriend, whom he
rarely mentioned, left because he hadn’t wanted to move to North Carolina, but
how much more was there to that story? Had she faced his unwillingness to budge
against the guilt that held him fast to a life he’d never bargained for? Did
she rail against him in hopes her feelings for him would be enough to make him
see the truth about what he was doing to himself?

I only had to close my eyes
to see the faraway look in his eye when he’d been telling me about discovering
opportunity at college, and how quickly that passion turned to cold resentment in
his voice. His warning that night at my apartment resonated through me like
little daggers of fear, a threat that if I pushed too hard he’d pull away, and
just when I’d gotten attached to the feeling of him in my arms.

He reappeared and sat down
on the edge of the sofa to unlace his boots. After laying them neatly to the
side, he lay down, and in a deliberate plea for affection rested his head in my
lap. I lifted my hand into the soft curls of his golden hair and a satisfied
grin broke beneath his carefully trimmed beard. I looked down the length of
him, the way his feet hung over the edge of the sofa because he was too tall.
The slim sofa was made to utilize the space, but it was almost too thin to
accommodate his frame. He was powerfully built, well-muscled from years of
hard, physical labor, and yet knowing what I knew now, he seemed almost
fragile.