Great Big Beautiful Life(68)
“Looking at it is giving me a migraine,” he says, dead serious.
I chortle, flip the top back to expose the other side: a sensible light purple with tiny white flowers—Mom trying to ensure maximum usage, beyond the length of time it would take me to get sick of the other side.
“What’s this?” Hayden asks, picking up a leatherbound book that rests atop one of the stacks of books that line the top of my old bookshelf. On the front, embossed, is The Scotts: A History.
“A present from my sister, when we were in college,” I say, going to stand beside him as he flips it open. “It’s just this service that will bind a story for you. I had all of these old photographs and journal entries from when we were kids, so…”
He flips slowly through the first couple of pages, gets to an old shot I took of Audrey crouched atop the compost toilet—fully dressed, not using it—the day we helped Dad build it. She’s wearing his wide-brimmed hat and making a funny face.
“Wow,” he says. “An outhouse.”
“Oh, yes,” I say. “This is our family’s opus.”
“So I see,” he deadpans, turning the page. There I am, out of focus, because Audrey took this one (thus it’s one of the very few shots of me in the book), lying on my back in a garden bed, spread out like a starfish in denim overalls like the ones Mom was wearing earlier, a mini bouquet of purple and orange wildflowers tucked behind my ear. I look beatific, under the sun. I can feel the humidity of that day on my skin, smell the grass baking, and catch the subtle buzz of the bumblebees bobbing around.
Behind me, crouched in front of the garden bed with his back to us as he digs, Dad is visible, just his lower half. Seeing it jogs something loose: the sound of Cosmo Sinclair’s signature vibrato crackling out from the old boom box Dad used while he worked, that velvety smooth voice singing about a woman who moved around with the light of the sun inside her, making everything better, warmer, brighter.
“You look so happy,” Hayden says, snapping me back to the present.
“I was.” I pass the book to him. “I am.”
“Mind if I borrow this after dinner?” Hayden asks. Then, teasing: “Might like to do some light reading.”
“Oh, that’s not light,” I say as he sets the book on the shelf. “This is a dense, academic doorstop. You’re going to want to take notes, have little colorful paper tabs to mark the sections you want to come back to. Actually, now that I think of it, there should be some highlighters in Audrey’s de—”
He pulls me into a hug abruptly, like he couldn’t resist, his face nestling into my shoulder. My stomach swoops up into my throat, trilling like a hummingbird. I loop my arms around his neck and lean back to peek into his face when he lifts it. “Were you trying to shut me up again?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head once. No other explanation, and if there was one, I’m fairly confident he’d give it, which means that he just wanted to do that. Which thrills me, makes me feel weightless and jittery, like that first second of a roller-coaster drop.
I can’t remember the last time I had a crush like this, not one that merely aches, the way I’d felt about Theo the first few months, that painful yet addictive feeling of wanting something that is being very intentionally withheld from you.
This is the other kind. The dopamine hit of proof, evidence, facts that add up to the knowledge that maybe the person whose very presence excites you is also excited by your presence. That I think he likes me back feeling.
Still, I can’t resist the impulse to double-check: “You regret coming yet?”
I’m expecting something jokey or deadpan. Instead, he just says again, simply, “No.” I let my arms tighten. His hands move to loosely circle my wrists.
It’s strange, how being here has instantly changed the boundaries between us, made everything feel more relaxed. Not just natural but inevitable.
“How would you feel about a walk?” I ask.
“Good,” he says.
We drop our stuff and go outside into the fading light, meandering down the driveway. At the corner of the country road the house sits on, his hand finds mine. We lace our fingers together and keep walking, kicking up dust, churning up sweat.
From the outside, we probably look picturesque and peaceful. Inside, my heart feels like it’s riding along the top of a very active geyser.
That’s the first time it occurs to me: I’m falling in love with him.
Maybe it should scare me.
It doesn’t. I never want it to stop.
* * *
? ? ?
In the crowded little kitchen, Mom drops a bundle of still-dirt-smeared carrots on the counter for me to chop, then goes to fill a pot with water. While she pops it on the stove, I connect to Dad’s old Bluetooth speaker and start up a playlist. Cosmo Sinclair’s “Say You Will (Be Mine)” croons out between us.
In my peripheral, I catch her twitch in surprise.
It strikes me that Dad was the one to put on their cooking soundtrack, largely because Mom always enters a kind of cooking trance that renders conversation with her nearly impossible. For all I know, she’s been cooking in silence these last two years.
The thought makes me sad. Wordlessly, she fishes a canister of noodles from the pantry and shakes some into the boiling pot.