Great Big Beautiful Life(70)

“And what did he think about you?” Hayden asks, leaning in, engaged, naturally curious like any good interviewer should be.

I catch myself beaming, waiting for the familiar beats.

Her exuberance softens into a calm smile, her fingers resting at the base of her glass’s stem. “Oh, he says he did all of that singing and everything to try to get my attention,” she says. “But seeing as how he kept doing it until his dying day, I’m pretty confident all he really meant was, he thought I was pretty.”

Here is where Dad would chime in, and so I do. “Beautiful. Smart. Hardworking. With great taste in books.”

“He’d just graduated from journalism school,” she says, “and I was taking a year off after undergrad, trying to figure out what to do. He’d see me reading in our downtime, so that was how he first struck up a conversation with me. Honestly, I thought he was so silly, it hadn’t occurred to me how much we’d have in common.”

The corners of her mouth tighten, her smile tilting toward woeful, and she says something I haven’t heard before, something new to the story: “He had this joy in him, this softness, and it took me a long time to realize that didn’t make him dumb. In fact, he was a hell of a lot smarter than me.”

She’s never been touchy, and so I’ve never been particularly touchy with her, but in that moment, for some reason—maybe it’s the wine, or the music, or Hayden’s comforting stone-steady presence—I reach out and touch her forearm.

Her smile tenses up a little, unconvincing, and she pats the back of my hand before pulling away to stand. “Dessert?” she says, moving the conversation on, and my heart flags in my chest.

“Sounds great,” I say, but it comes out thin.





22




“I should’ve known you’d be out here,” I say, crossing the garden to the stone bench where Hayden sits beneath the starlight.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks.

I lower myself beside him. “I’m so far off this schedule. Early to bed, early to rise—not really my thing.”

“And I’m just early to rise,” he says. In the distance, a barn owl hoots.

“Have you always been bad at sleeping?” I ask.

“Always,” he says.

“What is it?” I ask. “Afraid of the dark?”

The way he glances at me, I can tell he’s gauging whether I’m teasing him. I’m not.

“No, not that.” He leans back, scanning the sky. “You know what I think it really is?”

“What?” I ask.

“I think I don’t like people looking at me,” he says.

“Oh.” I turn my gaze purposefully forward, across the dark garden, toward the lone lit bulb beside the door to the house.

“Not like that.” He nudges my thigh with his, his eyes sweeping back to my face. “Not you.”

“Oh.” A pleasant warmth vibrates through me.

“I think…” He begins again. “I think as a kid, I felt so much pressure. To act a certain way, be seen how my dad needed his sons to be seen. And I was bad at it. Clumsy. Rude. All day long, I think I sort of felt like I was flexing every muscle in my body, or something. And then nighttime would roll around, and my family would be asleep—the whole world would be asleep, and…” He cocks his head to one side, his eyes sparking when they catch mine. “I started sneaking out when I was like ten.”

“And what exactly was there for a ten-year-old to do in the middle of the night in rural Indiana?” I ask, letting myself lean against him, my head tipping to rest on his shoulder.

He laughs a little, one soft rasp, and presses a kiss to the crown of my head that makes me feel volcanic, like lava is coursing down me. “Nothing,” he says. “Nothing at all. I’d just walk around our neighborhood, listening to music on a Walkman my mom gave me, and absolutely everyone would be asleep, or at least inside with the lights off. And I just remember feeling…light. No one was looking at me.” He seems a little bashful as he says, “I’ve always felt most myself when I’m alone.”

It reminds me of something Margaret would say, of things she has said, and I wish I could tell him that. But I can’t, not without breaking our most important rule.

“You want me to leave you to your alone time?” I ask instead, and hurry to add, “I won’t take it personally, I promise.”

“Nah,” he says. “This is better.” He rearranges his arm across the back of the bench, and I move closer, his head resting against mine. “Does your mom know? What you’re working on?”

“I didn’t break the NDA,” I assure him.

“No, it’s not—that’s not why I was asking,” he says. The same owl hoots in the distance. “She hasn’t asked you about it. About work. Why you’re here.”

I shift uncomfortably. “I already told you. She doesn’t care about most of the things I write about.”

“But she cares about you,” he says. “That much is obvious.”

Is it? I almost ask. But I know he’s right. Mom’s love has always been an action, rather than words. Making that hideous quilt, teaching me how to bake my favorite peach cobbler and my favorite cast-iron cornbread casserole, and serving one or the other every time I come home. “I think…” I’m not sure how to say this. I feel guilty saying it, because I think it would break her heart to hear, even if it’s true. “I think she loves me because I’m her daughter. But I’ve never felt sure she loves me because I’m me. Does that make sense?”