CHAPTER NINETEEN
BECKETT
“Stop smiling like that,” Barney snaps from the passenger side of the flatbed truck, his arms crossed over his chest and a bag full of snacks from the last gas station resting on his knee. The man has consumed more Honey Buns in 48-hours than anyone has a right to. “You look like a maniac.”
“I’m not even smiling,” I tell him.
Barney sinks further in his seat, his head against the window. His hand reaches for his plastic-wrapped heart attack. “Might as well be.”
The bed of the truck is filled with one-hundred-and-eighty-three Douglas Fir saplings. I know this because Barney insisted on counting them twice, loudly and in front of the people who mistakenly received our shipment.
“I still think those Lovebright people were up to something,” Barney grouches around a mouthful of processed sugar. “I don’t trust maple syrup farmers.”
I tap my fingers on the steering wheel. It was pure coincidence that our names were so close, though I do have questions for our supplier. I gave him our address three times, and it’s printed on the invoice we already paid. “They didn’t just harvest maple syrup. They had apples, too.”
“My point remains. I watched a documentary on the underground syrup trade. Apparently there’s a whole black market. Gang activity.”
I glance at him out of the corner of my eye. “What’s gotten into you?”
He mumbles something.
“What?”
He shifts in his seat and gives me a look, debating. I raise both eyebrows in encouragement. We have another three hours left of this drive, and I’m not thrilled about the prospect of listening to Barney hem and haw over there like he’s sitting on a seat made out of metal spikes. “I like you better when you’re a grumpy ass,” he finally says in a rush.
That was not what I expected. “What?”
“You’ve been humming for six hours,” Barney seethes, biting off another giant mouthful. “Are you aware of that?”
I was not aware of that. I had no idea, actually.
“The radio in this thing is broken, and you have been humming for six. Hours. Straight.” He slouches back down in his seat. “Driving me up a damn wall.”
I rub my palm over my jaw and keep quiet. I’ve had an old Tom Petty song stuck in my head since I left Evie tucked beneath my blankets, the kittens crowded around her and a flower from the greenhouse woven in her hair. I didn’t realize I’d been humming.
“Your dad does the same shit,” Barney complains, digging around in his bag of snacks. He pulls out some pretzels and sour watermelon gummies, offering me the latter. I shake my head. Those things make my tongue feel like a wool sweater. “Always humming something.”
“Yeah?”
“Mmhmm. He once did the whole soundtrack to Grease for a week straight, on a loop. He said it was my punishment for having an opinion.”
“What was your opinion?”
“That he shouldn’t fuckin’ sing.”
I manage to restrain myself for twenty-seven seconds. My opening bar to Summer Lovin’ is a little shaky, but Barney recognizes it all the same. He lets out a loud bark of laughter and punches me hard, right in the thigh. I tighten my grip on the wheel.
“Not while I’m driving, old man.”
“Old man,” he repeats to me. “I’d still kick your ass.”
I snort a laugh. He probably could. He taught Nova everything she knows about self-defense. He once picked her up early from school and took her to Wrestlemania in Baltimore. She tried to suplex me from the top of her bunk bed for close to three months.
We settle back into silence, the rush of wind at the windows and the creak of the truck beneath us. The crinkle of plastic as Barney fishes out another Honey Bun. If I remembered my damn cell phone, we’d at least have something to plug into the AV outlet. But I left it sitting in the center of my kitchen table, along with the thermos of coffee I was supposed to bring and all of our paperwork.
It’s a good thing Barney keeps duplicates shoved in a coffee-stained folder under the seat. Something about Evie tangled in worn flannel, the curve of her shoulder bare in the sunlight scrambled my brain before I even left the house.
“You know when his musical inclinations were at their worst?”
I grunt and merge over a lane, my mind still fixed on the way she stretched and rolled into me, not even all the way awake. A smile on her face and her hands reaching for me like she couldn’t bear to let me go. “December 1994. When you lost seven poker games in a row and you owed my dad $10,000 and a boat you don’t own?”
“I can’t believe he still tells that story,” Barney snorts. “No, smartass. The week he met your mom. He was moon-eyed, working in the fields and bellowing Springsteen at the top of his damn lungs.”
I shift in the seat. Clear my throat twice. “Sounds like you’re trying to make a point.”
Barney takes another bite of Honey Bun. “Imagine that.”
By the time we unload the trees and I return the truck to the large garage for service vehicles, I am tired down to my bones. I have aches in muscles I didn’t even know existed and my ears are ringing from the loud rumble of the truck. I want a sandwich the size of my head, a cold beer, and Evelyn.
I want to kiss the skin between her shoulder and neck, that little spot under her ear that makes her hum. I want to hear about her day and if she found any happy. Fall into bed with her and sleep for the next six days under seven layers of blankets. I want bare skin and husky laughter. More sandwiches.
My boots crunch against gravel as I wander up the walkway to the cabin, a twist in my stomach when I don’t see any light spilling from the windows. I can usually see Evelyn moving around the kitchen from the path, lounging on the couch with a book and the cats. I like seeing remnants of her spilled out across my hallway when I first walk in the door. Her scarf looped over the hook on the wall. Her boot knocked on its side by mine.
But the house is dark tonight, everything cast in shadow beyond the window. I stop on the bottom step of the porch and breathe in deep through my nose. The daffodils in the garden have started to peek through the mulch, a glimpse of bright green that looks gray in the darkness. They’ll be in full bloom soon, the other flowers not far behind. Black-eyed Susans and tulips. Pink and gold and yellow so pale it almost looks white, tumbling out of the front flower beds.
I continue up the stairs and ignore the anxiety sinking like a stone in my gut. I’ve had this feeling before. This twisting, painful thing that clasps against my throat and squeezes. Maybe she’s on the back porch or maybe she’s with Layla at the bakehouse. She’s been helping Stella digitize some of her records. Maybe she’s still at the office.
But I know as soon as I swing open the door. I glance at the dark hallway and the empty hook next to mine where she usually keeps her jacket. The house is quiet, still.
She isn’t here.
I’m not sure where she’s gone off to.
And I’m not sure if she’ll bother coming back.
I knew this would happen. It’s why I told her I wanted to see where this thing goes when I really wanted to say, Stay here with me. Hold my hand on the back porch. I’ll hold yours, too.
I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop since she pressed up on her toes in my kitchen and grabbed me by the back of my neck and kissed me like she damn well meant it.
I close the door behind me. I swallow and drop my keys on the table. I pull off my jacket and hang it on the hook. I go through the motions of coming home while a thin and trembling tension continues to twist in my chest, winding around and around. Like a piano being tuned, the strings vibrating with pressure. “Evelyn?”
No answer. One of the cats appears on top of the couch, a discarded sock draped over her back. I rub her tiny forehead with my knuckles and reach for it, a faded green pair that Evie had stolen from me.
“She isn’t here, is she?”
Vixen offers me a meow and then scampers off, back to the huddle of kittens at the edge of the fireplace. I see that Prancer has grown her little nest, an old necktie between her paws where she lounges with the rest of them. A scrap of paper and a kitchen towel.
I scrub both hands through my hair and glance down the dark hall, back to the table where my cell phone and coffee mug sit untouched in the middle.
I could go down the hallway and check her room, see if her suitcase is gone. Her laptop and the stack of papers she kept on the nightstand under a book. That's what I did the first time she left. I wandered around that little room and looked for any clue she might have left behind. A note, maybe. A slip with her phone number scribbled down. All I found was a pile of loose change and a receipt from the tiny bar we were in. A button and a pen cap.
The second time, I was in the bakehouse. I sat at the corner table with two cups of coffee and a cinnamon roll I had no intention of eating. I waited while telling myself that I wasn’t waiting at all. I picked at the edge of that damn cinnamon roll until the whole thing was gone.
If Layla thought it was odd that I was sitting at the window seat for the duration of her morning rush with two mugs of coffee, she never said a word about it. Turns out Evelyn left that morning. I hadn’t even warranted a casual goodbye on her list. No text. Nothing.
The solution, this time, is a simple one.
I won’t go down the hallway to check. I won’t look for signs or signals or whatever the fuck else. I need to realize that sometimes a shooting star isn’t magic at all. Sometimes it’s just a bunch of space dust burning through the atmosphere.
Sometimes you don’t get a wish.
Evie is always going to be leaving. And I’m always going to be the one standing here, wondering where she went.
Third time’s the fucking charm, I guess.
“Stupid,” I mutter. My muscles vibrate with the urge to throw, snap, break. I want to flip the table. Smash the glass vase holding a bouquet of wildflowers against the wall. I rub my palms down over my face until I see spots.
And then I go to the fridge and I make a sandwich.
“Beckett?”
I ignore the call from the far end of the field and continue digging.
Push. Dig. Dump.
I’ve been out in the fields for an hour and the sun still hasn’t inched above the horizon. The sky is filled with the dull gray light that comes just before dawn, the sky deciding how it wants to wake up for the day. Thick clouds have hidden the stars and it looks like they might hide the sun today, too.
Good.
“What the hell are you doing?” Luka demands from halfway across the field.
What the hell are you doing, I want to snipe back. These are my fields, after-all. But I’m not in the sixth grade anymore and Luka is damned persistent when he wants to be, trudging his way towards me with a mug of coffee in each hand. I ignore him and drive the shovel down again.
Push. Dig. Dump.
“I’m digging.”
I’m digging because the second I sat on the edge of my bed and reached for my sweatpants, I remembered her fingertips against my shoulder blades, her body twisted in worn flannel and her face in my pillow. I got up to go to the kitchen and heard her laughter bouncing against the countertops. Pictured her chopping tomatoes with her hair tucked behind her ear.
I’m seeing Evie in every single empty space and planting these saplings felt like the logical thing to do. I’ve got a hurricane inside my chest and the pull and stretch of my muscles is the only thing keeping it contained. I bite my teeth around it—clench my jaw so hard it hurts.
“I can see that,” Luka mutters, eyes firmly on the hole at my feet. “But why are you digging at four in the morning?”
I don’t say a thing.
Push. Dig. Dump.
“Beck, what’s going on?” he sighs.
I grunt. “I’m digging a hole—”
“I can see that.”
“—for your body.”
He snorts a laugh into his coffee mug. “That’s nice.”
I drive the shovel into a fresh piece of earth and rest my elbow against it, my thumb swiping at my eyebrow. “How’d you even know I was out here?”
“The cameras,” Luka offers. Stella installed cameras over the winter when someone was vandalizing the farm. It turns out the town librarian, Will Hewett, really wanted an alpaca farm and decided that destroying ours was the best way to accomplish that particular goal.
Idiot.
“Stella got a notification about a madman loading saplings into his truck and driving them out into the field.” He takes a loud, obnoxious sip of coffee. “Which is weird because dig day is in a couple of days. It is also not scheduled for four in the morning.”
“Decided to get a head start,” I say, as casually as I can manage, peering over the handle of my shovel at the hole I've been working on. It’s way too deep for a sapling, but I’m committed now. I place the shovel to the side and reach for one of the bundles from the wheelbarrow. I loosen it from the travel-safe container they arrived in and transfer it carefully to its new home.
It drops to the bottom, the top branches not even visible.
I sigh.
“That’s quite the hole,” Luka says.
I pinch the bridge of my nose.
“Will it—” he tilts his head to the side and takes another slurp of coffee. “Will it grow up out of the ground, you think?” He mimes some complicated gesture with his hand, like a rocket launching. “Like a pineapple plant. Have you seen one of those?”
I have. I sincerely doubt this will look anything like that.
I reach into the hole and pull the tree out, shoveling some of the dirt back in with my arm. Luka taps my shoulder and holds a cup of coffee in front of my face.
“Hold on a second. I brought you coffee.”
“I don’t want coffee,” I say, contradicting myself by immediately grabbing the mug out of his hands. Luka’s mom always makes sure Stella has the good stuff stocked for when she and all of Luka’s aunts randomly descend upon her cottage. Last time they brought biscotti, too.
I collapse back on my ass in the dirt and take a sip out of the mug. It has a tiny fox on it, a chip on the handle. Luka stares at me with one hand on his hip. For the first time, I notice he’s wearing one of Stella’s old sweatshirts, the sleeves too short on his long arms.
“What’s going on with you?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
He makes an exasperated sound in the back of his throat, the hair on the left side of his head sticking straight up in a riot of curls. Stella must have kicked him out of bed to come out here to check on me. The thought lifts my spirits, oddly enough. “Oh, my bad. You’re right. This is totally normal. We always have conversations before the sun is up.” He rolls his eyes and kicks at my boot with his. “Why are you out here planting trees? Where is Evelyn?”
Probably in some boutique hotel in a bright and shiny city, charming everyone she meets. Glowing like the fucking sun.
She’s not here. That’s the only part that matters.
“I don’t know.”
I hate that I don’t know.
Luka eyebrows flatten into a line of confusion. “Isn’t she staying with you?”
“She was,” I say. “Now she’s not.”
I avert my eyes to the line of trees I’ve managed to plant this morning—a somewhat chaotic row of small green bundles. In five to seven years, this whole field will be filled with whispering branches and thick evergreen.
I wonder if I’ll still be sitting here.
“What do you mean she’s not?”
“I mean her rental car isn’t in the driveway and her stuff isn’t in my house.” Maybe. I think. There’s a part of me that’s rolling my eyes at my assumptions, but the much bigger part of me is just trying to protect what I can. “She left.”
I don’t know if Luka wants me to draw him a map or what, but it feels pretty straightforward. I can see her reasoning. She was staying with me while she figured her stuff out. She figured it out. She left.
That’s it.
Luka makes another small sound under his breath, his eyes squinted in concentration. I want to roll into the hole I dug until he decides to leave me alone.
“You know how I met Stella, right?”
I roll my eyes to the sky and drape my arms over my knees. I guess he’s staying.
“I know how you met Stella.” I’ve heard the story enough over the past couple years. She fell down the steps of a hardware store and smacked right into Luka. They then proceeded to pretend they weren’t hopelessly in love with each other for close to a decade. I fix my gaze on the trees swaying in the distance and clench my jaw. “You can skip this whole thing.”
“Skip what?”
“Whatever hopeful platitudes are about to spill out of your mouth.” Luka loves a good motivational speech. “I don’t want to hear it.”
Luka huffs a laugh and goes quiet. Another gust of wind rolls over the field and all the branches lift and dance. It’ll be harder not to think of Evie this time, but it’ll pass. Maybe in a month or two I won’t see her in every damn corner of this place. I just need—I need to remember how to be on my own, I think. Me and the cats.
And that damn duck I said I wasn’t going to adopt.
“I almost told her.” Luka considers the ground with a frown, relenting after a lengthy pause and sitting in the dirt across from me. He rummages around in his sweatshirt pocket and emerges with his fist clenched around a roll of cookies. He opens it with his teeth and offers me one. “Way back,” he explains. “At the start. I almost told her how I felt.”
I begrudgingly take a cookie. Another when I realize they’re chocolate hazelnut and Luka intends to launch into his best encouraging speech despite my protest. “Could have saved yourself about seven years, I bet.”
“Could have,” Luka agrees. “She was getting out of a cab in the city. I was waiting for her on the curb and she sort of—she got stuck, I think. Getting out of the car. Her bag or something was twisted around the seat belt. She tried to step out of the cab and her bag yanked her right back in. She laughed so hard she snorted.” He smiles at the memory, his eyes a little bit glassy. “She was so beautiful I couldn’t stand it. My heart felt like it was right here.” He taps his throat and then between his eyes. Pops out a cookie and shoves it in his mouth.
“Why didn’t you? Say anything?” I’m annoyed with myself for asking.
He shrugs. “Because we had a good thing going and I didn’t want to rock the boat with a difficult conversation.” His brown eyes narrow on me and he bites into a cookie so hard it snaps in two. “Does that sound familiar?” he asks around a mouthful.
It does. I’m not going to argue with him about the particulars. I’ve actively avoided having a conversation with Evelyn. Absolutely. Sure, some of it has been fear. But a big part—the biggest part—has been—
“I don’t want to tie her here,” I confess with a deep, heaving sigh. “I don’t want her to feel obligated.” To my feelings. To me.
“You think she would?” A little line appears between Luka’s brows.
Maybe. I sigh and rub the palm of my hand across my forehead. “What the hell is the point of being honest with her if she’s just going to leave anyway?” That’s the heart of it. It all comes down to me fumbling my way around a tiny bed and breakfast in the late summer heat, looking for scraps of her affection. Why the hell would I crack myself open just for her to look at everything inside and decide it’s not enough? So I can feel this same twist in my gut every time she leaves without a word? Continue to lose pieces of myself until I’m a collection of ragged edges? No, thank you. “She already left. She’s left three times now.”
“Phones exist, you know. You could call her.”
I take another long drink from my coffee mug. If Stella is watching us on the cameras right now, she’s probably wondering why the hell her boyfriend and her lead farmer are having a picnic in a field full of holes.
At 4:18 in the morning.
“I tried calling her,” I explain. While sitting on the edge of my bed with a wilting blue flower in the palm of my hand. I dialed her number three times and listened to a generic voicemail message. I typed out seven different text messages before I settled on a simple Where did you go? I wanted to send another. Why did you go? “She didn’t answer.”
“That’s it? You’re gonna give up? Relationship over?” He snaps his fingers. “Just like that.”
“What else am I supposed to do?”
I’m a realistic man. I know where I belong, and where I don’t. I set my expectations and act accordingly. Going around with fanciful ideas in my head about things I can’t have has never served me well.
This thing with Evie—it isn’t any different.
My empty house is proof of that.
“Listen, man,” I blow out a breath and some of the coffee from my mug spills over the edge and drips over my knuckles. I ignore it. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do and I—I know I said I didn’t need the pep talk, but it was—” I tilt my head back and forth. “It was fine.”
Luka sputters out a laugh and I push to standing, an ache in my back and in the center of my chest. I rub my palm there and hand Luka my empty mug, grab the handle of my shovel and squint out at the fields. I have over a hundred trees left to plant, and it looks like rain. The anticipation of it hangs heavy in the sky, clouds thick over a blanket of stars. It occurs to me that it’s rained every time Evelyn has left, and it almost makes me laugh.
Even the sky is sad to see her go. Weather to match my mood.
Luka stands with a grumble and drops both mugs into the wheelbarrow with a clang. His sleeve of cookies, too. He grabs the extra shovel I brought and stares at me with both eyebrows raised, a determined clench to his jaw. “I have one more thing to say to you.”
“Alright.” I glance longingly at the too-deep hole and wonder if I’ll fit inside.
Luka squares his shoulders. “I don’t think you should give up. Not yet. I don’t know where she is, but I’ve seen the two of you together. I’ve seen the way she looks at you. And Beckett … When have you ever given up on anything? You built tiny tents over saplings to protect them from the rain last winter. You monitored soil saturation levels in the middle of a hurricane. You showed up for Stella when she first had the idea for this place.” His voice cracks at the edges. “You walked away from a secure job with good pay to help her get on her feet here, with no guarantee. You adopted a duck—”
“—I didn’t adopt the duck—”
“—you adopted a duck you found in the barn. Four cats, too. You smuggle in cookies because you’re afraid of hurting Layla’s feelings. And I know you were the one who drove two states up the coast to get her the fancy butter she wanted when all the local suppliers were giving her the cold shoulder. You aren’t a guy who gives up, and you aren’t a guy who doesn’t care. So please stop pretending you’re either of those things.”
I stare at Luka. He stares at me. I clear my throat. “That was, uh. That was more than one thing.”
“It was,” he says, winded and worked up. His cheeks are red, his mouth set in a firm line. He shifts on his feet and points at the marked spots in the field with the blade of the shovel. He stabs at the air with it once. “I’m going to go dig some holes now.”
“That’s fine.”
I think he expected me to fight him on it. I’m still a little shell shocked from his speech. Those piano strings in my chest vibrate under the strain, all of my notes out of tune.
“You remember what you said to me when I showed up at your house? After that fight with Stella?”
Right before they got together, Luka appeared on my doorstep, his sweatshirt on inside out and a look on his face like someone stole all of his cookies and his last slice of pizza, too. He sat on my couch wrapped in three blankets and stared blankly into my fireplace for close to five hours. I just need a second, he had said. Just a few minutes.
“I told you to stop being an idiot,” I say, reluctant. “Tell her how you feel.”
Luka raises both eyebrows.
“Stop being an idiot,” he tells me. A smile twists his mouth to the side. “Tell her how you feel.”
Stella appears not too long later, a sweatshirt down to her knees and a shovel dragging listlessly behind her. She looks like she just went seven rounds with her mattress and lost every single one. She brushes a kiss to Luka’s cheek, wraps her arms around my middle in a hug, and then tows her way over to the far end of the field and proceeds to dig the slowest, sloppiest holes known to mankind. Luka lasts three minutes before he trudges his way over to help.
Layla arrives just as a few fat raindrops decide to fall from the sky, rubber boots and a bright blue knit beanie. She walks right up to me and squeezes tight, her head under my chin. I get a mouthful of puffball.
“I didn’t have time to make zucchini bread,” she says. She squeezes harder and I let out a wheeze. “I’m sorry.”
I blink down at her head and give her a gentle squeeze back. Really, I’m trying to encourage her to let go. Rolling out all those pie crusts has made her scary strong. “That’s alright.”
“I’ll make some this afternoon.”
“Okay.”
She hoists the shovel I didn’t see her bring over her shoulder and joins Luka and Stella, her hat bouncing the entire way. I see headlights flash in the distance and I frown.
“What’s going on?” I shout over to my trio of unexpected assistants. A raindrop lands on my nose and slides down.
Stella is leaning back against Luka’s chest, her head tipped against his shoulder. Her eyes are barely open and for a second, I think she’s asleep. “The phone tree,” she yells back, her call echoing out over the empty field. “We moved dig day up.”
Another pair of headlights appears in the distance, two beams of light cast down the dirt road that leads to the farm. I watch them for a second and swallow hard. Those piano strings relax, just a bit.
“Why?”
I can see the look Stella is giving me from all the way over here. One delicately raised eyebrow, her lips in a flat line. Layla scoffs and Luka shakes his head.
“If you’re digging, we’re all digging,” she yells. The heat in her statement is lessened slightly by a giant yawn, right in the middle. She shivers and Luka presses a kiss to the back of her head, his forearm anchored across her collarbone. “That’s what partners do.”