Someday (Sawtooth Mountains Stories Book 2)

by Susan Fanetti

  Though in their hearts they were still the peace-loving, establishment-hating hippies they’d been back then, on the surface that didn’t show quite so much. They’d become too settled and well-heeled, and too much a part of the establishment they were still suspicious of.

  While they fell in love and eventually married, Curtis had earned his MA, and then another one, and then his PhD. Samantha had finished her BFA and begun placing her sculptures in small local art shows, and then winning prizes, and then getting placed in more prestigious shows, and then getting whole shows of her own.

  When Curtis got a tenure-track position in Madison, they’d settled in and begun a family. While their children were born and grew, Sam’s career shrank as she focused on the kids. Curtis’s career expanded. He went through the tenure ranks and then moved into administration. He’d been Dean of the College of Letters & Science since Honor was in college herself, and he would retire from that position, probably fairly soon.

  Their mother had never set aside her causes; she’d raised Honor and Justice the way she’d been raised—on the picket line, at the sit-ins, whatever the cause, wherever its war was being fought. When Justice graduated high school, she’d focused again on the sculpting she’d never entirely abandoned and made a small but lucrative career as a noted local artist. Now Honor’s parents, her father in his seventies and her mother nearing them, were very settled in a very comfortable life.

  Neither Honor nor Justice had ever known need or desperate struggle. They’d never been in danger of falling through any crack. They saw the struggle, they recognized and reviled the cracks that had trapped others, and they’d been raised to do all they could to help, but they’d always known they were safe from those circumstances themselves.

  They were both incredibly spoiled.

  Even now, while Honor struggled to reestablish her career or even to understand if she should, she knew that her landing pad was thick and sturdy. No matter what happened, she always had home.

  Justice hadn’t even left home yet, except for his stint in college. He was past thirty, but he showed no inclination of ever leaving. He had the loft over the garage as his studio and living space, and he was perfectly content.

  He was kind of like Logan in that—so deeply attached to his home and his family that he sloughed off anyone or anything that might intervene and complicate his contentment. Though he had a robust social and sexual life, all he really seemed to want was to live above their parents’ garage and make art.

  Justice drove his old Volvo station wagon—a hand-me-down from their mom—up to the big, charming brick Tudor house in University Heights that had always been home. As he parked on the street, that uncomfortable wistful happiness that was, she supposed, nostalgia, filled Honor up. She loved being home, and already she felt the kiss of the calm she really needed. But already she wished she’d brought Logan along with her. She wanted him to see this, to meet her family, to know this part of her. To know the rest of her.

  But first, she needed to understand if there was a way for her to exist in a relationship with him. In his life. Whether they lived a hundred miles apart or she lived in Jasper Ridge, she had to understand how—whether—having Logan and having her life, and herself, were things that could happen together.

  As she and her brother pulled her bags out of the back of the Volvo, the arched front door of the house opened, and their parents stepped out, arm in arm.

  Their father met them halfway up the walk and took the bag Honor was carrying. With his free arm, he hugged her. “So good to see you, minette.”

  “Hi, Dad. It’s good to be home.”

  At the door, her mother hugged her hard, and Honor breathed in the familiar scent of sandalwood in her long, cloud-grey hair.

  Her mom held her at arm’s length and examined her. “You look tired.”

  “Travel day. I am tired.”

  “Well, let’s get you inside and let you relax a bit. Are you hungry?”

  The dinner table was where they had all their important talks, so this meal would come at a cost. “I could eat, yeah.”

  *****

  “If you don’t want to come home, then what about other firms in Boise?” Honor’s father asked as he spooned quinoa salad onto his plate. “Your reputation must make you highly desirable to any firm.”

  She took the stoneware bowl from him and served herself some salad. “After what happened with Judith, other firms aren’t that interested. Besides, all the firms are old-boys’ clubs. It’ll just be more of the same. Even if they’d bring me in right off the bat as a junior partner, then I’d have a load of associates sniping at my back for cutting in front of them. I don’t want to deal with the politics of building my place at a new firm.” She pouted as she handed the bowl to her mother. “I wanted my plan to work.”

  “But it didn’t,” her mother said. While her father saw his paternal role as ‘fixer,’ and usually dispensed fatherly wisdom in the forms of ideas to think about or outright solutions to problems, her mother’s attitude was a fragile balance between invincible idealism and brutal pragmatism. In her mind, there was no option but to aim for the stars and keep jumping until you got there. You could take a break to rest your legs, but you could not give up.

  “You won’t come home, Honor?” he father asked quietly.

  “No, Dad. Coming home doesn’t solve any of my problems. It might make them go away, but it doesn’t solve them.”

  “Plus,” Justice cut in, his grin impish. “There’s the question of the hot cowboy.”

  Their father shot him a quelling look. Their mother shot a probing look at Honor. “We should talk about him as well. Are you staying in Idaho for a man? Because if that’s the case—”

  Honor cut her off. “It’s not. I love Logan, but I’m not giving up everything else about myself to love him.” She sighed and poked at her chicken breast. “That’s why he didn’t come with me. I need to think about what I want, and I need some space to do it.”

  Her mother reached across the corner of the table and gave her arm a squeeze. “That’s smart, kitten. Love is important, of course. But giving up your dreams for someone else is a hard way to live.”

  Honor and her brother made eye contact across the table, as their parents did the same. Everybody in the room heard the screaming subtext: their parents had almost split up while Honor was in middle school, over that very issue. The year that their father was awarded the rank of full professor, which had been his peak goal, before he achieved it and decided he wanted to get into administration. That was the year, around the time that both Honor and Justice were old enough to be more or less self-sufficient through their days, that their mother had turned around and been punched in the face with the understanding of how much she’d given up to make this family—and that she wasn’t done giving.

  That had been a very hard year. And the one after it as well. Their father had moved to a hotel for awhile, and they’d visited him on weekends. Lawyers had been involved.

  And then, at the end of the summer before Honor started high school, he’d moved home. Their parents, normally a bit too willing to keep the kids in the loop of their lives, hadn’t explained, but life had picked up and returned to the normal that Honor and Justice had known. Except that their mother moved her sculpting studio from a tiny room in a corner of the basement to a new free-standing cottage studio in their back yard, and had begun to sculpt regularly.

  Staring across the table at Justice while the whole family remembered that painful chapter of their history, Honor understood something she’d never had cause to contemplate before: she was afraid of losing what her mother had lost. That was why she felt so torn. She and Logan had started at the same time that her life had fallen apart. To a not-small degree, they’d started because her life had fallen apart. She’d been in crisis, and she’d needed him. She was still in crisis, but she couldn’t make a habit of needing him. Not like that. Not dependence.

  It was more than the distance b
etween Boise and Jasper Ridge giving her pause. It was more than his need to be needed. It was more than her uncertainty about her career. It was her worry that she’d fade away, and that was so acute because it had a face: her mother’s.

  “Okay! Well, that was fun,” Justice broke loudly into the stilted silence. “Mom, pass the rolls, please.”

  *****

  A couple nights later, after another family dinner and another round of discussion about her unsettled circumstances, Honor sat alone in the living room, curled up in her favorite chair, under the knitted afghan that had hung over the back of the chair for as long as she could remember. A cozy fire crackled in the fireplace, and she was a hundred pages into A Wrinkle in Time, which had been her favorite book as a girl. It still made the all-time top ten.

  Her father was in his study, doing academic things, and her mother was in her studio. Honor didn’t mind at all that she was sitting alone only a couple of days after she’d come home for the first time in nearly a year. One of her favorite things about being home was that it was simply that: home. They were thrilled to have her there, but they didn’t behave as if she were a visitor. Life continued on its usual path.

  In that vein, Justice was out trawling the bars with friends. He’d invited her along, but the last time she’d gone out to Wando’s with her brother, she’d gotten plastered on fishbowl cocktails and ended up fucking David Allsworth, her high-school boyfriend, in the back seat of his rental car. David didn’t live in Madison anymore, either, but it was Thanksgiving week, and she was sure he was in town for the holiday, just like last year. She didn’t want to risk a replay of that scene. She got horny and stupid when she was drunk. Exhibit A: Tyler O’Keefe. Whom she absolutely would have fucked if he hadn’t backed off that night of the limo.

  The man who’d then stalked her for months and nearly killed Logan. Drunk, she would have fucked him.

  Stupid and horny. Never failed.

  “What’re you reading, minette?” Her father stood in the entry to the room, wiping his glasses on the tail of his shirt.

  She turned the book so he could see the cover of her old Yearling Classics edition. “A Wrinkle in Time.”

  He smiled and came in to sit at the end of the sofa nearest her. “I’m surprised that hasn’t fallen apart yet. You must’ve read it a dozen times as a girl.”

  “At least. I just about had it memorized.”

  “You used to quote the Misses and try to do Mrs Which’s voice. Loudly.”

  Their shared chuckle at the memory faded out, and they sat together in companionable silence. Honor went back to her book, and had read a few pages before her father spoke again.

  “Talk to me about this boy.”

  She laughed and turned the open book face-down on her lap. “Dad, I’m thirty-five years old, and Logan’s almost forty-two. I’m not a girl, and he is definitely not a boy.”

  “This man, then. Talk to me about him.”

  “I don’t know what more to tell you. His family are cattle ranchers. They’ve held the ranch since the 1870s, I think. Logan’s great-great-something grandparents staked the claim. They’re good people. He’s a good man.”

  A good man who was about as spoiled as she was and had his share of irrational fears, too.

  “The brother of the man you defended last year, right? On a murder charge.”

  “Yes. Successfully defended, because he wasn’t guilty.”

  “And you love him.”

  “Yes. But don’t worry—I’m not going to give up who I am to be with him. I’m trying to understand if I can have both.”

  That was probably something better said to her mother. Her father winced subtly at the words. “Of course you can have both, Honor. What it takes is communication. It takes the understanding that having both doesn’t necessarily mean having everything all at once, or having things exactly the way you imagined. Sometimes having both is taking turns. Always, it’s compromise. And it takes the recognition that a sacrifice is always, by its very nature, a choice. No one can force someone else to make a sacrifice.”

  Again the subtext screamed, and Honor heard him speaking of his relationship and not hers. She felt uncomfortably defensive for her mother, the one who’d made the sacrifices and had had to wait her turn.

  As if he’d heard her thoughts, he said, “I was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship to Oxford University. Did you ever know that?”

  “No.” She shifted in her chair to face him fully. “Really?”

  “Yes. The most prestigious fellowship in my field, and I won it. It paid peanuts, of course, just a tiny stipend, but I would have lived in a box under a hedge to take it, and your mother was ready to join me in that box, because she wanted to wander the English countryside for inspiration. I turned it down because she found out she was pregnant. I took a faculty position here instead.”

  With her, he meant. Her mother had been pregnant with her, so they didn’t get their exciting adventure in the Cotswolds.

  Now she felt defensive for herself. The date of her conception was hardly her fault. “Dad …”

  He shook his head. “You were a joy from the moment we knew about you.” With a soft chuckle, he amended, “Perhaps from about a week or so after that. We promised each other we’d never tell you, because we didn’t want you to feel it meant we weren’t entirely devoted to you. I’m telling you now because I want you to know that I’ve sacrificed, too. When you’re ambitious, and also want love in your life, sacrifice is inevitable.”

  Leaning forward, he held out his hand, and Honor set hers in it. “You seem caught in a vortex, minette, and I’m worried. I don’t think you’ve ever had to compromise or alter what you wanted until now—but that’s because you’ve had tunnel vision. You’ve been focused on only your ambition, developed only that one part of your life. Now you want more than that, but you don’t want to make room for more. You have to decide what you must have in your life and strive for it, even if you can’t be sure you’ll achieve it. You will have to make sacrifices along the way. When you do, you’ll see that you don’t need to sacrifice your whole self, or ‘fade away,’ as you called it. You simply need to see more of yourself. Grow to fill your whole space.”

  Honor turned to stare into the fire. “Right now, I have nothing. I’m nothing but empty space.”

  “That’s not true. That will never be true. You have your family. You have your will, your intellect, your strength. You have your experience and talent. And perhaps you have true love as well. Honor, darling, you have everything. You must embrace that and move into your future. You’re trying to find answers to things that can’t be known before they’re lived, but you can trust that whatever the answers are, you have the tools you need to face them and succeed. Even if success doesn’t look like you thought it would.”

  He squeezed her hand. “This isn’t a problem I can fix for you, because this is your whole life.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m so scared.”

  Her father sat back and held out his arms. Honor set her book aside and went to the sofa to curl up with him. He held her and kissed her head as she leaned on him. “We’ll catch you if you fall. We’ll always catch you.”

  *****

  “Hey there, counselor.” The obvious pleasure in Logan’s voice made Honor smile and settle back into her pillows. It was late, possibly rudely late, but he’d answered on the first ring and sounded wide awake. And happy to hear from her. She hadn’t been sure that would be the case.

  “Hi,” she returned. “You haven’t called. It’s been four days. Are you feeling okay?”

  “Physically, I feel pretty good. I’ve been trying not to be a stalker. You wanted some time and space, right? And point of order—you haven’t called, either.”

  “I was worried you’d be mad.”

  “To hear your voice? Never. And I’m not mad, Honor. Bummed, but not mad. And hell, I think I probably deserve this. You doin’ okay?”

  Her talk with her father earlier beat a
heavy tempo at the back of her brain. She hadn’t stopped thinking about it since. “Logan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  “That’s very good to hear. I love you, too. But you didn’t answer my question. Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, except …” Flutters filled her chest with stunning swiftness, and Honor almost lost her nerve. “Except you’re not here.”

  That terrifying sentence sat between them, all alone, surrounded by silence.

  “Logan?”

  “What’s that mean, Honor? Be clear.”

  “I don’t … I’m still working things out. I still have no idea what the future looks like or how I’m going to make a life for myself out of what’s left of the one I had. I don’t know where I should be, or what, or how, or anything. I’m scared.”

  He breathed heavily into the phone, like a burst of static—a sigh so full of frustration she felt the weight of it all the way in Wisconsin.

  She went on. “But I miss you. Being without you is like walking around wondering if I left the iron on, if that makes sense.”

  “I think I get it. I think I feel it. But you’re not being clear, darlin’.”

  Honor took in and let out a heavy breath of her own. “I don’t know what my future looks like, but I know I want you in it. Is it too late for you to spend Thanksgiving here with me?”

  It was Wednesday night. Late on the night before Thanksgiving. Of course it was too late for him to fly to Madison for dinner tomorrow.

  Maybe it was too late for them altogether.

  “What time do you eat?”

  “Five o’clock.”

  “Lay a place for me, darlin’. I’ll be there.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Honor stood at the foot of the escalator and waited for Logan. The Dane County Regional Airport was quiet. As a regional airport, it was never the chaotic crush that Mitchell, in Milwaukee, could become, but it was quiet enough late on this Thanksgiving Day to be a bit eerie. While almost the whole country was already tucked away with their families, she stood and watched an empty escalator moving endlessly downward.