“No, it wasn’t.”
There was a bench seat ten yards farther on, with a planting of ornamental grasses around it, and Daisy didn’t wait for his agreement, she just sat down. He came to a reluctant halt a few strides beyond the bench, wheeled back and joined her, slumping onto the seat as if the effort of holding himself together had left him with energy drained and no breath. They sat in silence for a good minute, while Tucker gave off a brooding aura that told Daisy there was more going on here than she knew. Her heart ached for him.
“That little scene back there seemed to hit you pretty hard,” she finally ventured.
“Yeah, sorry.” He lifted a hand that might not have been quite steady, and massaged his temples with a thumb and forefinger. Watching tied her in knots.
“Not asking for an apology, Tucker, just wondering if you want to talk about it.”
“It’s nothing. Memories, that’s all.” He thought for a moment. “Flashbacks might be a better word.”
“Memories aren’t nothing. Flashbacks even more so.”
“I guess not.” He fell into another difficult silence, and once more she burned so much to touch him that she didn’t know what to do with herself.
“You don’t like hospital waiting rooms,” she suggested. It sounded so thin, so inadequate.
“No.” For a moment, it seemed as if this one syllable was all he had in him, but then he took a breath and said, “Arguments in hospital waiting rooms are worse.”
“Had a few of those?” Her voice came out scratchy with uncertainty about the way she was pushing him.
“Been there for them. Tried to hose them down. Watching Kyle’s mom and Bec brought it all back.” More silence, then, “Sorry, it’s not that I don’t want to talk about this. Something’s telling me I probably should.”
“Like the fact that you looked as if you might pass out from stress back there?”
“Yeah, that. I...hadn’t expected it. It just hit me like a train. As if I was back in the same situation, the same...yeah.” He shook his head, eyes closed, as if still fighting to shake something off. “I don’t know, it just feels—” He stopped again, and made an explosive sound of frustration. “Hell, what am I doing?”
“It’s okay,” she said inadequately. “I’m listening, Tucker.”
“I know. Doesn’t mean I can do this.”
“No, I guess not.” She realized out loud, “Maybe I’m not the right person...”
“No, you are. You are the right person.” He said it almost absentmindedly, as if his focus was still far more on the memories, but the words sent a golden shaft of happiness through her—a crazy, stupid golden shaft of happiness.
A stupid, idiotic golden shaft of happiness that completely robbed her of words, because it was like a bubble, filling and blocking her lungs.
You are the right person.
So simple and matter-of-fact. You are the right person. The sun rises in the east. The sky is blue.
Shafts, bubbles... Daisy, this is just wrong. It makes no sense.
But it’s happening anyhow.
“My dad got cancer,” he said abruptly. “When I was thirteen. Or I guess he got it before that, but I was thirteen when he told us.”
“He didn’t tell you right away?”
“Nope. He was behaving strangely. I could tell Mom was worried. I found her crying a couple times. He kept coming home late. Or he’d say he was at the office, only when Mom called the office, he wasn’t. And then when he told us about the diagnosis—it was caught pretty late, he should have gone to the doctor way sooner about his symptoms, the prognosis was never great—I had this weird relief in the whole mix. This is why he’s been lying to us about working late, he’s been at the doctor’s. Now that he’s told us, he and Mom can deal with it together, and he’ll get cured, and things will be normal again. I can go back to being a normal kid, in a happy, normal family.”
“Only, that didn’t happen.”
“That didn’t happen, and the lying didn’t stop with the cancer out in the open. He was having an affair. He’d started the affair because of the cancer, he said. He always blamed the cancer for it, like that meant it was okay, understandable and normal and right. Like a man gets cancer, and anything he does after that is totally acceptable, no matter how selfish or hurtful it is.”
He stopped again, broke off a spear of ornamental grass and began shredding it methodically into long, skinny strips with fingers that seemed to know exactly what they were doing even when the task made no sense.
“Was that what the arguments in hospital waiting rooms were about? The affair?”
“Yeah...no. Kind of. They weren’t arguments between Mom and Dad, they were arguments between Mom and Andrea. He didn’t stop seeing her. In fact, he saw her more, once their relationship was out in the open. He pretty much divided his time. I’d say fifty-fifty. Mom would say we got thirty percent, and Andrea seventy. Andrea was pregnant, she had a little boy.”
“Oh, Tucker!”
“We spent the last three years of Dad’s life dealing with his illness and this other family he felt entitled to have, and who we were just supposed to accept, the way you’re supposed to accept the person you love going bald from chemo. And, you know, of course you accept the chemo, but is having another family really in that same category?”
He didn’t need her answer, but she gave it anyhow. “No, it’s not.”
He went on without a pause, “Dad always acted as if it was totally his decision. Two families. Nonnegotiable. No one else had the right to set boundaries or have their feelings consulted. Andrea wanted to be at his bedside, and she wanted her son...their son...to be with his dad, and Mom felt for the kid...Jonah, my half brother...because it wasn’t his fault, but that meant these ongoing encounters with Andrea, who resented us as much as we resented her, and all these...” He trailed off, tightened his jaw.
“All these arguments in hospital rooms?”
“Yeah.”
He sketched it out in more detail, as if he couldn’t dam up the memories now that he’d let them loose. He talked about fights over who got to consult with the doctors, about his father’s attempts to intervene and hose things down. “And it was always about him. And I felt so angry. And so guilty. He had cancer. It was about him. But that seemed to come with such a limitless sense of entitlement on his part.”
He talked about his mom taking Jonah for a milkshake one day so that Dad and Andrea could have some time alone, after Dad had asked for it, and then Tucker’s own discovery later that his mom had gone to Andrea’s place that same night and punctured all her car tires.
“And I understood...hell, I would have grabbed a pocket knife and helped her...because it was hitting me that way, too. Trying so hard to do the right things, keep my brother and sister from getting hurt, but gripped by such anger... I had to go see Andrea and beg her not to call the police about the tires. She knew Mom was the culprit. And Dad just kept saying, ‘For my sake.’ We all had to behave perfectly for his sake, his two families, because he had cancer, so he got to do and feel whatever he liked.”
“Oh, Tucker...” There was simply nothing else to say.
“And when Lee was in the hospital after her accident, I was focused on her, not on my own stuff. Today, with all that hostility between Bec and Mrs. Schramm, it brought it all back. But I really, seriously was not expecting it. I mean, hell, it’s a long time ago, now, eighteen years and more, but it took me right back to that period when I suddenly had to grow up and didn’t want to. I really wasn’t expecting that level of intensity in the way I reacted. I’m really sorry.”
“Tucker, don’t apologize! How is it your fault?”
“Putting you through it. Spilling it all out like that.”
“I wanted to hear it. Lee never told us any of this.”
&n
bsp; There was a moment’s pause before he answered, then he said quietly and simply, “Lee didn’t know.” He glanced at her and their eyes met for a moment, like a dazzle of sunlight breaking between trees, but then he looked back down at his restless fingers, shredding another long strand of drying grass.
“Oh,” Daisy said, and that look between them froze in her awareness as if it was still happening. Blazing and short-lived and utterly confusing in its power.
“I just...it just never felt right to tell her,” he said, low and husky. “Especially after her accident.”
“About the arguments?”
“About any of it. Andrea, Jonah. She knew my parents had had a few problems before Dad died. I just...” He shrugged. “I guess it was still too fresh. I was twenty-four, but still I didn’t have the words. Or Lee and I didn’t have that kind of relationship or something. We were all about getting out there and skiing or hiking or rock climbing, not about talking, not about digging through the past, looking for damage. We just didn’t...share that kind of stuff.”
“Right...okay.”
“Maybe that should have told us something. Maybe the reason we never seemed to have any peace and quiet between us wasn’t because of the accident or the wedding plans, the way we always told each other it was. We should have seen the signs sooner.”
“It was ten years ago, Tucker. You’re not still questioning yourself about it, are you?”
He said slowly, “Only because Lee’s your sister.”
They sat for a bit.
“You think a good relationship needs peace and quiet?” Was she agreeing, or arguing, or asking for something? She didn’t have a clue.
Again, he spoke slowly, as if this whole conversation was a minefield he had to tread with incredible care. “I think if you can be quiet together and still feel like everything is perfect and right—” He stopped, then added impatiently, “But what do I know?”
“Well, I guess we do start to have a pretty good idea about that stuff by the time we hit thirty...”
Which is why it’s killing me that we’re sitting here like this. Connecting. We are! I’m not wrong about that. And yet there’s this wall. He’s pushing and pulling at the same time and I don’t get it!
They sat without speaking, and none of it got easier or clearer. Daisy could hear Tucker’s breathing, deep and careful now that it had returned to steadiness. She ached so hard to touch him. So hard. There weren’t even words for it. It was such an obvious thing to do, after he’d told her all that he had. Just a hand on his shoulder or his thigh. A quiet lean against his body.
But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Because they’d been through this already, out by the lake when she’d reached for him and been rebuffed. Because he would have done something about it if he’d wanted to signal a change. There was a preexisting and clear, if incredibly awkward, agreement in place. Not appropriate. Not right.
So why am I the right person, according to him?
The contradiction tied the knots inside her into tight, complicated twists—the fact that he could talk to her like this, tell her things he’d never told Lee even though they’d come within four days of getting married, and yet she’d put her hand on his arm a week ago and he’d taken it away.
And then he’d looked at her just now as if they could see into each other’s souls with a single glance.
It didn’t make sense.
They were just sitting there in silence, with the air so thick between them that she could practically taste it, and he’d talked about a man and a woman needing to know how to be quiet together, and it didn’t make any sense at all.
Seconds passed. Or minutes. He muttered a few more disjointed words, apologies for doing this, for keeping her here. She made equally disjointed replies. It was fine, he didn’t need to apologize, he didn’t need to say or do anything he didn’t want.
Then, just at the point when she really didn’t know what to do next, because if she had to keep sitting here without touching him...without kissing him or him kissing her...she thought she might explode.... Somebody walked by with a pizza in a box balanced on one hand, and the smell of hot oil and garlic and fresh-baked dough hit them in a warm, enticing, wonderful wave.
Food. Nourishment. Comfort. Oh, yes, please! If she couldn’t have a kiss, at least she might have a pizza. A little sound escaped her throat and her stomach growled. Tucker, too, was watching the pizza box disappearing into the night.
“Man...” he muttered. “How long have I kept you here? That smells like we haven’t eaten for a week.”
“Mmm.” Daisy suddenly felt totally drained of energy and light-headed from hunger, on top of everything else. She’d grabbed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at around eleven this morning after a banana for breakfast, and hadn’t eaten anything else all day. It was, what, nearly eight now? No wonder the smell of pizza had almost brought her undone. “You’re right, I should get home,” she said too abruptly. She began to rise, but it was her turn for unsteadiness now, and Tucker saw it.
He hissed out a breath, clicked his tongue and jumped up quickly to catch her elbow.
Just her elbow.
Just that one part of her.
“I’m not telling you to get home. That’s not what I meant!” He swore under his breath. With a steely effort at control, Daisy willed the feeling of faintness away so that he didn’t have to support her anywhere but her stupid elbow. “You’re so hungry, you’re about to drop,” he told her.
Yes, but there was pizza. If she could get in her car and stop somewhere for pizza...
“Sorry ’bout that,” she managed to say.
“C’mon, it’s not your fault.” He cradled her elbow—her stupid, inadequate elbow—in his cupped hand and bent his head.
“What’s not my fault?”
“Nothing. Nothing is your fault.” Once more the air between them seemed thick—thick with her awareness of all the places he wasn’t touching her, all the ways it would be natural for him to hold her while she fully recovered her balance.
“That’s good. I guess,” she said.
“Yeah...”
“Confusing, but good.”
“I’m sorry.” He was leaning so close that she could feel the warmth of his skin in the air. Their lips were inches apart, but their eyes never met because she didn’t dare to look up at him, and still the only place he touched her was her elbow. “I’m so sorry, Daisy.”
“It’s—it’s okay, Tucker, seriously.” She was letting him off the hook about something, but she didn’t know what it was. “You can let go now,” she told him after another moment.
He did, slowly, surrendering her elbow as if it was his passport at a hostile border crossing. “Sure you’re okay?”
“Just hungry, like you said.”
“I’m buying you dinner.”
“No, you don’t have to—”
“I’m buying us both dinner, okay?”
“Tucker—”
“Look, it’s late and you’re not the only one who’d kill for a pizza. I’ll drop you back here for your car when we’re done.”
“That sounds too perfect to argue,” she said weakly, and felt scared, suddenly, about how much she wanted to spend time with him at any cost, no matter what the deal, no matter that all he’d touched was her elbow.
I should have more pride. I shouldn’t get swept along by so much emotion. I should have better boundaries.
But tonight, the pride and the boundaries just weren’t there.
Chapter Ten
They found a pizza place not far from the hospital that Tucker said he’d been to before. It was family-run, not part of a chain, and had a sit-down section in back, beyond the front counter where it did a brisk business in takeout. “They do pasta and burgers, too.”
“But I want pizza,” she said firmly. She opened the menu and scanned the options for toppings.
“It was that guy walking past, wasn’t it?”
“Sure was!”
“He doesn’t know what a risk he was taking, out in the open with a box in his hand like that.”
“Closest to mugging someone I’ve ever been,” Daisy joked.
“You should have said,” Tucker told her. “I would have been up for it. We could easily have taken him down, the two of us.”
She laughed. “You think?”
“I could have pinned his arms while you grabbed the box. He didn’t look like he needed that pizza nearly as much as we did.”
“Tucker Reid and Daisy Cherry, the Robin Hoods of the pizza-thievery trade,” she suggested.
“Except I’m not sure that eating it ourselves counts as giving to the poor.”
“Mmm, true!”
“I think he got it from here,” Tucker said. “The smell is the same. Mushroom and onion work for you?”
It sounded perfect.
And when it arrived, it was huge. They ate every crumb, having to lean over their plates and wrestle the giant slices with both hands. They had oil on their lips and cheese stretching in strings that needed to be scooped up and threaded into their mouths. With it, they drank tall glasses of sweet soda, scoring no points at all for healthy diet, but at the end of a difficult day, damn, it was good!
You couldn’t get all tangled up in awkward awareness while you were eating pizza with your fingers, Daisy discovered. You couldn’t hark back to emotions and stories from the past that maybe should never have been shared in the first place. It simply wasn’t possible. The process was too undignified and too casual and too satisfying and fun. They talked about sports, instead, Daisy asking Tucker if he still had time for the skiing and hiking he used to love.
“Whenever I can, which isn’t as often as I’d like. How about in California?” he asked her. “Was it the same as it is for me here? You wanted to get out there into the open air way more than you actually managed? Wait a minute, were you ever into those outdoor things the way Lee was?”
The One Who Changed Everything (The Cherry Sisters) Page 10