Naomi's Wish

by Rachael Herron

  Fine—Rig was too surprised to say anything back. He’d kind of thought, if push came to shove, that Bruno would back him. Not that he wanted that to happen—he didn’t want to divide the office. But they’d talked together in a way Bruno never had with Naomi, and he’d thought they were friends. Possibly, they were. But Bruno still felt loyalty to Naomi. There was something admirable about that, even if it was goddamned annoying.

  A lighter tread behind him.

  Naomi.

  Without turning in his chair, he knew she’d entered the break room. The way his heart raced confirmed it, the way the center of his abdomen heated, sending warmth up through his chest.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Just getting coffee. I’ll be in and out.”

  Rig turned. The look of her slammed into him like the huge rogue waves that pounded the platforms during the worst fall hurricanes. White coat, long legs in black pants, clean face, those perfect soft lips. It was a travesty that she pulled her hair back like that.

  For just a second he forgot he was furious, forgot how much she’d let him down, and he almost moved to go to her, to wrap his arms around her shoulders and kiss her until they both had to come up for air. To tell her he loved her. That he couldn’t be without her. That she was who he’d been waiting for.

  And for that split second, he swore he could read the same impulse in her eyes, all of it, echoed.

  Then she poured a cup of coffee and pulled a note out of her pocket to read as she stirred the creamer in. She’d shut herself off again, and Rig remembered with a sinking gut that her irresponsible actions had almost killed his father. And she hadn’t even asked about Frank. Of course, she could be getting info on him from any of the doctors or nurses over at the hospital, but she hadn’t asked Rig.

  New anger bubbled up, and Rig had no place to put it. “Did you order the stage set up? With the microphone and amps for the band?”

  She nodded.

  “What about the permit Elbert said we needed?”

  “He got it for us.”

  “And all the drinks—”

  “Are lined up,” she said, as she walked past him on her way out of the break room. She kept her eyes on the floor.

  Rig leaned forward in his chair, and took her wrist as she passed. “Stop.”

  She did, but when she raised her eyes to his, they were bright green pools of sorrow.

  “I just …” he started, but he didn’t know where to go. He had too much anger to do even one of the things he was considering.

  “I am sorry, you know,” Naomi said.

  The breath left his body in a clean whoosh.

  “I’ve never done that before—prescribed anything with no medical history. I could have at least asked you, but I didn’t. Frank didn’t want you to know, and it felt like I was in on a little secret. It felt … fun. Like he was my friend. That was wrong. I screwed up. I know the words don’t mean much, but I am sorry.”

  They were the words he’d needed to hear, and now that she was saying them, Rig was astonished to find that his anger wasn’t dissolving instantly. In fact, God, he was so angry now his hands were shaking. He let go of her wrist before she noticed.

  “You almost killed my father.”

  She nodded miserably. “Yes.”

  He needed to go, to get out, to be on the water, to be anywhere but here, anywhere away from where he could smell that sweet rose and iodine smell of her. The last thing he wanted was to have to work with her at the dance. How the hell were they supposed to present a unified business front if they couldn’t even stand next to each other while melting down?

  “I’m taking the day off,” he said, suddenly sure this was what he needed. He’d rent a kayak, or hell, he’d buy one and be out on the ocean this afternoon, paddling hard, pushing every thought of her out of his body.

  “You are? We have a full load today,” she said.

  “I handled it when you were sick. You handled it before I started here. You’ll be fine.”

  Naomi just looked at him, and his fingers physically ached with the need to touch her cheek.

  “I can’t be around you today,” he said.

  She looked like she was trying to stop herself from saying something.

  “Yeah?” he asked.

  “I’m very sorry for my mistake. But you’re gonna have to learn how to be around me, buddy.” She shook her head, and he realized the tears that had welled in her eyes now were from anger. “Even if you hate me forever, you’re going to have to do better than this. You can despise me. Go ahead. But me screwing up big time, one time, doesn’t give you the right to be an asshole in perpetuity.”

  Didn’t it?

  “And now,” she said, “if you’ll excuse me, Hank, I have to remain professional. I have sick people who are here to see me. Luckily, I’m fast with my patients. In, out, better, faster.”

  She sidled past him, her lips clenched together furiously.

  Fine. He’d stay at the practice today. He wouldn’t run away. And he’d cut his patient visits short. He’d be the model of efficiency in doctoring, and show her he could have both bedside manner and speed. But for now, Rig remained where he was, holding fury in his clenched fists, his heart shredding in a way that he wouldn’t, couldn’t, examine.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  There’s an end to every knitting project. That much is guaranteed.

  —E.C.

  Naomi passed another almost sleepless night, torn between quietly crying, silently raging, and dropping into fits of sleep that were torn apart every time she remembered. She didn’t know how to mourn the loss of Rig and the loss of the man she’d thought was her father, and it felt impossible to do both at the same time. The pain might keep her from breathing, she thought, even though she knew that was physiologically improbable.

  Oh, Rig. The molten fury she’d seen in his eyes had scared her, but she’d expected it. What she hadn’t expected was that in the depths of her grief and remorse, even while she was still trying to accept her misplaced feelings toward him, she’d been able to be mad at him at the same time. She still hadn’t quite forgiven him for spilling her secret about Maybelle to Anna, but she had to admit she was closer to doing so. Regret made her feel softer, more willing to admit that perhaps she’d overreacted. A little.

  Telling him to man up and keep working hadn’t been planned, but it had felt good. And he’d listened, and stayed, and seemed to turn over patients a little faster than usual.

  Naomi had never had to live—and work—through a broken heart before. All day long at the office, every day this week, every word that she’d managed to speak had felt like a miracle. She’d thought she was pulling it off until Bruno had given her a bear hug before he went home. She’d almost burst into tears on the spot, but instead went into the center and moved the new furniture around for an hour.

  The new furniture Rig had bought for her. For her and her dream.

  She rolled over onto her back and stared up at a cobweb in the corner of her ceiling. Finally, what seemed like months after she’d gotten into bed, the alarm went off. It was time to face the music, literally.

  The dance had been trumpeted in the Independent for the last week—Trixie had been surprisingly agreeable when Naomi had called in the small ad, upping its placement for free, placing it on the front page, and writing a nice piece about what the annual contra dance meant to the community.

  Community. She would have to face everyone. Even him. And today, she just didn’t know if she was strong enough.

  For a moment, she gave herself the talk she’d been falling back on, the one that had been getting her out of bed every day. Dad wouldn’t have stayed in bed. He would be up and at ’em, ready for the day, excited about how he’d get to help.

  But her father’s health clinic had never hosted a dance.

  And he wasn’t even really her father, goddammit. More than just learning the truth of her birth, she’d also learned that the man she’d loved the most in her life, the one
she’d held all other men up to only to find them wanting, had been lying to her for as long as she’d known him. He’d lied every time he’d allowed her to call him Dad. Naomi felt as if she were standing on a pier in a storm, the pilings below her swaying. She couldn’t trust herself to stay upright.

  Or was it that lying had been his way of loving her?

  No, it was too much. Too confusing. Too awful.

  Naomi punched the pillow underneath her head and then smoothed it, fantasizing about pulling the covers over her, staying there all day. She heard the shower go on, and groaned. At least her mother and Buzz would be leaving tomorrow. They wanted to attend the dance before they left.

  Bully for them.

  Naomi knew she still had to have the talk with her mother about who, exactly, her deceased biological father was, but that was a conversation she had put off every time she’d seen Maybelle since they’d had that first, fateful talk five days ago. Tonight, though, she’d talk to her tonight, after the dance.

  If she got out of bed, that is, and that wasn’t necessarily in the cards.

  Instead, without leaving her warm spot under the covers, Naomi reached for the closest Eliza Carpenter book. Eliza’s Road Not Taken was on the nightstand where she’d last placed it. She flipped to the inside front flap, touching the picture of Eliza and her husband, Joshua. They leaned against the barn wall, both wearing hand-knit ganseys, both grinning from ear to ear. Tears welled again. Dammit. That happiness, that joy radiated by Eliza, even in a picture, was almost too difficult to look at.

  She flipped it open, pointing with her finger randomly, hoping, praying that she’d get the answer she needed about how to handle these feelings that threatened to drown her. A painful lump filled her throat as she saw the passage she’d landed on, and she reread the paragraphs greedily, gulping them in as if they were air.

  Joshua laughs at me, sometimes, when I get that old familiar yearning to start a family tradition. Any tradition, large or small. He’s never quite understood the need I have for touchstones, but he humors me, and is patient when I decide that every year the Christmas tree must be chopped down while Thanksgiving dinner is cooking. If he had his way, we’d never have a Christmas tree at all, he cares that little about them, but having grown up in foster homes where Christmas usually came only with new socks and a tall bottle for the foster mother, the holiday means so much to me.

  Bless him. Sometimes, late at night, I wonder where my people are. I’m sure my real mother died years ago, when I felt that pain that had no explanation—that drop in my heart’s assertion that I could never really be alone—but is anyone else left?

  It’s not that I want to meet them. I believe we create our own family. Joshua is my world, and I know I’m his. And even though we couldn’t have children, when Cade moved in to help, he took over that spot I’d known was empty. He is my great-nephew but I think of him as my son, and he loves me. My knitters, too, are my family. Our connections run deeper than mere friendship as we sit together, making our own traditions, building useful art that will be the foundation for future generations to base their traditions upon.

  But it still hurts occasionally, and I’m always thunder-struck when the pain resurfaces: they didn’t want me. Was it only she, or were there more of them pushing me out? Was I a discussion, something to be hidden, closed over, a chapter never to be reopened? Did anyone wonder about me? Could they have any idea that I made it to college? And to Europe, on my own earnings? That I worked my way across the Continent carrying only a knapsack and my needles in a time when women didn’t travel alone like they do now? Do they know that I skied the Alps with a Russian, got drunk in a Roman tavern on homemade grappa, herded sheep on a cold Scottish moor? Do they know Joshua feels like he’s always the luckiest person in the world that I picked him? Do they know he’s wrong? That I’m the one who came out ahead when I fell in love with the man with the most brilliant blue eyes I’ve ever seen? Do the people connected to me by blood know that Joshua and I built a house together, with our own hands? That every day I wake up with him, I’m happy just to open my eyes and the only thing that makes thinking of one day not being able to do that is my surety that we’ll be together again, later?

  They know none of this. And after all the thinking I’ve done, late into many nights, I know better than anyone else that they did the right thing, letting me go. I’ve been free all my life—a freedom granted me by birth. Joshua is my tie-down to the earth, the yarn that keeps me tethered. Otherwise, I might float right up into the air, coming down only to see what Uruguay is like. Or South Africa. Or Prague.

  Love makes a family. And thank heaven for that.

  Naomi closed the book and hugged it to her stomach, as if she could press the words into herself by sheer force of will.

  Love makes a family. It sounded like a slogan for a bank ad or something equally banal. But knowing the words were Eliza’s made them truer, and as Naomi closed her eyes again, she clung to them. Love did make Rig’s family, she could see it in everything they did for each other—how Rig always preheated his brother’s barbecue because Jake, firefighter though he was, would have been nervous about it; how they both tolerated Frank’s blasphemous prayers; how Rig hung Milo upside down despite Jake’s protests.

  Naomi’s heart plummeted again to her feet. She’d lost her father once to death. Now she was losing him again. Grief made her shoulders ache. Naomi had spent her adult years trying to get everything right, to be perfect, for him.

  And he wasn’t perfect. He’d lied for so long.

  From the back of her mind, a small, quiet thought arose that perhaps it showed something important on his part that he’d never given Naomi the slightest hint she wasn’t truly his.

  Even that thought ached.

  Naomi sat up and swung her feet to the cool floor. The whole room was cold and slightly damp, as she’d forgotten to shut the window last night against the fog. It felt right, matching the feelings in her heart, her lungs.

  A shower. That was next. A really, really hot one—maybe it would finally warm her up.

  One last time, before she stood, she flipped the book open to another random page. Just once more. Opening her eyes, she saw that she’d stabbed the epigraph for chapter eight.

  Knit through everything.

  Tears welled again. Dammit. That wasn’t right. She’d try again.

  A poke of her fingers into the book. Eyes opened again, she read: Always be brave.

  Naomi gasped. So be it. Before she got in the shower, she put her shawl-in-progress into her bag. For so long, she’d been trying to prove her worth to a man she hadn’t even truly known. So who cared if she asked someone for help with her knitting? Would it make her less of a doctor to appear stupid? Incompetent? Unable to even do a simple craft? She’d ask someone to show her what she was doing wrong with the dang picot edge bind off tonight. If she could build up the nerve.

  She stood under the water, and didn’t try to determine if the water on her face was salty or not. For a brief moment she allowed herself the fantasy of getting out of the shower, drying off, and going to find Rig, saying whatever it took to make it right again. Forgiving him. Asking him to pardon her. Pulling him into bed with her. Drawing the covers over their heads and staying there, for a very long time. Forever.

  Or maybe she’d just go far, far away from everyone who knew she was a mistake.

  Oh, God, she wanted to see him again.

  Naomi leaned against the cold tiles while the hot water hit the places on her body Rig had touched, kissed, worshipped. Then it felt right to cry, just for a few moments. Later, she’d figure out how to live her life again, but not right now. Naomi would give herself that.

  Chapter Fifty-two

  When a pattern comes together, when you can finally see how the pieces fit, it makes you feel like a genius. And, my dear, you certainly are!

  —E.C.

  It was working.

  All of it. It had come together, after a long day o
f hard work and avoiding Rig, ducking into the office every time he carried something for the party into the clinic. The clinic had been transformed into what, to Naomi’s wondering eyes, appeared to be a ballroom. Okay, a western ballroom, yes—there were hay bales along the far wall, under the windows, for sitting on. A low raised platform held the band, which consisted of a fiddler, a bass player, an accordion player, and a guitar player, each of them wearing a cowboy hat. The caller for the dance, Eric, was tall and bearded, his smooth, clear voice telling people to form long lines up and down the hall, now alemán right, alemán all.

  Rig and Naomi worked refreshments together, as planned. They were doing fine, professional and crisp, until Naomi spun around while reaching for extra napkins and collided full into his chest. She apologized. Rig mumbled something she couldn’t catch, and then he handed a flyer on the early warnings of heart disease to a short, stout woman who took it without suspicion.

  When Stephens asked her to dance, she looked at Rig, who nodded and finally spoke to her. He turned his face toward her, keeping his eyes below the brim of his cowboy hat, and said, “I can handle this part.” He gave out two more glasses of wine to the Lempkes and sold a raffle ticket to Mrs. Luby, who said she was on a fixed income so he should make sure she won.

  Naomi moved into Stephens’s arms, her hand in his work-roughened palm, her arm at his shoulder, grateful that there was no way to keep from smiling when an old cowboy was spinning a girl around and around so fast that Naomi knew if he let her go, she’d fly across the room like an out-of-control top. She didn’t know what she was doing, but he made her feel coordinated and graceful.