“Colin?” Sean runs up to me, a huge chunk of uncarded wool in his hand.
“Yeah, dude. Whatcha got there?”
“Isn’t it cool? Mr. Ronny said I could keep it. It was from the sheep that won the shearing contest. He grew more wool than any of the other sheep on the whole ranch.”
“That’s great. What are you going to do with it?”
“I think I’ll ask Mom if she can make something out of it. ’Cause you can make sweaters and stuff with sheep fur.”
“That you can, although that might not be enough for a sweater. But I’m sure your mom can think of something to do with it. Want me to hold on to it for you?”
“Yeah, and then can you go with me to the bouncy castle? Mr. Ronny says you have to be eight to go by yourself.” He rolls his eyes at the inhibiting rule.
I chuckle. “One bouncy castle coming up. Do you think they’ll let me in that thing?”
He looks me over skeptically. “I think you might break it. You’re kind of big.”
I laugh, and we make our way over to the contraption where I wait while Sean gets his shoes off and then goes inside to jump like a maniac with a half dozen other kids.
A few minutes later, Marsha sidles up to me. “You’re very good with him,” she says as she stands next to me and hands me a chocolate chip cookie. “It’s not vegan, but you haven’t committed yet, have you?”
“Thank you. And no.” I grab the cookie and pop the whole thing in my mouth. “This woman I know keeps offering me things like grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies,” I mumble around the mouthful of food.
“Maybe she’s noticed that you’re a big boy and she can’t imagine how you’ll ever get enough food to stay alive if you only eat plants.”
“A big boy, huh? Sounds sort of motherly. Are you trying to mother me, Ms. O’Neill?”
She gives me a sideways glance. “Mmm. Mothering has never made my top ten list of things to do with Colin Douglas.”
I can’t help but smile at the inferences I could make from that. She seems to realize she said it out loud and blushes when I look at her. I decide to let her off the hook and keep my mouth shut. Although her next question nearly causes my jaw to drop open.
“So, you’ve never been married or engaged or whatever?” She tries to pass it off as idle conversation, but I can tell that it’s not.
“Uh, nope. It’s been me, the bass, and the band for a long time. Never had much chance to get very serious about anyone. We were on the road and in the studio for most of the last eight years or so.”
“Just a lot of groupies, huh?” She winks.
I scratch the back of my neck, not sure how to approach this. If I were Mike, I’d own it with something like, “Yeah, baby. The chicks love a hot guitarist, and I gave ’em what they wanted.” If I were Joss, I’d own it but with more class. “Yeah, I’m a fucking rock star, and women offering themselves is part of the deal, but we were all consenting adults.” And if I were Walsh, I’d be able to say, “Sure, there were groupies, but none of them were Tammy, so I wasn’t interested.”
But I’m not. I’m me, and me isn’t sure how to answer this.
“Life on the road can be interesting,” I tell her. Lame.
She snorts. “Oh, I’m sure.”
“Not one of those girls was anywhere near as beautiful as you though.” I’m not handing her a line.
She stares at me. “Stop it,” she finally says.
“Just telling the truth.” I go back to watching the bouncy castle, but my pulse is racing.
Her next words are spoken through gritted teeth. “You can’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Flirt with me.”
“Why?
“Because we broke up ten years ago and now we’re”—she waves her hand around awkwardly—“acquaintances or whatever.”
“Hey, you brought up exes. I was only answering your questions.” I’m confused now, not sure what she wants from me.
“I was only making conversation.”
“So you don’t have any interest in my romantic past? There’s not any jealousy going on there? ’Cause I’ll tell you the truth. It makes me nauseous to think that you married someone else. When I first came to town and found out about him, I was so mad I went back to Mrs. S.’s and broke a few things.”
She stares at me, incredulous. “Why? After all this time, why?”
“Why’d you ask if I’d been in a serious relationship?” I counter.
She looks down, fiddling with her bracelet, taking a deep breath. “It’s hard I guess. Imagining you with other people. All these years, you’ve sort of been stuck in my imagination as my boyfriend. I never saw you with other people, didn’t have to go through that, so when you showed up here it was like being tossed back ten years. I don’t know who you were after you weren’t mine anymore.”
“Yeah, that’s a good way of describing it. Like all those years never passed. The feelings are all still there. I guess we never dealt with them, did we?”
She shakes her head. “Have you forgiven me?”
“Excuse me?” I ask, thinking I heard her wrong.
“Have you forgiven me? Or do you think you ever will? I’ve wondered all these years if you ever forgave me. And if you did, could we be friends? If we ever met again, would we be able to put all that behind us and be friends or something? And now you’re here, and we’re talking like civilized adults, and I wonder if that means you’ve forgiven me?”
I watch her, silent. Then I look out over the ranch, rolling land for as far as the eye can see. A warm breeze is blowing across the dusty area surrounding the barn and the house, bringing the noises from both—sheep bleating, women laughing, men shouting. As normal as it all is, it seems oddly surreal as I consider Marsha’s question. What is forgiveness, exactly? Some people say they can forgive but never forget. Others say they’ll never forgive. And still more claim that the only forgiveness any of us need is from God.
Personally, my guess is that the forgiveness that really matters is the forgiveness you give yourself. It’s when you forgive yourself that you really start to heal.
But that’s not what Marsha asked.
“Does it matter if I have or not?” I ask.
Her eyes close briefly, and when they open, they’re shining with emotion. “Yes. What you think has always mattered. It still does, like all those years never passed.”
That sparks something in me that’s almost cruel, the same thing it sparked in me the day it all happened. I struggle to communicate it without showing that cruel streak.
“You can see how it was hard for me to believe that I mattered when you made the decision without me?”
“I had to,” she whispers. “But it didn’t mean I didn’t care what you thought.”
I nod, numb from being at a standoff still, after all this time. “Here’s what I think then. I think it tore me in two when you cut me out of your life like that, out of the single most important decision you’d ever made. I think that even if I was only seventeen, I loved you—genuinely and completely. And I think all these years later I’m not sure if I’ve forgiven you, but I’m also not sure I’ve stopped loving you.”
She makes a small sound in anguish, and bites her lower lip as she struggles to contain whatever she’s feeling.
“Marsha…” I gently touch her shoulder.
She clears her throat. “As much as I want the love, Colin, I need the forgiveness. I can’t talk about one until I have the other. I need twenty-seven-year-old Colin to realize something seventeen-year-old Colin didn’t. I was a terrified teenage girl with no experience—not in life, or parenthood, or making adult decisions. The only job I’d ever had paid seven dollars an hour and was part time. The only bill I’d ever paid was for my cell phone. The only family or support I’d ever had was my mother who spent my whole life railing against teen pregnancy.
“You’d been my boyfriend for six months. That’s six months out of eighteen
years. Maybe I made the wrong decision, maybe I didn’t, but if you can’t find it in you to have compassion for the way I made the decision, then the love will never be enough.”
My throat is thick, and I’m frozen in place, feelings barreling through me at such a rate that I’m unable to process them much less vocalize them.
“That’s what I thought,” she finally says, her expression shuttered.
My heart is tearing in two as she walks away, and I fear I’ve ruined something that is irreparable.
IT’S LATE that night when I finally get back to the boarding house. Mrs. S. has been asleep for hours, I’m sure. Marsha and Sean ended up getting a ride home with one of the families they knew there. Sean and I had a great time, but Marsha didn’t speak to me again until she let me know she’d gotten another ride home. I’m miserable by the time I walk into my room in Mrs. S.’s basement. The ranch is dry, so there I couldn’t drown my sorrows in a six-pack, and as much as I wish I could light up and mellow out, I know that even if I had weed here I wouldn’t be able to smoke it. It’s like I had a threshold for how much ganja I could ingest in one lifetime and I reached the limit. Warning lights flashed, and the gate closed. Maximum capacity achieved or something.
I throw myself down on the bed and stare at the ceiling. If I close my eyes, I can hear her voice, the accusations, the firm way she told me that until I can get out of my own sorrow and understand hers there’s no future for us.
I pick up my cell phone, not paying any attention to the time and hit speed dial number two, waiting while it rings.
“Hey.” Walsh’s sleepy voice is crystal clear through the speakerphone.
“Aw shit, you were asleep,” I say, frustrated and embarrassed.
“It’s okay. I just dozed off. Tammy goes to bed so early these days that I’ve started falling asleep when she does. Probably nature’s way of preparing us for the next eighteen years of no sleep.” He laughs, and I can’t help but join him. “So, what’s up?”
“I have a question—about you and Tammy. I hope it’s not like, I don’t know, rude or whatever.”
“Go for it,” he answers. It takes a lot to get Walsh upset, so I imagine this is fine.
“How did you finally forgive her? She screwed up pretty badly, but she always loved you, and you knew that. How’d you get past the hurt? How’d you get to a place where all the bad stuff wasn’t in your way anymore?”
I hear him sigh on the other end, and then there is a moment of silence.
“I think it was a couple of things. First off, I had to admit—to myself—that I’d played a part in her mistake. It was easy to be the guy who had been wronged, but the fact is it’s a relationship, and everything that happens involves both people, you know? None of us is operating in a vacuum, and especially when you’re in love with someone.”
Deep inside I feel something connect with what he’s saying. I know he has a point, and a good one.
“The other thing—the real clincher—was when I admitted to myself that I’d rather be with her than not, and in order to do that I had to forgive her. I got to this point where I knew that I had two choices: live with Tammy or live without her. In order to live with her I had to let that shit go. I really wanted to live with her, dude. I don’t ever want to think about a life without Tammy. When I did, it scared the hell out of me. So I forgave her and we got on with our lives. Best decision I ever made.”
I can picture him shrugging and giving me one of his small smiles. Walsh is the guy most like me personality-wise. We’re both laid-back and slow to anger. I know he’s more outgoing than I am, but I can relate to his general outlook on life and people pretty well. Joss and Mike are like two sides of the same coin—Joss the shiny, gold side, Mike the tarnished underbelly, all Joss’s qualities taken to their negative extremes, the part no one wants to uncover and examine.
“Thanks, man,” I tell Walsh. “I appreciate the experience.”
“This have something to do with Marsha?”
“Yeah, it does.”
“You ever going to talk about it?”
“Someday. Not yet though.”
“Okay,” Walsh says. “You know where I am when you’re ready, right?”
“I do. Thanks.”
“Any time.”
I hang up the phone and strip before I switch out the light and lie on the bed looking at the stars outside the small, high window in my room. I wonder if Marsha can see the same view of the stars from her bed, and fall asleep dreaming of a beautiful girl with red hair who once promised me all of her.
Chapter Six
Marsha
I WAS six weeks away from high school graduation when Colin and I split up. He was a junior, and we’d planned that I would go to the community college the following year while he finished high school. Then we’d attend college together. But once we found out I was pregnant all of our joint plans went out the window. That day in the park was the last time I spoke to him alone, and it was two weeks later when my mother discovered my secret and locked me out of the trailer with the clothes on my back, a slap across the face, and the fifty bucks that was in my purse.
I was able to get the older widow a few doors down to let me stay with her for the rest of the night, and then the next day I got on the school bus and went to class. Once I got there, I talked to a girl I’d known since junior high and she let me stay at her house for a night. After that, I was out of options, so on day three I walked into the local homeless shelter and asked them to take me in. For the next month I spent long hours in food lines, did my homework on park benches and at coffee shops, and prayed each night that the shelter would have room for me to sleep there.
I was able to eat lunch for free at school, but I rarely got breakfast because I didn’t have time to wait in lines before school, and dinner was hit or miss, they sometimes ran out before everyone got served. I knew I couldn’t go on missing meals forever, and the fifty bucks I’d had was nearly gone. I’d stolen back into the trailer while my mom was at work and packed up some clothes, but I still had to spend money on some basic necessities. I needed cash and I needed a place to live. And I found it, but not before I’d flunked two of my finals at school, meaning I couldn’t get my diploma. In the span of six weeks I became a walking statistic—pregnant teen, high school dropout, homeless, and unemployed. Some days it seemed like housing was the least of my problems at eighteen.
I look around the small one-bedroom apartment I share with Sean and realize I haven’t come that far in ten years. Seeing it through Colin’s eyes this afternoon was a cold, hard hit of reality. I felt his disdain from across the truck cab, the thoughts circling in his mind. She really keeps a child in a place like that? He’s probably happy I didn’t raise his kid after all. No one wants their son or daughter to have a barmaid for a mother.
Sean has been asleep for hours, completely exhausted after the sheep-shearing fun. He brought home all sorts of souvenirs, including a chunk of uncarded wool that smells like the sheep it came from. Ugh.
I wash the last of the dirty dishes in the sink and sweep the kitchen floor before I head to the sofa and unfold it for my bed. I’ve been poor my entire life, and I’ve learned a couple of things along the way. The first is that just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you have to be dirty. The places I can afford to live are run down—peeling paint; cheap, old fixtures; stained carpets. But it’s up to me whether I’m going to scrub those vinyl floors or leave them covered in crumbs and spilled orange juice. I choose to do what I can by making sure everything Sean touches is as clean as it can be.
The second trick to being poor is to never be afraid of color. When your clothes are old and faded, and you live someplace that hasn’t seen new paint in a couple of decades, life can become gray—and beige, and sort of a pale, pukey green. Color can make a world of difference. That’s why I keep a bunch of flowering plants on the walkway outside my door, and it’s why I went to the recycled home goods store and got partial gallons of leftover p
aint to do Sean’s room. There wasn’t enough of any one color, so he has a green wall, and a blue wall, and a green-and-blue-striped wall. The fourth wall is almost all door so we didn’t need to paint it. The whole thing came out pretty nice.
My room—which is the living room—I scrubbed down really well and left white. Then I got some fabric remnants and sewed curtains that are patchwork—red, yellow, and orange. It makes the whole room feel like sunshine.
I know I live in a crappy apartment and there’s probably lead paint and mold and other unhealthy stuff all over this building. Those are the kinds of things you have to endure when you’re poor. But I do everything I can to make it cheerful and safe for Sean. Right now it’s enough, because he’s young and hasn’t learned to compare himself or me or where we live to others yet. But it breaks my heart to think about a day when he realizes that he has a mother who didn’t graduate high school, a father who’s in prison, and a home that’s one step above the shelters I lived in all those years ago. I can only hope that, when that day comes, he’ll also understand how much I love him.
I climb into my fold-out bed and snuggle down under the covers. While I lie there in the dark it’s easy to pretend—pretend that all the bad things never happened, remember when Colin loved me, trusted me, wanted me. It makes my heart squeeze to think about how he used to look at me and how he looks at me now. I ache deep inside at the pain I see in his eyes, the accusations, the mistrust. I would do anything to make that go away, but I can’t undo the past, and I can’t let him back in as long as he hasn’t forgiven me. I need to know that, even if he wishes I’d done things differently, he understands why I did them. I don’t need his agreement—I need his compassion. It’s what he didn’t give me all of those years ago, and it broke my heart in two.
I breathe deeply, putting the hurt and the loss out of my mind. I’ve become pretty good at it over the years. It’s amazing what denial can do. But Colin’s being here in town, coming to the Bronco day after day, playing with my son so sweetly, looking at me with his beautiful warm smile—it’s bringing it back. All of it. It’s making it harder and harder to deny, and it’s slowly eating away at me and at the little bit of peace I’ve managed to scrape out for myself. I only hope I can hang on, because I can’t let Colin Douglas ruin my life one more time.
A Lush Reunion Page 6
