Heart and Home

by Jennifer Melzer

  “Man, the things parents do to their kids,” I sighed.

  “Yeah, it makes you want to dive right into motherhood, doesn’t it?”

  “Totally!” I rolled my eyes.

  It was just after noon when I pulled in and parked beside Troy’s truck. The opened garage door revealed two dressed deer hanging, a buck and doe, but no sign of Troy or Marty. Leaving my shopping bags in the trunk, I hiked the stairs and found the two of them huddled around the television watching a college football game, still dressed for the hunt.

  “Who shot the buck?” I lowered my purse beside the sofa and sat down by Troy.

  “Marty.”

  “Becky’ll be so proud.”

  Marty’s face lit up with pride. “I haven’t shot a deer in fifteen years. This morning was amazing.”

  I sat by and listened to their combined story, how Troy shot his doe first thing, and then as they were dragging her back they’d come across Marty’s buck. I almost forgot in my years away how animated hunters got while recounting the hunt. My dad hunted while I was growing up, and Mom and I spent many a night listening to his close encounters or near misses at the dinner table, and a ripple of nostalgia quivered through me.

  After a few minutes it was more like the two of them were recounting the story to each other, so I just smiled and nodded when one of them happened to look my way with that self-satisfied gleam of hunter’s achievement.

  Finally Marty stood up with an elated sigh and held a hand out to Troy. “Thanks a lot, man. I really had a great time this morning, but I should probably get going.”

  “Hey, you’re welcome to come back and use a couple of them farm tags I promised. Bring your brother, and we’ll make a day of it.”

  “Definitely, I will.”

  I stayed behind and flipped through the channels while Troy walked Marty down to his car. I heard them talking just below me, but tuned it out. I was still preoccupied with what Becky told me that morning about Troy only having one year of classes left. The notion that he had been so close to finishing his degree, but refused to even discuss the possibility now was just further testimony to how much he sacrificed. So loving and giving, it broke my heart when I thought about how willing he was to set his own life aside forever, if need be, to fulfill a promise he’d never even wanted to make.

  His last girlfriend, whom he rarely mentioned, left because he hadn’t wanted to move to North Carolina, but how much more was there to that story? Had she faced his unwillingness to budge against the guilt that held him fast to a life he’d never bargained for? Did she rail against him in hopes her feelings for him would be enough to make him see the truth about what he was doing to himself?

  I only had to close my eyes to see the faraway look in his eye when he’d been telling me about discovering opportunity at college, and how quickly that passion turned to cold resentment in his voice. His warning that night at my apartment resonated through me like little daggers of fear, a threat that if I pushed too hard he’d pull away, and just when I’d gotten attached to the feeling of him in my arms.

  He reappeared and sat down on the edge of the sofa to unlace his boots. After laying them neatly to the side, he lay down, and in a deliberate plea for affection rested his head in my lap. I lifted my hand into the soft curls of his golden hair and a satisfied grin broke beneath his carefully trimmed beard. I looked down the length of him, the way his feet hung over the edge of the sofa because he was too tall. The slim sofa was made to utilize the space, but it was almost too thin to accommodate his frame. He was powerfully built, well-muscled from years of hard, physical labor, and yet knowing what I knew now, he seemed almost fragile.

  Becky said he seemed more confident in my company than he had since he’d come back, like I’d managed to empower him, and yet he kept the deepest of his pain hidden away.

  “You scratch behind my ear and I’m gonna start kicking like a dog,” he teased, breaking through my silent observation.

  What was I supposed to do? Was I meant to just succumb to his stubborn insistence, love him even though he was destroying himself, or was I meant to heal him, like my dream mother said?

  “Could you reach down and get my phone out of my purse, please?”

  He twisted sideways and rustled through the bag on the floor. He drew out my phone, handed it back to me, and then twisted and rolled around until he was comfortable again. He flipped the television channel back to the football game and lifted his head twice to readjust his position in my lap.

  I dialed Becky’s number, and she answered quickly, “Hey, did I leave something in your car?”

  “No, but remember when we were talking about that thing with Lydia?”

  She was quiet a moment, as if thinking, and then, “Oh, yeah. What about it?”

  “I think I should do it.”

  “Really?”

  “Can you call her and find out about it and call me back later?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “You’re the best.” I hung up and leaned over the side to drop my phone back into the bulk of my purse.

  Troy didn’t take his eyes off the television, and his tone lacked real curiosity when he asked, “Who’s Lydia?”

  “A friend of Becky’s,” I explained. “She used to be a Rockette.” I wondered why I’d included that, as it didn’t explain why we were calling Lydia, but he didn’t push.

  He simply said, “Oh yeah?” as he stifled a yawn with remote in hand.

  I returned to the task of running my fingers through his hair, “Yeah.”

  The soothing movement relaxed and eventually put him to sleep. I watched for nearly half an hour as he slept, having grown fond of the innocence revealed by the relaxation of all the muscles in his face. The cares that often creased his brow were smoothed away, and his mouth slipped into an adorable pout. He didn’t even notice when I slipped out and replaced my lap with a pillow.

  Grabbing my jacket I crept quietly down the stairs and into the house as I promised to do. Lottie was at work in the kitchen, where she’d already managed to bake a few dozen cookies unassisted. She put me to work straight away chopping walnuts for fudge.

  It always felt strange and just a little bit heavy inside the Kepner house, and I realized early on that it was due to the size. With just Lottie living in such a massive farmhouse it made the place seem almost haunted, and when she asked me to fetch her reading glasses from the spacious family room I wondered if the ghost of Aaron Kepner somehow lingered on. The high ceilings should have offered a sense of openness, but instead it only intensified the hollow loneliness pressing in on me. I looked up, half expecting to find evidence of his hovering presence watching over his family from beyond.

  On my way back to the kitchen I paused at the stairwell to look at the pictures on the wall. One that caught my eye was a family portrait, just the three of them and Lottie looking younger than I could ever remember. Even at those early church picnics when Troy liked to play chase-the-girls Lottie had been cursed by the early onset of multiple sclerosis, and she always seemed much older than she really was. Troy was probably only two or three years old, with platinum blond curls and a big toddler grin. Chubby cheeks emphasized the dimples that made him irresistible as an adult. On the left, like a dooming shadow, was Aaron Kepner, as serious and stoic as I remembered, but what really stood out were his eyes. Despite the fact that he hardly yielded to a smile for the photograph there was something playful and familiar about his eyes: denim blue with stark flecks of white, just like Troy’s.

  Handing over Lottie’s glasses, I went back to chopping nuts. “Lottie, what was Troy like when he was little?”

  “You don’t remember?” She asked.

  “Nothing before we were in school,” I admitted.

  “Well, he wasn’t too much different before he started school,” she said. “He was always real happy, always joking and teasing. It was like he wasn’t happy unless he had everyone laughing.”

  “He’s still like that,” I real
ized.

  “Not so much as he used to,” she poured a carefully measured bowl of oats into a batch of batter for oatmeal raisin cookies. “He’s too serious now, though I have to say he’s lightened up these last few weeks or so.” She started to stir the oats in, but after a few minutes her arm grew too tired and she passed it over to me wordlessly. “It’s like he’s found his humor again.”

  It saddened me to think that there had ever been a Troy who lacked the sense of humor I had grown so accustomed to in the last weeks. That, coupled with the shy, defeated sort of image Becky painted of him made the man they referred to seem unreal.

  Lottie seemed to sense my reverie when she noted, “You’ve been good for him.”

  “He’s been good for me,” I realized. “I just wish there was more I could do more for him, maybe talk him into finishing school somehow. He’s so creative and good with his hands.”

  A sigh deflated her as she sat down at the table. “I know dear. I tried to convince him for months to go back and finish, but he wouldn’t hear of it. My permission and my blessing weren’t enough.” She played with the tattered edges of the tablecloth, growing distant as she confessed, “His daddy laid an unfair burden on him that I haven’t had any luck lifting, no matter what I’ve tried.”

  “He must have really looked up to his dad.”

  “Yes, he did, and Aaron abused that devotion and admiration,” she explained.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Aaron grew up on this very farm with a houseful of brothers and sisters, and he expected we’d have us a houseful of kids too. When I first got sick, Troy was just little, and soon we discovered that having other children wasn’t in the cards for us. All his expectations fell to Troy. Even when he was a boy, it was like he could never do enough to please his dad, like somehow in Aaron’s head it was Troy’s fault he was an only child.”

  “It must have been hard on him.” The stabbing ache inside of me doubled, and I looked down into the bowl of dough in front of me. A broken and weary soul… how on earth was I going to be able to repair that break so he could rest long enough to realize he was denying who he really was?

  Lottie’s voice seemed to shake when she said, “I thought when he went off to school he’d find his own way, but then…” She shook her head and pushed up slowly from her chair. She walked by me and paused to rest a tender hand on my cheek. She looked into my eyes, her own gaze pale and fierce as a wintry landscape. “But you’ve been good for him. I see that light in his eyes again, and there’s hope in there. It’s like you have this power over him and every time he looks at you…” Her hand slid away, but I could feel the heaviness of her acknowledgement still hanging above me like a lead cloud. “If anyone can show him how to live again, Janice, you can.”

  Me?

  I didn’t even know how to live myself. I’d spent the last eight years of my life running away from a town I let have power over me, and only with Troy’s help had I started to realize it wasn’t the town that made the person, but one’s choices and deeds. By all rights, his choices made him one of the most noble and giving men I had ever known, but when nobility crossed the line and he gave more of himself than he had to give, wasn’t that like suicide?

  When he bounded through the backdoor two hours later with a steaming pizza, the depth of his thoughtfulness reaffirmed itself tenfold. He stole a cookie on his way to the dining room table and came back gushing his mother’s praises in such a way that Lottie nearly melted on the spot.

  I set the table while she finished tidying up in the kitchen, and as I set the last plate down Troy drew me into his arms and whispered, “There is something incredibly sexy about a woman who’s not afraid to get dirty in the kitchen.” Self-consciously I started to reach up to wipe the flour from my face, but he held my wrist gently from the task and stole a kiss instead. “It’s frighteningly domestic, but I like it.”

  As I laid my head against his chest and hugged him, I knew in that moment without a doubt that Troy was my future, that thing I hadn’t even known I’d been looking forward to, but never wanted to let go of now that I found it.

  It didn’t matter that it had been just a matter of a few weeks. From the very first moment he looked into my eyes while standing on the front porch step of my parents’ house a fire sparked between us that I was fairly certain would burn beyond this lifetime and the next.

  But as long as he was belabored with his father’s guilt he’d never be able to give all of himself because he’d given the best parts of himself to a dead man’s expectations. I drew back just enough to look into his eyes and realized that win or lose, it had somehow fallen to me to save him from the guilt that drove him like a slave through every day.

  I only hoped that I was strong enough to win, because I couldn’t even begin to imagine how I would survive if I lost him so soon after finding him.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It turned out that the psychic Lydia knew booked herself clean through the holidays, but because Lydia not only helped her find the perfect building to open her shop in, but a beautiful home in the historic district of Williamsport as well, she agreed to give us an hour of her time on Sunday afternoon. I passed on church, explaining to both Dad and a disappointed Lottie I had something important to take care of before heading back to the city, but Troy hadn’t been so easy to placate.

  “A psychic?” He leaned against the counter in his kitchen with his arms crossed, but the real annoyance read in his face. “What the hell for?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Haven’t you ever just wanted to know the answers, or maybe to ask someone for advice before you made a big decision, advice that might help you put everything into perspective, including the things that maybe you can’t see?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  I looked down at the bowl of cereal in front me. Small, pink marshmallows floated on top of the milk without direction and I swirled them absently with my spoon.

  “Troy, my life has changed so dramatically in such a short amount of time.” I didn’t look up for fear he might see some hint of the fearful reservations I had about my future. “My mom dying, quitting my job, falling in love with you and then Thursday my dad hands me this whopping check from my mom’s life insurance policy and tells me he wants me to buy the Standard building and give this town a paper again. Before all this happened my life was predictable and stable. I knew what to expect from every day, and now I can’t tell what’ll happen between sunrise and sunset most days.”

  “That’s the way life works. We’re not supposed to know all the answers, Janice.” He pushed off the counter and started back the hallway, calling over his shoulder, “If we were, we’d all be born with carefully mapped out instruction manuals we could refer to every single time something didn’t go the way we thought it should.”

  “Maybe psychics are life’s manual, Troy,” I shot back. “Did you ever think of that?” I found myself muttering under my breath about manuals and how I wished like hell he’d have come with one, while he dressed in the other room.

  Dumping my unfinished cereal down the disposal, I rinsed the bowl and left it in the sink before stalking back the hallway to continue our conversation.

  “I don’t know what the big deal is, or why you’re so against the whole thing.”

  “I’m not, just go.” He drew a dark blue sweater over a plain white button down shirt, both of which really made his eyes shine.

  This time I crossed my arms, not buying for a second his “just go” was even remotely sincere.

  “Is it because I’m bailing on church?”

  “You know I don’t care about church,” he said, stepping up to the mirror to adjust his collar. “I’d bail on it myself if I hadn’t already promised to take my mother.”

  “Then why are you so upset?”

  I was still wearing my pajamas and had two hours to kill before I was to meet Lydia in Montoursville. Becky woke up with a head cold, and called just minutes before to let
me know she wasn’t going to be able to go with us.

  “Troy.” I slid in behind him and studied his reflection in the mirror, the taut corners of his stubborn mouth and near brutal narrowing of his eyes. I had a dark feeling inside that the first argument I’d been so carefully avoiding was about to leap out and shake me by the shoulders. “Talk to me, please.”

  He leaned forward on the dresser, hands positioned on each side and fingers clenched around the frame so that his knuckles whitened. He looked into my mirror eyes. “What do you want me to say, Janice?”

  “I don’t know? Say that you’re not mad.”

  “Fine,” he insisted, pushing off of the dresser and turning around so I had to step backward quickly to avoid being toppled over. “I’m not mad.”

  “Well, that was convincing,” I huffed, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

  “I’m just saying what you want to hear.” He pulled open the doors of his closet and bent down to take out his shoes.

  “I don’t want you to say what I want to hear, Troy. I want to hear the truth. I want to know why you’re so upset about this whole thing.”

  “Because maybe I’m just the slightest bit selfish, okay?” he slammed the closet door. “Maybe the fact that we spend a weekend together here and there and then try to make up for that with hours on the phone isn’t as easy to deal with as I thought it would be.” He turned around, but avoided looking into my eyes. “Then on the last day we have to together before god only knows when we’ll see each other again, you’d rather run off and spend your last few hours with some stranger you’re hoping will solve all your problems.”

  “Is that what you think?” I stammered. “That I don’t want to spend time with you before I leave?”

  The shrug of his shoulder coincided with a questionable look that suggested I should just interpret things however I wanted.

  “Fine.” I threw up my arms and stood up. “I hadn’t realized that not spending every minute I had with you was going to make you think I cared so little about us.” I started out of the room.