It shamed me, as it always did, that my first response was to tell him no. I didn’t want to spend the whole weekend doing chores and listening to him gripe about how I was abandoning the family to get a degree I didn’t need. Then I took another look at those new lines on his face and relented. Besides, it’d get my mind off kissing Charlie, or at least, I hoped so. She has enough on her plate with what went down with Andrew and now she was leaving in a couple months.Forget about it, Walsh. I’d be content with the way things were. I had to be.
“Sure, dad. I’ll be outside in just a sec.”
He nodded, reached around me to put his cup in the sink, then pushed out the squeaky back door, the screen slapping behind him.
I crossed the scuffed checkerboard linoleum to the table and stopped to give Grandma Dorothy a kiss on her hair. I met Charlie’s eyes over grandma’s head and said, “Will you be okay here for a little while?”
She smiled, but there were questions in her eyes. “Sure. I bet Grandma Dorothy and I can find something to keep us plenty busy.”
“You sure?”
Grandma twisted in her seat. “You heard the girl. Now get outside. Your daddy’s been busting his back for months, but he’s not as young as he used to be and could use your help.”
Charlie sent me a sympathetic look and I sighed. Sometimes, despite her patchy memories and tics, Grandma could send an arrow straight through to the bullseye. “Go,” Charlie mouthed.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to help my family. I wanted to, I tried. But living my father’s life wasn’tallI wanted for my own. I had my own dreams. My own goals. He was stubborn enough that he didn’t want to bend, and I was stubborn enough that I’d never ask for help.
I found him in the old barn situated a healthy walk behind the house. Whatever color it had been painted when it was new had long since faded. My dad, and sometimes I, had kept it in good repair as best we could. Replacing the roof, rotted beams, weathered siding. It was a patchwork mess but the scent of fresh hay for the horse and motor oil was a familiar and welcome reminder of all the years I’d spent here. I thought of Charlie, who’d come to love my family in place of her own and felt guilty about even wanting to run from this place.
Dad called out from where he was sprawled underneath a tractor. “You’re taking your sweet time, aren’t you?”
Still thinking of Charlie, I swallowed my angry reply and hunkered down with one hand keeping balance on the side of the rusted old machine. “What do you need?”
We were more alike than I wanted to admit, because I saw him choke on his own response before he bit out, “Get me that wrench there.”
Like they’d been a thousand times before, the tools he needed for the job were laid out on a towel, a dirty one, but as organized as you could get in a country barn. I found the wrench and passed it to his outstretched hand. Metallic clanks echoed throughout the bowels of the tractor.
It would have been so easy to be the son he wanted me to be. Easy in that I could see how much he wanted the kind of man who’d proudly carry on the traditions he’d started, who’d farm the land he slaved over his whole life. The irony was it was the very farm that had inspired me to become a vet. We had horses, donkeys, a cow or two, plus a slew of chickens, goats and barn cats. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to have the large animal vet visit a couple times a year. Dad hadn’t thought anything of my tagging along back then, but it had molded me in the way that I knew he still wished the farm would.
The conversation we should have been having hung over the rest of the afternoon like a dark cloud, but neither of us could make the first move. Instead, the only words spoken were requests for more tools or polite small talk. I wished as I handed him a screwdriver and followed his directions for guiding in a part that I could talk to him like I had when I was a kid. Then he’d ask for something else and the moment was lost.
It wasn’t until he slid out from under the tractor that he looked me in the eye for the first time since I got home. He wiped his hands with a rag and sighed. My body tensed in preparation.
“We’re selling the farm,” he said.
Chapter Six
Charlie
“I’m sohappy to see you again,” Mrs. Walsh said as she smiled at me over a glass of milk after dinner that night. Liam had come in after a couple hours with his dad looking like a thunderstorm rolling in, so I kept my distance. He’d only surfaced when his mom started making dinner with a healthy side of homemade chocolate chip cookies. “I kept telling Liam he needed to bring you around.”
A pang of guilt made my stomach clamp down on the contents of rich chocolate-y goodness. “I know. I’m sorry I haven’t visited. I’ve had…a lot going on.”
She tutted at me. “No need to apologize, honey. Liam told me all about the boy you’ve been seeing. Andrew, right? How’s that going?”
Liam, who’d been happily stuffing his face with his mother’s homemade chocolate chip cookies, paused, and his eyes came to me. I shook my head subtly, and he chugged a glass of milk to help the cookies down.
I shrugged in his mother’s direction. “It’s going alright.” I hoped my response was nonchalant enough. Mrs. Walsh had a bullshit detector like you wouldn’t believe.
Which was why when she said, “Now, I don’t believe that for a second, but I’ll let it slide until you’re ready to talk about it, sugar bean,” I couldn’t look her in the eye. “Don’t you worry,” she added, “these things have a way of working themselves out.”
“I sure hope so,” I managed.
“You two clean up after yourselves. I’m gonna check in on Grandma Dorothy.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Walsh,” I said.
“No need, honey. You’re family.”
