CHAPTER TWELVE
Eleanor knew that she probably looked like a total cuckoo, pacing in front of Nuts and Bolts, Garrett’s hardware store, but she couldn’t help it. She was just feeling really nervous about this conversation.
It was silly. She told herself, time and again, that it was silly. Garrett was a wonderful boyfriend, and it wasn’t like Jeremy was some sort of secret child that she had hidden from him. He knew about Jeremy! He’d even waved to her son once or twice in the background of video calls between mother and son.
But that didn’t mean that he’d ever seen herreallydo ‘mom stuff.’ And while Eleanor thought of her mom-self and her girlfriend-self as two versions of the same person, not two separate people, it still remained true that Garrett had only seen the one side of her. Kids changed things. And yes, it was possible she was extrapolating from her marriage. She and Brian had been married barely a year when Jeremy had come along, and from then on, they hadn’t really dealt closely with one another. They’d been parents first and people second. It was why their marriage had fallen apart so quickly after Jeremy had gone to college. She had enough perspective to see that now.
And yes, Eleanor’s logical brain knew that a visit from a twenty-year-old son was not the same as bringing a baby into the world. But her logical brain wasnotthe one running the show here today.
And byhereandtoday, Eleanor meant all week. All week, in which she had not yet gotten up the courage to tell Garrett about her son’s upcoming visit. But she was running out of time. Also, she was starting to feel like arealcoward about it.
She stopped her pacing and sucked in a breath. It was time to go inside. Plus, it was really cold out.
She strode boldly into Nuts and Bolts, pausing only long enough to note the sign on the front desk that saidIn Back Workshopin Garrett’s no-nonsense, blocky handwriting. She headed to the doors of the workshop, not letting herself second-guess her decision… especially since it would be more like twenty-thousandth-guessing at this point.
Eleanor opened the door carefully, wanting to make sure that she didn’t startle Garrett, who sometimes got caught up in detailed work. Since that ‘detailed work’ often happened with power tools, she wanted to make sure to be extra careful. Breaking the news about Jeremy’s visit would bewaymore awkward if they had to have it in the emergency room because she’d made him cut himself with a jigsaw.
She found her boyfriend bent over his current project, a custom barn door for one of the big old houses that was on the outskirts of town, where properties were larger and lots of people kept animals. If she recalled correctly, the people who had ordered this piece of woodwork were hobby farmers, not professional ones, but they clearly had enough of a budget that they didn’t need to make money off their farm, since the work they had ordered was detailed, beautiful, and expensive.
“Hey, honey,” Garrett said when he noticed her standing there. “This is a surprise. What’s up?”
Eleanor wrung her hands together. She’d felt a momentary calm while she’d watched Garrett work, something that she found oddly soothing whenever she stopped by the hardware store to spend time with her boyfriend. Now though, with his hands no longer gently and competently guiding sandpaper over a curve in the carving, her anxiety came back full force.
“I have something to tell you,” she said, gnawing slightly at her lip.
Whatever he saw in her face made him drop the sandpaper to the floor.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, crossing to her, his hands coming to her shoulders right away. “Are you okay? Are you hurt? Are you sick? Is it the store? What’s going on? Whatever it is, we’ll get through it.”
And this wassosweet andsolovely that, of course, Eleanor made it all worse by bursting into tears.
“Oh, baby,” Garrett said, gathering her in his arms, sounding completely freaked out. His voice was steady despite his obvious stress, however. “We’ll fix it. Whatever it is, we’ll fix it.”
“No, no,” she said, pushing back and wiping her tears. “It’s nothing bad. It’s just… I’m so silly. You’re so wonderful and I feel sosillyfor freaking out.”
Garrett paused, looking at her. “Nothing’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong,” she assured him.
“Goodness, woman.” He pulled her into his arms again, this time in relief, and he pressed a kiss to her head. “Don’t scare me like that. Okay, what’s going on?”
“Okay, so…” She sucked in a breath. “Jeremy is coming to visit.”
Garrett blinked at her very slowly.
“Eleanor,” he said with absolutely no inflection. “You come in here like that, making me think that you’re sick or hurt or something terrible, and what you have to tell meis good news?”
Her brain felt very confused, because Garrett’s tone didn’t sound happy, but he was telling her the thing she wanted to hear.
“Um,” she said. “Yes.”
“Okay,” he said, pressing a finger to the space between his brows. “Okay. I’m going to move past the part where you took a year off my life and just get to the nice part. Right.”
He seemed to need another moment, and Eleanor gave it to him. She supposed this was only fair, given that she’d been the one to shake him up.
Whoops.
“Right,” he repeated. “So, when is he coming? How long is he staying?”
