Page 18 of Seeing Harper

Libby stood there, chewing on her nail as she thought about it. “You have your phone?”

Travis picked it up from beside himself on the sofa. “Always.”

“Check her last drive. See if she was at Clay’s house.”

“Already did. Shows her driving to the trailer park before she came home, but we don’t know where she was at the trailer park, just that she was there.”

“For how long?”

Travis pulled up his tracking app and scrolled through a few screens to see her past drives. He shrugged. “About four minutes.”

“Then she wasn’t visiting anyone, she was dropping someone off. Clay rode with her today, and I bet she was taking him home.”

“Okay,” Travis said.

“What if Clay is the one? The right one. The one who really sees her? What if he’s the one that she’s been missing and he’s always been right in front of her?”

“Like I said, a steady, reliable boy. Won’t have to kill him and she stays home and runs the farm. Win/win.”

“She might be close to home, but might not stay home,” Libby said. “She’s still going to be around, but maybe not here, here. Like in the house. I can’t see anybody, Clay or anyone else wanting to move in with her family.”

“I don’t see what the problem with that would be,” Travis said haughtily.

Libby laughed. “Yes, you do. You’re trying to be a hard ass, but you know what the problem is. She’s not a kid and she’s not even a teenager. She’s trying to spread her wings and keep us happy while finding her way at the same time. We need to lighten our expectations and give her some space. And you know damn good and well, you’d have never moved in with my parents to be able to be with me if it had come to it.”

“If that was the only way your father would allow me to be with you, I damn sure would have,” he said.

“Lucky for you by the time you decided to come home from the military and hate me for a year, they’d already moved away, huh?” she said, leaning over to kiss his cheek, then walking off toward the bedroom. “I’m going to relax in bed and read a little.”

“You sure?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m almost as irritated as Harper is. I’m going to read. There’s nothing else I want to do at the moment,” she said as she walked through the door of the bedroom.

Travis sat there in his recliner, and raised his legs higher than the rest of him to give some relief from the throbbing in what was left of his amputated leg and flipped channels on the television. “Didn’t want to go in there with you anyway,” he said, glancing toward their bedroom door a time or two before he finally settled, really wishing he was in the bedroom with Libby.

~~~

Julia opened the door balancing her purse, her keys in one hand, and the three plates of food that Cruz had brought to her. She stepped inside and kicked the door gently so it would close behind her. She walked over to the small square shaped kitchen island to put her purse and the plates down, but instead simply stood there, shaking her head at the array of crap on top of the island. Her room mate was less than organized to say the least. Anything she had in her hands when she stepped inside was dropped on the island and never looked at again until it was an emergency that she find something.

Julia turned around and looked at the coffee table in front of the sofa. It was partially covered, but not quite as bad as the island was. She opted for the coffee table and walked over to the sofa and set her purse, her keys, and her food on the sofa. Then she took the channel selector off the top of the coffee table and put it beside her purse before she picked up one end of the coffee table and let everything on it slide onto the floor. “There. That’s better.” Julia walked into the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge, a fork and knife out of a drawer, three or four paper towels, then went back into the living room and put her food on the coffee table. She smiled as she removed the foil from each plate, and her eyes rounded in appreciation when she got to the dessert plate. “I think I love him,” she said to the empty room as she started in on her food.

Thirty minutes later she sat on the sofa, her food still sitting before her on the table, her fork and knife lying on top of what was left on one of the plates, her hands resting on her belly. The door opened and her room mate walked in. “Ohhh! What are we having for dinner?” she asked, closing the door and hurrying over to see.

“I had leftovers thoughtfully packed for me by one of the most gorgeous men to ever walk this planet. You are having whatever you can provide for yourself. This is mine and I’m not sharing.”

“Oh, come on! That’s not fair.”

“Tell you what. You clean up this pigsty of an apartment, and I might consider sharing. But if you don’t and I find one bite missing, I’ll take back your key and you can move back to your parents’ house. I’ve had it. Clean it up.”

“I know, I know. I’m trying to do better. I just get so overwhelmed and then I think, I’ll pick it up in a little while, but then I forget. And then I do the same thing the next day, and I don’t mean to.”

“I know, that’s why I haven’t made a big deal of it. But I’m over being patient. I don’t like living like this. It doesn’t have to be spotless. I grew up in a house that was ‘lived in’. I have no problem with lived in. Shit everywhere is another thing.”

“Sorry.” Her room mate looked over at the pile of things on the floor that had slid off the coffee table. “Looks like you already took care of the coffee table.”

“No, I just moved it out of my way. It needs to be gone through and thrown away or put away.”

“True.” She went to the kitchen and came back with a garbage bag. She got down on her knees and picked up every scrap of paper and empty soda cans and put them in the garbage bag, then picked up the few pieces of clothing that were on the arm of the sofa — a bath robe, and a teeshirt, that she’d left there and took them to her room. When she came back in the living room, she was still holding the garbage bag. “I’m going to do the island now.”