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“She told me a story I’d never heard from Dad. They rode east to west, right? And they met in Kansas. But Dad never mentioned they had a fight in Wyoming, and he started sharing a tent with some woman named Jill. Mom took off with a different group, figuring she’d nev
er see him again. Then one day she had a flat, I think in Idaho, and no spare tube. She was sitting by the side of the road waiting for somebody to come along and give her a lift when up rides my dad, alone. He told her he was sorry. He’d been scared things were moving too fast, and he’d panicked. It was a stupid mistake, and he wished he could take it back.”
She hopped down and walked over to the window. There wasn’t much to see out there. No traffic to speak of.
“So what did your mom do?” he asked, knowing this was the important part.
Lexie turned around and met his eyes, and she was there again. Wary, uncertain, but there. “She forgave him.”
“Why?”
Tunneling her hands into her pockets, she lifted her shoulders to her ears in a full-body shrug. “People make mistakes. She was in love with him, and she wanted to be happy more than she wanted to be angry. She made him buy her pie for breakfast all the way to Oregon.”
Tom nodded. He still needed to think about what she was saying, but he knew already it was the best Bikecentennial story he’d ever heard Lexie tell.
When he took a step closer, she tensed up, so he stopped. He wasn’t going to push her. Yet.
She met his eyes again. “There’s a middle ground,” she said softly. “Between too much guilt and not enough. If you look around for it, you can find it.”
Tom returned to the doorway. “Thanks, Marshall.”
Her parting comment came to him over his shoulder as he walked out. “Sometimes penance helps. My dad had the pie.”
Back on the bench again, he thought about the story. Was it really that straightforward? Could you decide I want to be happy more than I want to carry this around with me? Lexie seemed to think so. Thoreau did, too, with his comment about elevating your life by conscious endeavor. Maybe you could decide to be different. Maybe it really was that simple.
Over the past five years, he’d given a lot of thought to what he’d done wrong, but he hadn’t often wondered whether he could leave it behind, or what, if anything, there remained to fix. He hadn’t been looking for the middle ground. But he wanted to find it now. He wanted the infinite expectation of the dawn, and he wanted to share it with Lexie. He’d buy her all the damn pie she could eat.
I made the wrong call. And now I have to live with it. That’s what he’d told her. And he did have to live with it. The past wasn’t going anywhere. But he didn’t have to let it ruin what was left of his life. Taryn was always trying to tell him he deserved to be happy. She didn’t blame him for what had happened. Neither did Lexie.
Hell, neither did his mom. One day during the trial, he’d been about to take the stand when an attorney had handed him a note. It was unsigned, but he knew his own mother’s handwriting. It said, I’m proud of you. He’d looked over to find her in her usual seat by his father’s side, dressed to impress in a navy blue suit. Loyal to her husband to the end, she hadn’t so much as glanced at him. But she’d told him.
Taryn, Lexie, his mother. They were three very smart women. Maybe they were right, and he wasn’t entirely beyond redemption.
He didn’t know if it was true, but for the first time, he knew he wanted it to be true.
Digging through his panniers, he found his phone and called his sister.
19
Ashland, Virginia. 4,171 miles traveled.
After forty-two hundred miles in the saddle, give or take, Lexie had reached the Center of the Universe. That’s what all the signs said, anyway. She and Tom had made it to the quaint college town of Ashland, Virginia, about seventy miles from Yorktown. They’d stopped for the day at a downtrodden motel on the outskirts, forced by a lack of campgrounds to find rooms for the night. Two rooms and four beds for two people who used to share a tent smaller than a sedan. It felt wrong.
She was lying spread-eagled on top of the bedspread, staring at a faint water stain on the textured plaster ceiling. Through the wall behind her head, she heard the white hiss of water cut off as Tom finished his shower in the other room. She imagined him drying off with the scratchy motel towel, tucking it around his hips as he dug through his bag for something clean to put on. It made her heart hurt. Apart from kicking off her bike shoes by the door, she hadn’t managed any preparations for her own shower yet. She was too busy trying to put her thoughts in order.
Early tomorrow afternoon, she’d dip her front tire in the Atlantic Ocean and then take her bike to the shop where she’d already arranged to have it boxed up and shipped home. She’d spend one last, lonely night in a hotel, and in the morning she’d fly back to Portland.
Somewhere in there, she was supposed to say goodbye to Tom.
She’d been trying to prepare herself for the separation for almost a thousand miles, but it wasn’t getting any easier to think about it. The closer they got to the end, the harder it became to sleep, to eat, to breathe; to do anything but pine. Yes, “pine” was the word. Or maybe “yearn.” She’d never thought of herself as the pining, yearning type, but apparently all it took was the right guy.
God, she missed him. She missed talking to him in the dark of the tent. She missed the way he’d come up behind her when she was stirring the rice and rub his stubbled chin against her neck, then kiss away the tingling burn. She even missed the way he hassled her in the morning when she was trying to pack up her sleeping bag.
Some stubborn part of her kept insisting it wasn’t over yet. At the Laundromat, she’d told him the story about her parents in the hope what he’d really been asking her was how to put the past behind him. She didn’t know if she’d said the right thing. After she finished up the laundry and they left, he hadn’t brought it up again. But that afternoon, when she rode away from him, he caught up with her. They played the cat and mouse game two more times before she gave up. Today, and yesterday, and the day before that, he’d been a few feet in front of her, where he liked to ride the most. And he seemed different somehow. Steadier.
He’d been telling her stories. When they’d crossed the Appalachian Trail, he reeled off a few tales from the college summer when he and a few buddies had hiked a long section of it. Along the breathtaking Blue Ridge Parkway, he’d talked about the Scottish Highlanders who had settled the area during the colonial period. Taryn was fascinated by them, he said, and for her birthday one year he’d bought her a trip to the big Highland Games festival on North Carolina’s Grandfather Mountain. At Monticello, where she and Tom had stopped for a tour of Thomas Jefferson’s home, Tom revealed an enthusiasm for the founder that bordered on a crush.
He talked to her, but he hadn’t touched her since the day he’d tried to put his arms around her and she’d pushed him away. Still, his eyes could strip her naked from ten feet away—and did. Sometimes she could feel his gaze on her, hot and hungry, and even though she refused to look up, her body responded with a fierce arousal that took hours to dissipate. He didn’t ask her to come back to bed with him, not out loud, but he didn’t have to. The door to his tent was quite literally open, and as she prepared to go to sleep every night she could see him sitting inside the entrance, watching her. Inviting her.
