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7
TEDDY
PRESENT DAY
Sunday isn’t usually my favorite day of the week. It feels like an end to the week, not a start, the way the calendar says. Filled with time to cram everything I’ve been putting off so that I’m not behind when I head to work on Monday morning.
ThisSunday, I wake up with a smile on my face.
It’s concerning—how complete and consuming her presence here is. How two hours of playing guitar and sipping whiskey turned into the highlight of my week.
Month.
Probably year too, if I want to soundreallypathetic.
I spent a long time thinking I was broken when it came to love and relationships. My father had come and gone in my mother’s—and my—life as he pleased, up until the state of Arkansas locked him in one place. I never met Grams’s husband, who had died before I was born, or my dad’s parents. Happy, lasting relationships were a fairy tale in my experience.
Sutton is both a confirmation and a harsh dispute that I’m capable of forming a strong, lasting attachment. I can see that with her.Confirmation. But it’s never—we’ve never—happened.Dispute.
She’s leaving today. Maybe it’ll be another eight years before I see her again. Maybe I never will. Her lengthy absence from Brookfield made it clear nothing is pulling her back here.
Not her father.
Definitely not me.
And I can’t figure out why it still matters to me so fucking much. Why the idea of her leaving, of her marrying someone else, of her having kids with someone else makes me feel nauseous for reasons unrelated to the amount of whiskey I imbibed last night.
I roll out of bed and yank on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Stumbling into the living room, the first thing I see are the two empty glasses on the coffee table and the guitar on the couch. It had been way too long since I played.
I’d started fooling around with my father’s beat-up Cordoba back in elementary school. I love playing. I’mgood. Music has always clicked for me, always made sense without me trying too hard. It’s also tangled up with a whole lot of other emotions that are painful and precious.
The coffeemaker wakes with aglugonce I pour in the grounds and hot water. I lean against the sink and look out at the lake as I wait for it to brew.
The surface of the water is flat and calm this morning, with only the lightest layer of mist lingering. It’s still hazy out, but there’s an underlying layer of warmth appearing that suggests today will be a hot one.
I pour a generous amount of coffee into a mug and start toward the door, pulling on a pair of work boots and crossing my front yard to the property line I share with the Everetts. The walk to the barn only takes a few minutes. I sip as I walk, pulling in deep lungfuls of the fresh air.
This is one of those mornings that feels like it was made for you to enjoy, where there’s nothing to worry about or figure out yet.
Ironic, since I’ve got a lot on my mind at the moment.
I round the corner of the barn and almost trip. A few drops of hot coffee splash out of my mug, hitting my hand with a sizzle. I wince, switching the mug to my other hand so I can wipe the liquid off onto my jeans.
“You’re up early,” I say. Stating the obvious like a pimply preteen who never learned how to talk to a girl.
Around Sutton, that’s often how I feel.
She’s not just the most popular girl in school anymore. She’s famous. Rich. Worldly.
But I know I’d still be fumbling even if she was none of those things.
“Yep.” She pops thePas she shifts from foot to foot.
She’s wearing sneakers this morning, not barefoot. Her blonde hair is up in a messy bun already falling apart, and she’s dressed in running shorts and a T-shirt.
It was easy to fall back into our old patterns last night, under the haze of reminiscing and glow of moonlight. The rising sun casts reality into sharp contrasts. We’re an epilogue, an addendum to an ending that was inevitable from the start. We started standing in front of Pop-Tarts, and this chapter is coming to a close amid cow pies. No candlelight or roses, but it’s real. Us.
“What are you doing here?” Sutton asks.
