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“It isn’t a waste. You deserve it.”
“Do I, carrot?”
“Yes. You do.” She tapped her chin. “I need to come up with an appropriate corresponding nickname for you.”
“No, you don’t,” he said.
“I do. My darling radish.”
He grinned, albeit reluctantly. “I’m not your radish.”
“Rutabaga.”
“Nope.”
“Turnip.”
“My masculinity is shriveling.”
She frowned. “Eggplant?”
“I mean...”
She laughed. They were ridiculous sometimes, and she never really had a person she could be wholly ridiculous with. At least, not in her memory. Not recently. She just... She was really working overtime to not think what she was beginning to feel, because she was afraid that when she thought it, she was going to say it. And she was afraid that once she said it she was going to disrupt this. She did not want to disrupt this. Because it mattered far too much to her. It mattered far more than anything.
They got plates out and set them on the table, and she loved that they were using real plates, real silverware. Because it felt official. Not like a picnic or like easy cleanup for guests. It felt like maybe they shared this place. Like it was their kitchen.
The idea of that made her heart squeeze, made her stomach go tight.
She chatted more about the farm store while they ate, and she could see that something was on his mind. She could read him now. As easy as anything. “What’s going on?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Levi,” she said. “I know it isn’t nothing.”
“It was something that my sister said,” he said.
“What?”
“I haven’t told anyone this,” he said, the words coming rough. “Because I was never going to tell the story to my siblings, and I’ve never been close enough to anyone else to tell it, not even Damien.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“I saw my dad die. I saw him go down in the middle of the field, holding his chest, but he didn’t... He didn’t cry out in pain or fear or anything like that. He just went straight down. And I ran to him, and he looked up at me, but he didn’t really see me. He was looking past me. And he just said her name. Two, three times. And that was it. I called for help, but he was beyond resuscitation by the time they got there. It was a massive heart attack. The kind that just takes you. And they figure it was because of the stress. The stress of his loss. A broken heart. That’s what I figured. That’s what I know. He didn’t want to stay.”
She didn’t have any protection left. Not any. Not from that truth. Not from the raw admission that had just come out of his mouth.
“You saw your dad die.”
He nodded. “Yeah. And, you know, I think it’s right. Because he watched her go, and somebody needed to bear witness. To him. What he lost. To his light going out.” He was quiet for a long moment. “His light went out when she died, though. That was when it changed. Forever. It changed forever.” He coughed, like it was a replacement for a sob. “I couldn’t ever talk to anyone about it. But I want you to know. I want you to understand.”
He looked up at her. “I had to go on,” he said. “For everybody, I had to go on. I wasn’t perfect. I was a little bit messed up, and I made mistakes because of it. But I tried. I had to. I couldn’t... I couldn’t let my own heart give out. I had too much left to take care of.”
“Levi, you are incredible. You have done so much to make everybody as okay as you possibly can and you...” She realized that while he had told her the story, he hadn’t actually said what his sister had said to make him think of it.
“What did your sister say to you?”
“I asked her why they all acted like they needed to take care of me. She said I never had any time to grieve. Because I was too busy taking care of them. But what she doesn’t understand is that taking care of them helped keep me together. It was a good thing. But if there’s one thing I maybe needed to get out, it was that. So, thank you. Thank you for letting me tell you.”
