Along Came Trouble(131)
Language development didn’t actually work that way, but she couldn’t help wondering if maybe it did, for Caleb. He had his own fluency in these kinds of things, a talent for coaxing other people into giving him their best. After all, he’d helped Ellen dismantle her own barriers between “you” and “me,” coaxing her slowly out from behind her castle walls until one day she realized that her whole perspective on self-sufficiency had changed.
Her eyes traveled down the slope of the yard to stop at the fence skirting the property line. As fences went, it was handsome enough. Eight feet tall, cedar, stained and weatherproofed, with a deep new flower bed stretching along its length.
She’d negotiated hard for that flower bed. Caleb spread the mulch for her, and she’d selected the plants from the nursery and put them in the earth on her hands and knees. New hostas, bleeding hearts, lungworts. He’d moved her tulip tree and bought her a second one to stand nearby at the corner of the property. None of it looked like much now, but it would grow. It would thrive.
She didn’t love the fence, but she loved him, and that turned out to be a lot more important.
After three months with Caleb, Ellen could see that she’d taken the wrong lesson from her mascot hosta. She’d thought the plant’s survival proved that she, too, could endure anything. But it was a perennial, for Christ’s sake. Surely the point was that it kept coming back.
Renewal. That was what her life had been missing. That was the pulse that beat at her wrists, the sap rising in her blood, the beautiful pinch of emotion in her throat when she watched Caleb with her son or woke up in the dark to hear her lover groan, caught in a nightmare, and she was able to hold him, soothe him, talk him through it.
She’d spent the past few years hibernating. Now her life had these green shoots, this promise of fullness, and there were moments when gratitude overwhelmed her.
Caleb finished raking a pile of leaves onto a bright blue tarp, plopped Henry down in the middle of it, and hauled him down the driveway, threatening to dump him out front and leave him there for the leaf trucks. She watched her dark-haired lover with her light-haired son, and she let the late afternoon sun warm her bare feet where they stuck out from under the porch roof. It was a perfect day of the sort that came only three or four times a year in Ohio. Bright blue sky, crisp air, a breeze.
They were a perfect family, suspended in a perfect moment.
Of course, tomorrow it was supposed to rain, and it would turn colder soon. Last week, Caleb had questioned her parenting one too many times in a twenty-four-hour period, and she’d snapped at him and sent him home to sleep alone.
He worked himself ragged, especially now that his business was taking off, and he didn’t like it when she got on his case about that. Sometimes she still got scared and hid behind a self-protective wall, and he didn’t like that, either.
But he always coaxed her back out.
Interdependence required these terrifying acts of faith. She kept reminding herself to practice trust, to believe that Caleb would deserve it. He hadn’t let her down yet, and the longer they were together, the more deeply she believed that he never would. That no matter what missteps either of them made, he’d never fracture her trust irrevocably.
Caleb and Henry walked back up the driveway, Caleb dragging the tarp behind him, and Ellen heard the familiar rumble of the garage door going up. She set her tea down and stood, knowing he’d need help folding the tarp to put it away. “Go grab the big rake for me, okay, buddy?” Caleb asked Henry.
“No.”
“Do it now, and I’ll give you fruit snacks when we get inside.”
Henry smiled and ran off to get the rake. It was clear across the yard, which made its retrieval a big job, but Henry would do just about anything for fruit snacks.
“You shouldn’t bribe him,” Ellen said, picking up one end of the tarp.
“I just wanted a minute with you. I haven’t talked to you all day.”
It was true, more or less. Henry had a tendency to insert himself into every conversation she tried to have with Caleb. He adored Caleb, but he hated having to compete for Ellen’s attention. She kept hoping he’d get over it, but so far, no luck.
Thank God for Maureen.
“Are we shaking this out?” she asked.
“Yep. Close your eyes.”
She did, holding tight to the corners and letting Caleb do the shaking. Her arms rode along as passengers. When she opened her eyes, she saw leaf litter in Caleb’s hair and smiled. “Am I covered in leaves, too?”