Everything I Left Unsaid(12)

Those rules wouldn’t get me very far in the outside world. I would starve to death trying not to be vulgar.

“I need the money.”

Kevin leaned his heft back in his office chair, which squealed against the weight.

“I’m paying you a salary,” he said. “Just make it up another day.”

I’d worked on the farm my entire life and not once did it earn me a penny. All my money I had to ask for, from Mom and then from Hoyt.

Until I took that three grand from Hoyt’s safe.

Back wages, I’d told myself.

“Now, go on.” Kevin shooed me out the door. “Take a day off.”

“You sure?” I asked. “Because if there’s anything else that needs—”

“No. Nothing else needs doing. Now go.”

Still, I lingered at the door. It’s not that there weren’t a thousand things I needed to get done, but all of them meant leaving the trailer park. This small island of safety. Of work.

I totally tore my life up by the roots and now I was too scared to actually live it.

“Were there any other packages delivered for me?” I asked.

Every night I looked at that phone and thought about calling Dylan. About texting him. Every night I chickened out. Or resisted, like that was a virtue.

“Nope. You gonna stand around here all day?”

“Nope,” I said, pushing the door open and making the bell overhead jingle. “I’m leaving.”

I would go twenty miles into town to get some groceries, because that’s what normal people did when they ran out of gas station food and dish soap. And then I would see if there was a library with an internet connection so I could check on the news from Oklahoma.

Woman Runs Away, I imagined the headlines. Though considering Hoyt, the headline should undoubtedly be more like Lying Wife Runs Out on Husband, Leaving Him No One to Smack Around on the Fifth Day in a Row Without Rain.

Heading back to my trailer I saw Ben in his garden, curling the delicate stems of peas up twine runners tied to the top tier of his fence.

“Sugar snaps?” I asked as I approached.

“No,” he laughed, not looking up, which frankly was a relief. I wasn’t good with eye contact. “Nothing so fancy. I’m trying runner beans for the first time.”

“I wanted to thank you for the tomatoes and the mayo.”

“You did. I got that note. Both notes. You want to write me a letter, too?”

I smiled at the rusty teasing. Smith used to tease me that way, too. A long time ago.

Oh God, Smith.

In my house we had this front hall closet. Right off the foyer next to the front door no one ever, ever used. That front hall closet was where we put the stuff we didn’t know what to do with. Christmas decorations. My grandfather’s old coats. My grandmother’s formal dress, in a garment bag I liked to open when I was a kid, to see the sequins and the peacock pin at the dress’s neck.

And I had one of those closets in my brain. That’s where I’d put all my memories of Smith. All my guilt over what had happened. What…I’d done to him. And I hadn’t thought about him in years, but for some reason, Ben opened that door and the memory rolled out.

“Well, I wanted to thank you in person, then,” I said, pulling myself away from those awful memories.

“My pleasure. I’ve got fifty more tomatoes I can put on your doorstep.”

I had a sudden brainstorm of homemade pasta sauce, with ground beef and Ben’s tomatoes. I learned how to be a lousy cook from my mom, the lousiest, but one year Mom—before things with Smith got so strange, and the new minister, and Mom getting sick—got it in her head to volunteer to make the meat sauce for the church spaghetti supper. She found this recipe on the back of a can of tomatoes and it was such a huge hit that she ended up making the spaghetti sauce for the church for years.

It was the one thing we could make that didn’t involve opening a box and preheating the oven.

And I could give Ben some spaghetti sauce. The quid pro quo of it appealed to me.

“I’ll take whatever you care to give me.”

His garden had everything. Peppers, cucumbers, beets, even. Along the far edge of the fencing were herbs. I saw basil and oregano, which would be pretty awesome in the pasta sauce.

“You want something you should ask for it, girly.”

“I don’t…that’s not—”

“What do you want?” His eyes were nearly black they were so dark, and when they looked into mine I felt pinned to the ground.

Ugh. Eye contact.

“Nothing.”

“Go away, girly. I got no time for this.”

His dismissal stung. “The basil,” I said.

“Yours. Anything else?”

I shook my head, far too uncomfortable to answer.

When I’d needed help, really needed it—life-or-death stuff—I’d been unable to ask. There was no way I was asking for more from this guy’s garden.

“I’m running into town,” I said. “Is there anything you need?”

“Nope.” His thick, gnarled fingers were busy with the delicate work of making sure his beans grew up the twine.

There were tattoos on his knuckles. A word, each letter on a different finger that I couldn’t quite make out.