~Leslie~
A few things needed to be clarified.
Why was Blake Young in town? Why was he buying a building? And why was this the worst day of her life to date?
“Spill it,” she said, succinctly and with no hesitation, just as soon as Travis had sat down to his breakfast.
Leslie had invited herself in without considering that maybe Avery and Travis didn’t want her barging into their house this early on their day off from work. They were training for another one of their crazy super long triathlon things (Leslie didn’t even know what they were called or what was involved, honestly), so it wasn’t like they were really enjoying a day off anyway, waking up before dawn to swim and run, or bike or run, or who even knew. Leslie doubted that it could be true, but they always said that the early morning exercise set the tone for a more positive day.
But still, as Travis raised up a bite of some sort of granola to his mouth, still in his sweaty clothes, he looked just a little irked by her presence.
“Spill what?” he asked, taking a bite.
“Blake Young,” Leslie said, the name still causing her to cringe inwardly. “He just bought First Love!”
Travis considered this new piece of information for a long moment. “Did he?”
And it wasn’t what he said that caught her attention but what he didn’t say. He’d asked about what Blake had done instead of starting with what should have been the obvious first question – Blake Young? What’s he doing back in town?!
Travis already knew that Blake was in town. It was a long stretch to assume this, but Leslie did so anyway, narrowing her eyes at Travis as she did. Sure enough, he looked away.
“You knew he was in town,” she said accusingly. “Why is he in town, Travis?”
“Who are we talking about again?” Avery asked, stepping back over to the table with two coffee mugs in hand, sweat still on her brow from her run. She glanced over at the box of cupcakes Leslie had brought in, cupcakes that she’d made the night before, planning on eating them here with the family as a way to celebrate finally being on her way to owning her own cupcake shop.
So much for that.
“Can I have one of these for breakfast?” Avery asked, grinning up at Leslie.
“Avery,” Travis chided. “That’s the worst recovery meal you can have.”
“You can start lecturing me on my eating habits once you’re actually able to outrun me, Travis,” she said sweetly.
They were competitive but well-matched. Leslie was thankful that Avery had come into her brother’s life and that he’d been smart enough to marry her and make her part of the family.
Leslie pushed the box closer to her sister-in-law with a nod. “Be my guest. Carrot cake and strawberry shortcake. Oh, and white chocolate.”
“So many choices,” Avery murmured, selecting one from the assortment before dropping into the seat next to Travis. “Now, who are we talking about?”
“Blake Young,” Leslie said, moving her attention from Travis to Avery now, hoping to get some answers. “Have you heard that name before?”
“Of course I have,” Avery smiled around her coffee cup. “He’s the new youth pastor at our church. Travis was on the committee that brought him and hired him.”
Leslie watched as Travis froze mid-bite, then casually tried to resume eating as though nothing had happened.
“Travis Collins,” Leslie breathed with even more venom than she’d shown to Blake before. “How dare you…”
Avery looked between the two siblings. “I’m sensing some back story here that I don’t know yet,” she said simply. “Leslie, do you know Blake?”
More than a little.
“I did know him,” she said. “Back in high school.”
“She dated him,” Travis said. “He was her first love.”
Love. As if.
“He wasn’t my first love,” Leslie cut in. “For him to have been that, it would’ve had to have been love between us, and it wasn’t. It was just… stupid, idiotic, high school romance. That crashed and burned, and I’d really not like to relive the whole sordid tale if you don’t mind.”
“Then don’t,” Travis said. “You’re the one who keeps on talking.”
Leslie frowned at this. “Fine, then. I’ll shut up.”
“Praise God,” Travis said.
“If,” she clarified, “you’ll tell me what in the world is going on! Since when is Blake Young a pastor of any kind, and what does that have to do with the fact that he stole my building from me?!”
Travis took a long breath, pushing his granola away for a moment.
“We began the process of looking for a new youth pastor about six months ago, and Blake’s resume was one of the first we got,” he said. “Sent to us straight from the seminary, where he was finishing up a theology degree while embarking on a project with the home mission board. Revitalizing small town churches.”
She didn’t even know where to begin in sorting all of that out. Blake at seminary. Blake working for a mission board. Blake in a small town –
“Granted, he was just starting that work,” Travis said. “The seminary was putting out resumes to try and place him in a small town where he could begin the practical part of his work. Taking a youth ministry at an established church and revitalizing it to reach the entire community.”
“Blake Young,” Leslie repeated, trying to reconcile what she knew of Blake to this new information. “In ministry. Here.”
Travis nodded. “That what I said.”
“We’re talking about the same guy, right?”
“We are,” Travis nodded again. “I’m not sure the seminary was aware that this is his hometown and that he went to church at our church all those years ago. But either way, once his resume came through, the committee was in agreement that he was the one we should pursue. So we did, and he moved here a couple of weeks ago.”
A couple of weeks ago. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?!” Leslie screeched, thinking that she should have known the second he came back so that she could be prepared to…
To what? To never come home again? That was ridiculous. Why did any of this matter so much to her anyway? Why was she freaking out?
“You never wanted to hear anything about him before,” Travis said. “And when you left town for college, you really didn’t care to hear anything about what was going on here anyway, Leslie. Forgive me for not giving you every last detail of every part of our lives here.”
“I didn’t want every detail of your life,” she said. “But the big things, Travis. I would have liked to know about the big things!”
“And Blake Young and his business… was that a big thing to you?”
As if he had to ask.
But no. No! It wasn’t. It shouldn’t be. It…
“Stop trying to distract me,” she said irritably. “You know what I’m talking about –”
“I don’t know,” Travis said wearily, running his hand over his face. “It’s hard to know what you’re talking about when you do so much talking.”
Maybe she was getting carried away. She usually did. Speaking up for her sisters, speaking up for Travis, generally speaking, all the time –
“Please,” she said. “I don’t.”
“The talking,” Travis grumbled. “The constant talking. Chitty chat chat, chitty chitty chat, blah blah blah.” He waved his hands around his head.
Leslie shot him a cold look. “Are you quite done?”
“I don’t know,” he shot back. “Are you done, Leslie?”
“I’m just trying to tell you what’s going on!” She looked over at Avery. “I didn’t choose him, you know, so I suffer through his attitude out of necessity. But you willingly yoked yourself to this grump, and I can’t fathom for the life of me why you’d –”
“He’s cute when he wants to be,” Avery grinned around her cupcake. “And this one is the best yet. Carrot cake. But you did something different to it.”
“I do something different to all of them,” Leslie said, waving away the praise. “Secret recipes. All of them. Which is why I think I’ve surpassed the small business end of this whole deal and need to move to a bigger business model.”
“Because you have secret recipes?” Travis asked dubiously, making a face at her.
“Because I want bigger and better,” Leslie practically yelled. “Because I’ve gotten to a place where I know there’s another step to take, and then, this guy comes in and –”
“And we’re back to it,” Travis sighed. “Let him have that decrepit, ancient, horrible building, Leslie. I’ll build you a brand new building from the ground up. If you’ll only stop talking this whole thing into the ground. Pardon my pun.”
“Yeah, you’re so punny,” she deadpanned. “But I don’t want a new building. I want that old one. The location, the ambience…”
And there was more to it than that. Surely he knew it.
“What?” he asked, sensing it, just like he’d gotten good at sensing many different things over the years. Like when she’d started her period shortly after their parents had died and she had, unfortunately, not known what in the world was even going on. How would she have been having these conversations with other girls her age, when her life was about surviving one day to the next, wading through her impossible grief? It had gone on for a day with her rationalizing it away as all kinds of different things, until it had become too horrific to ignore. She’d come out of the bathroom at their old house where Travis was sitting at the kitchen table with stacks of file folders from work, trying to make sense out of the financial catastrophe he was in. That catastrophe was nothing compared to the one that came when he looked up to see why Leslie was standing just outside the door, panic in her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” he’d asked, likely expecting that she was going to start crying again, like all three girls had been doing more and more often. Irrational, grief-stricken crying over the strangest things and at the weirdest times. All part of the mourning process, Pastor John had said back then. Impossible to chart it or predict it, best to just take it as it comes.
Travis had been expecting more of the same, but Leslie’s words had stopped him.
“I’m dying,” she’d said, even a drama queen back then.
“I’m sorry… you’re dying?” Travis asked, eyebrows raised. “What’s wrong? Why are you dying?”
“I’m bleeding to death,” she’d managed, impressed with the calm way she’d said it, as though she wasn’t screeching on the inside, which she so totally was.
“Did you cut yourself?” Travis pressed, standing now. “Where are you bleeding from?”
She watched him take stock of her, looking for any open gashes or contusions and abrasions.
Nothing.
“Well?” he asked.
“It’s a bathroom problem,” she said.
And he’d looked even more confused for a few seconds, then understanding passed over his features… followed closely by horror.
“Oh… uh…”
“Bleeding to death,” she said again, emotion in the words. “It may be too late to go to the hospital. This may be the end of me, Travis.”
Travis had let out a long breath. “I don’t think you need to go to the hospital,” he’d said, choosing each word carefully. “And it’s not the end of you. It’s… it’s a different kind of problem you’re having. I think. Well, it’s not really a problem.”
He’d let out another long breath as he watched her.
“Oh, Lord,” he said, dropping his head into his hands. “Help me out a little here.”
He was praying, beseeching divine intervention on her behalf, praying that the God who resurrected the dead would sustain her a little longer.
“Is ten too young to…” He looked up at her again. “Leslie, is ten too young?”
“To die?” she asked, thinking that she’d be dead any minute now with the length of time it was taking him to process this. “Probably.”
Travis took a deep breath, his eyes never leaving her. He’d seemed to give himself a good, stern talking to before softening his voice and unclenching his fists. “Come sit over here with me, Leslie.”
She had, wondering what he’d do to try and fix this, thinking that she would have given anything for just a few more years before she bled to death and died like this. Holly and Brooke were going to need her, especially since Travis was an idiot who couldn’t even get her to the hospital on the off-chance that it wasn’t already too late –
“You’re not dying,” he said. “And though I can’t say with complete certainty that I know what’s happened… well, I think I know what’s happened.”
This wasn’t helpful at all.
“Leslie,” he said, before she could tell him that she was sorry she’d ever told him, “we need to go to the store and… pick up some things.”
He’d loaded all three girls into the car because he didn’t have childcare, seeing as he was now a single brother/dad hybrid of sorts, and on the way to the store, he’d awkwardly and uncomfortably filled Leslie in on all the details of puberty as he knew them in his twenty year old male wisdom. That had led to even more questions from all three sisters about the hows and the whys of such things, which led to answers that had Travis really sweating, about boys and girls, the differences between the two, and why it had to be that way for babies to be made. Travis’s knuckles had been completely white on the steering wheel when Brooke, fascinated by all of the new vocabulary she was picking up, had said, “Penis? Do you have a penis, Travis?” He’d valiantly answered even that with a strangled and panicked, “Yes, I have a penis, Brooke. And let’s never speak of it again.”
But he’d done well. And everything he’d told Leslie about what was happening to her and what she was going through was right. She’d confirmed it all later with friends whose mothers had talked them through it, just like her mother would have done, and amazingly enough, Travis had gotten most of the important details right.
And he’d done better than most mothers, not only getting her the products she needed but also loading up on ice cream and chocolate because “women like those kinds of things around that time of the month, I think.”
She could still remember Travis peeking in on her that night as she’d gone to bed, nervously biting his lip and watching her, likely wondering if he’d done okay. And she hadn’t known at the time how many times he’d have the same doubts over the years that were to come and all the attempts he’d made to be both mother and father and brother to his sisters, but she’d been grateful enough in just that moment, for just that season, to whisper, “thank you, Travis” to him before he left her to sleep.
Remembering it all and watching Travis as he sensed the something more to what she was feeling regarding the shop and all of her dreams had Leslie’s heart softening.
Just a little. Well, as much as her heart ever softened.
“What?” Travis asked again, more gently this time.
“I know you’d build something for me,” she said softly. “But I want to do this on my own. And part of it is the building… I wanted that building. But the other part of it is that I want to be a success like you are.”
He was a self-made man. He’d turned their parents’ business around until it was the biggest employer in their town, supplying jobs and commerce, growing their community in a viable, sustaining way.
She wanted to do something great like he had.
“I think you’re already there,” he said. “This cupcake business –”
“Next level, she said, Travis,” Avery said, smiling at her sister-in-law. “That’s a goal worth aiming for.”
Travis watched her for a second before turning his attention to Leslie. “A worthy goal. And maybe this setback with the building…”
“A horrible setback,” Leslie confirmed, thinking of all of her plans ruined.
“Maybe it might end up leading to something better,” he said thoughtfully. “I don’t think God’s done with you yet, at least.”
Obviously not. But there was a smile in his eyes as he said it, as already she was thinking through her next step.
“Well, let’s hope not,” she said.