I’ve been waiting for a day to go as planned since Gran’s death, and today won’t be it. I try to do something nice for Gran, to honor her, and instead I end up knee-deep in mud, and not the kind I’d thought I’d be in by now. I should be planting flowers at Gran’s final resting place, but instead I’m changing the tire of my truck off the side of the road. I hit a pothole and blew a tire. A poetic summary of my life.
What should have been a few minutes turned into longer. Tools broke, lug nuts were stuck, the jack ancient, my patience shot. Finally finished, I toss the tools into the bed of my truck then wipe the sweat off my brow. I glance down the road and squint. Someone’s walking, a hitchhiker, maybe, and that doesn’t make sense. This isn’t a direct route to anywhere.
A breeze runs along the highway, and the walker’s long hair blows around her head. Same form-fitting pants, same blue shirt, same strut that hypnotizes me. That’s Scarlett miles from town and without her father. As she gets closer, she’s watching me like I’m watching her.
Her mascara is smudged and smeared. Could be the heat. If I didn’t know better, it could be tears. She has a limp and she wears dress flats on her feet. I suck in a breath to ask her what her deal is with taking long hikes in the wrong shoes, but swallow the words.
She lifts her chin, probably waiting for me to say something smartass, to shoot her down because that’s what the two of us were doing the last time she was in my truck. Two five-year-olds with toy guns. Taking aim and firing.
I go to the passenger door and hold it open for her. She pauses, as if she’s waiting for me to take an unfair hit. I hold my hands in the air. No more sparring. Even I’m tired. I incline my head to the cab, and Scarlett slides in. I round the front, jump in, start the engine, then pull out onto the road.
Scarlett leans against the rolled-down window, her hand fisting her hair near the base of her neck. She’s known for keeping to herself, but Scarlett doesn’t look like the girl who thinks she’s too good to speak to me. She looks like she’s been dragged out into the open by an angry mob and stoned near to death.
I have to give her credit. If I were the one on the road, I would have kept on walking, even with the offered ride. Accepting this help would have cost me my pride. Scarlett, at least the Scarlett I once knew, lives on pride.
Earlier today, her father was going caveman in a public parking lot, and she waved me off. I should leave it alone. Scarlett’s not my problem, I shouldn’t care, but . . . “Things between you and your dad looked intense. You okay?”
“Nope.” She pops the p as if her answer doesn’t carry weight, but she’s dropped a bomb. At least to me it’s a detonation. I hadn’t expected her to be honest.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Nope.”
Fair enough. “That’s okay, I don’t like talking about things that bother me either.”
Scarlett glances at me, and for the first time since freshman year, her eyes aren’t frozen. It’s as if that one sentence has caused them to thaw. Now, they’re a deep blue. As blue as the sky, as blue as the sea, and I’m lost in them longer than I should be.
She blinks. I do, too, and I force my focus back on the road, but I don’t see pavement. I see her beautiful eyes, I see her sad eyes, and I wish I could take away her pain.
“Can I help?” she asks.
Hearing her voice jars me, and I look at her to make sure I didn’t make it up in my head. “Help with what?”
Scarlett gestures to the bed of the truck. “I’m assuming this is for Suzanne. I liked her. A lot. When we were younger, I used to pretend she was my grandmother.”
A stinging in my soul. “She liked you, too.” More than liked. Gran loved her enough to give her power over my future. Loved her enough to mention Scarlett at least once a month—a constant reminder that Gran didn’t like my decisions.
Scarlett bites her bottom lip and the motion causes another stirring, but this time in my blood.
“Or maybe that’s something you want to do alone,” she says, “or with your friends or—”
“No,” I cut her off. “That’d be fine. She . . .” I pause because I’m close to feeling and that scares me. “Gran would have liked that.”
Scarlett nods, and we continue down the road.
“The problem is,” Scarlett says, as if we had been having a longer conversation or that I had overheard the one in her head, “I don’t know what to say when someone loses a loved one. And I really don’t know what to say to you.”
If those are the rules, I should be permanently chained to the trailer. “I guess I’d say the same thing as when someone else’s father acted like a jerk in a parking lot, and that person ends up walking miles for home. Sometimes, there aren’t words and that’s okay.”
This time, her entire face softens, and Scarlett is absolutely stunning. I’ve never seen anyone as beautiful in my life—even with the mascara smudges, even in the ninety degree heat. I run a hand over my face because if I don’t stop staring, we’ll crash.
“If you want me to take you home tell me now,” I say. “Otherwise, you’re going with me.”
She shivers as if she’s cold and whispers, “I don’t want to go home.”
The turnoff for our road arrives, but I don’t take the right this time. Instead, I keep going and eventually take the dirt road that will get me closer to the oak in the east field, toward the place where I laid my mom to rest and where I want to spread my gran. When we hit the stream, I veer off the dirt road and we go over the land I love more than my own life.
The truck rocks and jostles over the bumpy terrain, and Scarlett no longer looks hard or calculating. Just thoughtful. For the first time in weeks, I find some semblance of peace.
* * *
It’s near eight and the sun is more west than it is anywhere else. Another hour and this place will be dark. I’ve dug, I’ve planted, I’ve sweated, I’ve watered, all with Scarlett by my side. She’s turned over dirt, she’s packed soil over new and old plants, and she’s poured water onto dry ground.
We’ve worked for over an hour in the most comfortable silence of my life. Never once did I have to tell her what to do, never once did I have to tell her the vision I had in my head. It’s like she had crawled up in the scary place and took out the blueprints for how I needed Gran’s final resting place to be.
To be honest, maybe I didn’t have a blueprint and Scarlett’s a genius. She’d been like that when we were children, knowing what to do with my land in such a way that it had seemed like the God-given plan from the start. Like the peonies along the stream, the black-eyed Susans near the woods, and the honeysuckle near the sugar maple that we used to call ours.
I toss the shovel into the bed of the truck then scan the area to see if I missed anything in the cleanup. Scarlett’s on her knees, patting the dirt around one of the rosebushes. She rubs a hand along her brow and leaves a trail of dirt on her skin.
Warmth in my chest at the familiar sight. Scarlett was like me as a kid. A day hadn’t been done right unless you ended it with more soil on you than on the bottom of your shoes.
Scarlett lifts her head and smiles . . . at me. It’s a gentle smile, and one that causes a spike of excitement in my blood. It’s as if the sun has melted off her outer shell and has revealed the girl I once knew, and a woman I want to get to know.
My feet move, one in front of the other, even though I don’t recall making the conscious choice to move. It’s more a response to a gravitational call, one I can’t ignore.
I crouch next to her and Scarlett busies herself dusting the soil off the leaves of the rosebush, as if the tender drops of the next rain won’t be enough to wash the dirt away.
“Thanks for helping me,” I say.
She continues to fuss over the plant. “Thank you for offering me a ride.”
A lock of her hair falls forward and entwined in the strands is a small leaf. I reach out to remove the offending foliage then freeze when Scarlett’s deep blue eyes dart to mine. I stop breathing, stop moving and my mouth dries out. My heart picks up speed because the need is to draw nearer. The urge is to touch her cheek, to cup her face, to . . . “There’s a leaf.”
“Okay.” She slowly wets her lips, and as I draw my fingers through her hair, the leaf falls to the ground. Scarlett briefly watches it, but then returns those gorgeous eyes to me.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
“You’re welcome,” I whisper back.
Time has halted, and the world surrounding us is nothing more than beautiful slants of light. Wind rushes through the trees; a crack from above and Scarlett jumps to her feet. I look up in time to catch the sight of a twig tumbling to the ground. I slowly stand, and wonder what the hell any of that was.
A leaf.
My fingers in her hair.
Possibly the most intimate moment of my life.
Scarlett’s cheeks have a healthy glow. It’s a blush. As if she liked me touching her, as if the moment made her shy. I shove my hands in my pockets because I’d be lying if I didn’t say the moment made me shy, too. Curious, confused and shy.
“What else can I do?” she asks. “To help.”
It’s all been done. “I need to scatter her ashes now.”
Sorrow shadows her face, and her sadness awakens mine.
“I remember climbing this tree.” Scarlett glances up at the old oak, and I wonder if she sees our ghosts racing toward the top.
I reach both arms up and touch the thick low-hanging branch. Closing my eyes I can feel the energy of the tree barreling through my veins. The tree is old, not the oldest on the farm, but close to it. The roots run deep into the soil, into the heart of the land. Touching the tree releases a surge of power from it into me—like recharging a battery.
“How do you do that?” Scarlett asks, and I open my eyes.
“Do what?”
“The same thing you’ve always done since we were kids.” She shrugs as if she’s confused by her own words. “Touch anything on this land and look peaceful.”
Twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes of my day, I have no peace, but I guess I’m lucky that my land can at least hand me fifteen minutes of no demons. “Don’t give me that crap. You know what I’m doing, and you know how to do it.”
Pure defiance. “No, I don’t.”
I smile because I like the familiar stubbornness. “Yes, you do.”
Crossed arms over her chest.
“Touch the tree,” I say.
“Touch the tree?”
“Touch the tree.”
Scarlett grins, one reminiscent of our childhood days. The breeze plays with the ends of her hair, and I capture that moment. A snapshot of something I want to remember. Scarlett’s back on my land. My friend. My foe. The person who used to push me, compete with me and made me alive. My Tink.
“Do it,” I tease her. “Or are you scared of what you’ll find when you do?”
“I am not touching a tree to prove a point,” she says.
I chuckle because Scarlett was never one to be pushed to do anything she didn’t want to do. Not even when I double-dog dared. I release the limb and head for my truck. “Your loss.”
But when enough steps have happened, I glance over my shoulder to see her staring at the trunk like she’s considering pressing her hand against the bark.
I open the passenger door. On the bench seat is her phone and it’s surprising my truck hasn’t caught on fire. Someone is blowing up her cell, and I’m betting it’s her dad.
Two parts of me battle as I stare at her cell. The selfish part wants to ignore it and continue on with my plan with her by my side, but then the other part of me, the part my grandmother wanted me to pay more attention to, knows what needs to be done.
I pick up her cell and stretch it toward her. “Looks like someone wants to talk.”
Her posture crumbles as she accepts her cell and scrolls through the messages. With a blink of her eyes, she hardens. A fortress built to endure a war.
Scarlett blows out a breath then looks up at me. “I have to go.”
Yeah. Saw that coming. “Hop in. I’ll give you a ride.”
“Thank you for the offer, but I’ll walk.”
“Don’t be like that. I thought we weren’t mad at each other anymore,” I say. Her forehead furrows, and my stomach sinks. “Are you still mad at me?”
“N . . . no, yes . . . I . . . I,” she stutters, and that keeps me from opening my mouth and arguing with her. When we were young, she stuttered all the time, but then she learned how to control the stutter through breathing. After that, the only time she did it was when she was upset and her thoughts were moving too fast for her mouth. My eyes narrow in on her as I try to figure out the problem.
The haunted look in her eyes—it’s déjà vu. A whisper of a memory from another lifetime. I saw that sadness in my mother’s eyes. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Her head drops with what I can imagine was her reading the disbelief on my face.
“My father’s angry at me, okay? I’ve pushed him, and I’ll admit to pushing him on purpose. In hindsight, that was stupid. If he sees me with you, it’ll only make him angrier.”
I bristle. “Because I’m Jesse Lachlin, town menace?”
Her dad hated me when we were younger, too. He didn’t think I was good enough to be her friend then. That’s why we snuck out at night to play. I don’t guess there’s any reason for his opinion of me to have changed.
“Because I’m not allowed to be alone with a boy. I’m barely allowed to go out with my friends, but he does allow it and only because he checks my plans with their parents. He won’t appreciate you giving me a ride home, and I won’t appreciate any assumptions he’ll make as to what I was doing alone with you.”
My eyebrows raise. “Are you saying your dad would think we were having—” Her cheeks turn bright red, cutting off my words, and I chuckle. “Our conversations were different when we were kids.”
“I guess they were,” she says with a faint lift of her lips, but then it falls. “When it comes to my dad, I’ve dug myself a hole and I don’t need to dig it any further.”
That I can respect. I’ve spent the past couple of years digging holes, too. “Do you know how to get home?”
“I’m going to cut through the east field, follow the stream and hit the road a quarter mile from my house; that way he’ll think I came from the main road. I promise I won’t get lost this time.” There’s a twinkle in her eye, and it’s the most adorable thing I’ve seen.
“That’s a twenty-minute walk.”
She shrugs. “I said I need to go home, not that I wanted to.”
“I’ll go with you. At least to the road.”
“You need to stay and scatter your grandmother’s ashes.”
“Scarlett,” I start, but she silences me with a lift of her hand.
“You need to do this.”
She’s right, I do, and the misery in my chest nearly brings me to my knees. Scarlett rises onto her toes, kisses my cheek and I close my eyes with the tender pressure of her soft lips on my skin. She pulls back and offers me a sad smile. “Thank you for all that you’ve done for me. The job, the ride, for bringing me here. I needed this.”
Scarlett takes her flats off her feet and starts barefoot for the stream, but I can’t let her go, not yet. “Is everything going to be okay with your dad?”
That stops her cold, and she looks at me over her shoulder. There’s something there in her expression that bothers me. A pulling and a nagging.
“I’ll be fine,” she says.
“He’s the reason you took that job, isn’t he? He doesn’t want you to go to UK.”
Scarlett stays silent but the answer is there in how her shoulders crumble.
“I’ll still help you if I can,” I offer.
“I don’t think anyone can help me, but thank you for trying. It’s more than anyone else has ever done.”
“We’re friends now,” I say. “Friends again, I guess.” I can do it again—friends with Scarlett. I’m friends with V, Leo and Nazareth, and overall, they’re doing okay. As V said, we’ve figured out a way to be lost together.
Her entire face drains of color, and her sadness hits me deep. “I don’t know what being friends means anymore. Not just with you, but with anyone. There’s something wrong with me. When I look inside me, I don’t see anything. I’m empty.”
“Scarlett, I mean it. We’re friends again.”
“No offense, but you don’t get to make that decision. I appreciate the job, I appreciate the ride and I appreciate you letting me have this moment with you, but you burned the friendship bridge between us years ago then danced in the ashes. After how you treated me, there’s no going back, but at least we had this moment. I’m not angry with you anymore, and it feels really good to not be angry with at least one person.”
I don’t understand why I feel like she just reached into my chest and created a black hole, but I do. The loneliness as she leaves is close to crippling.
Partially believing she’ll turn around and tell me she was wrong, I watch as she disappears on the horizon. She doesn’t turn, and she doesn’t forgive me. The overwhelming sense of loss creates a confusing ache.
I return to the truck and check my cell. There are messages from V, but also a message from Glory: What she needs, ask me and I can help.
The skin on my neck prickles, and I scan the area searching for the eyes watching me, but I’m alone. What are you talking about?
Glory: You know.
There’s a crazy buzz in my head. You’re full of crap.
Glory: Am I?
This is stupid. There’s no way Glory knows what Scarlett needs. No way she knows anything. I throw the cell back on the bench seat, but then stare at it. What if Glory can somehow give Scarlett what she needs? Am I going to let my pride cost her?
Scarlett needs a job. One she can work from home and one she can keep secret.
Silence. Enough time that I should be smug that I called Glory’s bluff, but I’m not. I want Scarlett to have a job more than I want to be right.
Glory: You have to ask. Nicely.
And Glory wonders why I don’t like her: Can you please give Scarlett a job?
Glory: Bring her to me. She and I will talk.
I massage my neck and then hope I can pull this off. We’ll be by tonight.