Chapter Twenty-Eight
CALLIE
Using my heels, I pushed my sister’s porch swing back and stole another peek at the velvety horizon spotted with stars and a round, buttery full moon. It was the presence of the peaceful night sky that had encouraged me to tackle the infamous green tote in the back of my trunk. And somehow, I’d managed to drag that beast of a box all the way down the dirt path and up three concrete steps to where it sat now. Under my feet. Because if I was going to do this—sort through these pictures once and for all—I needed a comfort my Tiny House couldn’t offer: a sense of home. And Clem’s house was the homiest home I knew.
My sister’s family had been asleep for hours, hence the reason I’d been using an old camping lantern to illuminate my project. Not the best lighting. But it worked well enough.
The metal chains grated against the swing hooks, a rhythmic sound that calmed my nerves as I set another stack on the bench beside me. Rocking back and forth, I took a mental breather from all the images and memories. It would be worth it in the end, salvaging one childhood album from this mess of history so that I could finally toss out the rest once and for all. Or at least, that was what I’d told myself for the last two hours.
I wondered again how Davis had faired in the showdown with his in-laws. I didn’t need to understand all the history between them to feel the tension. Heck, anyone within a hundred miles of his house could feel the tension.
My thoughts drifted back to the scene in his driveway. Davis had been so composed, spoken so respectfully, even though the strain and stress in his jaw had revealed a different story. But in that moment, when I’d stretched my hand out to shake the Lockwoods’, I would have been anybody Davis needed me to be. A casual bystander, a dog walker, a neighborhood nanny . . . but then he’d gone and pressed his hand to the small of my back and introduced me to his dead wife’s parents as if . . . as if I were someone of significance to him. Someone who belonged with him.
A part of me had wanted to say yes to their dinner invitation tonight, to hold Davis’s hand in a restaurant booth and support him however I could. But that wasn’t the part of me who won the proverbial coin toss.
I reached for my phone, flipped it over in my hand, and scrolled through my contacts.
I typed a text to Davis, adding and deleting as if I were writing an article for the town newspaper, until finally, I ended up with the bare-bones truth:
Just in case you’re wondering, I think you’re pretty incredible.
Lifting the lid to the box under my feet once again, I grabbed another large grouping of photographs. Though I wanted to believe otherwise, my attempts at organizing the giant mass of pictures wasn’t going well. The majority of them remained lumped in one mountainous maybe pile. Clem’s DIY scrapbooking magazines made this process look so much easier.
The front door creaked open, and I shielded the stack of photographs in my lap.
“Callie? What are you doing out here in the dark?” Clem’s sleep rasp pricked at my conscience.
“I’m sorry—did I wake you?”
She waved me off and yawned. “No, I couldn’t sleep. Chris has a big call with his boss tomorrow. I figured I’d get up and do some laundry . . . but then I heard the swing. Uh, we do have a porch light, you know.”
“I didn’t want the light to shine through your blinds and keep you awake.”
She flicked on the light and illuminated my piles—or pile.
“Are those . . . ?” Clem tightened the belt on her robe, her slippered feet shushing over the wide plank boards. “Is that the photo box Mom gave us after her wedding?”
“Yeah.”
“You never sorted through it?”
“I’m not the one who’s gifted in the organization department, remember?”
She slumped onto the swing beside me, tilting her head back with a sigh. “I probably should have taken that on, but the week of Mom’s wedding was so crazy. Corrie had just had her tonsils removed, and Chris was having visa issues overseas. I didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with the past, too.” She twirled her finger, indicating the box at my feet. “I guess you didn’t either, huh?”
I’m not sure I ever will. “Afraid not.”
She peered at the pile in my hand. “Here, hand me some of those. I’ll help.”
“You don’t want to do this any more than I do. It’s fine. Go tackle your laundry and then go back to bed.”
“Nope. Hand them over. We can get this done together.”
I slapped a heaping stack in her open palm, and she went to work. Enviously, I watched her sort. She didn’t seem to have the same level of agonizing guilt—or any guilt—as she made her piles. Her strategy appeared simple enough: any picture containing Leo Quinn was placed in the exile category. Apparently, he was her only filter criteria.
“I’m sorry we haven’t spent much time together, Callie. Feels like my kids have seen you about five times more than I have this summer.” The genuine quality of her words warmed me.
“I’m glad I was here when you needed me.”
A simple smile graced her lips. “Me, too.”
Clem zipped through several more handfuls of memories before pulling her legs up on the bench and tucking a bobbed piece of hair behind her ear. Her favorite imported perfume, rich with lilac and hints of vanilla, danced in the breeze. And this time when she sighed, the sound was contented and peaceful, a quiet call for an intermission.
I dropped the remaining photos back in the box. “I can feel the difference, you know? Every time I’m in the house. The tension between you two is lifting.”
“Yes, it is.” A profoundly beautiful answer.
She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs. She smiled softly. And in that moment, Clem was eighteen all over again, giggling about a list she’d written while away at church camp. A list she’d titled “Clem’s Top Forty-One.” How anybody could come up with forty-one bullet points to define the perfect life partner remained a mystery to me. But of course, by that time, I’d already dismissed the idea of marriage and children from my future.
“I hope that smile means Chris is back to scoring forty-one out of forty-one,” I said.
Clem laughed. “Gosh, I’d completely forgotten about that. I suppose it says something about his character that he didn’t run at the first mention of that ridiculous list.”
“Uh, I was the one who had to listen to it first, remember? You woke me up from a dead sleep.”
She clamped her hands to her cheeks and dragged them down her face—a very un-Clem-like gesture. “Tell me I didn’t really do that.”
“You did.” My laugh fizzled out as I recalled the moment she bounced on the edge of my bed and flipped on my bedside lamp, unable to contain her twitterpation for one more minute. “I think I remember it so well because, just the night before, I’d butchered my hair when Mom was at work. You found me in the bathroom, remember? I told you I wanted to be my own person, that I didn’t want to have long hair like you anymore.”
With a half chuckle, half groan, she nodded. “Oh yes, now that moment I do remember. Quite well. Mom and I refer to that night as the beginning of the Callie Revolution. After that, no one could give you advice on fashion or makeup or, heaven forbid, your hairstyle. It was like you’d become Miss Independent overnight, and all of us, well, we just got in your way.”
An owl hooted from somewhere above, merging with the noise of rustling leaves. I shivered from the nip in the late-night air. Was that really how she’d seen me? And how she thought I saw her? That couldn’t have been any less true.
“When you came in my room and took out your crazy-long list, assuring me of how perfectly Chris met every single item, I just remember wishing . . .” Unexpectedly, my throat tightened as a tender truth pushed to the surface.
“You wished what?” she asked.
“That I could fix it. My hair. My quirky personality. My stupid mouth and all the awful things that had spewed from it. Because the truth was I didn’t want to be different from you. I wanted to be just like you. Beautiful and happy. Someone who could believe in lists and prayers.” Someone who could be trusted with love.
Maybe it was the full moon or the vulnerability of the hour that had caused the words to rush from their hiding spot, but there was no mistaking they were mine. Because even now, even after a decade of doing my own thing and living my own way, I still looked at my sister’s life as if it were cast in an idyllic light.
“Oh, Callie . . .”
I struggled to hold eye contact and instead dropped my gaze to the top of the exile pile where Leo Quinn propped his little Fire Dancer high on his shoulders. How could I fault the man who first believed in my artistic gifting? Who showed me how to tap into the creative world with nothing more than a paintbrush?
While I studied his picture, Clem studied me.
I waited for her to swoop in with her sisterly advice or start cleaning up the photo mess I’d made on her porch. But she did neither.
Finally, she rested her chin on her knee and turned her face to mine. “I never dealt with Leo leaving us the way he did. I didn’t think I needed to. I thought if I got married and had a family of my own that he couldn’t hurt me anymore. That the pain would go away. But that was a lie I’ve only just begun to face, seventeen years later. His abandonment did affect me. And because of that, it’s affected every person I love. For me, it was easier to pin my unhappiness on my marriage, to heap my disappointments and stress and anxiety onto Chris, rather than look in the mirror and deal with all the hurt I’d been hiding for decades.”
I rotated on the bench to look at my sister, the swing knocking side to side. “I had no idea you even thought about him.”
“I do,” she admitted. “More so lately, since Chris and I started counseling.”
“Counseling?”
“Yeah, our pastor recommended someone. We’ll go weekly for a while. Had our second appointment today, actually.” She placed her hand on mine. “I know you’d like to believe I have everything together all the time, but I really don’t. I’m far from a perfect wife or mother or sister. And I wish now, more than ever, that instead of spouting off some silly list at you that night, I would have come into your room and asked about the real reason behind cutting off all your hair. I should have tried to understand what was going on inside your head instead of hoping that you’d forget about our father.”
I stared at the streetlight. “I never forgot.”
“I know you didn’t.” She gave my hand a squeeze and didn’t let go. “But dealing with this box of old pictures is only the beginning. The real work—the harder work—happens in here.” She tapped her temple. “Sorting the truth from the lies.”
I remained quiet for a moment, content to feel the comfort of my sister’s touch. How long had it been since we’d held hands like this, since we’d truly connected? Long enough to make my chest constrict.
“I’m not sure how to do that,” I admitted.
“Our counselor says it begins by accessing our beliefs. About ourselves. About others. About God.” She leveled me with a look I’d seen a million times. A look that suggested she knew me better than I knew myself. “If our decisions are based on false beliefs, then we’ll never experience the life we’re meant to live—the life God has in store for us.”
Clem and I hadn’t seen eye to eye on issues of faith and God for quite some time. After our father left, she’d clung to the lessons we’d been taught in Sunday school and church camps, content to embrace the concept of an Absolute Being, while I’d been content to explore.
The idea that one God could meet all our needs? Hear all our prayers? Restore all our hurts? It felt too far-fetched, even for a dreamer like me. He certainly hadn’t been there when I’d needed him most.
But then I remembered Davis’s words on our walk to his house, about the current of grief. Had I been content to wade with these memories in stagnant water? Never moving forward? Would I ever be brave enough to confront God the way he had?
“Callie . . .” There was an unmistakable plea in my sister’s voice for me to understand, to believe the way I did before I’d begged my father not to go. “When was the last time you did anything without having an exit strategy in place?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. A vise grip of indecision squeezed at my heart as a picture of Davis and Brandon surfaced in my mind. I broke our handhold to knead my thumbs into my temples. “I think I preferred Life Coach Clem to Annoying Big Sister Clem. Can you go back to her, please?”
“No can do.” She bumped my shoulder.
“If this is where you warn me not to—what did you call it, again?—use my Callie-charm on Davis, then—”
“Oh, you’re both way past that stage.” The twinkle in her eye made my stomach drop three floors. “I may have been caught up in my own family drama recently, but I’m not blind to what’s been happening between you two. You have a look about you—you know. Every time you come home from a date with him, your entire countenance glows. Chris and I both see it.”
“Pretty sure that’s your own wishful thinking you’re seeing.” But even as I said it, heat rose up my neck.
Avoiding her gaze, I gathered the two stacks of approved-for-the-album pictures, ready to store them away from the tainted photographs piled on top of the box lid. Clem shifted in her seat and reached for a photo wedged between the weathered floorboards. She sighed sweetly before handing it to me.
Thankfully, my father was nowhere to be found in this memory. This was a picture of me and a much younger Collin. His squirmy body was nestled into my side, his mouth a sticky pink mess from his waiting room sucker as he peered over my lap to see his new baby sister.
I stared, unblinking, at the precious image in my hand. The memory of that day, so close to the surface of my heart, unfolded anew. Filled with nostalgia and a yearning I didn’t dare name, I could still feel the tiny form of my swaddled niece in my arms and see the pearly sheen of her skin and her rose-petal pout. I could still smell the lemon-scented disinfectant heavy in the hospital air and hear the squeak of the rocker with every soft push against the checkered linoleum floor. Cradled against me that day was love in its truest, most vulnerable form.
Clem touched the crown of my head and stroked my hair tenderly. “What if it’s more than wishful thinking, Callie? What if it’s the beginning of an answered prayer, one I’ve prayed no less than a thousand times for you in the last ten years? That you would believe in home again. In truth. In love.” She pressed her hand to my back. “If Davis Carter is the man God uses to show you the way again, then I hope, for your sake, that you’ll let him.”