SEVENTEEN
After dinner, a tired Gretta ushered everyone out of the house, citing her need for peace and quiet. Vivian and Nash had walked out of there filled with doubts and a niggling worry.
“I feel like there’s something she’s not saying,” Vivian confessed as the two of them strolled through the pasture. They’d gone at least a mile already, in comfortable silence. Now, she felt the need to reveal what had been weighing on her mind since the afternoon she’d driven Gretta to the doctor’s office.
“I know,” Nash agreed, “but she’s a grown woman, and she deals with everything in her own time and her own way.”
“So you do think something’s wrong?”
He sighed deeply. “I suspect as much, but she’s not goin’ to say what she doesn’t want anyone to know. Gretta has always been a very private person, despite her proclivity to meddle in other people’s affairs.” He cast her a knowing look.
Vivian stared at the ground, watching each step they took in time with each other. “She’s been extra tired lately.” Though a person might not realize it if they weren’t sharing her personal space like Vivian was each day. Gretta’s mouth was a great disguise for what was going on beneath the surface.
“She isn’t exactly a spring chicken anymore,” Nash pointed out.
“Still. I feel like we didn’t get any real answers after her episode, and she hasn’t said anything toward it since. I doubt it just went away.”
“I’m sure it hasn’t, but like I said, she’s her own person. She’ll ask for help if she needs it. In the meantime, we’ve all just been pulling a little extra weight to be sure.”
Vivian nodded. She’d been doing the same. It seemed Gretta had a lot of people around her who cared for and respected her.
“Even if she wants to be a stubborn old woman, she has a circle of people to look out for her.” Nash echoed her thoughts.
“I can see that. It’s really admirable.”
Nash pulled a face. “Admirable?”
It was then she realized that what she deemed a rarity, he viewed as typical. “Where I come from, almost everyone is out for themselves. Living in the city, knowing the people I do, you learn early on that the only person you can truly rely on is yourself.” She shrugged. That was her normal, so different from his. It was a sad reality when she stopped long enough to analyze it.
“You city people are somethin’ else,” he said, shaking his head.
“I’m guessing that wasn’t a compliment,” she responded rhetorically.
“You’d be right about that.”
They walked a ways more in silence, enjoying the warmth of the fading sun and the chirping of the crickets combined with the eerie ebb and flow of the cicadas high in the trees before Vivian realized they were no longer on Gretta’s property.
Scanning her surroundings, she took note of the faded-red pull barn that’d seen better days, the miscellaneous farm equipment in various states of use and disrepair. The small house set back from the road, surrounded by neatly trimmed grass and backed up to a split-rail, fenced-in pasture containing a single tall oak tree and a sable horse.
If it hadn’t been the horse that tipped her off to where she was, it would have been the green truck sitting in front of the house, parked on a patch of gravel. He’d driven home earlier after dropping her back off at Gretta’s and then walked back later. Now she realized just how close the pair lived to one another.
“Is this your place?” She asked the obvious question.
Nash paused to look up at the old homestead and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Sure is. Bought her straight out of high school at eighteen. Single best investment I ever made.”
Vivian couldn’t help but compare the home to the modern and pristine constructs she’d been raised around and taught to strive for, but despite the comparison, she wasn’t judging. Out here, life went at a different pace and by different standards.
“It’s a beautiful home. I’m sure you and your wife were really happy here,” she offered gently.
“Yeah, we were.”
Seeing the sadness in his eyes, she asked, “Have you ever thought of selling it?”
“Once, but then I realized I’d rather live with the memories than bury them.”
In a single instant, Nash managed to touch Vivian’s heart. She could feel the love he had for his wife still alive and well, no less weakened by her absence.
Would anyone ever love her that way? Cherish her memory when she was gone from the world, desire her to the very ends of it and beyond?
Andrew mimicked such a claim, but he had already proven himself to her. He wasn’t the man for her—or any woman, for that matter.
Maybe love like the kind Nash and his late wife shared was one of those rare kinds that came around once in a lifetime and couldn’t be replicated.
Which didn’t leave much hope for the rest of the sorry saps in the world, did it?
Vivian was fast on her way toward a downward spiral of depression and self-deprecation when Nash said, “Come on,” and headed off toward the pasture at the back of the property.
The question was at the tip of her tongue, but Vivian held off giving it voice, instead choosing to follow and see what had sparked his interest.
The simple home surrounded by untended and wild flowerbeds that had clearly once benefited from a woman’s touch gave way to the backyard, which turned out to be far deeper than the view from the front had suggested. Vivian spotted a dirty and rarely used patio set with a tattered green, and white umbrella pushed up against the side of the house, along with a dusty round grill that she imagined a man like Nash was probably proficient at using but hadn’t in a while. Sprigs of grass and wild ground cover poked up from between the brick platform it was all set on, and she wondered if their disuse occurred this season or if it, too, had a long-reaching history that stretched back to when the woman of the house had infused it all with life and light.
Trudging through a patch of tall grass, they finally reached the fence that divided the yard from the pasture, and Nash propped a booted foot on the lower rail and bent to support himself on the top.
With a bright smile, he said, “There’s my beauty. I believe you two sorta met on your way into town.”
Vivian’s dour mood slowly gave way to a smile as she watched the horse trot her way around the perimeter, paying her visitors no mind. “From afar, yes. I remember.”
“She doesn’t like strangers much. Or people in general. Hell,” Nash said, almost laughing, “I think she only barely tolerates me.”
“Gretta mentioned she was a bit moody.”
“Moody ain’t the half of it. But she’s a good mare. Loyal. I don’t count that as a fault, just a minor inconvenience, but we’re working on it.”
The horse made her way slowly over to them and huffed once she reached Nash’s side. He reached out and ran a hand down the crest of her long, midnight hair then gave her shoulder an affectionate pat.
“What’s her name?”
Reaching for a bucket on the ground beside his feet that she hadn’t noticed, he plucked out a round, yellow and red apple and lifted it to the horse’s mouth. It took it all in one bite and began chomping it to bits right before their eyes.
“Maxine.”
The reason for that was obvious. In her history studies at university, she’d taken a special interest in Roman history. Maxine meant “great” or “bright” or “noble,” and from what Vivian had heard, she was all of those things. She was a magnificent horse up close. Of course, she didn’t have much to compare her to, unless one counted the magazines, books, and television programs she’d seen them in over the course of her twenty-eight years.
“After the accident, she had to learn to rely on me. I think I’ve done the same with her, to be honest,” Nash admitted as he stroked her muzzle. “We both got the most important thing to Carlene left: each other.”
If a heart could cry, Vivian’s was a sobbing mess. Swallowing down the lump in her throat, she said, “It’s good you found comfort in each other.”
Nash nodded, withholding further commentary as they both ruminated over the past and the present before them. If ghosts were real, Vivian swore she could feel Carlene there with them, and she hoped the woman wasn’t upset that they’d been spending time together.
Vivian’s intentions certainly weren’t pure, and they grew less so with each passing day and moment she and Nash spent together. But if Carlene was the amazing woman she was being given the impression of, then she would want Nash to be happy, and being stuck in the past wasn’t the path toward achieving that goal.
“Do you think you’ll ever remarry?” she found herself asking.
He didn’t flinch or start yelling, so she considered that a good sign. Placing both feet flat on the ground, Nash considered her question while feeding Maxine another apple.
“I haven’t gotten that far, to be honest. I’ve just been taking each day as it comes, and when all that consists of is work and more work…”
She got it. His head wasn’t in the future. He was just focused on getting through each day.
“Would you ever consider it?”
After a moment, his gaze found hers. “It’s not off the table. But it would take someone pretty special to make me walk that aisle again.”
It was Vivian’s turn to look away this time. “Same here.”
And in the silence that followed, she knew Nash understood where she was coming from, too. They were separated by different worlds and circumstances, but they connected on a basic human level that anyone who had experienced heartache could relate to.
“Do you wanna go for a ride?”
Vivian’s eyes widened in shock. “Depends. Do you mean in your truck or…?” She pointed a wary finger at Maxine, who was suddenly looking pretty damn scary in the failing light.
Nash chuckled. Kicking a foot over the fence, he climbed inside the pen. “Don’t tell me you’re scared of a little horse.”
“She’s not little!” Vivian protested. “And she doesn’t like people. You said so yourself.”
Taking Maxine by the reins, he steered the horse toward the locked gate. “She might not be a people person, but she does know how to follow orders. And she trusts me. It’s all about trust.”
When he reached her, Maxine towering over his shoulder, those big, black eyes shining as she stared down at Vivian, Nash asked softly but with a hint of challenge, “Do you trust me?”
Did she? Vivian hadn’t even reached the point that she felt she could truly trust herself, so how could she trust anyone else?
But even as she thought it, she knew that some part of her did trust him. Nash might still be a virtual stranger—they hadn’t yet overturned every stone and outed every skeleton in their closet to one another—but she knew in her bones that he was an honest and honorable man.
Putting a smile on her face and summoning her courage, Vivian said, “Show me what you’ve got, cowboy.”