Chapter Twenty-Six
“Mom! I have a science project!” Abby called from the mudroom where she knelt digging through her backpack after school.
I had already set Blake up with his massive amount of homework at the island and Lucy had flashcards to work on. She hadn’t stopped talking since we walked in the door, not-so-patiently waiting for me to finish with Blake.
When did fourth grade math get so hard? And why wasn’t I smart enough for these story problems?
“What kind of science project, Abigail?” I had already decided that if her project took any more time than ten minutes, I was going to have to sell her on EBay.
Maybe I could use the money I made to pay a math tutor to help Blake finish elementary school.
Her bouncing red head popped into the kitchen and she held up an instruction sheet dated a week ago. I mentally went to the Craigslist browser. I could probably find an immediate buyer.
“I have to do a thing. On a vertebrate.”
“What is a thing?”
“What is a vertabit?” Jace echoed.
“I diaphragm.”
“Gram,” I corrected quickly. “You have to make a diorama.”
“Whatevs.” She read over the sheet of paper. “And I have to write a report.”
I took the instructions from her. “And color a picture. What is wrong with your school? This is too much work! You all have too much work! I’ve decided, starting tomorrow, we’re going to homeschool.”
Blake snickered, “Wouldn’t you have to do all of the work then?”
“Since you’re so smart, maybe you could teach it.” He tapped his pencil on his psychotic math homework. I let out a squeak of frustration. “Okay, we’re going to need to divide and conquer. Abby, your vertebrate is a monkey. Don’t argue with me. Lucy, go get Mr. Puddles.”
This instruction caused an uprising from the savages. “Abby, I don’t care if you want to take Mr. Puddles or not! That’s the only model I can think of to use. Lucy, you have to share with your sister! She will bring him back! Jace, get off the table!”
I wanted to curl up into the fetal position on the floor, but that wouldn’t help solve any of these problems. I settled the kids down by working myself up and shouting at them- always an effective tool. They went off to their corners of the house to retrieve a shoebox, a skinny, bendy monkey figurine that Lucy had nicknamed Mr. Puddles after she dropped him in one, and I went to the computer to do a Google search on printable monkey pictures.
“Blake, I’ll be right back! Just do what you can!”
“I figured it out!” he shouted back.
It seemed to take forever for the monkey pictures to print. My computer was slow and then my printer wouldn’t connect wirelessly. By the time I had something for Abby to use, my kids could probably all curse with the best of them.
With the pictures printed and held victoriously in my hands, I walked out of the den and dropped them all over the entryway floor.
Ben stood in the doorway, looking slightly panicked and more than a little bit confused.
“What are you doing here?” I felt utterly breathless as I took him in. If possible he looked more gorgeous than ever. And up close his handsome face made my heart flutter and my stomach fizz. I had been watching him at a distance for two months now. I would watch him check the mail or mow his yard. I would look to see if his car was around on the weekends or if he had a date.
Of course, I never knew if he had a date or not. But I liked to speculate. Sometimes I would make Emma come over just so we could speculate together.
He had let his five o’clock shadow become a gruff beard that suited him. He had thick-framed glasses on that I had never seen before and his clothes were more rumpled than I could remember them ever being.
All in all, he looked like a mess.
Not that my limp ponytail and sweatpants were any better.
It was just shocking to see him so… disheveled.
“I got a text.” He held up his phone so I could see the screen. “You said it was an emergency.”
“I didn’t text you.”
His eyebrow quirked. “Liz, I was in a meeting. I raced over here. I was rude to a client.”
“Ben, I’m so sorry. I… It wasn’t me.”
“It was me,” the small voice came from the kitchen doorway. Blake looked ashen. “I didn’t know you were busy. I’m sorry.”
Ben looked from me to Blake and then back again. “Why did you text me, Blake? What did you need?”
“I need help with my homework and mom is busy. She’s really busy and she keeps cussing. I just wanted to make it easy for her.”
Ben’s gaze swung back to mine, “You keep cussing?”
I felt betrayed by my oldest child. “PG-13 words! Nothing worse than that.”
Ben and Blake both gave me disbelieving looks.
“Did I ruin your job?” Blake asked with a slight tremble in his voice.
Ben’s expression broke and a grin finally made an appearance on his face. “No, no you didn’t ruin it. I was only rude to my client because he was a jerk to me. I’ll make it up to him tomorrow. He’ll get over it. If you need help with your homework, I can help you. Then we’ll both help make dinner so your mom stops cussing.”
“I wasn’t really cussing!”
“That’s awesome! Thanks, Ben!”
Blake disappeared into the kitchen while I swooped down to gather the scattered pictures. “You don’t have to stay, Ben. I have this handled.”
“I’m sure that you do, Liz, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to stay.”
I steeled my nerves and met his hopeful gaze. “You would?”
“I’ve missed these kids,” he admitted on a long sigh. “A lot. I’ve thought about coming over here at least a hundred times to see them, but I didn’t want to make things worse.”
“Oh.”
“Ben!” Lucy squealed from the staircase. She jumped down four steps so she could run into his arms. “Ben! Ben! Ben!”
Abby followed and Jace raced over too. They attacked him with hugs, screaming his name and jumping up and down.
“Are you going to eat supper with us?” Abby asked excitedly.
“I’m going to make it for you,” he told her which brought on a whole new level of screaming.
“Okay, settle down! Get off Ben or he isn’t going to come back!” I tried to pry my kids off of him, but they wouldn’t have it.
“You mean, he gets to come back?” Lucy wrapped her arms around me as a thank you hug for lifting Ben’s exile.
Oh, gosh. What had I done?
“If he wants to,” I told her.
She looked up at me with bright green eyes and said, “He does! I know he does!”
I patted her head and smiled down at her. I didn’t think he did, but I couldn’t tell her that. “Go help Abby find the crayons.” Jace galloped after her.
When it was just Ben and me and miles and miles of distance between us, I said, “You didn’t have to come over.”
“I know,” he said back.
“You don’t have to stay.”
“I know that too.”
He tucked his hands into his pockets and stood there stoically. He didn’t make a move toward the kitchen even though the kids were calling his name. He watched me instead, without saying anything, without seeming to want to say anything.
The quiet was too much for me. I couldn’t look at him there without filling up this space that separated us in some way.
“How have you been?” I was thrown off by how much I wanted to touch him. I had broken it off with him in an attempt to end my heartache, but ending things with Ben had only worsened the pain. I had been a mess before Ben left, but now… now I was a disaster.
Maybe on the outside things had gotten marginally easier. We could make it to school on time this year. I didn’t forget nearly as many after school activities. Dinner had fallen into a routine. My kids brushed their teeth twice as much as they did last year. But internally… internally I was a pile of ashes. I was broken, jagged pieces that cut and tore and damaged everything they touched.
One of his eyebrows rose in a challenge to my inane question. “How have you been, Liz?”
I cleared my throat and banished the tremble that threatened to give me away. “Oh, you know… holding it together.”
He took four steps forward until he stood just a few inches away from me. His dark, stormy gaze hit me with the power of a hurricane. “Liar,” he accused.
My lips parted, something was bound to come out of them. I just had to think of it first! He turned away from me and walked into the kitchen. I stared at his back and decided that was probably a good thing.
I didn’t know what I would have said. I doubted it would have been kind. Or maybe it would have been the truth.
I missed him…
I needed him…
I didn’t know how to reconcile my feelings for my husband and for him, but I wanted to try it again…
Those thoughts scared me more than anything. So, like the pro I was, I buried those thoughts as far down as I could and moved on to helping Abby with her science project.
While Ben helped Blake with his homework and talked to the kids about school and the rest of their summer, I made the best damn monkey diagram this world had ever seen.
Okay, it was probably a B+ effort. But we tried.
I worked with Lucy on her flashcards while Ben and Blake made dinner like they promised. We sat down to grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup as a family with the addition of our estranged next-door-neighbor.
“How are your parents, Ben?” I asked over the laughter of children.
He looked up from where he had just painted Abby’s nose red with tomato soup. The wide grin he wore died as he looked at me from across the table. His shoulders stopped shaking with laughter and his entire demeanor grew serious.
He hated me.
And why shouldn’t he?
“They’re good, Liz.”
Okay, that attempt at conversation was a bust. Apparently he didn’t want to make this easy on me.
“How’s work?”
He took a patient breath and said, “It’s good, too.”
I was too stubborn to give up. I should have stopped but I couldn’t. “Lucy’s art project is going to be featured in the school art fair next month.”
His level gaze held mine, “I know. Emma told me.”
Betrayal hot and sharp cut straight through me. “Emma?”
“Yes, Emma.”
“When did you talk to my sister?”
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “Liz, Emma and I never stopped talking. We’re still good friends.”
“She never said anything.” I couldn’t believe my sister had kept this from me this whole time! I made her come over and eat boxes of chocolate with me just so I didn’t have to face this alone and this whole time she had been talking to him?
“She was probably afraid of your reaction.”
I glared at him, “I wouldn’t have reacted.”
“You can be very irrational. She probably didn’t want to risk it.”
He had a point. But I didn’t want him to know that. “She’s my sister. I will love her no matter what she chooses.”
“That’s funny,” he said with the driest expression ever. “Because I feel the exact same way about her sister.”
The breath left my lungs and I nearly knocked over my bowl of soup. “Ben-”
“Who wants dessert?” he asked loudly. “I saw popsicles in the freezer!”
I watched my kids jump around his legs as he pulled out the leftover boxes from summer, all but Blake who sat at the table pensively watching the excitement. Ben dealt with each kid patiently, making sure they walked back to the table with their icy dessert and had everything they needed. He held out the box to Blake and then pulled back just as Blake went to grab one. Maybe it was a little cheesy, but Ben got Blake to smile and that was all I cared about.
“Liz?” he held out the box to me. “Would you like one?”
“No, thanks.”
“They look pretty good,” he pushed. “Might help cool you off.”
“I’m not hot.”
He gave me a smoldering look. “Are you sure about that?”
I reached for an orange one.
My kids had asked about Ben every single day since our “breakup.” That word… that whole idea… Breakup. It seemed so childish compared to what actually happened.
We didn’t break up. I ended things between us and set my world on fire, burning what little remained to cinders. I removed Ben from our life and watched my heart abandon me completely.
He had never been my boyfriend. Boyfriend was a word used for girls who had never been through what I had. For girls that still believed in love. For girls that still believed in happily ever afters.
I knew better.
Ben had been my savior.
Ben had been breath back in my lungs. Beats back in my heart. Blood back in my veins.
Ben had been found instead of lost. Home instead of wandering. Life instead of death.
And yet there was still too much between us… too much that kept us apart. I couldn’t just move on with him. I couldn’t expect my kids to move on. Ben wasn’t the answer to all of my problems. He might have eased the burden, but he didn’t take them away.
Dinner ended and I shooed the kids upstairs for their baths. They couldn’t go without giving Ben a hug first though. The sight of three of them clinging to his legs and waist twisted in my guts. Maybe the kids didn’t need to move on before they could accept Ben.
Maybe he had been right. Our heart just accepted new love by expanding, not by being exclusive.
Blake didn’t hug him or jump all over him, but he did walk over to ask when he was coming back.
“Do you need more help with math?” Ben didn’t even glance at me to see if I approved. I would have told him not to worry about it at all, but he wouldn’t look at me. He stared straight into Blake’s eyes and let my oldest answer on his own.
“Mom’s not very good at math,” Blake confessed.
“I do just fine,” I said to no one because no one was paying any attention to me.
“I’ll come back tomorrow, yeah?”
Blake’s mouth split into a big-toothed grin. “Yeah.” He held out his fist to Ben and they did this silly fist-bump thing they’d worked out over the summer.
“Alright, ducklings, up the stairs you go! Go brush the Popsicle off your teeth!” After a few more minutes of wrangling, they finally listened.
I moved toward the door to let Ben out. We were alone again after several hours of screaming kids and other things to occupy our attention. I didn’t know what to do with him except shove him out of my house.
“Thanks for helping Blake,” I told him. “We would have figured it out, but it was nice to have the extra hands.”
“Do you know what I keep thinking back to?” Ben asked seriously. I shook my head. I had no idea. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “The time you tried to overpay for our dinner at Sullivan’s. The waitress kept trying to give you the change back and you kept trying to hand her more money. It all makes sense now. You can’t add.”
A surprise laugh bubbled out of me. “I can add! I was confused that night! They write their receipts weird there! And Blake’s homework is just insane. It’s like they expect fourth graders to have nothing better to do with their time than work on math problems. I didn’t learn that stuff when I was in school!”
“Don’t you have a masters in education?”
“Well, look at you. Successful lawyer and math genius. Congratulations on being awesome.”
“I miss you.” His words killed our laughter. Murdered it. My breath hitched in my chest and any coherent thought I had left disappeared.
“Ben…”
“I’m not going to apologize for coming over tonight.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“And I want to keep seeing your kids,” he pressed on. “And you. I’ve thought about this for months, Liz. I’ve thought about coming over here night after night. I’ve thought about what you said and the space you needed. But I’m tired of it, Babe. I’m so tired of it.”
“What are you saying?”
“I want to be a part of your life. However much you’ll let me. We were friends before we were anything else and if that’s all you’ll give me then so be it.”
My stomach fluttered, butterflies awakening from a dormant sleep. They stretched their wings in my belly and took flight, lifting their faces toward the sun for the first time in months. “You want to be friends?”
He laughed darkly, “No, Liz. I want to be so much more than friends. But if this is all I can have, then I’ll take it.”
“You should move on,” I pleaded with him. “You are such a great guy. There are so many girls out there that would love to be with a man like you.”
His jaw tensed and his eyes heated. “I don’t want to be with other girls, Liz. I want to be with you.” I opened my mouth to argue with him, but he held up his hand and stopped me. “Listen, I get that Grady was your first great love. I get that you had this incredible marriage with him and he was your soulmate. I understand that. And I would never want him to be anything else. Never. I have endless respect for him. For loving you the way that he did, for raising these amazing kids. I don’t know if I can ever live up to the legacy that he left behind. I don’t know if I want to. But Liz, he died. And you’re still alive. And there is so much left of your life to live. I want to live it with you. I want to be a part of everything that remains for you, good and bad. I want to be there for your kids, for your stressful days, for your amazing days, for all of your nights and for every moment in between. We tried the time apart, but we are better together. Both of us. Yes, Grady was your great love, but you are mine. And if you would let me, I would be yours too. There isn’t a limit on how much we can love, Liz. You had Grady. Now have me.”
“Ben, I-”
“Forgive yourself, Liz. Give yourself the freedom to be alive again.” He put his hand on the door and swung it open. I couldn’t stop him tonight. I couldn’t even make words to respond to that speech. He gave me a slow, hopeful smile and disappeared into the sleepy twilight.
I watched him walk across our lawns without looking back. He’d said everything he had to say. He made his point.
And like so many times before, he challenged everything I thought and believed and then asked me to believe it too.
Could I do what he asked?
Did I love him enough to give us a chance? A real chance without the walls I’d built around my heart or the ghosts of Grady’s life haunting us?
Could I do as he asked and give up this buried existence that I’d entombed myself in and live again?
I would never forget Grady. He was my true love.
But maybe some people were allowed to have two. Maybe my love story didn’t end with one man, but continued throughout the course of my life.
Maybe Grady had been able to love the woman that I was, but Ben would get to love the woman I had yet to become.