27
(Cara)
Full sunrise arrives far earlier than I want it to. Garrett leaves for work after promising he’ll be back to say a real goodbye on his lunch hour, and after he’s gone I try to sleep again, but can’t. Finally, I drag myself out of bed and grab my phone, checking emails and sending a text to Amie to let her know my plans for heading out.
When I click the phone to sleep, the lock screen shows today’s date. April first.
Fitting, since I’m still waiting for the April Fool’s Day joke I want to kick in. Garrett showing up later, pretending we’re about to say goodbye, then laughing and looking at me like he doesn’t understand how I could fall for the whole thing, because he wouldn’t dream of letting me go.
But he hasn’t even kept the door open to more between us. No hints or comments, no invitation to visit, no vague remark about my always having a place to stay if I’m in town. Instead, he spent our last moments before sleep last night tracing my entire body with his fingertips and his lips—all because he said he wanted to memorize me. Remember me.
And all I could think about was the one thing that too often goes hand in hand with remembering.
Forgetting.
After loading up a few remaining things into my car, I stop in the kitchen and fill up my water bottle, then take a glance around the room, which is empty of my belongings now. I walk through to the living and dining rooms and take the same inventory. All are empty of any sign I was here—exactly the way I found them.
I allow myself one last look at the place that became my home while I was here. Then I step outside, toss my water bottle in the car, and head back to take a seat on the porch. The trees that surround the house are starting to bloom—tiny green buds on the oaks and small pink blooms on the apple trees. The rumble of a truck I know so well sounds in the distance. I close my eyes as it grows louder and louder, finally opening them when it goes quiet.
Garrett steps out from the truck in his rural uniform: a red T-shirt that shows off the contours of his chest, a pair of dusty jeans, and scuffed boots. A sweat-stained ball cap on over his light brown hair, a few hunks of slightly curly hair escaping from around the brim. No coat, because Colorado has decided it’s spring. Sunny and warm, a cloudless sky above.
“Hey.” Garrett pauses on the flagstone walkway, halfway to me.
“Hi.” Standing up, I wipe my palms on my jeans and close the distance between us.
Then we’re eye to eye, and the memory of the first night we were together comes back in a rush.
“Tell me you feel that, too.”
“The way we fit together.”
“Are you all set? Everything loaded up?” I nod, watching the way his lips move when he talks. “Nothing left in the house that I need to carry out here for you? Did you remember your maps? You’ll need them if you’re going to Kansas from here; the GPS in your car might not show the area this guy is in. And what about your bag—”
“Don’t.” I drop my head. “Don’t talk about stupid stuff right now. I don’t want to skip over this part.”
“What part?” Garrett’s voice becomes so muted the words are almost hard to hear.
I look up to find his eyes, wait a beat to be sure he’s paying attention.
“The part where we say goodbye and it hurts. Hurts so much I can’t breathe. The part where you let me see that you feel it, too.”
Garrett’s jaw ticks tight. Then he gives in, drops the mask of being a guy’s guy, and shows me, with only a slump of his shoulders, what I asked to see. My eyes start to sting and his face falls.
“Come on, City, don’t cry. Please. It tears me up to see you cry.”
Immediately, my hands reach up to gather fistfuls of his shirt. I ball the material tight in my hands and give a yank, knowing my voice is harsh, and knowing I want him to hear it.
“Don’t you dare call me City. Not right now. Don’t say goodbye to the girl who showed up here two months ago. Say goodbye to Cara.”
Garrett’s arms gather me up, then his mouth is on mine and we’re kissing. Kissing in a way that makes my heart beat too fast and my skin feel as if it’s both burning and freezing. He pulls back but keeps our foreheads pressed together, using his fingers to tuck my hair behind my ears.
“I need to say something, Cara.”
A rush of expectation tears through me. Maybe this is it. The moment, the declaration I’ve been waiting for.
He leans back, drawing his hands to the base of my neck, and his eyes flicker to where his thumbs have settled near my throat, his hold so close to where it was last night. Garrett lingers there, stroking his thumbs slowly, eventually resting them against my clavicle.
“I don’t quite know where to start.” My eyes rise to his, but I stay quiet. He has the words, I know he does, he just has to find them.
“You showing up here was the best thing that’s happened to me in years.” Garrett shakes his head slowly, like he’s still trying to reconcile it all for himself. “You reminded me what wanting more feels like. The way it scares you and gets your blood pumping in a way nothing else can. And I needed that more than I realized.”
Another swell of hope, with less uncertainty now. He gets it. He feels it.
“So even though I know you don’t belong with me, that you belong to another life in another place . . . thank you. Thank you for coming here and being with me. No matter how short it was.”
I wait for him to say more—the part where he asks me stay—but nothing happens. He doesn’t ask me to love him, he doesn’t say that he needs me. He doesn’t say anything else at all.
Garrett is letting me go.
A day later, I’m in another state. And whoever coined the term “fly-over state”—and all the derision that goes along with it—was a moron. They’ve likely never been to northwestern Kansas, either. Because if they had, they would be hard-pressed to find what I’m currently staring at anything but gorgeous.
I’d always pictured Kansas as hopelessly flat and dusty, but instead there are miles of rolling hills. The fields are planted, and here in one of Gerald Ramsey’s wheat fields, the stalks stand about a foot tall, rich green in color and thick like a lush carpet. A spring rainstorm is brewing in the distance, and Gerald claims they need this rain. He just hopes it’s the right kind of rain. Gentle and steady, for long enough but not too long. And no hailstorms or tornados, thank you very much.
Gerald is part of Brooke’s extended family—and while she had only met him a few times, she claimed he was the sort of rural-life character whose plain-spoken ways would be worth my time, and even if it couldn’t be a part of my Grand Valley story, I’d at least be able to see what the fields of Kansas look like this time of year. When I pulled up to Gerald’s house, I found a white-haired man who stood at least two heads shorter than me, but managed to grip my hand with his knotted, arthritic one so hard my fingers ached. Then he looked me over and asked in the bluntest way possible what the hell a woman like you is so interested in farming for.
And I needed that sort of bluntness in the wake of leaving Hotchkiss, otherwise I would fall apart. The drive from Hotchkiss to Denver was a blur. I stayed the night in a clean but basic motel room, enjoyed a stale donut and weak coffee from the breakfast buffet, and was in the car again by six a.m., cruising down I-70 in traffic until things turned sparse at the state line. I made my way north to Kansas Highway 36, and after that the radio picked up nothing but country music, church services, and conservative talk shows. I went with the country stations, but realized quickly what a mistake that was. Country songs about love and guys who don’t ask for much? Not what this girl needed to hear for three hours straight while driving through places so rurally beautiful it made her chest ache.
Gerald’s truck growls up from behind me and I turn to find him cruising down the two-track, slowing to a stop next to me. “You all set there, Miss Cara?”
Gerald had left me to take a few photos and scribble some notes while he took a quick drive over to his machine shop, with plans that we would head back to his house after that and sit down to talk for a bit. Tucking my camera into my backpack, I sling it over one shoulder and climb in the passenger seat of his beat up Chevy flatbed, then drop my bag to the floorboard and roll down the window on my side.
The air is humid and thick. It smells like heat and mist and silt, the dark clouds in the sky turning darker with each passing minute. In the distance I can hear what I now know—thanks to Garrett—is the hum of industrial fans at the local grain elevators.
Gerald pops a cough drop in his mouth from the bag he has sitting on his dashboard, amongst a clutter of papers, a wrench, a red shop rag, and other assorted pieces of his life. Tucked into the edge of the rearview mirror is a photo of a couple in black and white. A Saint Isidore pendant hangs below from a leather cord, bouncing each time we hit a low spot in the road, sometimes hitting the windshield with a flat thwack.
“I think you brought the rain with you, Miss Cara. We like folks who bring the rain.”
I laugh and run a hand through my hair, tucking a few strands behind my ears. “Glad I could be of use.”
We roll to a stop in front of a large two-story farmhouse, disproportionately longer than it is wide, stretching narrow toward a cornfield behind it. A smaller house sits across the way, on the other side of the driveway, a square one-story showing its age with rough paint and an even rougher roof.
“This house is what we always call the big house. Over there is our little house. I grew up in this one, but when I came back from Korea, my wife and I moved into the little house. Stayed there until my parents passed.”
Gerald opens the front door and I follow him in. “That’s how it’s been done around here for a hundred years. Kids get married and stay in the little house, then move in here when it’s time.”
“Does anyone live there now? Your kids?”
He stops to set his coat on a hook inside the doorway. “Our Bobby didn’t make it home from Vietnam. He was our only one, so it’s been empty for years. Had a part-timer a while back who lived there for a bit, but he didn’t work out.”
We pass through a dark living room, the windows still covered in heavy draperies I suspect Gerald’s wife hung in that room a few decades ago. In his kitchen, a small table is as covered in stuff as his dashboard was, and the countertops are the same—Crock-Pots and toasters, coffee makers and a stack of phone books, plates and bowls, empty mason jars lined up in neat rows.
Gerald clears a stack of magazines off a kitchen chair and rearranges a few things on the tabletop, and then pulls the chair out for me.
“You drink coffee? There’s a pot here, plus some of those cookies there.” He points toward a blue metal tin sitting opened on the table.
Garrett’s caution about always taking what’s offered rings in my head, even when the cookies look like they haven’t seen a lid in months and the coffeepot shows a dark, suspect ring of tarnish lurking at the top of the glass carafe.
“I’d love some coffee, thank you. Would you mind if I record our conversation?”
He tells me to do what I need to do, then pours two cups of coffee and sets them on the tabletop, pushing the tin of cookies my way with one of the bulbous and knotted knuckles on his painful-looking hands.
“My Sarah loved these. Takes me a while to get through a tin on my own, but I can’t help myself from buying them when I’m in Colby, over at the Walmart.”
I take a cookie and dip it in the coffee, eat it in two bites. Gerald tries to fit a finger through the mug handle but can’t manage it, wrapping it up in both hands instead and bringing the mug, slightly trembling, slowly to his lips.
I set my notebook out but drop my pen to the page and leave it there, lean back in my chair and cast a glance out the window above the sink where raindrops are on the glass.
“There you go. My rain has kicked in.”
Gerald nods. “Needs to keep on for a bit.”
The room is quiet, not even the tick of a wall clock. He pops another cough drop, this one extracted from the chest pocket on his button-down denim shirt. “You ever been to Kansas, Miss Cara? Brooke said you weren’t a farm girl.”
“This is my first time here. And I have to tell you, it’s nothing like what I expected. It’s so hilly and green, so beautiful.”
“I’ll say thank you, even if I don’t have a thing to do with it.”
I tilt my head. “Oh, I don’t know about that. All that green out there is because of you. If it weren’t for you, it might be a subdivision or an oil field.”
Gerald’s face turns hard. “I’ll be damned if that happens. I’d say over my dead body, but I’m going to make sure they can’t do it even after I’m worm food.”
When his eyes light, I know that whatever he’s about to say is why I’m here. I grab another cookie and set it on my notepad, taking a sip of coffee.
“See these hands?” he asks, holding up his gnarled fingers. “Can’t do a damn thing with them. Fixing fence or running a tractor, these claws of mine won’t cooperate.”
“Is it painful?”
“Course it is.” A bleak chuckle. “Anyway, Doc Hart in town told me I got to start thinking about what’s next. I told him a plot next to my Sarah was what’s next. Doc didn’t think that was much to laugh at. Said I had to think about what to do with this place.”
I slide my cookie off the notepad and notice a dark spot of oil soaking through the paper.
“Did you come up with anything? A plan?”
Gerald is quiet as he attempts to stretch his fingers out of their hook-like positions. “I won’t sell. Not to one of these big guys, at least. I don’t give a good goddam if this land goes dry and I have to will it to the county as a damn preserve, I won’t hand over more land to guys in suits and ties who will tear down this house and work this land like it’s a two-bit whore.” His eyes come to mine. “Sorry, miss.”
I wave him off. “Don’t be. So if you don’t want a corporate farm here, who do you want? Another local farmer?”
He shakes his head. “Most of these local guys are one step away from the big boys. I sell to them, a few years from now and they sell out. Same damn result. What I want seems like it should be simple, but I’ve yet to find it.”
I raise my brows, pick up my pen.
“A young man who wants this life so damn much he thinks there’s clay under his nails even when there isn’t. And not some kid from the city who thinks farming sounds like a neat idea. They wouldn’t last a day out here. I want someone who knows this life, all the shit that comes with it, but wants it anyway.”
My body starts to sink into the chair, a clear picture of just that guy coming to mind and weighting me in place. Gerald scratches the back of his neck, and that familiar gesture—Garrett’s absentminded go-to when he’s thinking on something—gives more reason for my body to sink even lower.
“Someone who would let me live out my days in this house and sometimes indulge an old man’s stories, let him believe he might have a lesson to pass on. A kid that might let me putz around in the machine shop on my good days, check in to make sure I’m not dead on my bad days. I find that kid? He can have this place for a song. Just so long as I know he wants to make this his own. For as long as his damn hands will let him.”
In a flash I can see it all: Garrett, right here, amidst the green and the hills. Gerald still here, every day until he’s gone.
Two guys. One farm. A million reasons why it could save them both.