Chapter 21
I step barefoot into the grass and let out a ridiculously loud sigh. I won’t put my shoes on. Not yet. Not until I need them for whatever Virgil has in mind. For now, a walk across the yard or even a walk across the pasture means letting both my soles and my soul connect with Mother Earth.
I’ve missed this, but I haven’t dared to go for even a twenty-minute walk in the grass or in the sandy dirt road in front of my mom’s house for fear of her wandering off or unintentionally hurting herself. The only reprieve I’ve had in the past few months at all has come from Virgil and Dixon. Without them, I’m not sure I could’ve taken care of myself properly, let alone my mom.
My next step lands on a thousand tiny brown spikes, and I gasp. The patterns of rain and drought have caused the invasive stickers in the yard to flourish and then the green to die back so that only the clusters of sharp seeds remain. Virgil’s been cutting the grass every week, so I don’t even have overgrown grass to cushion my footsteps.
Virgil lends me an elbow, so that I can stand on one foot and brush the stickers out of my foot with my free hand. As far as I can see, the yard is covered in patches of the damned stuff, with each spreading field of brown hiding tiny stickers. They’ve been in my mom’s backyard for as long as I can remember, but never this bad. Before I was born, one of daddy’s relatives borrowed his lawnmower to cut a yard full of stickers, and when they brought it back to him, they brought back seeds. After that, try as they might, my parents had never been able to get rid of the invasive weed.
Beside me, Virgil chuckles. “Don’t you want to put your shoes on?”
“Not here! When I can get to some place where I can put both feet on the ground, then yes. But I can’t do it standing on one foot.”
Not here. I’d certainly lose my balance and maybe fall into the little daggers.
“Okay, okay. Put your feet on top of mine, and put your arms around my neck, and I’ll walk you out of this minefield.”
I’m grateful for Virgil. I’m also grateful that he’s wearing his work boots and not his office shoes. He stifles a laugh as he walks another thirty feet with me hanging onto him and my shoes dangling by their shoestrings and bumping against his back. He swings me to safety.
“Now, you can put your shoes on. Let’s not do that again. “
For some reason, I can tell that he doesn’t really mean that. But what would Pamela think?
I shove down the tinge of jealousy. I have no reason to be jealous. Virgil’s just a friend. Although right now, he may be my best friend. He’s definitely the person I rely on most heavily.
“So, um, Pamela is your girlfriend?” I tie my shoe without looking up.
“Not exactly.”
As I tie my other shoe, I glance up. “What exactly does ‘not exactly’ mean?”
“She’s a friend. But that’s the extent of it. Since my wife died, I haven’t had a relationship with anyone. Despite all the locals trying to match me up with women they think are suitable. I don’t know. Since I was an adult, there was Kimber, always Kimber, and then there was my mom to take care of. I guess you could say that I’m still healing.”
I understand. It’s been three years since Jesse. There’s a part of me that’s still healing from that as well. Maybe I’ll always be healing from that.
“I know what you mean, Virgil.” I don’t look up at him. Instead, I tie and retie my shoe.
“It’s like your grief is this huge ball inside of a box, and every little thing causes that ball to touch the walls of the box it’s in, and every time it touches, it causes pain. Over time, the ball gets smaller in the box, but it can still move around and touch the edges. Maybe the pain isn’t as great, but it’s still there. Even if it doesn’t hurt as bad, it’s still a reminder of what you lost. I’m not sure that ball ever vanishes.”
I glance up in time to see him staring toward the horizon. Not only do I understand, but I know precisely how he feels. “Sweetie,” I say, “I’m not sure we ever want it to completely disappear. Our grief is a testament to the depth of our love for someone. You can’t have one without the other.”
Standing up, I stomp my shoes a few times. I’ll have to be careful not to track stickers on my way back across the yard. “So why did you tell my mom that Pamela was your girlfriend?”
“I didn’t. Your mom assumes that everybody is coupled up or should be. I didn’t think it would hurt to let her assume. It makes her feel safe. But anyway, Pamela and I decided that we would give you a break, and that your mom would probably feel comfortable enough with Pam to let you out of her sight.”
He’s thought of everything. He brought food. He brought soap and lots of enticements for her to use it. “It’s amazing how well you can handle my mom.”
Virgil shrugs. “She may or may not remember me as a child, but she trusts me because I’m not you. In her mind, you’re still the baby whose bottom she powdered. To her, you’ll never be the expert. Even if you’re now taking on the role as her mother.”
“I don’t say thank you enough.”
“Yes, you do.”
“And Dixon. He’s been wonderful. I never would’ve thought when I was a teen that he would grow into such a compassionate adult.”
Virgil guides me along a field path across the farm toward his own property. “Be careful with Dixon, okay?”
“Why?” I’m teasing now. I throw my head back, face to hot and cloudless sky. “Are you afraid I’ll break his heart?”
Virgil points to an opening in the fence between our property and escorts me over the brambles. The energy of his wards’ bright blue mixes with my own to form a barrier to keep enemies out from either side.
I scan the pasture on the Caine brothers’ side of the fence. I spot the old oak where their mother is buried and quickly get my bearings. Their house is due south of where we walk. It’s as far to walk there as it is to take the main roads to drive. Virgil makes a sharp turn to the east, and I’m certain now that we are no longer headed to his home. Whatever he wants to show me is out among Mother Nature’s cathedral itself.
“I’m not worried that you’ll break Dixxie’s heart. I’m worried that he’ll break yours.”
“It’s not like that between us.”
What I don’t tell Virgil is that my relationship with his brother has been limited to deep kissing and holding hands, but I haven’t been able to summon the interest in him at midlife that I had in my early teen years. Maybe that’s because there’s so much more to me now than just hormones.
“Don’t get me wrong, Virgil. I like your brother. A lot. I appreciate him. I even enjoy our time together. But I’m not looking for anything with him.”
“So, he’s a distraction? Or placeholder?”
“Neither? As I said, I’m not looking for anything. My mom’s done the matchmaking. Dixon knows that I’m not looking for anything with him. I mean, the original plan was that I would be here only a few months to spend time with my mom and then I’d be moving to a new town and starting a new life. But I’ve done my best to discourage your brother from thinking we have any kind of future together.”
Virgil sighs. “And that’s just it. There’s nothing more attractive you could do or say to Dixxie than you don’t want him. For him, it’s all about the chase. He only wants what he can’t have. Women who aren’t interested. Or women who treat him like shit.”
He walks ahead of me for a few seconds, then remembers himself and waits for me to catch up.
“I promise you, I haven’t done anything to lead him on. And I do not treat him badly. I’ve been quite firm in my expectations, and he’s accepted that.”
“We all have our unique quirks. Some men fall in love with the damsel in distress because they like being the hero and they fall out of love when they can no longer save her or she’s saved herself. Some men need to put a woman on a pedestal and worship her. The problem there is then she falls off the pedestal or he knocks her off it, or breaks the pedestal himself, and then he can never get beyond the flaws he sees in her that he didn’t before. Other men put on armor and carry lances to keep all women as far from their hearts as possible. They’re careful not to give a woman too much information about who they really are behind the armor because that information turns into ammunition that could be used against them.”
“And then there’s Dixxie?”
“And then there’s Dixxie. Until the last few years, he’s always been the most eligible bachelor in his community, regardless of which community he lived in. When he was a young man, he was both blessed and cursed with good looks and an easy personality. He never knew what it was like to struggle to have a girlfriend. Women fought over him. They have all his life. Even now. And with that type of easy access to women, Dixxie wants what he can’t have. He’s been married four times, and all the women are exactly the same. Cold. Sharp-tongued. Exceedingly critical. He’s divorced four times now and split his assets four times. You can count him as a success in just about anything except relationships.”
Yes, Dixon Caine and Quent and me and a lot of people. But not Virgil.
“There’s a part of my brother that I think wants to be unhappy so that he can pursue happiness. The minute you let your heart soften toward him and let him in, he’ll disappear on you.” Virgil ventures a glance in my direction, then quickly averts his eyes. “Just like he did when he went off to college.”
The truth stings. I had indeed been head-over-heels in love with Dixon Caine at fourteen. He’d been the sexy older high school boy, the athlete, the scholar, the football quarterback, and the homecoming king. If his mom hadn’t stopped us the night before she decided to move the family—probably because she caught us—it’s likely I would’ve lost my virginity to him, and it wouldn’t have made any difference to him at all. He would’ve left the next day without saying goodbye. I hadn’t been a challenge to him—I’d just been very convenient.
“After all these years of being unhappy with his choices,” Virgil continues, “Dix is playing a game of ‘what if?’ He needs to be unhappy to be happy. That may sound strange, but he’s one of those people who will never be conventionally happy. He finds happiness psychologically in being rejected. I’m sorry to tell you that, but you’d find out soon enough. I just don’t want you to get hurt, Laurie. I remember how batshit crazy you were for my brother back in high school.”
I can see eight-year-old Virgil now in my mind’s eye as I mooned over his brother. If I’d been half as aggressive as my equally lovelorn classmates, their mom never would’ve chosen me to be Virgil’s babysitter for fear of what my proximity to her older son might mean. She’d seen that in a dozen other girls, including my nemesis, Iris-Ann.
After almost a year of successfully watching Virgil fifteen hours a week, I’d ultimately failed his mother. Instead of interviewing a new sitter, she’d simply moved the family to follow her dream. She wasn’t taking any chances on Dix having a second shot at me, at least not that young. The last thing she’d ever said to me was something under her breath to the effect of I was paying attention to the wrong brother.
“Is this what you wanted to talk to me about, Virgil?”
Clenching my jaws, I outpace him by ten feet or more. I can feel the truth in his words, but I don’t want to hear them. I want to go back to that momentary lightness between us when he directed my bare feet to the tops of his boots and, using his cane to stay sturdy, walked awkwardly to stickerless safety. Now we’re back to the heaviness of the prior moment.
We reach a barbed wired fence I’ve never seen before, marking the boundary between Virgil’s green cemetery and some other land that looks a bit like the outskirts of the swamp where Bobby—
No. I know my parents’ farm is to the north and east, but I’m turned around now. This can’t be a boundary to the farm where I grew up. It must be Virgil’s land and another neighbor’s. Any boundary on my family’s farm wouldn’t have a shiny new fence like this. Instead, it would be like all the other fences my dad erected—rusted, bent, falling over, pulled to the ground by briars and blackberries. This is a fence not to be stepped over but climbed.
Virgil presses down the top wire to give me a few inches’ extra grace from the metal spurs on the top strand of wire. He motions for me to hold onto the fence post as I plant my feet in the spaces between the wires. I’m three squares up before I swing my leg over. Atop the fence, I swivel and slowly begin my descent on the other side. Virgil extends his cane for me to steady myself. With the wires wobbling under my feet, I grab the stag’s head of the stick.
A vision strikes me like lightning.
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