Page 26 of Shake the Habit

“Kayleigh, whatever Taygen just told you is wrong. Damn it!” Marc jerked back and put his finger in his mouth. “Who left a screwdriver in here?” he demanded. “I just stabbed myself.”

He had left it there, but I didn’t judge. “That’s how it always goes,” I agreed. “Sometimes life seems to conspire to keep kicking you when you’re down.”

“I’m not down!” he retorted angrily. “I’m not down, I’m right!” He stared at me and he got the same face he’d made when we’dbeen little and had fought over the rules of a card game we’d made up together: he looked mulish, a new word I’d just learned.

I reined in my own temper. “From what Taygen explained, I could see how everyone’s words could be misinterpreted,” I said carefully.

“‘Misinterpreted?’” he quoted. “Like hell they could!”

“If your mama heard you talking right now…”

He actually looked over his shoulder before continuing. “There is no way that I’m installing shutters on my house. It’s aesthetically wrong.”

“Marc, do you hear yourself? You don’t even have the siding up yet! Why are you fighting about shutters?” Although, when I’d texted with Taygen, she hadn’t sounded much better. In fact, she’d struck me as equally silly and…what was it? Intransigent. As she’d typed a particularly long complaint, I’d killed time by looking up synonyms for “stubborn.”

“If he won’t install shutters, I’ll do it myself!” she’d ended that message, with a lot of capital letters and so, so many angry emojis.

“Taygen,” I’d started to cajole, but then she’d continued with more. She was as obstinate as her fiancé, which was another good word.

“I’ll stand on the highest ladder I can find so that he gets nervous, and then I’ll paint the shutters pink, hot pink so that he has to regret them every time he pulls into the garage. Which is only for one car, by the way! Marc says that he’ll have to be theone to park inside because of the tool chest in his truck but what if it’s raining? I don’t even know if he loves me.”

“He does,” I had assured her. “Didn’t he just fix your toilet?” Then I’d promised that I would talk to my cousin, and I was giving it my best shot.

“Marc, why do you want to marry Taygen?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled. He was sucking on his injured finger again.

“I mean it,” I pressed. “Why do you want to marry her?”

“Well…” He sighed. “She’s fun. She’s ready to go and try anything, on a moment’s notice. But she’s not crazy.” He quickly glanced my way, to see if I’d taken offense. I only nodded encouragingly. “She was so happy when I rolled out her trash can the other day. You would have thought I bought her a diamond ring and I will do that, someday. But she didn’t care about the ring I gave her when I asked her to marry me. She said, ‘I just want you, not some jewelry.’”

I put my hands over my heart, very impressed. Taygen had really liked the ersatz stuff from Aunt Paula that I’d shared with her, but I knew just what she’d meant: the engagement ring hadn’t mattered, but the engagement did. “Marc, you love her and she loves you. It’s almost Valentine’s Day! Why are you fighting like this?”

“Yeah, you’re right.” He sighed again. “I’ll talk to her more about installing shutters. I could explain how stylistically, it’s a bad, terrible, stupid idea.”

“No,” I told him.

“What am I supposed to do, then?”

We spent a while cutting out cardboard and painting it, and Marc left early to go hang the pieces on his house so that they could both get an idea of how shutters would look there. “When you discuss this with her, you are not to say ‘wrong,’ ‘ridiculous,’ or ‘sensitive,’” I admonished. “There are more words to avoid and I’ll text you a list.” Then I wrote to Taygen, too, reminding her that this was his area of expertise, after all. It was also the home he’d purchased himself and had worked to renovate, after-hours and on weekends, toiling mostly alone to make it the very best he could.

“Give him a little break,” I urged. “He loves that place and he’s not saying ‘no shutters’ because he wants to insult you and start a fight. One of the reasons you love him is that he’s pigheaded,” I further reminded her, and she admitted that I was right, and she would try to be more rational about the home’s exterior.

My Lord. That had been exhausting! “I’m over relationships,” I texted next, but not to either of those people.

“Did you start one while I wasn’t looking?” Caleb wrote back, and I gave him a brief summary of the day’s activities. He returned with, “Hell.” Then he stated, “They sound like kids.”

Well, they were pretty young. Marc was only twenty-five, I wrote, which was really just barely out of the teen years. I was surprised that, as someone with such a strong math background, Caleb hadn’t done some quick subtraction.

“He’s older than you?” he wrote, and I answered affirmatively. “You’re always saying that you’re ancient.”

“I’m not ancient,” I said out loud when he answered his phone. I’d gotten tired of waiting for him to type because he was very slow at that, so I’d called him. “I don’t think I ever said that I was ancient.”

“You talk about step-counting all the time.”

“I don’t need to count those anymore.” I yawned. “Sir and I went running this morning and I’m feeling it now. Isn’t it supposed to be energizing?”

Caleb got excited about my pace and distance, and he wanted to know the route I’d taken. He didn’t know the streets we’d traveled very well yet, but he was interested in learning his way around. We’d walked there together, too, on the previous weekend, so that he could get a better lay of the land.

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