Page 37 of Shake the Habit

The dog looked up and ran over to me.

“Sorry, I meant, ‘No, Caleb.’ I can’t take that! Look what just happened to my nana’s car. I don’t think that Poppy repairs luxury vehicles.”

Caleb argued that yes, I could take it, and we continued the discussion throughout our dinner. We talked about many things, in fact, but what was on the forefront of my mind was something that I felt I couldn’t bring up: Marc.

Unless I did it another way. “Have you ever felt like you were in over your head?” I asked casually.

“Sure, when I went to boarding school. I felt it again in my first job out of college. I started working at an investment bank and it was cutthroat.” He shook his head, remembering. “I was sick to my stomach every morning before I went in and I hated it. It’s why I started doing my own thing.”

“Wasn’t that even scarier?”

“It was different because I was in control, but then the scary part was not having a backup plan. There was no backup at all, except me pulling myself out of it.” He placed his utensils on his empty plate. “If I ever have kids, I’ll be that backup. I’ll be there for advice or a loan, whatever they need.”

“Your mom wasn’t like that,” I said, stating the obvious.

“No, she wasn’t. When I left for college, she made sure I understood that it was for the last time. I was eighteen, an adult, and I wasn’t welcome back.”

“Not even for vacations? For the summer?” I asked. “What did you do?”

“You can stay on campus more than you’d expect,” Caleb told me. “There are international students, poor kids like me, and people who just can’t go home. Also like me. Over the summers, I got jobs, mostly in New York but once in San Francisco.” He looked around the vintage kitchen. “I never came back, not once.”

“Until she needed you,” I pointed out. “You said that you were here for more than a year before she died, because she needed you.”

“We’d talked a few times, so I knew that she…this wasn’t what we were discussing. What did you ask me?”

“I asked if you ever felt like you had gotten in over your head, and I’m glad to know that you understand the feeling. Because someone I know is struggling, although I’m also sure that it’s going to be fine great due to a lot of support and love, and due to the fact that this person is smart and capable, with so much potential. I’m sure it’s going to work out.”

“I’m glad about that,” he answered, and I felt like this topic was a little too dangerous. I shouldn’t have brought it up, but my breakthrough with Marc had been a big part of my day and I liked talking about my day with Caleb. I liked hearing about his, too. I now understood more of what he was doing in front of his computer all the time and what the red and green line graphs were. He would tell me, “You can’t really be interested in this,” but I was. I really was.

Fortunately for me, he introduced a different topic. “You know, something’s coming up.”

“Easter?”

“That, but I was thinking of your birthday,” he corrected, and tapped his phone. “Someone reminded me that I have a calendar in this thing.”

“Let me see,” I said, and he passed it over. Yes, there it was: “Kayleigh’s birthday,” not “Kayleigh McCourt” but just my firstname. And he’d set it to repeat every year, or maybe his phone had just defaulted to that. I preferred to think that he’d made the choice himself.

“What are your plans for the day?”

“My parents are going to want to have me and thirty other people over for dinner, and my mom will make a cake or two, or three.”

“That’s nice,” he commented. “Why do you sound so glum about it?”

I shrugged. “Your birthday’s coming up, too. I also have it in my calendar.” I had everyone’s, so that birthdays popped up left and right. But I’d put his in capital letters.

“It’s coming in July,” he noted, but as someone whose job depended on looking at future trends in the economic markets, he should have known that summer was a mere eyelash away in a timeframe sense. “Can I invite myself to your party?”

“Of course you’re invited,” I said. “I mentally include you in everything.” After the first time he’d come to church and then to our family get-together afterwards, he’d kept coming, and it had felt totally natural.

“I’m Kayleigh’s friend,” he’d explained to all my relatives on that first day, and they’d accepted that and had been happy to have him. So he was invited for the next Sunday, too, and all of them in the future. I loved to have him there, although I knew it had been hard for him sometimes. When put together, all the McCourts were a lot—especially for a guy who’d grown up so isolated. After hearing that he hadn’t been able to come homefrom college, I could now picture him getting dropped off at his boarding school at age fourteen and then watching his mother drive away. Had she let him return for the holidays back then? Probably not. He’d been less than an hour from home, but it was the same as a million and two miles of distance.

Sir was nosing at my knee, and he didn’t ever interrupt at the table anymore unless the situation was dire. “His tummy might be acting up again,” I said nervously, and Caleb jumped to his feet and ran for the door, with the dog loping along behind him. I followed because…well, I just got a weird feeling when I was in the farmhouse. It felt sad to me, which was probably due to the awful stuff I’d heard about Caleb’s life here. Loneliness, isolation, friendlessness, and a total lack of love—that was how he’d lived, and maybe those emotions remained. Anyway, it made me anxious, especially when I was alone, so I followed them out onto the porch. They disappeared behind the outbuilding which held the beautiful car, the one I wouldn’t be taking.

The first time Marc and I had come here, I’d noticed that the front porch was wide and gracious. It could have been beautiful, but at the time, it had been mostly covered by sticks, leaves, and dirt, and the only furniture had been a broken rocking chair. Caleb and I had swept it off and put the chair into the construction dumpster, so it had improved a lot. Now the main feature was an oversized rolltop desk that listed to one side, because one of the legs was broken and had been propped with a rock that wasn’t quite big enough. The desk had previously satin the barn, but Marc’s crew had moved it up here to save it. It had belonged to Caleb’s mom.

I walked over the creaking floorboards and carefully tugged up the slatted top, which resisted a lot before it gave way. The interior was crammed with papers about a foot high…my Lord, what was in here? “Hm,” I sniffed. “Lara-Lee, you were a pig.”

The front door of the house, which I’d left ajar, suddenly slammed shut. I jumped and the breeze blew around the leaves we’d missed during our cleanup and lifted the papers on the desk, which I quickly held down until the air stilled again.

---