Page 29 of Between the Shady Groves
Then, she left it cooking on the stove while she got a plate out, and a cup and fork while she was at it.
She filled the cup up with cold tap water and set it in front of him.
“Thanks,” he said, and he picked it up and drained it.
She smiled a little, because it didn’t surprise her that he was thirsty, and he never drank anything except for water in the evening. She took his cup and filled it up again. That time, he didn’t touch it.
By then, the garlic bread and the spaghetti were done, and she scooped them out on the plate and set it in front of him.
“I’m sorry I didn’t hold you and take off work like you wanted me to.”
“I guess that’s probably my biggest thing. In your life, work is number one. Wife is…more down at the bottom.”
“That’s not true at all.”
She lifted a brow and then turned back to wipe down the stove and put the spaghetti away.
When she had returned to stand in front of him, he’d prayed silently for his food and started eating.
“It may not feel that way to you. But that’s the way it felt to me.” She took a breath. “My feelings are valid, even if they maybe don’t take into account everything that you’re doing. After all, if I give you a present of the biggest diamond in the world, you’re not going to be veryexcited about it, unless you think you can sell it and get money out of it. Because diamonds don’t mean anything to you, am I right?”
“Yeah,” he said with a forkful of spaghetti halfway to his mouth.
“All right. So if you give me a gift of making your business super successful so that it makes seven figures a year and wins a bunch of prestigious awards, that’s for you, not for me. Because it’s not what I want.”
“You don’t want the security of a successful business? You’re not proud of your husband for building something like that out of nothing?”
“Of course I want security, and of course I’m proud of you, but when it requires that you spend every waking minute focused on your business, and you have no waking minutes left to talk to me, or to notice that I’m grieving, or to understand that our miscarriage was more than just a couple of cells leaving my body, and that it devastated me, and that I wanted to talk about adoption and you didn’t want to have anything to do with it, then it’s a problem.”
She’d ranted a bit, and she deliberately closed her mouth and took a calming breath.
“I don’t know if I understand the appeal of children. They’re messy, demanding, and you’re miserable while you have them. I just saw my sister and her husband, and they looked exhausted, like they hadn’t slept since the babies were born, and I know my sister was up all night, she got maybe five minutes of sleep, if that.”
“Those are some of the sacrifices that you make for children. I’m willing to make those, I want to make those. Just because you’re inconvenienced doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.”
He seemed to think about that, but she knew he didn’t agree.
“When you have a problem with your business that you have to spend a lot of time and money solving, you don’t think ‘all this is inconvenient, why did I ever start this business?’”
“Sometimes I do,” he said around a mouthful of spaghetti.
Apparently he wasn’t trying to impress her enough that he would actually wait until his mouth was empty before he talked. But she didn’t mind. That was what happened when people were comfortable with each other, right? She’d liked that part of marriage. She liked thatcomfortableness, that total lack of self-consciousness when he was around. She could be herself, and he loved her anyway. Or at least, he was supposed to. That was the way she thought of him too. He could be comfortable with her, and she would love him anyway. Could be totally himself, not put on any kind of civilized trappings at all, and she would love him anyway. Just him. Not the persona that he showed to the rest of the world.
“Okay, so parents probably think, ‘what was I thinking,’ when they have children. But you don’t for one second think it would be a good idea to sell your business, right?”
“Yeah. I understand what you’re saying. The inconveniences are annoying at times, but the overall joy I get out of it makes it more than worthwhile.” He got joy out of his business. That seemed to be a revelation, and at the same time, it hurt.
“Do you get joy out of your marriage?” she asked.
He blinked, surprised, and this time, he kept his mouth closed, chewing thoughtfully.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of it that way before, but yeah. Marriage might be a bit of an inconvenience at times…” He looked around ironically, and she understood what he was trying to say. It was a huge inconvenience for him to be in Raspberry Ridge right now rather than running his business where he felt he belonged. “But it’s more than worth it. You’re more than worth it.”
“I guess I just didn’t feel like that was the way you truly feel.”
“That’s a lot of feelings. Could you put it into words that I understand?” He was kind of kidding, she was sure, but that went back to what Skyler was saying. The man was smart, so smart it was almost sinful, and yet…he couldn’t figure the simplest of relationship ideas out.
“I think it goes back to the diamond. If I give you a diamond that you need a wheelbarrow in order to haul around, you’re not going to appreciate it. Because it’s not what you want. You’re not going to look at that and go, ‘boy, my wife really loves me.’ You’re going to look at that and be like, ‘boy, what did I do to tick her off that she gave me this big old rock to haul around?’”
