Page 42 of Butterfly Sisters
She smiled at his lighthearted comment, but a flash of heat rose through her, remembering his teenage desires. “So, you still want to do all that?” she asked, curious about the man in front of her, their years together just a tiny piece of who he was now.
“Yes—all those things make me happy—but I forgot one thing. I want to fish and watch football and know everyone in town, but what I onlykind ofknew back then was that I want to do it with my favorite people around me, because none of it means anything without the people you love. I want to make my own enormous family one day, but until then, I’ll take my parents and your family if that’s okay.”
“Ours is a bit of a mess,” she said, warmed by his candor.
“Only if you let it be. Talk to Meredith.”
“Maybe I will,” Leigh said, wondering if he was right.
FOURTEEN
When Colton dropped Leigh off, she got straight out of his truck and walked over to her rental car to take a drive. She wasn’t able to face her family at the cabin quite yet.
“You gonna be okay?” Colton asked, with his elbow hanging out of the open window of the Ford.
“I’m going to try,” she said, as she opened the door of her rental, still feeling uncertain about everything.
“Call me if you need me,” he said with a gaze that told her he, too, saw someone in front of him who was no longer exactly the person he’d known.
She nodded and then closed the driver’s side door of her Honda, cranking the engine. Colton headed out down the road toward his place.
With the windows down, she meandered along the winding lanes, under the crisp coolness of the shade from the canopy of deciduous trees, their new growth a bright green. The idea that an aerial view of those roads would look like wilderness to an outsider made her feel protected, as if she were in her own little cocoon where no one could touch her—not Phillip, not her family, not Jimbo and his unfriendliness…
As she drove, with only the sound of the cool spring wind in her ears, she kept coming back to the idea that her entire adult life had been wrapped up in her job. She didn’t even have a houseplant in her apartment because she wasn’t present enough to water it. Her nose was always in her computer, searching, studying, scarfing down the latest facts to propel her through her next meeting like a rocket. She’d wrapped her entire self-worth in it.
But now, in this moment, she forced herself to pay attention to the rustle of the trees, the snippets of sun through their branches, the way the car ground on the dirt road and hugged the curves as she took them, following alongside the edge of the sparkling lake. She took it all in, thinking how these things were what Nan held dear, and she wanted so badly to have her guidance.
“You picked a terrible time to not be here,” she said out loud, hoping Nan could hear her. “That’s not like you.”
She’d intentionally pointed fingers at Nan, hoping to fire her grandmother up enough to come rushing back into the car to tell her she had no say in the matter. Leigh’s senses sharpened, hoping to catch “I’m still here,” whispered on the wind, but there was nothing.
It would be so easy to spiral down into her sadness that the cabin wasn’t nearly the same vibrant place without Nan, that every minute Leigh struggled right now made the shiny memories of her youth seem more and more like a fantasy. But it wasn’t in Leigh’s nature to wallow—she’d already done enough of that. Like Colton said, she was a doer. She wanted to work, to think, to figure out how to change what wasn’t right.
Her phone went off with an email alert and her doer instincts kicked right in. She slowed to a stop, pulling two tires onto the soft wild grass of the shoulder, and grabbed it from the passenger seat. Green Hat Coffee Roasters wanted to talk. There, on the side of the road, she did what she did best and scheduled a time to have a phone call. Her pitches were spot on—she’d had two of the four clients return her unsolicited emails in less than twenty-four hours. In her world, that was unheard of.
With a satisfied sigh and a swell of hope, she decided it was time to go back to face her sister.
“Meredith,” Leigh called when she opened the door to the cabin.
“I’m on the porch out back,” her sister replied.
Armed with Colton’s words, she headed to the screened-in porch where Meredith and her mother were sitting, and lowered herself on the sofa next to her sister. “Can I ask you something that I’ve always wondered?”
Meredith eyed her, closing the art magazine she’d been reading, holding her place with her finger. “Sure.”
Mama looked on, clearly wondering what all this was about.
“Why didn’t you come out in the driveway to see me off when I left for Northwestern?”
The skin between Meredith’s eyes wrinkled and she looked at Leigh like she was crazy.
“I’ve always wondered what I’d done to make you so upset with me.” Leigh felt a release, saying the words that she’d held in for so many years, as if she were uncaging a flock of doves and watching them lift into the air.
Meredith set her magazine onto the coffee table, and leaned her forearms on her knees. Her attention moved from Leigh to her mother and back again, that look of confusion sliding into one of heaviness, as if she, too, had been holding on to something for all those years. “Leigh, when you went off to college, Mom and Dad threw you a huge party—remember, Mom?”
Mama nodded, her reading glasses now off and her book in her lap, interested as if she, too, had been wondering this same thing.
“But two days before, when I’d told you that I was finishing my classes early to waitress in Florida until I could bartend, I got a lecture on selling myself short by taking the easier diploma. Instead of a party, you and Dad gave me a packed lunch for the trip and a wad of cash so that I could get home if I ever ‘got stuck.’”
