Page 57 of The Making of Mila and Blake
“Broken.”
Blake softly smiles. At least I can still make jokes. That’s something.
We move slowly down the steps, and he allows me to lean my weight against him as he helps me to his truck. He lowers the tailgate and gestures at the truck bed suggestively.
“Just trust me,” he responds to the look of confusion etched across my face. I sniff, take a deep breath and compose myself. Blake scoops me up in his arms, and I gasp as the ground disappears from beneath me, clinging to his neck as he lifts me onto the back of the truck. He pops the tailgate shut again.
“Wait,” I say. “What are you doing?”
“We aren’t going to stayhere,” he says with a breezy laugh as he points to our surroundings. Sheri’s van, my parents’ rental cars, the old rocking chair on the porch. The light from the living room shines bright. “Those trash cans aren’t exactly romantic, are they?”
Blake leaves me in the back of the truck as he starts the engine. Dad peers out of the living room window, his face scrunched in confusion, and I can only shrug from the truck bed. I have no idea what Blake is doing either, but he doesn’t head for the gate and that is enough peace of mind for Dad. He disappears from the window.
It turns out Blake is only moving his truck deeper into the ranch. It judders through the fields, through the long grass and over the uneven ground. Blake hops back out again once he parks in a spot in the very middle of one of the fields.
“I thought maybe you’d just need some air, and there’s a hell of a lot of it out here,” he explains. He sticks his head into the backseat and emerges with a bundle of soft, wool blankets that he hands me, and next comes a bag of food. He leans over to set his guitar by my feet, then effortlessly swings his body into the truck bed.
“I brought takeout from Jefferson’s,” he says, shaking the bag of food at me. “Tori told me you like the buffalo shrimp.”
We scoot up together against the rear window, pulling the blankets around us. The bag of takeout rests between us on the blankets and we sit quietly in the darkness, observing the lights of the house in the distance and listening to the crickets punctuating the silence. We share the food, and maybe it’s because I have barely eaten anything that constitutes actual food this week, but the shrimp is extra delicious. It makes me feel human again, alive and breathing.
“I needed this,” I say. But I’m not just talking about a substantial meal. I mean the fresh air, the comfort of Blake’s presence, the space and time to gather my thoughts. It’s less scary when you aren’t alone.
“I thought you might,” Blake says. He rearranges the blankets, pulling them up to our chests. It’s not cold. In fact, it’s extra warm tonight. But they make me feel safe, protected. “Your grandfather was a great man, you know. My mom always spoke highly of him.”
“He was,” I agree. “Stubborn, but great.”
“I talked to him last week. That morning. Before we left for Belmont,” he says, and I tilt my head toward him, listening. “When you ran upstairs to grab your phone and you left me out on the porch with him, he told me you still loved me. Something about how your heart chooses.”
“Hewhat?” I gasp, pressing my hand over my face, mortified. Throwing me under the bus like that is such a Popeye thing to do, the little weasel. He knew me so well, could read me like a book. I think of our conversation that day at Bowie Park, how in between his critique of my sandwiches, we spoke of findingthe one. It must have been so obvious to him that I was still in love with Blake.
“I told him I already had an inclination that you might.” He laughs and pulls my hand away from my face, steadily capturing my gaze. “I made sure he knew I still loved you too, and I promised him I wouldn’t let anything screw things up between us again. He shook my hand. Told me if we ever get married, your surname has to be Harding-Avery. So, bear that in mind. You aren’t allowed to drop the Harding name.”
A warm fuzziness takes hold of me, and I bury my head into Blake’s shoulder, pulling the blanket up to my chin to hide my grin. Talking about Popeye inflicts unimaginable pain, but it also fills me with a soaring joy that he will live on forever in the memories of everyone he ever knew. And it is so typically embarrassing of him to discuss the terms of my presumptive marriage to Blake, but God, I love him for it.
Blake presses his lips to the crown of my head and into my hair, he asks, “Can I sing for you?”
“Please.”
He retrieves his guitar and nestles it against his body.
“This is a song I listened to a lot when my grandpa passed years ago,” he says, his voice filling the night air. “It’s ‘Let It Hurt’ by Rascal Flatts. I like to think it’s about letting yourself feel,reallyfeel, the pain of losing someone. It’s okay to be hurting right now. It’s even okay to hurt forever.”
He clears his throat, reaches beneath the blankets for a pick in his pocket, and positions his hands over the guitar with great concentration. The opening strums are slow and morose. My eyes immediately well up and I hug my blanket closer to me, tilting my head back against the rear window. The sky comes into focus as I blink away the tears. Blake’s soft, Southern drawl weaves through the still night as he builds to the song’s chorus.
The stars seem brighter than ever, clusters of vibrant sparkles in the stretching darkness, and I know it’s Popeye. A tiny whimper escapes my lips. My heart hurts with a grief I never imagined possible.
When Blake finishes the song with a few lingering, echoing strums, he sets down his guitar and draws me into his arms. We say nothing more. I cuddle into him, his strong arms around my shoulders, and we sink further beneath the blankets until together we fall asleep under the stars.
24
First thing on Monday morning, the construction crews roll onto the Harding Estate, the peace and quiet disrupted by the churning of machinery and the buzz of voices. It’s a bit jarring, watching the ranch come alive again as things return to normal. They have to. The world doesn’t stop spinning.
I sit on the chair on the porch with a fresh glass of iced tea, the ice cubes clinking rhythmically as I rock gently back and forth, my laptop balanced precariously on my lap. Dad and Sheri are inside with the attorney working out the details of Popeye’s will, and it is a conversation I need no part in, so I’ve come out for some fresh air. Popeye could have easily sat here for hours, gazing out over the land. Time passes quickly out here.
I’ve chosen to work on my essay for LeAnne. It’s a good distraction, one I am thankful to have, and I flick through all of my open tabs on my browser. There are so many news articles to check out. Every decision LeAnne has ever made during her past five years in office has been subject to thorough scrutiny from the residents of Nashville and government officials. I write an entire page praising LeAnne for making Nashville teachers the highest-paid in the state, but then another page on how she has so far failed to fully deliver on her promise to improve neighborhood infrastructure. In the end, I summarize that for the most part, LeAnne gets shitdone.I send the essay to Blake to pass on for me, and he is surprised that I actually made the effort to write it.
Savannah and Teddy dip in and out of the stable block, hard at work as they bring the horses into the pasture for grazing. They have worked double-time lately, and I believe the pair of them are the sole reason the Harding Estate didn’t completely collapse last week. All of Sheri’s riding lessons were canceled and she was in no state to assist with the daily feeding and grooming, so Savannah and Teddy really took one for the team and made sure the horses were one less thing we needed to worry about. Even now, they still show up early for their shifts and leave long after they are required.
