“You know,” she said with a bright smile, solace like a cool stream of water sliding through her, gently eroding the tension that had built in the last few moments. “You had me with the coffee.” She lifted her mug and took a sip while Agnes and Ron laughed.
“What do you think, buddy?” Julia asked her son. “Should we stay?
Ben smiled, his face radiant and beloved and threw his arms in the air. “Pancake!”
“Sounds unanimous,” Ron said.
Julia watched her son clap his hands and she took a big sip of coffee, using both hands so that she wouldn’t do the same.
CHAPTER FOUR
JULIA INSISTED on doing the dinner dishes that night and spent a long time with her hands in the warm soapy water, washing Agnes’s great-grandmother’s china.
Her fingers traced the faded vine around the edge of a dinner plate and she tried to imagine owning something so old. So precious. There was such a feeling of solidity and permanence in this house that she craved to be a part of.
She put Ben to sleep after finishing the dishes and Agnes retired a few hours later, declaring herself pooped. But Julia was too awake to go to bed. In Germany she’d put Ben in daycare three days a week for two hours because she’d been worried that seeing only her day in, day out would stunt him in some way—make him a social outcast in kindergarten. So while he’d learned to share toys with other kids, Julia had taken long runs to drive out her worry, to banish her fears. It seemed a good tactic to use now.
“I am going to go for a walk,” she told Ron, who read in his easy chair. He and Agnes had accepted Julia so quickly, had taken care of her and Ben so readily, that she felt a little blank. What am I supposed to do? she wondered. She wanted so badly to believe that this comfort and family was real. Was hers. She could settle in, put her feet up and stop treading water. But part of her was still braced—ready for the rejection she still wasn’t entirely convinced wasn’t going to come.
“Ben is out like a light,” she said assuring Ron that she wasn’t going to run out and leave him to entertain her toddler.
“Of course, Julia, it’s a lovely night,” he said with a smile. “Grab my sweater there at the door.”
She took the beige cardigan, then stepped outside. The cool twilight embraced her as she admired the low stucco homes that made up the neighborhood. The sweet scent of night-blooming jasmine filled the air and somewhere nearby a dog barked and another answered. Julia gave herself a moment to imagine a life here. A family. Ben and a dog and a man who was honorable. Everything that she’d thought was possible when she married Mitch.
Mitch had loved New Springs—or at least his boyhood. That had been part of the attraction for Julia at first, what drew her to him like metal shavings to a magnet. He’d seemed so grounded, so focused. He’d told her all about this beautiful, fairytale-childhood with adoring parents and a best friend with whom he’d gotten into nothing but trouble.
Jesse.
More importantly, Mitch had claimed to want to recreate that experience with his own family—right down to the best friend and the trouble. She almost laughed at the spectacular failure he had made of that.
She remembered everything Jesse and Mitch had talked about that night in Germany. Every word was imprinted on her, including the directions for the shortcut between Mitch’s home and Jesse’s.
In this foreign territory, she longed for a trace of something familiar, even if it were only a tidbit from a story she’d heard months ago.
It had not been her intention to seek out Jesse’s house when she set out for her walk. But standing on the sidewalk with nowhere to go, her heart became a compass.
She looked around to get her bearings. Mitch’s street ended in a forested dead end and she walked toward it, then cut left across one dark lawn and another before finally jumping over a ditch to arrive at the next street. She turned right and saw a small house on the corner with a broken front window.
Jesse’s childhood home. Interior lamps cast a shallow pool of light on the porch through the damaged glass and a ladder leaned against the side of the house.
Her heart faltered, her breath clogged in her throat. Her skin pricked as blood rushed through her veins and the world seemed to swim.