“Alone?”
“Yes.” I nodded enthusiastically and pointed toward my house. “I forgot the sunscreen anyway. Walk with me?”
“You got it.” He bent down to kiss the top of the kids’ heads and offer promises about taking them to the arcade.
I looked back at Ben and tried to convey my concern with raised eyebrows. We hadn’t been dating long enough for him to read all of my facial expressions, but I hoped this one was pretty obvious. “Can you keep an eye on everybody? I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Ben moved to the ladder and climbed out with agile grace. “Who needs a snack?” he called to the wild things. They agreed with more shouting and cheering. “That’s great!” he told them as he herded them toward his sliding glass door. “Because I’ve got three different kinds of Pop-Tarts I need to get rid of.” I froze in place. He had to be kidding. He looked over and shot me a sly wink. That man.
Trevor and I walked in silence up to the house. I opened the front door for him and stepped into my super-cooled entryway. Or maybe it just felt that way after lounging for hours in the hot sun. I hadn’t bothered with flip-flops so my grass-covered feet felt every inch of cold wood as I led him into the kitchen where I’d left the sunscreen on the counter.
“I haven’t seen you in a while, how have you been?” The truth was, I hadn’t seen much of Trevor or Katherine over the past couple months. I knew she was avoiding me after she caught Ben kissing me in the hallway and I felt too guilty and too ashamed to reach out to her first.
Trevor was a casualty of Katherine and my avoidance.
Although, there was a very good chance that he was avoiding me on purpose too.
“I’ve been great,” he breathed on a sigh that sounded good-so much better than the last time I saw him.
“Really?” The question was out of my mouth before I could process why I asked it. I thought maybe I expected more bad news. It was stranger to me that Trevor could possibly be okay than if he would have said he was filing for bankruptcy.
He smiled at me, “Really. Summer has been good for me and good for the business too.”
His words filled me with hope, “How good?”
“Liz, we might be back on track. We haven’t lost money in three months and we’re booked out through the fall. I think it’s going to stay this way too. I finally feel like I have my feet underneath me and a handle on what Grady had been doing.”
“Trevor, that’s amazing! I knew you could do it!”
His smile grew into a proud grin. “I kept waiting for Grady to come back and put someone else at the head of his business,” he confessed. “I just couldn’t believe that he meant to put me in charge. I am not Grady. I will never be Grady. And yet he left me so much to take care of. I felt like he made a mistake.”
“He didn’t.”
Trevor’s smiled died and the bright light in his eyes dimmed. “I am still struggling to believe that. But what you said at Thanksgiving, about how I was killing him all over again, that really made me start to think.”
“I shouldn’t have said that!” Regret churned in my stomach. God, how cruel I had been! “It wasn’t true, Trev. I was just so angry and-”
“It was true, Liz. And I needed to hear it. I needed a fire lit under my ass.”
I smiled and shook my head at him. “I’m still sorry.”
“And I’ve already forgiven you.” He looked around the kitchen, taking it in again. “I don’t really like that guy you’re dating.”
His words sucked the air from the room. I wasn’t expecting them and I didn’t know how to reply. I stood there awkwardly playing with the spray can of sunscreen.
“But Grady would have.”
My heart dropped to my stomach and I struggled to speak above a whisper, “What?”
“Grady would have liked him,” Trevor repeated finally meeting my eyes. “He never wanted you to be alone, Lizzy. He never wanted to leave you with everything. It’s been hard for me to come over here ever since he… died. Not just because everything in this damn house reminds me of him, but because watching you do this on your own killed me. I love those kids, as much as I’ve ever loved anything. They need a dad. You need help.”
“Trev, Ben and I aren’t serious. Not at all. I’m hardly thinking of him as a replacement for Grady.”
He smiled patiently at me, as if he knew something I didn’t. “But if you have to have a guy around, he’s a good one.”
“You don’t really know him.”
“Are you trying to convince me not to like him?” Trevor laughed. He ran two hands through his tussled hair and took a deep breath. “When Grady first told me about you, I was still in high school. He called me up to tell me he was going to bring a girl over to meet mom. I was too young to know that might mean anything, so I made some off-color joke that he didn’t like. I remember that he got serious, right away. He didn’t yell at me though or lecture me. He just said, ‘When you meet Liz, you’ll get it. She burns bright, Trevor. I need that kind of light in my life.’”
“Trevor…”
“He didn’t want that to end with him, Lizzy.”
Through a thick throat, I said, “He said something like that to me near the end.”
“He always thought of you first. Always. And he always wanted what was best for you and the kids. That’s why he worked so hard. That’s why he built what he did. He just couldn’t even imagine giving you something less than he thought you deserved. He was the best guy I have ever known.”
“It’s hard to imagine settling for anybody else. I think whoever they are will always feel like second best. Or second string or whatever.”