Epilogue
Three months later
Ellen sat on her front porch with her feet up, sipping a glass of iced tea and watching Caleb rake up leaves while Henry followed him around with his own tiny rake. It was windy—typical for October—and their voices drifted to her on unpredictable currents, so that she caught only snippets of Henry’s questions and Caleb’s patient responses.
Jump now, Cabe?
Not quite yet, buddy. Give me another second to make the pile bigger.
Then, later, I’m raking! Cabe, look! I’m raking!
I see you, Hank. That’s awesome. You might want to rethink your technique a little . . .
Caleb had spent weeks gently correcting Henry every time he mixed up “I” and “you,” and then one morning a switch flipped, and Henry woke up fluent in pronouns. Naturally, Caleb took credit for teaching him, and Ellen smiled and praised them both.
Language development didn’t actually work that way, but she couldn’t help wondering if maybe it did, for Caleb. He had his own fluency in these kinds of things, a talent for coaxing other people into giving him their best. After all, he’d helped Ellen dismantle her own barriers between “you” and “me,” coaxing her slowly out from behind her castle walls until one day she realized that her whole perspective on self-sufficiency had changed.
Her eyes traveled down the slope of the yard to stop at the fence skirting the property line. As fences went, it was handsome enough. Eight feet tall, cedar, stained and weatherproofed, with a deep new flower bed stretching along its length.
She’d negotiated hard for that flower bed. Caleb spread the mulch for her, and she’d selected the plants from the nursery and put them in the earth on her hands and knees. New hostas, bleeding hearts, lungworts. He’d moved her tulip tree and bought her a second one to stand nearby at the corner of the property. None of it looked like much now, but it would grow. It would thrive.
She didn’t love the fence, but she loved him, and that turned out to be a lot more important.
After three months with Caleb, Ellen could see that she’d taken the wrong lesson from her mascot hosta. She’d thought the plant’s survival proved that she, too, could endure anything. But it was a perennial, for Christ’s sake. Surely the point was that it kept coming back.
Renewal. That was what her life had been missing. That was the pulse that beat at her wrists, the sap rising in her blood, the beautiful pinch of emotion in her throat when she watched Caleb with her son or woke up in the dark to hear her lover groan, caught in a nightmare, and she was able to hold him, soothe him, talk him through it.
She’d spent the past few years hibernating. Now her life had these green shoots, this promise of fullness, and there were moments when gratitude overwhelmed her.
Caleb finished raking a pile of leaves onto a bright blue tarp, plopped Henry down in the middle of it, and hauled him down the driveway, threatening to dump him out front and leave him there for the leaf trucks. She watched her dark-haired lover with her light-haired son, and she let the late afternoon sun warm her bare feet where they stuck out from under the porch roof. It was a perfect day of the sort that came only three or four times a year in Ohio. Bright blue sky, crisp air, a breeze.
They were a perfect family, suspended in a perfect moment.
Of course, tomorrow it was supposed to rain, and it would turn colder soon. Last week, Caleb had questioned her parenting one too many times in a twenty-four-hour period, and she’d snapped at him and sent him home to sleep alone.
He worked himself ragged, especially now that his business was taking off, and he didn’t like it when she got on his case about that. Sometimes she still got scared and hid behind a self-protective wall, and he didn’t like that, either.
But he always coaxed her back out.
Interdependence required these terrifying acts of faith. She kept reminding herself to practice trust, to believe that Caleb would deserve it. He hadn’t let her down yet, and the longer they were together, the more deeply she believed that he never would. That no matter what missteps either of them made, he’d never fracture her trust irrevocably.
Caleb and Henry walked back up the driveway, Caleb dragging the tarp behind him, and Ellen heard the familiar rumble of the garage door going up. She set her tea down and stood, knowing he’d need help folding the tarp to put it away. “Go grab the big rake for me, okay, buddy?” Caleb asked Henry.
“No.”
“Do it now, and I’ll give you fruit snacks when we get inside.”
Henry smiled and ran off to get the rake. It was clear across the yard, which made its retrieval a big job, but Henry would do just about anything for fruit snacks.
“You shouldn’t bribe him,” Ellen said, picking up one end of the tarp.
“I just wanted a minute with you. I haven’t talked to you all day.”
It was true, more or less. Henry had a tendency to insert himself into every conversation she tried to have with Caleb. He adored Caleb, but he hated having to compete for Ellen’s attention. She kept hoping he’d get over it, but so far, no luck.
Thank God for Maureen.
“Are we shaking this out?” she asked.
“Yep. Close your eyes.”
She did, holding tight to the corners and letting Caleb do the shaking. Her arms rode along as passengers. When she opened her eyes, she saw leaf litter in Caleb’s hair and smiled. “Am I covered in leaves, too?”
“You have some in your hair.” He brought his hands together to fold the tarp lengthwise, and Ellen did the same.
They flipped the tarp flat, and Caleb walked toward her to match the ends. When he got close, their fingers met, and he handed over his corners of the tarp while his mouth moved over hers in a long, slow, lazy kiss that made her wish Henry’s bedtime were a whole lot sooner.
“Any chance I tired him out enough that you can put him to bed early?” Caleb asked.
“Not unless you want to get up with him at five in the morning.”
Caleb wrapped his hand around the back of her head and kissed her again, pulling her close enough to crush the tarp between them. This kiss wasn’t so slow and lazy. This kiss dissolved her inner thighs. “Tonight,” he said.
“Tonight,” she agreed. “We’ll make it good.”
“We always make it good.”
“But this time you raked my leaves, so I’ll make it extra good.”
He smiled. “I didn’t do that for sex, but I’ll take it.”
“I know you will.” She knew why he’d done it, too. The leaves had been another item in their protracted wedding negotiations.
She glanced over at Henry. He was walking backward, holding on to the rake with both hands and dragging it toward them, grunting in a pantomime of grown-up effort.
“I’ve been thinking about what I owe you,” she said when Caleb released her. She made the final fold of the tarp against her stomach and started walking toward the garage. “About setting a date.”
Caleb was right at her heels. “And?” He caught her shoulder and spun her around.
“I’m thinking end of February.”
“That’s an interesting choice. Can I ask . . .”
“I’m thinking Jamaica,” she added.
That put a smile on his face. “Ah. Jamaica gives a whole different spin to February.”
“Small ceremony, hot sand, lots of drinks with little umbrellas on them.” She smiled. “We’ll make a great escape of it.”
“Do you need to escape? I thought we were doing pretty good here.”
“We are. I just like the idea of a new beginning in a new place.”
He dipped his head and kissed her again. “If you like it, I like it.”
Henry came barreling up, dragging the rake behind him. “Fruit snacks,” he said, and dropped the handle strategically between her legs and Caleb’s, forcing them apart.
“I love you,” she told Caleb as she backed up a step.
“Fruit snacks,” Henry insisted.
Caleb grinned in that way he had. That way that told her, the morning they met, that the two of them were a team, and they were in this together, and they were going to have a hell of a lot of fun. “Fruit snacks it is.” He met Ellen’s eyes. “And I love you, too.”
She admired the wedge of his back as he walked inside ahead of her, guiding Henry with a hand on his shoulder.
That first morning, she had thought he was trouble. She was so sure that Caleb had come along to upset her routines, fracture her independence, and she wouldn’t be able to carry on along the narrow path she’d made for herself.
She’d been right. But as it turned out, trouble was exactly what she needed.