Page 67 of Once Smitten, Twice Shy

When he glances back again, I know he has. He winks in that way of his—a double blink, eyes crinkled. “I’ll give it a try.”

•Twenty•

Will

“Sending a message to Juliet?” Mom asks.

I hit the button on my phone to turn the screen dark. I was about to, but now I sure as hell am not.

Pushing off the fence penning in our two milk cows, Daisy and Buttercup, I throw a stick that Hector sprints after across the grass. “Just checking the weather,” I tell her.

Mom leans against the fence beside me, massaging her left hand’s knuckles. “I still can’t get over it. Of all the small-world connections.”

I decided to get ahead of whatever story I knew was going to make its way to Mom, between Fee seeing us at the pub and Juliet’s mom sounding so excited to share the news, by telling her and Dad first thing Monday morning over coffee about befriending Juliet, meeting her parents, making the connection between our families.

All week long, Mom keeps dropping by, asking questions, pressing me for details on our “relationship.” I’ve told her the truth each time: Juliet and I are friends, and that’s all we’ll ever be.

I’ve tried not to dwell on the sadness that’s come each time I’ve said it, knowing even our friendship will likely have to end when our paths diverge again, mine toward my life here, finding the woman I’ll spend my life and run the business with, hers towardher life in the city and her hope of falling in love again. I’m able to move beyond the sadness not because I won’t miss Juliet or because saying goodbye won’t hurt, but because I know that every ounce of sadness I’ll feel after leaving her behind, no longer having what we’ve shared, will have been worth it. Because it gave me the chance, even just this sliver of time, to know Juliet. And I’m a better man for it. I hope she’ll feel her life is better for having known me, too. I’m trying so damn hard to be sure that’s the case.

My mom’s shoulder gently knocks mine. “Where’d that lovely mind of yours wander off to?”

I peer down at my mother and wrap an arm around her. “All over the place.”

She grins, setting her head against my chest, quiet for a minute, before she says, “Are you happy, Will?”

I stare out at the land as the dying sun spills blood orange across the fields and the tops of the trees, gilding their green leaves as they sway in the wind. At Dad, who stands on the back porch, hands on his hips, head thrown back, as he laughs with Fest. At Miranda, perched on the swing hanging from the massive oak tree beside the house, sketchpad in her lap. At Hector loping my way, ears flopping, stick wedged in his mouth.

Breathing in deep, I nod. I am happy. I am happyand—happyandcarrying this ache that’s been with me since my weekends began with Juliet, sharper when I think about her and miss her, when there’s so much I want to show her and share with her here but don’t, because that would only make it harder when I have to stop, when I have to move on and face what can never be: my world and her world becomingourworld. Because soon we’ll have to say goodbye.

“Yeah, Ma.” I squeeze her gently against me. “I am.”

“Good,” she says.

Hector drops the stick at Mom’s feet, panting, his big pinktongue lolling out of his mouth. She picks it up and chucks the stick as far as she can, which is pretty damn far for a sixty-three-year-old dealing with rheumatoid arthritis.

She arches an eyebrow. “Don’t look so surprised. I used to be a dynamite softball pitcher.”

“Like I could forget sitting on the first-row bleachers, watching you kick butt in the local league? That no-hitter you pitched against the Capulettis in the family tournament?”

“Those cankerblossoms,” she mutters darkly. Ma’s strictly against swearing; I’ve always loved what she uses in place of cuss words. “Buttercup got outonce, barely tromped through their disease-ridden cabbage patch, and they try to say at the town hall that she’s a ‘threat to local agriculture.’ Trying to take awaymyson’s beloved cow because of a ridiculous hundred-year-old family feud that my child had nothing to do with? Your poor father and I had to shell out—do you know how much? I can’t even stand to say it—to replace their ‘prizewinning’ cabbages. ‘Prizewinning,’ my backside!”

“Easy does it.” That was a mistake, mentioning our neighbors, the Capulettis, who’ve had a gripe with Mom’s family for generations, something Mom had hoped they’d get past when she moved here after having inherited the land from her aunt. Her hopes were swiftly, brutally dashed, and she’s never forgiven them for it. Bringing up the Capulettis is guaranteed to get Ma fired up.

She shakes her fist to the east, toward the Capulettis’ property, which begins a mile away, past a thick grove of trees very intentionally planted to block our view of them, and says, “Just try and mess with Isla Montag Orsino or anyone she loves, and see where it gets you!”

I give up trying to calm her down and figure I’ll join in instead. Turning east beside her, I raise my bent arm, hand fisted, and slap my other hand down on my biceps, honestly my favorite way to sayfuck you, which I learned from Dad’s grandfather. My great-grandpa,Pap, was already as old as God when I was born, but he hung in there long enough to teach me the art of skipping rocks and the proper use of every colorful Italian hand gesture he knew.

“William Campbell Montag Orsino!” She swats my arm down. “That lewd Italian gesture is not permitted on my property.”

I shrug. “I’m a quarter Italian, and those ‘cankerblossoms’ have been mean to my mama. I can’t help it.”

“A quarter Italian,” she mutters, rolling her eyes, but a smile sneaks out. “It’s less than that, sweetheart.”

“Not according to Pap.”

“Your great-grandfather, God rest his soul, might have been Italian and brave enough, when he married a very fiery Scottish woman, to try his hand at producing her family’s whiskey rather than his family’s wine, but after that, not another Italian has joined the Orsino family, all the way down to your father—”

“Who metyou,” I say sweetly, “another fiery Scottish woman who’d inherited the land that ran right along his, and then he wooed you, and you lived happily ever after.”

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