Page 51 of Broken Country

“I was so angry, Beth. You believed what my mother told you. You said I used people and threw them away afterwards. That hurt me so much.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s me who should be sorry. I was a bloody fool. Too proud to beg you to come back.”

“Why would your mother tell me you were with Louisa if you weren’t?”

“Wishful thinking?”

“Or worse.”

I always knew Gabriel’s mother would find a way to stop our being together, even if I hadn’t managed to sabotage it myself first.

“How stupid and stubborn we were. Such a waste,” I say,and this time there’s no mistaking Gabriel’s tone when he says: “Is it?”

I look up at him and he looks back at me. A stare that feels dangerous, intimate, intoxicating. Every bit of resistance crashing down.

What I want, more than anything, is to reach out and touch him. I’d like to place my palm against his cheek. Or his heart, to see if it’s beating as wildly as my own.

There have been too many thresholds like this one, chances missed, turns not taken, and always the question burning between us, me and Gabriel, Gabriel and me, the life we might have had.

“What are we going to do?” Gabriel asks.

The music pouring from the tent is loud and yet, in this sudden stillness, I hear only us. Our breathing. The blood pounding through my head, my pulse or his?

“This,” I say, standing on tiptoe to kiss him.

Finally.

My mouth against his.

A kiss that feels like everything all at once. Unhinged. Tender. Too much, too much, nowhere near enough. Teeth snagging lips, hands caught in hair, every second of every year we’ve been apart in this kiss.

The record changes and the party continues, and it feels as if we are the only two people here, the only two people in the world.

Before

The oak tree is pronounced dead in early June, first by David, then by Frank, then by a tree surgeon friend who can take it down for us, but it’s a big job and will have to wait until he’s free later in the summer.

“You can’t cut it down,” Bobby says. “It has to stay forever.”

He is bereft at the thought of losing the oak, we all are, it has always been the most magical spot on the farm.

David says: “But, Bobby, it’s too dangerous to leave it. If one of its branches came down in a gale it could kill you.”

“I won’t go near it in a gale, Grandpa.”

David stoops to put his face closer to Bobby’s. “Maybe the tree wants to be taken down. It’s old and sick and exhausted. It’s given us, and so many people before us, the best years of its life.”

Bobby nods at him. “All right, Grandpa,” he says.

The tree felling is planned for Saturday, the men will take care of it themselves.

When Saturday comes, Bobby is excited. While David and Frank and Jimmy make plans and read over the instructions left by the tree surgeon, he slides around the kitchen asking questions.

“Will it be noisy when it comes down?”

“Very,” David says. “It will make a crack like thunder.”

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