Page 25 of Shake the Habit

“That was a different woman.” He rubbed his jaw. “There might be a pattern, but I wasn’t referencing them. I was thinking about how I ran out of Tennessee the first chance I got, and I avoided everything that was happening here with my mother. I knew that things were turning rotten.” He looked across the room, toward the patio door with a screen that was now slightly misshapen. “For the last ten or so years of her life, she wasn’t able to keep up with the farm.”

“You were in Florida,” I reasoned, “so you weren’t around to watch over it personally.”

“I wouldn’t have anyway. She wasn’t like that.”

“What do you mean? She didn’t want help?”

“That’s putting a very positive spin on it,” he said. “She didn’t want anything to do with me or with anyone else. You can’t get help from people if you literally lock the gate and refuse them entrance.”

I thought about what Aunt Paula had said, how everyone had been surprised by Lara-Lee Woodson’s pregnancy because she’d hated people so much. “Lara-Lee was like a briar patch,” she’d told me.

“Do you remember the cold snap a few years ago?” Caleb asked.

I nodded, because I did a little bit. That had occurred just before I’d left for my second stint in rehab and specific events of that time were little hazy, but I remembered the general misery.

“I saw the weather reports and I was sure that her pipes would freeze, since there was no heat in the house,” he continued. “I called on the landline, which was the only way to reach her, and she told me to leave her the hell alone. Then she hung up.”

“Why was she so angry at you?”

“She was angry at the world. I happened to be an inhabitant of that,” he said quietly. “But I had done things to piss her off, too. I didn’t go into the sciences like she’d wanted. She was very unimpressed with my career.”

But he had one. Aunt Paula would have liked that.

“She didn’t approve of where I’d gone to college, where I was living, none of it. But she was still my mother,” he continued. “I believed that things at the farm weren’t going well but rather than acting, I ignored it.”

“Maybe you just didn’t want a fight. I don’t blame you for that,” I added quickly. “Who wants to help someone who’s angry and insulting?” I thought of myself, though, and how people had kept after me even when I’d been awful, and I sighed. “I guess I understand, because you keep doing it when you love someone. Even if it’s like slamming your head against a wall, you keep doing it.”

“Exactly. I don’t want to be that guy who conveniently looks the other way, not again.”

I thought of the things he’d said to me about his mother, how she’d been “too busy” to teach him even though she’d wanted him to be homeschooled, and then how she’d prevented him from knowing any other kids. I thought about how he’d had to cut a switch for himself. “I would give myself some grace, if I were you. And also, remember that it’s a new chapter.”

“That’s right. We turned the page on the year,” Caleb agreed.

“It’s my responsibility to find a new place for me and Sir, not yours. But I wouldn’t mind help,” I offered.

That seemed to make him relax. “I do want to help. In a way, I feel like Sir is my responsibility, too.”

Well, no, but I was gracious. “Want to look at listings while I start packing? According to the notice, I don’t have that long until I’m out on my butt.”

“Hell. Yes, I’ll start looking,” he agreed. “There has to be something.”

There was. Not what I expected, but there was.

Chapter 6

Marc frowned at his phone and then I watched him text back. He mouthed the words as he wrote and it was easy to read his lips. As his thumb slid around the screen, I repeated his message out loud: “What are you talking about? No, I didn’t say that!” I whispered. “You always blow things out of proportion!”

Shit. Was he writing to Taygen? “Marc,” I said, but he held up a finger to me and then kept writing.

“Babe I have no idea why you’re reading so much into this,” I murmured. “You’re being too sensitive and dramatic.”

“No!” I burst out loudly, and he did look over at me. “Marc, are you talking to your fiancée right now?”

“No,” he shot back, but he was, which I soon knew without a doubt. A few moments later, after he’d gone out to his truck and had started angrily clearing things from the bed by throwing them on the ground, Taygen wrote to me.

My Lord. I hadn’t ever considered that, as the one who’d first brought them together, my role would continue as the person who had to keep bringing them back together. I was no expert! They both knew my own relationship history, like how I’d gotten left at a gas station in Calhoun, Georgia when I went inside to use the bathroom and my boyfriend met another woman while he’d filled his tank. Fortunately for me, it had been a very nice, very clean gas station with really good snacks, and Uncle Johnnie (who was Megan, Matthew, Marshall, Michaela, and Marc’s father), had been able to leave work to come pick me up. So I did owe their branch of the family, and I was going to do my best for my cousin now.

Taygen and I exchanged messages for a while and I thought I was making headway with her, so then I moved on and talk to the third person in this relationship. “Hi,” I said to my cousin as I walked outside. Sir joined me and got excited about the mess of trash he found, since Marc had started emptying out his back seat, too. He was really a pig about his truck and there was a ton already on the ground for the dog to sniff.

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