Page 73 of Not Our First Rodeo
“This can’t all be for me,” I breathe, the words feeling choked in my throat. My heart is pounding, my stomach tightening reflexively. When I rip my gaze from the party in front of me and look at Jade, she’s wearing a soft, patient smile.
“Els, I told you this town would show up for you.”
“Not like this.” But even as I say it, the words obviously ring false. Because here they are. Women I’ve barely met at church potlucks and Fourth of July barbeques. Parents of students I teach at the studio. Beau’s teachers from high school and his babysitter from childhood. People I’ve never seen before or only know in passing.
All of them here for me, even after all the hurt I caused. It feels like a balloon filling up in my chest, too much air and close to bursting.
“I don’t know what to say,” I whisper to Jade, my eyes drifting back to the party. In the distance, I see my mom talking to Cheyenne. Lottie bringing out another doily-lined plate from the big house. Tonya making one of the studio moms laugh.
“Luckily, almost everyone will ask you one single question about how you’re feeling and then offer you unsolicited advice about child rearing,” she says, shrugging. “At least that’s how it was at my cousin’s baby shower last year.”
My laugh pushes back the tears threatening to spill, and I look at my best friend. Her brown eyes are soft, her smile tender. “Thank you for making me do this,” I tell her.
She nudges my shoulder with her own. “Anytime. Now let’s go eat some chicken salad. I was here yesterday while Lottie wasmaking it, and she wouldn’t let me have any. It’s all I’ve been thinking about since.”
“I bet she let Cooper have some,” I say, climbing out of the truck, careful not to let my dress get stuck.
Jade glares in my direction. “Don’t even start.”
“Youshouldreallyjustlet me do this and you watch,” I try to tell Elsie for the fifth time this morning, but from the stubborn tilt of her chin, I know she isn’t going to listen.
“I can paint, Beau.”
“There’s a lot more to do than just paint.” The guest room, the room I slept in for far too many months, is going to be the nursery. I moved all my stuff back into our room a couple of weeks ago, but the furniture is still in there. It needs to be taken apart and moved out before we can paint and begin to set up the nursery furniture and decor. It took three trips to bring home all the stuff gifted to us at the baby shower, and it’s all been sitting in random corners of the house, waiting for us to get started assembling and organizing it. And as often as I’ve tried to convince Elsie that I can handle the heavy lifting, she refuses.
“I can move a mattress,” she says this with an eye roll, but I don’t miss the way she absentmindedly massages her lower back. She’s been trying to hide the pain from me for the last few weeks. Like I don’t know that she has a growing human sitting on her nerves and compressing her organs.
“Not according to your obstetrician.”
Elsie waves a hand dismissively, avoiding my gaze. “What does she know?”
I heave out a sigh and open the bedroom door. It’s been weeks since either of us has been in here, and it’s already developed a closed-off, musty smell that will soon disappear when I prop open the windows to let the summer breeze in.
It takes me a moment to realize Elsie has stopped in the doorway. I crane my neck over my shoulder to look at her as I push up the window. She’s staring at the wall above the bed.
“The paintings,” she breathes.
Only now do I remember them there. I can still feel the cold air of the attic as I climbed into it late one evening while she was still at the studio. The cobwebs that clung to my clothes. The dust that had gathered on their surfaces. I remember the tight feeling in my chest as I looked at them, unsure of whether we’d ever get back to the people who had painted them, drunk on cheap wine and handsy, laughing as we made love after returning home and hanging them on the wall.
We didn’t make our way back to those people, but I’m not sure I would want to. I like who we are now so much more.
I finish pushing the window open and turn to face her, feeling the breeze rush in, catching the curtains and wrapping them around my thighs. “I got them out of the attic,” I say, stuffing my hands in my jeans pockets. They’re worn, soft against my skin.
Her eyes peel from the paintings and settle on mine, bright blue in the light peering through the window. “Why? When?”
My shoulders lift in a shrug. Maybe I should be embarrassed that I wanted them back, that I wanted to fall asleep beneath them, but I’m not. “A few days after you told me you put them up there. I…” I trail off. “I missed them.”
Her eyes settle on the paintings once more, her expression softening. She looks beautiful like this, her hair catching in thebreeze, her skin golden from the sun, her entire body relaxing like she’s at peace, something neither of us was sure she’d ever be capable of feeling again. “Yeah, I think I did too.”
I move to stand beside her, the bare skin of her arm brushing beneath the sleeve of my shirt as I reach for her hand. She entwines it with mine, and I can feel her pulse against my palm, beating in rhythm with mine. We stare at the paintings for a long moment, and I wonder if she still looks at hers and thinks it’s ugly, or if she sees what I do. If she remembers the way our teeth clinked together when we laughed in our bedroom after hanging them, too drunk to unbutton her jeans. If she remembers ending up with my painted fingerprints staining her ribs because the edges weren’t completely dry. If she remembers us touching up the paint on the wall in our apartment when we moved out for the same reason. If she remembers what it felt like to make something together, to be the people we once were. If she likes who we’ve become even more.
“We should put them back in our room,” she says.
My heart skips a beat, my chest filling up with something that feels like bubbly champagne, popping and exploding.
I try to steady my voice when I ask, “Yeah?”
She smiles up at me, so bright in this dark room, the one that always felt so lonely. The one that will never feel like that again. “Yeah. And maybe after the baby is born, we can have a date night and paint some terrible pictures of her to hang in here to embarrass her with until the end of time.”
