Page 28 of Through the Dark Night
“It did take me aback a little bit, but she’s so sweet and just innocently joyful that you can’t help but fall in love with her.”
Lance pulled a pie out of the refrigerator. “I had Lauren make this special for us. It’s blueberry.”
Shannon’s hand stopped as she reached for the drawer to get some forks. “You remembered.”
“Of course,” he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world for him to remember her favorite kind of pie. They had a conversation about it that had been brought back as soon as he said blueberry. About how Michigan was known for their blueberries, and blueberry pie was her absolute favorite, but she hardly ever got it because she couldn’t make pies that didn’t run all over the place.
“We’ll have to see if this one’s runny or not,” Lance said with a grin.
“I can’t believe you remembered.” James would never have remembered anything like that. Honestly, she couldn’t trust James to remember something that she said two hours before, let alone two decades.
She supposed that was what happened when someone really liked someone else. Was interested in them. They were interested in everything and wanted to know everything there was to know about them.
He cut two pieces and pulled them out without it running anywhere. “Lauren said if you let it cool, it has a tendency to not be as runny.”
“I wonder if I knew that back then.”
“Maybe that’s why you could never get them to turn out the way you wanted them to. You were always too impatient to cut into them.”
“If I recall correctly, anytime you knew that I was making a blueberry pie, you were there with bells on well before I brought it out of the oven.”
“You do recall correctly,” he said.
They grinned at each other, and then he turned to get ice cream out of the freezer while she put the pies in the microwave for a few seconds each.
Finally, when their desserts were ready, they walked out on the porch.
“Do you want to sit on the swing?” Lance asked, nodding toward where it swayed gently in the lake breeze at the end of the porch.
“I’d love to. We spent lots of evenings chatting on the swing.”
“We sure did,” Lance said, glancing at her but not saying anything more.
They walked over and sat down together, the springs creaking slightly under their weight.
“It’s so impressive the way you take care of Katie. The obvious love that you have for her, the patience you show her. No wonder you’re so patient with me while we’re working together.”
“You’re a lot different than Katie,” he said, and he gave her a look that said in more ways than one.
She didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything.
“She’s all the family I have. Of course I love her. Of course I’d be patient with her. I love her.” He lifted his shoulder, like it was that simple.
“It’s not that easy. There are a lot of people who would not have sacrificed what you did in order to take care of a sister who could have been sent to an institution. They might not have been able to wait to get rid of her. And yet… You rearranged your entire life. I love that. It’s beautiful.”
“I don’t know if it’s beautiful or not. But I guess I just don’t feel like I wanted to make any other choice. It wasn’t a hard one. I mean, sure, I was looking forward to getting out of the house when she was born. And when my mom was dying, I promised her that I would take care of her. I promised I wouldn’t leave Dad alone.”
“Do you really think your mom expected you to keep that promise?”
“I’ve wondered that over the years. If she would have known that she was making me promise that the next eighteen years of my life, I wouldn’t go anywhere.” He paused for a moment. “I wanted to follow you to college. Sometimes I wonder…if I would have gone…if things would have been different.”
He was saying he wanted to know if he would have gone, whether she would have kept her promise if he’d been right in front of her.
“I owe you an apology. I gave you a promise, and I broke it. Maybe that’s why I admire what you did so much.”
“No. You don’t owe me an apology. We were what? Seventeen? You didn’t know what you wanted to do with your life. And then you went to college, and I stayed here. You didn’t know what I was going to do, whether I would be able to support a family without an education. I don’t blame you at all.”
“You’re more magnanimous than most people would be.”
