Page 104 of Townshipped
“You’ve been a friend and a provider during a very challenging time in your family.”
We’re standing two feet away from one another now, his golden hazel eyes trained on mine.
“You never were a burden,” he says to me.
“I was going to ask you something, but knowing you need to be here for the kids makes it a pointless request.”
“What?”
“You’re the person I know best since the accident. I feel like I’m going back to live my life with a bunch of strangers.”
“And you wanted me to come with you?”
How does he know? Is he that tuned in to me? Or am I that obvious?
“Never mind,” I say with a wave of my hand. “Hearing the words out loud, I realize the idea’s absurd.”
Silence fills the space between us.
Aiden smiles, but it’s not the smile I’ve come to cherish and would give anything to see right now. This is a smile reserved for business. It’s the smile he gives people in town whenever we go to a store. It’s the smile he offers his mom when he doesn’t want to discuss something. It’s the smile he maintains when the kids are making bedtime a little harder than it needs to be.
I hate that smile. I’d rather he do anything than smile that smile right now.
“I’ve never been to Boston,” Aiden finally says. “I’d come in a heartbeat.”
“You would?”
“Mom even offered to keep the kids for a few days so I could go with you.”
“She did?”
“She did.”
Aiden’s face says everything. He’s not coming. He can’t.
“It’s too soon to leave them,” I supply, so he doesn’t have to. “They’re just getting settled.”
Aiden nods. “If they weren’t here …”
“You’d go.”
“In a heartbeat.”
“So you said.”
I surprise myself by saying, “Maybe one day you’ll come visit the home of the beans and the cod.”
Aiden gives me a questioning look.
I chuckle. “I just remembered a saying:
And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.”
