Page 63 of The Last Second Chance
“You’re good enough as is. And I don’t care if someone ever told you different,” Phoebe said stubbornly.
Jax eyed up his mother.She couldn’t know, could she? After all these years, could she have known the reason he left?
“You’re good enough just by being born. So stop trying to prove yourself by working yourself into exhaustion trying to be eight different people and work twenty hours a day. Do what you want to do, not what you think you have to do.”
“Do you think Dad would be proud of me now?”
His mother looked legitimately shocked. “What in blue heaven would ever make you think he wasn’t?”
“I write words on a screen. What’s so great about that? Dad fed people and rescued animals. He raised a family. He was always there whenever anyone needed him. I ran away.”
“Being sent away is different than running away.”
She did know. Son of a bitch, all these years he thought it was a secret between him and his father. “I still had the choice and I made it.”
Phoebe’s smile was a little sad. “Oh, kiddo, you’re a lot more like him than you know.” She pulled a large yellow envelope out of a purse big enough to hold groceries and slid it across the table to him.
“What’s this?”
“Something of your father’s that I found while I was packing and organizing. It’s yours now.” She pushed her chair back from the table and stood. “You take a little break and I’m going to go find my handsome fiancé and talk him into splitting a piece of that Irish cream cheesecake with me.”
She dropped a kiss on his head. “Don’t ever let anyone make you feel less than, and that includes yourself,” she ordered before heading off in search of Franklin.
Jax stared at the worn and battered envelope. A red string closure kept its secrets secure.
He carefully unwound the string and pulled out a thick stack of papers.
Jax held his breath, paging through the top of the stack. Dozens of short stories written by his father. A man he’d never seen turn on the family computer, much less sit down to type something out.
There were stories about the farm, his brothers, his mother. One in particular caught his eye.
A Mid-Summer Night’s Splash
By John Pierce
July in Blue Moon Bend means painting the landscape with humidity thick as a wet blanket. The sun cracks the earth, sending shimmers of mirages dancing along the horizon. It means the kids are already a month into summer vacation and singing a chorus of “I’m boreds” and “Do I have tos?” To the farmer, it means we spend the month holding our collective breath for rain, in the right amounts and the right times.
It was a hard July. We were slipping past the “It would be nice to have a good rain” conversations into desperate times. Another week without a good, soaking rain and we’d all start to lose crops.
I’d spent the day in the fields with varying degrees of participation from the boys as we coaxed, cajoled, and then threatened the irrigation into working order. The days were all long, sweltering, and edging toward hopeless.
All the work of the spring could be dried up and murdered at the whim of Mother Nature. One storm can change the entire growing season. Now, I’m not a worrier by design. I’ve found if you’ve done your job as well as you can, when it’s time to hand over your work to the next person, the next stage, there’s no room for worrying about the outcome.
But this afternoon, my back against the oak overlooking the trickle that used to be a creek, I felt the tiniest parade of What Ifs arise.
What if the rain never came? What if we lost all the crops? What if the farm failed?
Who would I be if not a farmer?
The buzz of the locusts and the waterfall of sweat between my shoulder blades brought me back and I shook it off. I returned to the fields like a soldier marching into battle. No time for worry. There was only room for work.
The boys had disappeared under the pretense of a drink break, but it wasn’t long before I heard the shrieks and threats and the unmistakable sound of a garden hose wielded as a weapon.
For a moment, the thing I wanted most in the world was to join in their water war. But the work was calling. The responsibility of an uncertain future needed to be fed my best effort.
I worked late, taking a sandwich in the barn for dinner while I greased the sprayer for the next day. Phoebe had put the boys to work weeding in the garden for an hour before letting them scatter to their summer night childhoods. Freedom of the best kind.
I was pretending to read in bed after midnight while cursing myself for telling Phoebe air conditioning in the house could wait until next summer when I heard the suspicious sound of silence. It was followed by the more suspicious sound of bedroom doors shutting quietly and footsteps avoiding the squeaky floorboards.
