Page 130 of The Last Second Chance
“She’ll…she’ll wake up then?” Forrest asked, still staring at his daughter’s ghost white face.
The doctor turned back to him. “She will.”
Forrest bent from the waist to catch his breath with a relief so strong it nearly swept him off his feet. In that moment we shared something that could never be put into words. We’d come within millimeters of losing something irreplaceable and the knowledge that everything could go back to normal was like a summer rain after weeks of drought. Being faced with the thing you didn’t have any control over and then rewarded with normal? It was a humbling experience. Unfortunately not for all.
With Joey stitched up, the doctor finally convinced Jax to let her take a look at his forehead. He sat in a chair, never releasing Joey’s hand while the doctor made quick work of the cuts on his head and hands.
With the good news, Forrest channeled his energy into attack mode.
I can’t remember all that was said, in the heat of the moment, but voices—including mine—were raised and Forrest was one second away from demanding that security remove Jax from Joey’s bedside.
April was in tears again and Phoebe was spitting fire.
It was that moment that Joey decided to return to this world. She opened her eyes with a flutter and told everyone to keep it down. She held Jax’s hand in one of her own and her father’s in the other. And once again helplessness was redirected into relief.
It was the middle of the night before Jax was officially released and Joey was admitted. We stayed on to see her moved to a room and something happened in those hours between heartbreak and hope that changed the course of our family.
I was returning with hot, stale vending machine coffee for all when I saw Forrest and Jax having a heated discussion in the doorway of an empty waiting room. I walked in on the word “lawsuit.”
He laid it out for us. If Jax didn’t leave Blue Moon, Forrest would file a lawsuit against us. And to make sure his daughter stayed away from Jax, he wouldn’t pay for her to go to Centenary with him. Anything to keep them apart.
I thought it was just the hurt and scared talking. But Jax saw something else. He saw Joey’s dreams dashed, he saw a drawn out legal battle for his family. He saw only one way out.
I tried to talk him out of it. We would figure it out, I told him. Leaving everything he’d worked for, everyone he loved was an unfair punishment for something that wasn’t his fault. But Jax was adamant. I saw that it was his moment, his choice and he was doing what he thought was best for the people he loved.
In that moment I saw my son clearly standing on his own two feet taking—too much—responsibility for his life. If I stepped in, discounted his feelings, and tried to protect him by sweeping up the mess, it could do even more damage. If Forrest did sue, if he won, how responsible would Jax feel then for the outcome? How would Jax and Joey survive with their families so bitterly divided? He’d already thought of these things and weighed them unacceptable. He’d rather face the unknown of starting over on his own than taking his family into a battle that he didn’t want us to fight.
I was proud and devastated. The profound concern for others beyond his eighteen-year-old self was a side his mother and I had only caught glimpses of. But now, stripped and raw, he was ready to take this burden on himself for the good of us all.
I didn’t tell Phoebe, and that I know I’ll come to regret. When we drove home, the air was heavy with unspoken words. Phoebe gave Jax a long hug and told him she loved him before she went upstairs to bed. Jax went upstairs to pack. I waited for him in the kitchen second, third, and fourth guessing myself.
I wanted to tell him not to go. That I didn’t want him to go. I had been prepared for the separation of college in the fall, not the sudden and life-altering separation that was about to happen tonight. But then a quiet voice whispered deep inside. Jax could get out. Unburdened from any expectation and responsibility, Jax could build a life of freedom.
Over the years, I had faced nights where I wondered quietly what would be different if I hadn’t started this farm? If I wasn’t carrying the weight and burden of this place? What would my life look like had I just driven south or west? Would it be easier? Better? Brighter?
I never pondered these thoughts too long. I was married to this land. I had a wife to love and a family to provide for, to enjoy, to watch grow as if they too were crops to be harvested. I loved it. But it is hard. Harder than I ever could have imagined. Balancing, juggling, hoping, influencing, sweating, challenging Mother Nature to a duel year after year.
But Jax could start over. He wouldn’t be the Jackson Pierce whose story and family everyone knows. Whose eighteen years were well documented and expectations pinned on him from birth. He wouldn’t be the other half of a couple, at least not yet. It was one of the dangers of love so young. Being half of a couple often comes before being a whole person.
Maybe it was selfish of me to let him go. To let him do what I never had the guts to do. To drive him to that bus station, wrap him in a hug so tight I thought we were almost the same person. I tucked what he and his brothers had affectionately dubbed the “oh shit fund” money into his hand. And when he tried to give it back, I told him that if he was starting over, he was doing it with an investment from me. Because I believed in him. And I did.
I sit here in the dark of the kitchen waiting for Phoebe to wake up and read the note Jax left her. I don’t know if she’ll forgive me and I’m not sure how much of my role I can confess to her and still live to see noon. My heart hurts for me, for them, for Joey, and for Jax. But it’s also soaring for him because I know that this is just the beginning for him and he will be back. And I’ll be all the prouder for it.
The piecesof that night that Jax hadn’t known he’d lost came rushing back as he rested his head in his hands. The relief on his parents’ faces when they pulled back the curtain and it wasn’t him in the bed. The overwhelming feelings that swamped him when Joey’s beautiful brown eyes opened, disoriented and hurt, butalive. And that sick slide into guilt, knowing he’d put her in that bed, knowing he’d put his family in danger of losing it all.
To read his father’s take on it all was a painful and beautiful kind of therapy. His dad had never blamed him, like Jax had feared he had. He’d been proud. Since that night there had been a nagging question in the back of his mind about why his father had let him go. And now he knew. And knowing meant healing.
A plan began to form in Jax’s mind, and with it, hope in his heart. He scanned a copy of his father’s story with his phone and sent it to the printer upstairs. He fired off a middle-of-the-night email to Ellery. Then he opened his screenplay and got to work.
29
Joey was in a bad mood, and throwing herself into her work didn’t seem to help. At home, Waffles was happy to curl up with her on the couch and in her lonely bed, but at work when she had to deal with the incompetence of everyone, the dog decided he was better off following Carter around than sticking with her.
She’d ripped the bottom drawer out of the filing cabinet in her office when it failed to glide open smoothly. While fixing a loose board on the indoor ring’s mounting block, she’d given her thumb a good smack with a hammer and then rained down four-letter words until the horses were nervous.
High-strung Calypso had chosen that day to give her a swift kick when she wasn’t looking and now she had a goddamn hoof print on her thigh.
When Colby had the audacity to ask her what “crawled up her butt and died” she put the fear of the Almighty in him with a look frosty enough to freeze boiling water and a few colorful, choice words about his genitalia and parentage.
