Page 104 of Story of My Life
She cocked her head. “How do you mean?”
I couldn’t believe I was actually talking about this to anyone, let alone a woman who had blackmailed me into a fake date. “Still off the record?”
“I’m holding an Italian sub, not a notebook.”
“After college, I stuck around for a few years and worked at Bishop Brothers while Levi did the military thing. But I wanted…something different. So I took a job in Maryland for a real estate developer and worked my way up in the company. Everyone else stayed here.”
“Until?” she prompted.
“Until my dad had a stroke. A bad one.”
“I noticed he has a limp sometimes,” she said.
“Yeah. It wreaked havoc on his right side. I took leave at my job and came home to help out. At the time, we had the construction company, the general store, and my parents’ farm was operational.” I shook my head at the memories.
“That’s a lot to handle,” she mused.
“We filled in everywhere we could during his recovery. Mom never left his side. She calls it supervising. We call it micromanaging. But my God, that woman can do anything. She got Dad back on his feet. Dragged him to doctors’ offices and therapy appointments. Badgered him about his diet and his sleep. The doctors said his recovery was miraculous. Mom wouldn’t have settled for anything less. Meanwhile, the rest of us kept everything running.”
Hazel sighed. “I love your family.”
She sounded wistful.
“Guessing you’re an only child.”
She wiggled her hand. “Pretty much. But we’re talking about you, not me.”
“Not much else to say. Dad got better. I left again.”
She lifted her beer and took a slow sip. I tried not to focus on the way her mouth brushed the curve of the bottle. “You went back to the life you built.”
“And I stayed there until Laura’s accident. Now I’m back.”
“For good?”
“Don’t know. I quit my job. Sold my place. I can’t leave here. Not with things so…up in the air.” How was a man supposed to plan for the future when the present felt like a never-ending limbo?
“But after you fix everything, you might decide you have more to prove,” she guessed.
“I don’t have anything to prove,” I argued.
Her smile was soft. “Iknow that, but I don’t think you do.”
“I’d be nothing if it wasn’t for them. I’d have nothing,” I insisted. Yet I’d still left them. I’d still distanced myself from them. And I didn’t know if I would do it again. I shifted on the seat, irritated by the feelings this conversation was bringing up.
Hazel twisted to face me. “Maybe you wanted to prove that you could be something, someone on your own.”
I ignored the twinge I felt in my chest. “More like just plain selfish. I should have been happy to stick around like Gage and Levi.”
“It’s not selfish to want your own life. You wanted them to be proud of you, but maybe you also wanted to know for sure that you could make it on your own.”
“Selfish,” I repeated.
She reached over and laid a hand over mine that was balled on my thigh. “You were a kid from a stable, loving home who wanted to spread his wings to make sure they worked. That’s not selfish. That’s a rite of passage.”
“Why didn’t my brothers need to spread their wings?”
“What makes you think they aren’t in their own ways?” she countered. “Gage went to law school, and Levi…”
