God, he’d grown. He’d been big for his age at sixteen when we met, but by my measure, he’d grown nearly a foot taller in ten years—two in shoulder width. One of those shoulders just in the last two years since I’d seen him.
When he’d shown up at the farmhouse looking for work, Pop didn’t think twice. It was clear to all of us that Jake had nowhere to go, so Pop took him in, cared for him just like he’d cared for me when my parents died. In turn, Jake had worked his ass off for Pop, earning every bit of his room and board and then some.
Of course, we’d only really known each other that first summer, at the end of which I left for New York to live with my aunt. Jake stayed on the farm indefinitely, and I was glad for his presence there. It excused my guilt for leaving Pop.
Pop.
A sharp pinch in my chest brought my palm to the spot, followed by the familiar sting at the corners of my eyes. Tears were never far these days, the endless well forever surging without warning. I’d been at work when Kit called to tell me he was gone. On my way out of the office, I turned in my resignation at my aunt’s marketing firm. Went home and packed a bag. And here I was.
Jake stopped, and I slammed into his back, bouncing off him like a rubber ball. Unfazed, he glanced over his shoulder at me.
“You sure you’re okay?”
I waved a hand and made a noise of dissent. “Please. I run into brick walls all the time.”
The quietest chuckle left him. He picked up one of the suitcases like it was empty and set it in the bed of his old Chevy.
A low whistle slipped out of me as I inspected his truck. “A ’67 K20? Boy, she sure is pretty, Jake.” I ran a hand across the shiny cream stripe, crisp against the fire-engine red. “Did you lift it?”
“Just a couple inches,” he said, depositing the other bag with a thump. “Didn’t figure you for a gearhead.”
“I did grow up on a farm, you know,” I teased, nonplussed. “Pop loved his old Chevy. When I was little, I helped him tune it up, fix it up, replace parts. He thought it important that I know the difference between a ratchet and a socket at a very young age.”
“It’s useful knowledge. Not that you have a chance to use it in the city.”
Something in the way he’d said city—like it was week-old garbage—set my lips in a frown. But I followed his lead when he got in the truck, sliding in next to him. The tan leather bench was bouncy, and with a smile, I tested it out. He cut me a look when the squeaking of springs hit his tolerance threshold.
Warmth blossomed on my cheeks. I reached for the seat belt as he turned the key, and the truck rumbled to life around us.
Jake didn’t say a word as he backed out of the space, then the lot. But it wasn’t that comfortable, companionable sort of silence. It was awkward, weighted with half-conceived thoughts and yawning distance.
I wasn’t accustomed to this kind of quiet. I started a dozen conversations in my mind but couldn’t find the wherewithal to actually speak. Instead, I played every conversation into a dead end, because I figured that was where it would go. Nowhere.
It wasn’t as if he’d ever been any other way, though he’d definitely gotten worse with age. Really, I didn’t know why I’d always been cowed by his quiet judgments or lack of conversational skills. He was and forever had been the brooding farmhand, the silent workhorse. Lone wolf and all that. To him, I was the same silly girl with the pink suitcases who’d abandoned the farm all those years ago.
He’d said so himself a few years ago when I came home to help after Pop broke his leg. Pop told me to go back, that all was well. Jake insisted I should stay, that Pop needed me. I argued that Pop would tell me if that were true. And Jake had accused me of abandoning the farm before I ran back to my life in New York.
I’d spent the last few days regretting that choice with every painful heartbeat.
I snuck a quick look at him, tracing the rugged lines of his profile with my gaze. He wasn’t wrong. But I was here to make that right, to atone by doing what I should have done years ago—drop absolutely everything to take care of the farm.
I didn’t know why I’d thought Jake would behave any differently than he always did. Maybe I’d expected him to be different because of how utterly affected I was by him, my memory paling next to the real thing. Or maybe I wanted him to want to talk to me. Maybe I wanted to connect.
Jake was like a grandson to Pop, making him and me the only family Pop had in the end, my final connection to the man who had raised me. But Jake didn’t seem to want to talk to me, and that knowledge made me feel desperately alone.
All these years, I’d been firmly on the other coast, working my dream job, using my degree in communications to work in social media at my aunt’s marketing firm, telling myself my absence from the farm wasn’t felt, that I’d only be in the way, that I had time. But I’d been wrong, and now it was too late.
The tears came again, almost too fierce to stop, halted only by a solid pinch of my thigh and a long, hard look at nothing outside the passenger window. Almost immediately, we were in the countryside, the sky cloudless and sun beating down on the truck, heating the cab like a greenhouse. Sweat prickled at my nape, across my forehead, down the valley of my spine. A fat droplet rolled between my breasts and into my bra, and I reached for the window crank in the same moment he reached for the air conditioning.
I beat him to it, rolling down the window with gusto, reveling in the feel of the cool coastal air against my overheated skin. The current whipped my hair into a copper tornado, curly and wild, and I gathered it up, searching my bag for a hair tie.
A lock of hair broke free, twisting toward the window, and the sight of the brilliant red against the cornflower-blue sky and the rolling grasses that stretched to meet it left me thinking of Pop. Of summer days in his truck with the windows down and Merle Haggard on the tinny old radio. Home became a presence, washing over me with the breeze. This place would forever be occupied by my grandfather. He was here, everywhere—whispering on the wind that soothed my sadness, living in the warmth of the sunshine.
The weight of my loneliness drifted out the window, the burden on my heart easing just a little, just enough. I sighed, leaning back in the seat with my eyes on the horizon, where blue met green.
It took me a moment to realize Jake was watching me, and when I turned to meet his gaze, I was struck.
It was only a second—a fleeting, fluttering second—but I saw the honesty of his own pain, of his loss, etched in the lines of his face, the depth of his eyes. Because it wasn’t just me who had lost the most important person in my life.
He had too.
And so I decided right then that it didn’t matter if he didn’t want to talk to me or that we were virtual strangers. It didn’t matter if he didn’t want to connect. Because he needed me just as badly as I needed him. We’d never survive the next few days without each other.
We were in this together whether he liked it or not.
“So,” I started, deciding dead-end small talk was better than the silence, “how’s Kit holding up?”
He didn’t answer right away, his eyes on the road and face tightening almost imperceptibly. “As good as you’d figure.”
I waited for him to elaborate. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t.