Chapter Twenty-Two
Saturday night
Water whined through the pipes as Heart turned off her hair dryer and rubbed the fog off the mirror to see her messy waves curling in the humidity. Tyler, in her periphery, sluiced water down his frame in the shower, washing away a day of farm labor and filling the space with warm, humid cedar. Naked. His whole body was a suntanned muscle. Through the semi-opaque shower door, she could see his rear, narrow but powerful waist, broad shoulders—
“You keep staring and I might have to drag my woman in here with me,” he said darkly, but she knew him well enough to hear the humor, even when he wasn’t smiling.
His woman. It still sent a thrill through her, that a relationship could be this easy. Even if everything was so fresh and she hadn’t told him about her scar. Hadn’t met his kids.
Dressed in the skirt she’d met Tyler in and a strappy, sleeveless blouse with a light coating of makeup on, she grabbed the plaid Ty had loaned her and her backpack, and meandered down the stairs to wait. It was silent, like her twenty acres of desert ranchland in West Texas that her mother had nicknamed Purgatory when she’d emailed the address.
She took in the framed black-and-white photograph of Tyler’s great-great-grandparents by the Tiffany Lamp encrusted with colorful butterflies. To have such a deep sense of history was beautiful. It was one of the things she loved about her grandparents’ estate. The vineyards had been in her father’s family for over two hundred years, had survived wars, invasions, and was still rich today. After Monica’s loss, after the harrowing, lonely weeks of recovery in the hospital with only the nurses to play games with her, Heather had clung to those threads of familial connection each summer.
Perhaps it was why she felt attached here. Tyler had what she’d always been afraid to want. Even though she knew Tyler struggled to accept his place. Watching him flex his legal muscles, watching him sit up in bed and pore over legal literature on Fossyl while she worked on her computer, told her a piece of him was missing. A passion he’d loved and given up. But why? If he loved law, why not do more with it than simply fight battles against Fossyl and argue with her car insurance and occasionally help out his family?
Frodo, sleeping on the couch as she stepped into the living room, jumped up and padded to her for a pet, which she obliged. More generational photographs were spaced along the walls, turn of the century and later. The same McClintock Farms wagon as was depicted in the foyer, was captured in photographs here as the descendants of Tyler’s grandparents started families of their own.
Beyond the living room was that pocket door. She’d spied a piano through here, then promptly avoided it.
She peered in. A wall of family photos. Tyler and his brothers… Tyler and his boys! She furrowed her brow. Shut away from the house as if a secret, and yet… This was the family’s space. The rest of the house was a museum, but this?
She ignored the well-worn upright piano, settling instead on an old acoustic guitar smattered in SXSW sticker from Austin propped on a stand. A bookshelf, bearing stacks of board games, rows of YA books and volumes of others: classics from Shakespeare to Hemingway, Plato’s Republic to The Lord of the Rings. She smiled again. She’d seen him crack a smile at her joke about Mordor. Couch. Flatscreen. Movies. A tin drum, the type one would load with beers for a party in a cornfield, was piled with throw blankets beside the couch, school books and binders. He homeschooled his kids?
She envisioned the trio kicked back on the couch watching movies, or flopped on the floor reading on a rainy day, or taunting each other over a game of Risk. Memories washed over her of happy childhood times, before the accident her parents still couldn’t talk about, when they had been a close-knit family, piecing together puzzles on Christmas Eve. Why did Tyler evoke such memories? She’d gone happily through life for years, unhindered by them. He’d blindsided her, forced her to face them.
But the piano was unavoidable. Her eyes bounced around it. She turned to leave, no longer hearing the water running through the old pipes which meant Tyler was almost ready. “Julliard’s application deadline is soon.” “Monarch would have loved to play the nocturne.” “Have you considered ballet?”
Her parents’ hopeful questions whispered though her mind. She hadn’t touched a piano since Ridgeport. When she’d graduated, she’d dumped her dorm things in the dumpsters and jetted to Beira with her annual plane ticket, where she’d sipped wine and ate pastries in the garden and deleted the Julliard application from her laptop—she’d missed the deadline, having never applied, lying and saying she had. Monarch had been Juilliard-bound, not her. It wasn’t the first lie she’d told them, either. Any given phone call, she’d lied:
“How are you?”
Heart: “Fine.”
She hadn’t been fine. She’d been angry.
She was still angry. She’d always wanted kids someday and couldn’t have them. Knew it had disappointed her parents, and it was all her fault. It was her fault Monarch was dead. Tyler had a point. If she wanted this relationship to work, she would need to open up to him, too.
If she wanted roots here, or anywhere, she had to actually plant them.
Her eyes settled on the piano, taking it in. Finger touched middle C. Pressed it down and held it until it eventually extinguished itself, and looked at the children’s piano books open on the stand. She gazed at the family photos, the first she’d seen of his boys, dressed in plaid button-ups like little lumberjacks—Ty must have dressed them. She smiled. School photos, family photos. But the one that grabbed her attention was a young dad slouched back on a familiar wagon, paint chipping and faded: McClintock Farms. The same wagon as in the original farm photo and all the others.
His boot was slung over his ankle, Stetson not on his head, but in the clutches of a toddler sitting on the wagon with Daddy’s protective arm around him in nothing but bare feet and a diaper. A little boy in boots and a lopsided T-shirt clung to Tyler’s leg. That must be Seth. His broad palm rested atop the boy’s tousled head. And that smile… Tyler was laughing! Enjoying his younger progeny’s antics, but the way Ty’s palm cupped his older boy’s head spoke that he was connected to him in the moment, too.
And their mother had left them? These cherubic faces? Left him? Why?
Words scrawled in nice, neat Tyler handwriting sat on the photo: “Here’s to a new legacy.”
His family ranch out west was named the Legacy.
She pressed middle C again until the sound waned, then shifting onto the bench, brought her left hand to the keyboard to join the right, as Tyler’s footsteps creaking overhead and the faint sound of a drawer scraped open. Her fingers led into Chopin’s “Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2.” Her fingers trilled within the upper octave. She glanced to the walls, overwhelmed by the deep sense of family that resided in this room—
Footsteps creaked.
Her hand splayed upon clashing notes as she turned over her shoulder. Tyler was leaning on the doorframe, eyes furrowed, hair shower-fresh, stylishly brushed across his forehead with a hint of enduring hat head that kicked his waves off to the side, plaid shirt rolled up to the elbows, clean jeans that hugged his thighs and ass and slung low on his hips, and that tell-tale bulge that, even softened like now, still impressed.
“Didn’t meant to interrupt,” he said, clearing his throat. “Don’t stop on my account. That’s incredible. I had no idea you could play.”
“Oh, it’s nothing—”