Her path had forked. Her future amended. And it was all because of the very same thing that had healed and hurt me. Confused and consoled me. Trapped and tempted me.
Land.
“Like this?” she asked, the sun doing its best to turn brown hair blonde with its overly hot rays. She kept shoving the long strands off her shoulder as she bent over the back of the tractor where we needed to change the mower for the raker attachment.
“Nah, the lynchpin first, then the coupling.”
“Ah.” She nodded as if she understood. What made it doubly annoying was she did understand. Everything I told her cemented itself into her brain as if she already knew this stuff.
With a quick tug on the well-greased pin, she unlocked the mowing blades and looked up to where I sat in the tractor. Giving me a thumbs up, she grinned into the brightness. “All good.”
Trusting her, even though instinct commanded I slip to the ground and check, I lowered the large contraption until it fell the rest of the way to the grass. It clunked as the coupling came loose, ready to be removed.
Normally, I’d head down and do what was needed, but with my back being so tetchy…well, Hope had proven her worth.
I couldn’t have done this without her. As the day wore on and the sun burned hotter, my headache grew more intense, making my balance unreliable.
And just because Hope stopped pointing out when I grew dizzy didn’t mean she didn’t stop noticing. Almost every time, she’d be there with a bottle of water and a painkiller.
She never smirked or made me feel like a patient. She just delivered what I needed and walked away, leaving me to my own issues at being taken care of.
Tearing my eyes from hers, I pulled forward at a snail’s pace, then ambled over to where the raker sat in the tree shadows. Hope trailed on foot, her tiny frame bouncy and high on life in my rear-view mirror.
Her step was springy, her smile so wide it caused premature wrinkles by her eyes. She glowed with joy. Literally glowed with it as if she were some woodland creature that’d slipped into a human skin for a day and marvelled at a brand new existence.
She didn’t try to hide how happy today made her. She didn’t apologise for laughing for the sake of it or for skipping for no reason.
She was pure ecstasy, and her freedom in such wonder and delight caused painful shards in my chest. She hurt me because I hadn’t been around such carefree happiness before. If my mom smiled, it held a tinge of grief. If my aunt laughed, it shadowed with sadness. If my grandpa grinned, it tinkled with memories of lives taken far too soon.
Cherry River might look like the ideal place to live but buried in the wind and trees and grass was permanent heartache.
Only Hope was free from such afflictions.
Only Hope could look at the forest where we’d scattered Dad’s ashes and see heaven and not a ghost.
Only Hope could twirl in the wildflowers and grin at the sky rather than feel guilty for being so happy.
Watching her made me feel wrong.
I wanted to tell her to be respectful of those who could no longer be here with us. To tell her the dead were watching, and it wasn’t fair to have such a good time when they had run out of time completely.
But how could I snatch away her joy when she’d fought so hard to find it? How could I tell her to leave this place when it would be like kicking her from a home she’d wholeheartedly claimed?
“Hey, Jacob! You’ve driven right past it!”
Goddammit.
I pulled back on the accelerator, shaking my head from gloomy thoughts. The urge to apologise to Dad—to look at the trees and say, ‘I’m sorry she’s so happy when you’re gone and can’t be happy anymore,’ overwhelmed me.
Doing my best to ignore such things and convince myself that Hope’s glee wouldn’t reflect poorly on me with my dead father, I scowled, reversed, and lined up for the rake.
The nasty looking implement could take out an eye, lung, or leg with the row upon row of sharp spikes ready to gather cut grass and place it neatly into heaped lines to dry.
“Watch yourself,” I commanded as Hope fiddled with the coupling, looking a bit lost. I couldn’t in good conscience make her fumble with something so dangerous. “Back away.”
“I can do it.”
“Hope.” I growled. “Back away. I’ll do it. You drive.”
“Really?” Her eyes turned wide.
All day, I hadn’t let her drive. I’d explained what I was doing as I shifted gears and pulled levers to set the mower down and pressed pedals to add torque, but I hadn’t let her into the captain’s seat.
Gritting my teeth, I grabbed the rail and steering wheel and twisted to climb the two steps to the ground.