A Favor

Dale went through a wide doorway and I can hear him yelling for Harold. I don’t hold back as I hug Sam tight, of the four paintings the three he had picked were among them.

“Thank you, so much.”

“Hey, no thanks for me, you were the one that painted them. I told you they were good. Go have a seat in the truck, you like you’re about fall down. I’ll get these wrapped up and back in the truck.”

I want to help him but he shakes his head and pushes me out the back door. Almost fifteen minutes later he’s back beside me in the truck.

“How are you feeling?”

“Umm, I don’t know yet. I still can’t believe it. I feel like I’m going to wake up and it was just a dream.”

“No dream, sweetheart, come on. Let’s see this little town a bit. It seems a waste to just head back so quick.

He talks me into a winery tour where both of us are only good at spitting out the wine we don’t like it. He buys a case of two different wines we both like. We stroll through the streets and find a pretty little café and we realize we had spent a lot more time at the winery than we thought. The food is excellent and even though I beg to at least leave a tip, Sam firmly overrules me. The sun has set and twilight is around as we make our way back to the truck.

After the wine and good food, I’m dozing to the soft country music on the radio. It takes a little while before I realize nothing looks familiar.

“Sam, where are we going?”

“Got a little surprise for you.”

He turns his attention back to the steep incline and then the unpaved road levels out. Turning off the truck he slides out without a word, what is he doing I wonder and finally I give up and slide out of the truck to see what he’s up to.

He’s messing with the cover on the bed of the truck. It’s heavy and vinyl and could be rolled up.

“Come on, baby, help me roll it up.” I follow his instructions and as I roll the cover back toward the cab I can see what the cover hid. The two remaining paintings are on top of what looks like a bed out of a magazine. Light soft pillows are everywhere. White sheets and a pretty old patchwork quilt is on top of the sheets. He’s careful with my paintings and sets them against the truck.

He pushes up and his muscles flex and then he holds out a hand to me. I give it to him without hesitation. Sam pulls me up as though I weigh nothing. It’s one of the things I love the most about him, his strength and ability to carry me around with ease but how gentle and careful he is with me. Moving pillows and the quilt he settles in and I follow him down. He pulls me into his arms, my head on his chest. The moon is a bright white against the inky black of night. Stars sparkle and dot the sky.

“This is amazing.”

“You know, baby, in all that I’ve gotten from you and Taylor, everything starts in Austin, there’s nothing from Chicago. Taylor says you never talk about your life there, it was like once you hit Austin that’s when your life started. It was a nice city except for the damned cold. What was it like growing up there?”

Closing my eyes I tighten my arms around him. I don’t want to remember Chicago, there is so little that had been good there that it was easier to forget it all. Allowing a shaky breath to escape I attempt something I have always disdained before. I attempt to divert his attention with sex, my hand strokes his chest and then down his stomach. His hand catches mine and settles it back up to the middle of his chest laying it flat against his heartbeat he holds me there, his hand covering mine gently but firmly.

“Okay, I’ll start. You saw where I come from. My grandfather had a chicken farm, it was a small business but then when he died he left my father in charge and pop killed himself to make it bigger and better. He’d work sun up to sun down trying to compete with big companies. He was dead by the time I was ten but he’d tripled the size of the place so maybe to him it was worth it. I’m not so sure about that.”

“I’m sorry, Sam.”

Sam shrugs, “It was important to him, wasn’t nothing mom could say or do to deter him. Mom kept on and took on more help but it was a struggle. Mom was no stranger to hard work but the business, hell, all that went above her head. All she could do was keep the agreements in place, she wasn’t sure if they were good deals or not and the men working for her were just as lost as she was. By the time I hit my teens my mom was adamant I had to go to college so I could take over the business side.

I wasn’t happy about it but she wasn’t to be talked around it. I tried to talk her into letting me stay in Texas so I could come home on vacations and help out but no. I’d managed to get into Harvard and I was going and I was going to focus on learning what I could about business and it would be worth it, she told me.”

“That’s the thing that has driven me nuts from the first day. What the hell is a Harvard graduate doing in the Army?”

He chuckles but there’s no humor in it and I wish I could see his face more clearly.

“You tell me about Chicago and I’ll tell you how a Harvard graduate ended up in the Army.” His hand strokes the back of the hand he had captured and held.

Chapter Fifteen

L

ying under the stars with Sam so hard and yet soft, big and yet gentle with me, Chicago feels far away. Melting into Sam, I barely notice that I shiver but then the sheet and quilt are pulled up around us. “I don’t like to talk about Chicago because there isn’t a whole lot of good to remember there. I was actually born in Wisconsin and lived there until I was about three. My mom, she had problems. Besides, having me only a few months after sixteen and having no idea who my father was, she was diagnosed as a manic depressive, or what everyone now calls bipolar. She’d have these moments where everything was amazing and she loved life and then she had moments when the world was out to get her and nothing could go right.

She was very abusive, but it was a gradual build. We left city after city when neighbors would report her because they heard the beatings. She did everything on high volume. It’s funny but I think she thought in a bigger city she would be more anonymous but she wasn’t and it was more expensive. Things got harder for her so the beatings were worse. When I was four she had to take me to the emergency because she broke my arm. They took one look at the break and put me in a room with a social worker. The social worker undressed me and started taking pictures of the bruising.

I didn’t see my mom for almost a year.