She stuffed all the questions she was asking herself even deeper as she arrived home. As she got ready for bed, she thought about ways to convince Cal to spend a little more time in town, events she could take him to, places he might enjoy. And she convinced herself she was doing this for Owen, not for herself. At some point, she was going to have to face the truth of the matter, but not tonight. Tonight, she was going to brush her teeth and put on her pajamas and dream of what it would be like to live with two people as charming as Cal and Owen Nolen.
CHAPTER 10
CAL
If Cal could depend on one thing in his life, it was that his telephone would never ring. He’d lived in his cabin in the woods for nearly five years now, and he rarely, if ever, received phone calls. He didn’t even have a cell phone. He kept a landline for emergencies, and he never really had a good reason to use it.
Now it was ringing, and he still didn’t want to use it. Then he got the what-ifs. You know.What if it’s important? What if it’s an emergency? What if it’s a long-lost friend who will never call you again because they’ve decided you hate them after you failed to pick up the phone? What if it was the bank checking to make sure he really was the person who was currently trying to buy something obscenely expensive all the way across the country?And he picked up the damn phone.
The voice that responded to hishellodid not disappoint. It was April, and he couldn’t have been happier to have bothered to pick up his phone. “Hi, Cal!” she said excitedly.
“Well, hello there, Nurse April.” He couldn’t keep from smiling.
“Don’t hate me now,” she said.
“Impossible. What is it?”
She took a deep breath. “Well, have you ever been to the local farmer’s market? I was going to spend the afternoon there, and I thought it would be a lot of fun if you and Owen joined me.”
As much as Cal enjoyed the company of April, he wasn’t sure it was worth getting friendly with Summit Falls again. “I don’t think we’ll be able to go,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Oh.” She sounded more disappointed than he’d expected her to be. “That’s too bad. They have so much fresh produce there, and it’s just local farmers selling their crops. I thought you’d enjoy talking to them. They seem like your type of person.”
Cal laughed. “No person is my type of person.”
“Well, I’m sorry your plans overlap. I should have told you earlier. It was just a spur-of-the-moment idea.”
“There aren’t any plans,” he admitted, and his palm immediately flew to his forehead. That hadn’t exactly been a smart move to make if he really wanted to keep his excuse valid. And he did want to keep his excuse valid, didn’t he? He didn’t want to be pressured into spending a pleasant afternoon at the local farmer’s market with a beautiful woman. Right? But he couldn’t convince himself of any of it. Part of him wanted her to pressure him, to talk him into doing something he would never normally do.
“Oh,” she said, clearly taken aback. “Well, I hope it’s not because I didn’t sell it well enough.” She laughed. “I was also thinking of your garden.”
He smiled at her effort. Few people had put any effort at all into spending time with him, so it meant more to him than it might have meant to anyone else. “What about my garden?”
He could almost hear her smile on the other end of the line. “Well, they sell so many different seed varieties, too. You could plant winter squash or even strawberries in a sunny patch. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a large variety of seeds in one place. So, you know, I thought maybe you’d love it. It would be a day out, anyway, and…” She seemed to hesitate to say what she said next. “Well, I’d like to see you again. You and Owen, I mean. I’d like to spend more time with you two, if you’re OK with it. And I thought, since you took the time to show me around your home, I would like to take the time to show you around mine.”
Cal wanted to keep her hanging for just a few minutes more, if only to hear her voice on the line—onhisline. But he also didn’t want to hear an ounce of disappointment in her voice. “I suppose I should ask Owen.” His son was sitting at the table, using crayons in a coloring book that taught him very basic math problems in the form of slowly multiplying small animals. “What do you say, Owen?” he asked. Owen’s eyes snapped up expectantly. “Do you want to go to the farmer’s market with Nurse April?”
Owen immediately abandoned his coloring book. “Yay! Yay! Yay!” He leapt up in his chair and jumped around the room so much that Cal had to remind him to calm down or he would hurt himself. “Let’s go now,” Owen said when he’d calmed down a fraction. “Can we go now?”
“This afternoon,” Cal said.
“Around one,” April added.
“Two hours,” Cal said.
“It’s too long!” Owen whined.
“Sounds like the kid wants to go,” April said as though it wasn’t blatantly obvious. “So, that’s two against one.”
“I’ll never win with you two.” Cal laughed.
“Meet me at the library?” April said. “We can park there and walk. The market is a block away. The library won’t mind. I do it all the time.”
“OK, we’ll be there.” Cal hung up the phone and reminded himself he was not supposed to be as excited as his son about this visit. Except he was. He was excited to spend the afternoon in town, of all places, because one woman would be with him.
The leaveson the trees in town were greener than they had been before. That was something Cal noticed early on in his drive into town. Had they ever been this green, even in previous summer months? He didn’t think so. The strangest sensation overcame him, and he had to admit to himself that he was feeling happy, excited for the future, hopeful. Hope was something Cal hadn’t felt in years. Sure, he’d had the occasional happy memory made with Owen, the occasional pride that came with fatherhood. But hope had eluded him ever since that day, ever since he lost everything except his son.
For years, Cal had viewed the outside world through a lens of suspicion. If people weren’t outright untrustworthy, they were at least well-meaning but incompetent. He had no hatred in his heart, but he also had no trust. It had all been used up when hisson was born. Now he was feeling hope, maybe even a little trust, although that was still unlikely.
