“Iwasmad at her,” Ransom said softly. “But I’m not anymore.”
“What if Travis gets mad at me?” Mae asked, putting her engine down on the rug, her eyes suddenly filling with tears.
“Then you’ll both do a better job making things right than I did,” Ransom said, getting right down on the floor with her. “You’ll talk to each other, right?”
“Travis was mad when I broke his remote-control car,” Mae whispered.
“And then you told him you were really sorry,” Ransom said gently. “And what happened next?”
“He h-hugged me,” Mae sobbed, collapsing against her daddy’s chest.
“It’s okay to get mad at each other,” Ransom told them, lightly stroking Mae’s back. “It’s what you do when you feel angry that matters most. When I got mad at Aunt Willow we both went away, and we didn’t talk about it for a long time. And that was worse than what we were mad about. Does that make sense?”
“Why did you both go away?” Travis asked suddenly.
“Well, that was when we were in the service,” Ransom told him. “So we didn’t really have a choice.”
Travis nodded slowly, his eyes still on the piece of track in his hands.
They were all silent for a moment and it hit Hailey that all three of them were probably thinking about the one thing they weren’t saying.
Their mother went away.
She knew the subject probably needed to come up, but maybe it was odd to talk about in front of someone who wasn’t part of the family.
But if she got up and left, she might break the spell of openness that seemed to have fallen over Ransom’s little family.
Mae peeled herself off Ransom’s chest after a moment and went back to her engine.
Travis laid down another piece of track and used his car to test it out.
“I’m going to put on some tea,” Ransom said, getting up.
Hailey watched the kids for a minute, but it was clear that they were back on task, so she got up too and headed into the kitchen.
Ransom stood by the sink, filling the copper teakettle.Though his eyes were fixed on the snowy scene out the window, the expression on his face said he was miles away.
“Hey,” Hailey said softly. “Everything okay?”
“Hey,” he said, heading to the stove and shrugging.
“They’re not just thinking about each other or their Aunt Willow,” she guessed.
“They’re thinking about their mother,” he said flatly. “I haven’t gotten one thing right since the day you and I broke up, you know that?”
“We broke up?” she asked, quirking an eyebrow.
He looked up at her in surprise.
“I’m just saying,” she said, shrugging. “I don’t remember us breaking up. I remember youdumping melike a sack of wet cement. Right before prom.”
“Oh, Hailey,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry. I’ve always been sorry.”
“I was kidding,” she told him, feeling mortified that he still felt sorry for her, even though she still felt the hurt all these years later. “Obviously, you had every right to break up with me and go live your life. We were just kids.”
The words were bitter in her mouth, though. She hadn’t felt like a kid.
“If it makes you feel any better, I’ve never stopped thinking about you,” he said, his eyes glued to the kettle, as if he couldn’t bear to look at her while he spoke.
