But they’d agreed to speak again.And the second time, she had been slightly more prepared.
“Helena,” she’d said when the other woman called at the appointed time.She hadn’t even bothered to say hello.“Is Helena your daughter?”
Peyton had let out a breath.“She surely is.And she’s as hardheaded as they come.Once she found out about Cowboy Point, and the whole Lisle family there, well.Nothing could have kept her away.”
The coffee cart hadn’t been around that long, Jenny had thought.That meant Helena had been observing her half-family for a while.
Patrick had called himselfLyle Patrickfor his second family.He hadn’t even had the creativity to pick different names.He wasPatrick Lisleat home in Cowboy Point, and had clearly made it so he could answer to the name in either direction.
Jenny really did have to admire the efficiency of it all.
When it didn’t make her feel sick, that was.
“Helena has been talking so much about Cowboy Point that she’s convinced her brothers to come check the place out,” Peyton had told her.“And I felt I needed to reach out to you, because I don’t think it’s necessarily fair for us all to descend upon you without you having any idea that it’s happening.Or even that we existed in the first place.”
“I knew,” Jenny admitted.She’d been sitting in her house then, curled up on the couch, in the historic Victorian that some or other Lisle ancestor had built in the wake of the gold rush era in Paradise Valley that had never come to much in the copper mines in Cowboy Point.She now lived in the old house alone, save for all of her ghosts and regrets.Maybe that made it easier to tell truths to a stranger on the phone who she suspected she had more in common with than she’d like.“The first time I saw Helena, I knew a call like yours would be coming at some point or another.She looks just like my daughter, Cat.”
Jenny and Peyton had a lot to talk about, it turned out.They both had two sons and a daughter each, all named after places.All names chosen at the behest of Patrick or Lyle or whoever he’d been.
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry that he created two familiesexactlythe same,” Jenny had said, somewhat helplessly.
“I find I do a lot of both,” Peyton had replied in the same tone.
They had talked quite a bit over the past year, until an evening spent on the phone with Peyton, who was living over in Dillon then, was something Jenny looked forward to most nights.Now it was a new year.It had come in cold and snowy, just the way people around here liked it.Peyton herself was currently in Bozeman, because she liked a short-term rental, she said.Something she’d picked up in her years with Lyle.
More important than all of that, though, was that the Patrick brothers were due in town any day now.
Jenny and Peyton had decided it was best to meet up, in person at last, in advance of that arrival.
She’d helped plan this meeting and yet Jenny found herself something like nervous.She hit the interstate once she made it down Copper Mountain and wound through Marietta, then drove up toward Livingston.It was a sullen, cold morning.There hadn’t been much light to speak of in weeks, though there were glimmers of it today up high above the Gallatins as she made her way along the highway.Nothing more than that low smudge of pale light that marked a full winter daylight this far north.
Like most things, it was beautiful.If you knew how to look at it.
Maybe, she acknowledged as she closed in on Livingston, she didn’t want anything to change.She liked these faceless, anonymous discussions with Peyton on the phone.Meeting in person felt a little too close to scary.Like they’d have to give up all those rambling, confessional, healing conversations if they actually shared a physical space.
But she laughed as she thought that.Because who was she kidding?They’d already shared far more than most folks who lived on top of each other.
She was still laughing about that as she made her way into sturdy, charming Livingston itself, hunkered down against the relentless onslaught of the early February weather.There was snow on the ground, but nothing worrying, and none coming down as she parked.The famous wind was up to its usual nonsense this morning—she could see it causing a commotion wherever it found a sign or a stray tree branch—so she raced from her parking space in a bent-over attempt to keep it from slicing her in half, then threw herself into the coffee shop where she and Peyton were supposed to meet.And it took a minute to wrestle the door shut behind her.
It was warm inside, bright and cheery with music playing, the hum of conversation, and the louderwhirof the espresso machine.She stopped just inside the door and unzipped her coat to let the warmth in quicker.Then she pulled her knit hat off of her head, running a hand through her hair to get the static out.
As she was doing that, she glanced around the tables where people were sitting in casual, small groups, not sure how she was expected to recognize a woman who was a stranger to her despite all the things they shared—
But then she stopped, and stared.
And the woman staring back at her had the same look on her face that she expected was on hers.
Arrested.Astonished.
There was one beat.Another.
And then they both laughed.
It was a helpless, whole-body laughter, and Jenny staggered over to the table to sit down and keep on laughing, because it was that or end up on the creaky wood floor.They laughed and laughed and kept on laughing.
In the end, they were wiping at their eyes, still laughing, and looking at each other as if they were about to speak, but laughing again instead.
Jenny imagined that at least half the coffee shop was staring at them, but she couldn’t let herself care about something like that.It was one more reason they’d chosen neutral ground for this.Space to react however they wanted.
