She glanced over at him, feeling a little rush at those words.
Half an hour later,she was using a broom to dust the spiderwebs off the tops of the barn doors while Dalton was up on a ladder doing the same for the roof overhang.
“We can just use the power washer for this,” she offered Dalton for the second time.
“These webs are strong as superglue,” he replied. “Besides, you should stay dry until you’ve dropped Dove off at school.”
She nodded and turned back to her work.
They continued in friendly silence for a while, the only sounds the cries of the morning birds and the whispers of the breeze through the last few leaves still clinging to the old sycamore.
“Andy and I used to have this job,” Ella said, not sure why she was bringing it up.
“Oh yeah?” Dalton asked.
“Back in high school,” she said, nodding. “It was kind of fun to have an excuse to hang out.”
“You two weren’t close?” Dalton asked, frowning.
“We were,” she said. “Growing up we were really close. But in high school he was just so much cooler than I was, and of course his friends didn’t want to hang out with his little sister. So chore time was one of the only times we spent a lot of time together those last few years of school.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Dalton said. “That doesn’t sound like Andy.”
“Every teenager is figuring things out,” she said, shrugging. “I wasn’t always the best sister either.”
“I highly doubt that,” Dalton chuckled.
“I was annoying,” she said. “I broke his favorite Batman action figure. I followed him around like a duckling.”
“That all sounds pretty normal,” Dalton said.
“I didn’t come home in time to say goodbye to him,” she heard herself admit out loud.
He didn’t answer right away, and she sucked in a breath of cold air.
“Well, you had just lost your husband, right?” Dalton asked quietly after a moment. “And Dove was a toddler. That’s a lot.”
“I still could have come home,” she said. “I was so determined to get packed up and out of there. I didn’t want to make the trip back here twice.”
“That’s understandable,” Dalton said. “You were probably exhausted.”
She had been, heart and soul.
“Taking care of Lee wasn’t easy,” she admitted, shocked at herself for sharing that selfish thought. “I feel bad saying it.”
“I’ll bet it was hard because you did a good job,” Dalton said.
“It was hard to see him like that,” she admitted, glad to have work to do while she spoke, so she didn’t have to see the look on his face. “He was so miserable, and he was constantly trying to do stuff he shouldn’t. He’d always been such a physical guy, but by the end, he was so weak…”
She expected Dalton to bury her feelings under a mountain of sympathetic talk, like her girlfriends had done at the time.
But instead, he let her words sit for a moment, to be absorbed by the breeze and the birdsong.
“And you wouldn’t know it now, but Dove was a handful as a toddler,” Ella went on. “I loved her with all I had, but I felt like I was always too sapped to give her everything she deserved.”
“She’s a great kid,” Dalton said firmly. “You clearly did everything just right.”
“Thank you,” she said, venturing a glance up at him. She really did love the fierce way he always had her daughter’s back. “Anyway, Andy really wanted me to come home to see him off, and I told him I couldn’t. I never got to say goodbye.”
