Just talking about it reminds me of how blind I’d been at the time, and I wonder if Taylor thinks I’m dumb as a rock.
She doesn’t say a thing though, just listens, her brown eyes so serious.
“Well, she didn’t want a vacation,” I say, with my own bitter smile. “When Meg was two, Erica finally left us to work as a waitress at a bar in Philly. She cut us off completely, doesn’t even visit or call.”
“I’m so sorry,” Taylor says softly.
“If she’d gone to Europe and run off with a French guy or something, it would have been a lot better,” I admit out loud for the first time.
“Why?”Taylor asks.
“Because she would have at least been runningtosomething,” I say. “But she just went to have a worse life than the one she had here. She was running from me, and my farm, and my old-timey dreams.”
“I don’t know,” Taylor says, frowning. “It sounds to me like she was running to something.”
“To what?” I ask. “A bug-infested Philly apartment with two roommates? A dead-end job in a dive bar?”
“Freedom,” Taylor says simply. “A life on her own terms, by the work of her own hands, even if it’s not much.”
I think about that for a minute, and weirdly I kind of get it.
“Look at it this way,” she says. “Someone from this town could easily go to law school, right? Earn a lot of money? Live in a mansion?”
“With land prices in the Poconos how they are now?” I ask. “Maybe a small one?”
“Well, would the guy in thatsmall mansionlook at someone like you and say that you’re not living any kind of life?” she asks me. “Toiling away on a farm in the middle of nowhere?”
“Maybe,” I say, shrugging.
“And what would you say to him?” she asks.
“I’m doing what I want to be doing,” I say immediately.
She nods, and leans back, not sayingI told you so.Just giving me space to reframe the last eight years of my life.
“I see your point,” I tell her after a moment. “I do.”
She smiles.
“I’ll always wish I’d understood her better when she was my wife,” I admit. “But I’m trying to makebetter decisions now, be there more for the people I want to have in my life.”
Her smile softens as she looks away.
And it hits me that I’ve shown up for Taylor in ways I never would have thought I was capable of after Erica.
I should tell her that—tell her what she means to me.
Or maybe I’m just being silly.
“Taylor?” Meg calls out from the front of the shop before I have a chance to decide.
Taylor is on her feet in a heartbeat, but Meg skids to a halt in the aisle between shelves before we even have time to leave the table.
“There you are,” Meg says happily. “Wedidget Chinese food.”
“We sure did,” Taylor says, grabbing Meg’s hand and leading her to the third chair, the one that’s between us. “I hope you don’t mind that we already got started. Your dad set aside a plate for you big enough to give you a bellyache.”
Meg giggles in delight at that idea and for a second I can picture this same scene unfolding at our own kitchen table, the three of us sharing a real life together, not the pretend one we have at the bookshop.
