Twenty-Three
My first thought as I get out of the car and walk toward the gigantic tree is how happy I am that there’s no entrance fee—I was going to pretend I lost my debit card if there was.
My second thought is that Angel Oak shouldn’t exist.
The massive oak defies logic with its sheer size and the fact it’s been growing for hundreds of years. The branches stretch away from the Herculean trunk in at least a hundred feet in every direction—some so long and large they’re braced by manmade support structures—before they curve upward and reach for the sky.
It doesn’t look real. Doesn’t seem possible that one thing could bear so much weight.
In the thick hedge surrounding us, there are plenty of other oaks, but none compare to the one at hand. It’s a total anomaly. And with the morning light painting the leaves, Spanish moss, and patches of small ferns clinging to the bark, stunning. I see why it’s turned into a tourist destination and why Anson Burns would have wanted to bring his wife here. Simply standing in the shade of it feels like a gift.
Nash falls into step next to me on the path. His eyes are bright, his hair looks like hands have been in it, and his retro-striped button-up has the nerve to fit perfectly.
“You avoiding me?”
“Avoiding you?” I echo. “Considering the fact I just picked you up and drove you to this steroid-injected tree, I’d say no.”
“So you not talking to me is just my imagination?”
It is not.
After being so overwhelmed by my life I wept like an emotional lightweight before secretly sleeping in his backyard, I needed distance. Physical distance isn’t an option, so I figured I’d try not talking to him. Other than a mumbled hello, it worked for twenty-six whole minutes.
“Thinking about today.” I focus on the arrows of the path.
“How was your night?” he asks.
“Fine.” And because I’m an idiot: “Yours?”
“Good,” he says easily. “Watched a baseball game.”
With Emma, I think morosely. Then I remember,Good for them!
“Jonathan loves baseball.” That is a lie. “The Jets.”
I make the mistake of looking at Nash, and it’s as if there’s a laugh waiting just behind his lips.
“The New York Jets?” he asks, brows high. “That’s football.”
His happy face: so punchable.
“He likes them too.”
Cap grunts as he hobbles, prosthetic foot kicking up clouds of dust with every step. At the first bench we come to, he drops into it like a sack of cement. “Might as well be climbing Kilimanjaro,” he mutters with a long sniff of his oxygen.
“Maybe if you got rid of Penny, you’d be able to breathe without hacking up a lung or needing a tank of oxygen.”
He defiantly pulls Penny out of his pocket and ignores the sign next to us that saysNO SMOKING OR VAPINGto take a long drag.
“Impressive, huh?” Nash says, drawing my attention to the widespread canopy surrounding us.
At the outstretched branches overhead, impressive might be too small a word. It’s otherworldly. The canopy alone is bigger than the roof of my house. Other than the base of the trunk that’s roped off to prevent anyone from getting too close, people roam freely around the tree and its spider-like branches.
“What do you think?” I ask. “Cap, what did you find here before?”
His bushy brows raise.
“Dad,” I correct, making him smile and Nash stifle a laugh.
