never forgot. Daphne told me once that she knew Joshua would never love her the way he’d loved your mother. She didn’t expect him to. But she helped him through a very bad time, helped him see some light at the other end. He was grateful for that. It’s always been my feeling that if he hadn’t married Daphne, he probably would have died of heartbreak. People handle things in different ways, son. But we all do what we have to do to get by.”
She turned and left the kitchen again then, her shoulders a little hunched as if bearing the weight of all that she had just told him.
Jack stood there, feeling as if everything inside him had shifted, leaving little that was recognizable. For so long, he’d closed his mind to the man he’d once thought his father to be. Evidence of his father’s character had been relayed to him more than once since he’d come back to Macon’s Point, by Henry Sigmon, the man who’d worked for so long at C.M., and now by Essie, who had been all but a second mother to Jack.
Could she be right? Had Joshua done what he’d had to do to survive losing the love of his life?
The questions needled Jack now with something that felt undeniably like truth at its tip.
He turned to the counter where he’d set the pitcher of iced tea. He poured himself a glass and took it outside on the back porch, where he collapsed into one of the old rockers there. The chair was old and squeaked in fifty different places. The September night air was cool. The moon was just short of full, throwing light across the pasture to the left of the barn and the shadows of Ned and Sam, grazing, the days still warm enough that they spent most of it in the shade of the maple tree in the center of the field.
Jack swigged the sweet tea. He welcomed the coolness in his throat as a change of focus from the burn centered in his heart. He dropped his head against the back of the rocker. Closed his eyes and concentrated on the squeaking chair. But it failed to drown out the questions surfacing inside him, so he stopped rocking and let himself hear them.
Had he been too hard on his father? Refused to see that maybe his grief had been too much to bear alone?
Had he really loved Jack’s mother as Jack had once believed?
Jack had lived his adult life under the premise that love like that was little more than a fairy tale. Refusing to commit to one woman because commitments did not last and affirmations of forever love were nothing more than hollow promises. Oh, he’d believed it could last awhile. Years, even. But something always came along to change it. Or maybe it was just that people eventually allowed it to be changed.
He thought about the rift between his father and him. Of how it had grown wider with each passing year until mending it seemed an impossible thing. Jack had let his bitterness blind him to anything other than what he’d believed to be true.
He would never have the chance to fix that. The weight of the realization felt enormous to him now. And he realized suddenly that Essie was right. He didn’t want to let all the old anger at his father be the compass that determined his future.
Sitting there in the old rocker, he wished he’d found his way to this point a long time ago, that he could have put aside his stubbornness and found a way to talk to his father. That was a regret he would have to live with. And not one he was proud of.
A picture of Annie joined the hum in his head. As she’d looked that afternoon on the drive back, smiling, a little flushed from the craziness of the day.
He could not remember the last time he’d enjoyed a woman’s company as he’d enjoyed Annie’s today. There was something about being with her that felt natural and easy. One conversation flowed into another. Whether he started it or she started it, they blended so seamlessly that it seemed as if they had known one another for years.
But then everything about what he felt for Annie was different.
The admission tripped him a little, and he was hit with the sudden sensation of falling, fast and hard.
He took another swig of his tea, tilting backward slightly and feeling