trying to hide a smile like usual, and then turns, heading for the living room.
I walk to the center of the foyer, taking it all in.
It’s the little things that make it shine. An old horse harness hanging on the wall. An aged wooden barrel with the hooked end of an umbrella sticking out the top. Two crocks on the base of the stairs, one full of pinecones, the other a few pine boughs that give my nose an instant punch of freshness.
Then there’s an antique—I’ll use the proper word for Tobin’s sake—washboard with the word WELCOME painted on it in a girly script.
Finally, an old, scuffed-up grey board, with a rope looped around it and several pictures attached, hanging on the wall near my mom’s portrait.
Walking closer, my heart swells as I realize they’re candid photos of my mother throughout her career, carefully selected from several different movies.
Talk about memories galore.
Shit, the one where she’s smiling, half toppled over, dusted with flour...I remember being on the set.
I think I was seven years old. The set crew even let me fling big fistfuls of flour around to help create the scene where Mom fell over in her own cake factory after trying to keep up with a hundred delicious confections for a big Italian wedding with eight hundred people.
It’s one of those classic, funny, awkwardly organic rom com scenes. Very I Love Lucy.
I don’t realize how much I’m smiling until I turn.
Yeah. There’s no question these pictures are better memories than that towering portrait with its thick gold frame.
I step back, staring at the wall, the table below it holding the vase and its roses.
There, too, she’s made a subtle change.
The vase has been moved just slightly, making room for an old oil lamp and two horseshoes. Both linked together, lying between the lamp and the vase.
Impressive.
With barely a few tweaks, she’s altered the entire feel of that wall.
The in-your-face memorial is more subdued now, as if it’s a natural part of my house, rather than a bitter piece of the past I’d agreed to on Tobin’s whim.
Slowly, I make my way into the living room. Again, no jaw-dropping changes, just little things.
Old odds and ends. Antiques. Natural art.
A few empty metal containers and crocks, probably waiting for the flowers we talked about.
Each bit of décor more fitting than the last.
Right down to the three blue canning jars on the coffee table. They’re inside a flat wooden tray with stones and miniature candles. Her insight about bringing in nature to make the house feel less sterile was dead-on.
There’s another old board attached to the wall. This one is wider and has silvery wire around it, and then more pictures.
This time, they’re all me.
I recognize several of my boy wonder superhero flicks, the angsty high school quarterback I’d played half a lifetime ago, a few scenes from more recent Western flops.
Here come those memories again.
And they come with a smile I just can’t shake.
There’s also a handsome saddle blanket draped on the back of the sofa. It’s old, subtly frayed, but freshly washed, and it adds a perfectly rustic touch to the room. So does the scarred wooden bowl with a small antler lying inside it on an end table.
I feel like I’m teleported back to the Westerns without the stress or the market indigestion at the end.
Just the good times.
When I had this place built, I wanted balance. Country and classy paired up in equal measure.
A whole team of architects and interior designers from California might’ve started it, but Grace Sellers gave it a soul.
She’s turned old junk into unique, heartfelt warmth.
She’s given me a home—at least a few room’s worth—and suddenly it’s not just her dilemma that makes me want to keep her around.
Goddamn, this woman could be lethal to bachelorhood.
If only claiming her wouldn’t be the biggest dick move on the planet.
I make my way into the kitchen and have to stop, taking a look at another board lined with pictures.
For this one, she used copper wiring. It has pictures of me I barely remember from my military days.
An infectious grin eats at my face as an old Polaroid catches my eye, my younger self standing outside Kandahar with Faulk and a few other guys. We’d finished up a dangerous recon that day and pitched our camp in this dangerous stretch of mountains.
“She made that one to hang in your office, but you were in there,” Tobin says, sneaky as ever.