Big Cherry Holler - Adriana Trigiani [98]
The ride back from Knoxville goes way too fast. I stay within the speed limit. I guess I’m trying to drag out the trip. I wish it would take a week to get home. But it doesn’t. It takes me exactly three hours. Since I left at dawn, I will be home long before Etta returns from her sleepover this afternoon.
Jack’s truck is parked in its usual spot next to the house. I park the Jeep and sit in it for a while. I hear the creak of the screen door. Shoo the Cat has pushed the door open and comes running out onto the porch. He lifts his head and sniffs the breeze. Then he looks over at me like I’m crazy for sitting in the Jeep. He’s never seen me do this. You park and get out. But he’s never seen Ave Maria the Coward before. I’m not mad at Theodore for being honest with me, but maybe I didn’t want to own up to what a terrible person I’ve been. Shame is keeping me in this Jeep.
Maybe I thought my life would settle down and take care of itself naturally. Iva Lou’s words ring in my head: “What’s your plan, what’s your plan?” I should have known I needed a plan. I have to work for everything I get, normalcy and routine included. So I throw my legs of lead out of the Jeep and climb the stairs and go in.
The house is orderly. I can still smell the spices I spilled all over the kitchen floor; the scent of cumin and cinnamon lingers in the deep cracks of the old wood. I walk into the kitchen, which has been put back together in perfect order. I turn and look into our bedroom, which is neat. The bed is made, with the exception of pillows. There are no pillows. I’ll have to buy new ones. No way to put the old ones back together again.
I go through the kitchen and out the sun porch and into the field behind our house. Jack is there in the yard, stacking firewood in that way he does, where it looks artistic, like a latticework fence. He looks up at me. He stops his work. I know I have to make a decision, and whatever I do in this moment will determine the fate of our marriage. Now that I have been honest with myself (thank you, Theodore), there is no turning back. I have to be clear. Other lives are involved here. My daughter’s. My husband’s. Our extended family.
I wish I had a picture in my mind of what I think marriage ought to be. The old movies never helped; those people were always happy. And my mother and Fred Mulligan’s marriage was so cold, I knew long before he wasn’t my real father that mine should not be like theirs. And for a girl, now a woman, who never thought she’d marry, to be in the thick of one is surreal.
I realize now that I have not chosen this. Jack MacChesney chose me; and never once, in all these years, have I chosen him. Of course, I said yes when he wanted to marry me. But I said yes because he asked, not because I really chose. How must it have been for him, all these years of trying to please me? Of hoping every day that this would be the one that Ave Maria would choose him? But I never did. I loved him, no question. And his babies came through me and into the world. But never once did I choose him. Not really.
This field that used to overwhelm me looks like a small patch of grass. The mountains shrink back into small mounds of dirt that disappear into the wet earth. And the sky, tacked up like a pale blue sheet, looks temporary. The only eternal things are what we choose. The things we would die for. What would I die for? My children, yes. But would I die for Jack MacChesney? I walk across the field to him. He looks at me. I sit on his pretty fence of firewood. I rehearsed so many ways to tell him what he means to me on the ride back from Knoxville, but now that I’m here, I don’t know where to start.
“I’m sorry I trashed the house.” This is my opener?
“I had a hard time getting up the rice. It took me the better part of the day to sweep it up. How was