Page 82 of Love Wells Kept
With a nod, he fishes his cell phone out of his hoodie pocket. After a handful of light thumb taps, and a few more twists and bends in the sun-drenched highway, he turns sideways in his seat to face me.
“Want to start easy, or go for an intense one?”
“Um…” My head rocks side to side on the upholstered headrest. “Toss me an easy one so I can get warmed up.”
“Okay.” His thumb moving across the screen makes something coil low in my stomach. “What’s your favorite time of day and why?”
“Does it make me an awful mother to say right after the kids go to bed for the night?”
He snorts a laugh. “You’re the furthest thing from an awful mother. Those kids are a lot. If you didn’t want a break at the end of the day, I’d be concerned.”
“Specifically, it’s the moment when I crack a cold beer or pour a cup of tea—depending on how the day went—and finally catch my breath. Then some nights I torture myself by looking at their baby pictures on my phone. It feels like it was only yesterday we were bringing them home…and they were so little. Perfect,” I say with a sigh.
So lost in memories that seem both yesterday and forever ago, I don’t notice right away that Jackson’s observing me with a look of adoration.
“You’re an incredible mom, Kate. If there’s one thing I did right in my old life, it was convincing you to be the mother to my children.”
“It took very little convincing.” No convincing, in fact.
Some people spend their entire life in pursuit of a dream. My dream has always been one thing that so few people achieve, and yet it came to me in a rushing wave that summer sixteen years ago.
I want to be happy.
And with him, I am. Always will be.
He looks back down at his phone, knuckles creating a scratchy grating sound as they run over his coarse facial hair. My fingers tap the steering wheel, drumming along to the low bass in a song I can’t quite make out. The radio station cuts in and out with the cadenced curves of a mostly-empty highway etched into the side of a sky-high mountain.
“Aren’t you going to answer?” I ask, when it becomes obvious he’s looking for a new question to ask. “Your favorite time of day…”
“You probably know the answer.”
I shake my head. A few months ago, I knew everything about my husband. And I’ve struggled to shake the notion that this man beside me is exactly the same person he was before.
“In the morning, when I wake up and remember that you exist.”
—
The car rolls to a stop in the parking lot of a small-town shopping complex. Another twenty minutes up a dirt road, and we’ll be at the hot springs, but the incessant growling in my stomach is starting to interfere with both my ability to answer Jackson’s road trip questions and my ability to remain calm and collected with so many terrible drivers on the scenic highway route. I squint at the assortment of businesses laid out in front of us. Between the post office, liquor store, pizza place, and hair salon, this really is a one-stop shop.
“Divide and conquer?” Jackson drums his hands on the black metal hood of my SUV. “You grab us dinner and maybe find something to drink by the fire tonight”—he gestures toward the hole-in-the-wall liquor store squished between a laundromat and bookkeeping service—“and I’ll stock up on snacks from the grocery store.”
“Look at us working as a team.”
He scratches the back of his head and looks over his shoulder briefly. “Should, uh…should I buy condoms?” He whispers condoms as if he’s suggesting something illegal.
“A little presumptuous, don’t you think?” I tease, arching a brow and watching his cheeks turn pink.
With a bashful smile, he shrugs.
“If it’ll make you feel more comfortable. Even when we’ve wanted to get pregnant, it’s taken months of careful planning, plus I’m not ovulating…but if you don’t want to risk it, that’s fine with me.”
“Stupid question, probably, but we didn’t use them before, did we?”
“Not since we were in our early twenties, no. I’m okay with whatever you’re okay with, Jackson. I don’t want to pressure you to do anything.”
“Okay…” He nods thoughtfully. “Okay. I’ll buy some, just in case.”
It’s a short walk to the only dinner place here that isn’t a chain restaurant: Poppy’s Pizza. Whether it’s named after a girl named Poppy or the nickname somebody has for their sweet old grandfather, I immediately trust a food establishment with a name like Poppy’s Pizza.
