Heart & Soul

  My day pretty much consisted of the excitement level of a senior citizen in a retirement community, minus the outings to the grocery store and senior center for bingo. I woke up before the sun was up, which really blew since I’d never been an early riser. Of course, when I would have preferred to sleep eighteen hours a night, my body was only up to the task of a solid six. I staggered to the bathroom, assisted by my faithful husband, did my business, then staggered back to bed to try and fail to fall asleep for another three hours. Usually that resulted in me giving up with a grand sigh and a few punches to the bed. I floundered through my pile of “entertainment” on my bedside table for the remote and fired up the TV only to scan the channels and find that America’s issues don’t stem from entitled youth but from suck-ass television choices.

  After that depressing reminder every morning, I turned off the television, resisted the urge to fling the remote across the room, and tried to fall asleep again. By that point, Jesse’d been up and working for close to five hours and usually came back to check on me at his parents’ place. The Walkers had been generous enough to sacrifice their living room to my bed-rest sentence.

  Mrs. Walker had said it was the best option since it was so close to the downstairs bathroom, large enough that everyone could fit inside so we could all have dinners together, and the abundant windows let in plenty of sunshine in the morning and the smell of late summer flowers in the afternoon. I didn’t want to sequester their living room. I already felt like enough of a burden being unable to do anything but ring my bell when I needed something, but Rose had insisted. Neil had insisted. Jesse had insisted. Pretty much everyone but me had insisted. So the living room it was. My bedroom. The place where I spent twenty-three hours of my day. The other hour I lived it up in the bathroom.

  I heard Old Bessie coming—one of the perks of having a husband who drove a beast that had rolled off the assembly line when our grandparents had been teenagers—and remembered what I’d been doing before taking my power (third) nap of the morning.

  I had time to organize my desk table and my sheets and hair so I didn’t look half-rabid before I heard Jesse’s boot-steps bounding up the front porch. Rose and the girls were in town visiting the farmer’s market and stopping at a couple of stores, so the house had been especially quiet. So much so, the fridge had started to sound deafening.

  As much as I hated that Jesse took extra time out of his day to drive back here from wherever he’d been working—he was so busy he, unlike me, barely had time to take a bathroom break—I looked forward to this time of the day like a five-year-old waiting for Christmas morning.

  It was just past ten, which meant I’d been bored out of my mind for a few hours since waking up and was just about at my breaking point when he made it back to have his lunch with me. I’d never told him how nuts the bed rest thing was driving me, but I supposed all he had to do was look in my eyes. They gave it all away. After that first week, he started coming back to the house to have lunch with me, and he hadn’t missed a day since. Even if his sisters and mom were home to keep me company—or more accurately, keep me from shaving my head and listening to Joss Stone on repeat—he still came back.

  He opened the front door quietly, not letting the screen door slam shut. He always did that just in case I was asleep. I never was though. I never slept during the ten o’clock hour because that was Jesse’s and my time. One of the best hours of my day, if not the best.

  After that, I knew he was pausing in the hall to slide out of his boots so they wouldn’t make any noise on the hardwood floors, so I spoke up. “I’m awake. No need to un-layer. Unless you’re planning on un-layering everything.”

  Yeah, right. That part of our married life had gone from “outlook sketchy” to “grab a duster and sweep the cobwebs away.” This time it was doctor’s orders, not just a paranoid husband’s precautions, so I had another month to endure of not getting laid by my oh-so-lay-worthy husband. I was positively rolling in a bed of win and yippee these days.

  Jesse moved inside the living room, his smile moving into place when he saw me. I was eight and a half months pregnant, hadn’t been able to do anything more than be a drag for two months, and he still smiled at me like I was the girl he’d fallen in love with several summers ago. Okay, so not all parts of my life sucked.

  “Why would you be asleep when that’s what you’re supposed to be doing on bed rest, right?”

  I motioned at the bed I’d been having fantasies of torching in a giant bonfire when this whole thing was over. “In order to sleep, a person has to be tired. In order to be tired, a person has to have done something more than turn from one side to the other in bed. ‘Bed rest’ is the biggest oxymoron out there.”

  Something flashed in his eyes. “Then this is probably the perfect time to distract you with a present?”

  “I know I should be all selfless and say, ‘You didn’t have to do that’ or ‘I don’t need any other gift than getting to spend time with you’ but”—I lifted onto my elbows and winked—“Gimme, gimme.”

  He laughed as he ducked back into the hallway and out onto the porch, but this time he let the screen door slam shut. It whined open only a few seconds later, and a few more after that, he came back into view. Or at least partly came back into view. Half of him was hidden behind the large object he seemed to be part wrestling and part balancing in his arms.

  My heart thumped harder in my chest. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Something to get our freak on with.” I suppressed my smile when Jesse broke to a momentary halt.

  With a clearing of his throat, he continued toward the little table that rolled across my bed so I could eat my meals, try and fail to sketch something, or bang my head against when the urge arose. Which was often.

  “You’re worse than a teenage boy,” he said, setting what was in his arms on my roller table.

  “That’s because, unlike the majority of teen boys pretending they know all about sex, I actually have had it, frequently, and enjoyed it just as frequently. I know what I’m missing out on, thus giving me the right to whine, complain, and be unable to carry on a conversation without referring to it in a direct or indirect sense.”

  Jesse smiled as he worked on positioning his masterpiece on the table. “I can’t argue with that.” He tightened a few clamps around the lip of the table, securing the object in place. “Do you have any other guesses? Ones that don’t involve us utilizing it to ‘get our freak on’?”

  The words sounded so wrong coming from Jesse’s mouth, I came close to laughing, but I was too excited about what he was rolling in front of me. “It’s an easel,” I whispered, my tone as reverent as it got. “An easel for a bed jockey whose muscles are about to jellify and whose brains already have.”

  Jesse rolled the table a bit toward the foot of my bed since my stomach was in the way, then he grabbed an armful of pillows from the couch before stacking them behind my back. “Also known as an easel for a woman on bed rest.”

  “Wait, you made this?” As Jesse propped me up a bit higher with the mountain of pillows, I noticed the details and craftsmanship that had gone into making the easel. I’d owned enough easels in my day to recognize a store-bought one from a handmade one.

  “Well, yeah. Do you think it will work okay? I wasn’t sure . . .” He rubbed at the back of his neck as he fiddled with a few of the clamps, adjusting them a bit tighter. “I took a look at your easels when I was packing up the condo and tried to get this one close, but I wasn’t sure . . .”

  I grabbed his hand, which was still fussing with the clamps. “It’s perfect. So much so, I kind of want to cry, and you know how much I hate to cry.”

  He stopped playing with the easel with his other hand too. “I thought you could use a distraction from all of this. Sorry it took so long for me to finish.” He sat on the edge of my bed, his arm circling my stomach like it was instinctive. “I started it the first week you were put on
bed rest and I meant to finish it in a few days . . . but that didn’t happen.”

  I couldn’t stop grinning at the easel. He couldn’t have given me a more perfect gift at this point in time, not even if he’d booked me a daily massage. This right here meant I’d be able to draw from the right kind of angle or paint even. I could entertain myself for hours so long as I had a pencil or a brush or hell, even a crayon. Trying to create something with a notepad balanced on my stomach or lying flat on the table didn’t work. But this would.

  Screw the close to crying. When I blinked, a tear spilled down my cheek, and I didn’t care enough to wipe it away. If ever there was a reason to cry, it was over something like this.

  “Please don’t feel bad.” I rubbed at the creases in his forehead, trying to erase them. “This is one of the best presents I’ve ever gotten. You have no idea how many sessions of therapy you’ve saved me with this thing. No idea.”

  “You like it? Do you think it will work okay?” His forehead started to smooth out.

  “Heck, yeah, times two.”

  I reached for a notebook to tear out a sheet of paper, but Jesse got to it first and clipped it into place on the easel. He handed me a graphite pencil right after that. I raised the pencil to the paper and drew a few quick lines, then a few more, and before I knew it, my hand was flying across the paper like it had been starved of sustenance for months. I didn’t know what I was drawing, but it didn’t matter. It just felt good to create something again. Jesse stayed silent beside me, going from watching my face to the sheet of paper.

  “God, Jesse, this thing is, like, so perfect. The angle is just right, and the height is spot-on. I couldn’t have designed this better if I’d tried.” Even when I glanced away from the paper long enough to look at him, my hand kept moving.

  “Well now I’m really sorry I didn’t finish this sooner.”

  “It’s not like you’ve been busy or anything, right?” I kept smiling. I felt like it was plastered to my face and would be impossible to remove. “It’s not like you’ve been packing up our condo back in Seattle, getting it cleaned, and listing it for sale. And it’s not like you’ve been laying the foundation and framing our house a mile down the road. And it’s not like you’ve been helping your dad out around the ranch and helping Garth over at his place. You haven’t been busy the last couple of months at all. I can’t imagine why you didn’t finish this easel in record time.”

  He rubbed at the back of his neck and raised a shoulder. “I’m used to being busy.”

  “Busy is one thing. What you’ve taken on is three full-time jobs.”

  “It’s not so bad.” Another shoulder raise.

  My hand paused, tipped against the easel. “Other than the few hours you squeeze in for sleep and these few minutes during lunch when you sneak back here to see me, you haven’t stopped moving since we came to Montana.” I swallowed. The shadows under his eyes seemed extra noticeable in the late morning light spilling through the window. “I’m worried about you.”

  Half of his mouth curled up. “You’re the pregnant one on bed rest with a heart condition, and you’re worried about me?”

  “I’m not the one trying to be everything to everyone all the time, so yes, I am worried about you,” I said, tightening my fingers through his. “You might be the one with a healthy heart, but it won’t stay healthy if you don’t take a break soon.”

  He shook his head, but I knew he recognized the truth in what I was saying. A person couldn’t carry on the way he had without starting to feel like they were more toeing the line of death than life. I admired his work ethic and I respected that he wouldn’t know how to complain if someone ordered him to, but I was worried. If he didn’t back off and give his head and body some real rest, I was terrified it would be his heart that would give out instead of mine.

  “I’ll be fine.” His eyes didn’t meet mine when he answered.

  “Hey, I know that answer. I invented it. Don’t B.S. a B.S.’er.” I arched an eyebrow at him to make sure he’d noticed my substitute for the foul language he was worried about exposing our child to in the womb.

  He acknowledged my efforts with a gentle squeeze of his hand. “Are you fine?”

  “I’m better than fine. I’m fantastic. For real this time.” I motioned at my easel and him. “How could I not be?”

  “Then I’m fantastic too.” He kissed the tip of my nose. “I’ll let you get back to your sketch.”

  “You just got here.”

  “Garth’s meeting me over at our place to help me with the rafters in fifteen minutes. I promised I’d help him move their new washer and dryer into their place when we were done.” He kissed me again, but this time it was on the lips.

  “So does that mean I’ll see you at about the usual time tonight? Eight?”

  “Maybe nine.”

  “Jesse, you can’t keep doing this. You’re going to keel over dead one day, and how’s our child going to grow up to be a well-adjusted person with just me as a parent? I need you to keep our kid from becoming a totally pessimistic too-strange-for-their-own-good person. I need the goodness and sunny disposition you’ll bring to the parenting potpourri.”

  My spiel got him to smile, but it didn’t stop him from continuing out of the room. “I’ll be there, every step of the way. Just make sure you’re with me too.”

  “Does that mean you’ll be home before everyone’s gone to bed for the night?”

  “It means I’ll try.” He paused when he got to the hallway. “Hey, you want me to make you a sandwich or something for lunch before I head out? I think Mom just restocked our peanut butter stores . . .”

  My shoulders fell. I was doing nothing more constructive than comparing the number of freckles on my right forearm and my left—my right had two more than my left—while he was out busting his ass trying to build a life for our family. Why was he the one offering to make me lunch when I should have at least been capable of slapping a few pieces of meat and cheese between a couple slices of bread for him? Oh yeah, because I wasn’t supposed to be on my feet all of five minutes to make my husband a lunch.

  “From the time I’ve had breakfast, I’ve burned a whole eleven calories. I think I’m good. But thanks.” I pointed my pencil at him. “But this is your lunch hour, slash lunch minute, so maybe you should eat a few thousand calories to replace those you used up helping your dad with the fences this morning.”

  His jeans, which had once been a miracle of science they’d fit so snugly, had become loose around his hips and, sigh, his backside. If he lost any more weight by forgetting to eat like he had been, those jeans would fall off of him.

  “I’m not hungry, but if that changes, I’ve got a banana and granola bar in Old Bessie.”

  “Wow. A whole banana and granola bar. You could go on for weeks with that.”

  His eyes lifted to the ceiling. “I’m not hungry.”

  “But that doesn’t mean your body doesn’t need food.”

  He gave up with a sigh. “Fine. I’ll grab one of the sandwiches Mom left in the fridge. Will that make you happy?”

  “Only if you follow up grabbing that sandwich with eating that sandwich.”

  “I promise,” he said.

  “I love you, Jesse,” I called before he disappeared from view. “Even more than I love this easel you made me, and I love this easel a lot. Like, so much I’m not sure it’s healthy to be in love with an inanimate object to the extent I am with this thing.”

  His soft chuckle echoed in the hall. “I love you too, Rowen. More than any animate or inanimate object in the whole world.”

  When I heard the screen door whine open, I yelled, “Your sandwich!”

  “Sorry. I forgot.”

  I could tell by his tone that he really had. Not even five seconds had passed, and the sandwich had slipped his mind. As if I needed to worry any more for him, I felt it grow right then, crashing over all of the former in typhoon-like waves that wouldn’t end. He couldn’t keep running himself
ragged. He was going to burn out or worse . . .

  After I heard the creak of the fridge door, followed by his boot-steps jogging through the kitchen, he stuck his head back in the living room. “Love you.” He gave a quick wave, the sandwich in his hand.

  “Eat that sandwich and prove it.”

  He peeled the plastic baggie back, smiled at me, then sank his teeth into the sandwich.

  I FINISHED THE sandwich. Truer story—I inhaled the sandwich. I hadn’t realized I’d been hungry until I tore into the first bite to prove my love—because what better way is there to prove you love someone than by eating a ham and cheese sandwich, right? But after the first bite, my stomach growled so loudly, I heard it even over the roar of Old Bessie’s engine thundering to life.

  After finishing the sandwich in a whole three more bites, I found myself wishing I’d grabbed a couple more. I couldn’t really remember the last thing I’d eaten—I had to have thrown something down at breakfast that morning, right?—but my body, and stomach mainly, was making it rather clear it was starving.

  I was tempted to make a detour into town to grab a bag of burgers and fries from the old drive-thru, but I was already running late. If Garth beat me to the house, he would start working without me, and I didn’t want to worry about him breaking his back moving around rafters. Breaking it once was enough for any one person.

  The spot where Rowen and I had decided to build our home had been one of my favorite places since I’d been a boy. It was tucked down in a wide valley that a creek ran through in the spring and early summer. By the time August rolled around, the creek was nothing more than a place to go have mud fights with friends, but it was a great place to cool off at earlier in the summer, and it made the most beautiful sound trickling around the rocks and shrubs and grass lining the creek.

  We’d originally planned to build the house right beside the creek so we could open up our windows at night and let the sound of that lazily moving water put us to sleep for those four months out of the year it ran. Then Rowen mentioned how much our little boy—she was still positive we were having a boy—would love to play in it. She said we’d have to be on the lookout for plastic boats to float down it and little buckets and shovels to make mud pies with.