Someone to Call Home
Rhonda Bowen
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Copyright (c) 2015 by Rhonda Bowen
Someone to Call Home
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The characters in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental.
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Other text quoted:
New International Version (NIV)Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.®Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Author’s Note
About the Author
Other Books by Rhonda Bowen
Chapter 1
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come? Say the word and I’ll be on a plane in an hour.”
“No, no, I’m fine,” I stumbled a little as I dragged my heavy suitcase through Southwest Florida International Airport. “I’ll be okay.”
The urge to strip naked was strong as I balanced my cell phone in one hand and tried to flag down a taxi with the other. I could never get used to the sweltering Florida heat, despite the fact that I spent the first eighteen years of my life living in it.
“Are you sure, Piper?” My younger brother’s concern was clear through the phone. “It’s a big house. You shouldn’t have to go through all that junk by yourself.”
“First of all, Philip, Grandma’s house is not that big. It’s just three bedrooms,” I said. “And second, even if you got on a plane in an hour, you still wouldn’t get here for another two days. I’d be done with half the work by then.”
Philip sighed. The defeat in his voice was as obvious as if he was right beside me, rather than thousands of miles away in Australia.
“You’re right,” he conceded. “I’m just worried about how you will take all of it.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I slid into the back seat of a waiting taxi, and pulled the door shut. “I’ll be fine.”
An hour later, as I stepped through the front door of Grandma Pearl’s house and the deafening silence wrapped itself around me, I wasn’t so sure. I thought I was prepared to deal with Grandma Pearl being gone. I thought I had finished crying since the funeral a month before. But it seemed there were always a few more tears left.
My younger brother Philip and I had grown up in this house in Port Charlotte with Grandma Pearl since I was five and he was three. Our parents died in a car accident when we were young. Rather than have us lost in the foster care system, Grandma Pearl, my mother’s mother, took it upon herself to raise us. Despite the fact that she had already raised three children of her own, Grandma Pearl never made us feel like we were a burden to her. She loved us with her everything and even stayed on at Patsy’s Diner long past retirement just to make sure we were never in need. Although she was gone, I would always be grateful for the sacrifices she made for us and the faith that she instilled in us. A faith I had forgotten for a little while.
Pushing less pleasant thoughts aside, I made my way through the small cozy living room, touching the antique cabinet, ornate sofa and end tables. As I slipped into the kitchen, I could almost smell the fresh blueberry pancakes she used to make for Philip and me when we were teenagers. The memories swirled around me and invaded all my senses. It was too much. I rushed through the living room and out the front door, gasping for air. I missed her so much. How was she gone? I couldn’t imagine this house, this life without her.
Resting my head in my hands I let the fresh tears fall.
“I heard you were coming, but I guess I had to see it for myself to believe it.”
I looked up to find a tall dark figure directly in front of me. The sun behind him framed his strong form and made his golden hair glow like an angel’s.
His usually bright eyes darkened when they landed on me.
“Darn. The first time I see you in ten years and the first thing I do is make you cry.”
I smiled in spite of myself. “It’s not you, Jackson. Not this time anyway.”
He saw right through my lame attempt at humor and came to sit beside me on the porch steps.
“What’s wrong?” he peered at me from under thick eyebrows.
What was right was the better question. And the answer to that would have been nothing. Nothing was right, and hadn’t been in a long time. But I couldn’t tell him that, so I just shrugged, triggering even more tears. Before I could say another word, he wrapped an arm around my shoulders.
“I’m sorry about your grandmother,” he sighed. “I know how much she meant to you.”
I nodded and wiped my tears with the back of my hand. It was nice to have an old friend around. And with Jackson, all this was very familiar - sitting on my grandma’s front porch upset about something, and him sitting beside me trying to make it better. The early years of my life were filled with moments like this. In fact, with Jackson and I growing up barely a block from each other in Port Charlotte, going to the same schools and attending the same church, there were very few moments of my early life that didn’t include him. Grandma Pearl used to joke that if you wanted to find one of us, all you needed to do was look for the other.
Like every teenager in Port Charlotte, we dreamed of escaping to the city. After we both finished college, we were supposed to move together to New York. At the last minute, however, Jackson backed out of the plan, deciding instead to stay and work in his father’s construction company. After a big argument, I left, still angry with him for betraying me.
Now, all of that seemed so far away as I sat with him on my grandmother’s porch.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the funeral,” he said a few moments later when my tears had stopped.
“It’s okay. Your mother told me you were out of town on business.” I sniffled. “I hear that things are going well.”
He smiled. “Yeah. Since Dad retired I’ve been able to make a lot of changes, and business has picked up. God has really blessed us.”
“That’s good,” I smiled. I tried to take a deep breath and blink back any further tears. I caught him watching me with his intense green eyes.
“What are you doing here by yourself?”
I explained to him that Grandma Pearl had left the house to me and Philip in her will. Since neither of us lived in Florida anymore, we had decided to clean it out and sell it.
He frowned. “But you love this house.”
“Can’t afford to keep it. I already have a place in New York I can barely pay the rent on. I could never afford the repairs and maintenance this house needs. Besides, there’s nothing here for me anymore with Grandma gone.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I looked up at him, instantly realizing how hurtful they might be. We had been friends forever. But t
he truth was we hadn’t really spoken in years. Emails and Christmas cards were our standard procedure. But they didn’t count when it came to someone who was once your best friend. Truthfully, I barely knew what was going on in his life and he in mine. Like many childhood friends, we had drifted apart.
Before I could open my mouth to apologize, he shook his head.
“It’s okay. I understand. But I still think you shouldn’t be doing this alone. This must be hard for you.”
“There’s no one else, Jackson. Me and Philip are the only family Grams had, and Philip is halfway across the world in Australia on some work thing.”
Jackson shrugged. “I’ll help.”
I looked up at him in surprise. “I can’t ask you to do that. You have a company to run. You don’t have time to clean out an old dusty house with a weepy granddaughter.”
He chuckled. “You let me decide what I have time for okay?”
He stood up and reached out a hand to me. “Enough of this crying. Let’s get to work.”
I rolled my eyes and let him pull me up from the step. “Still bossy as ever I see.”
“Well,” he grinned. “I am still six months older than you.”
Chapter 2
Jackson spent the rest of the afternoon helping me box up items in the living room and the kitchen. I tried to get through as much of it as I could that first evening, but the jet lag soon got the better of me, and it was not long before I had to call it quits. But the next day he was back bright and early to help me with the rest.
We got through my old bedroom and Philip’s room in two days. Philip had moved out most of his stuff when he went away after college. All that was left were a couple of old swimming trophies from high school and some dusty yearbooks. As we flipped through the yearbooks, Jackson and I laughed at our senior pictures; me, with big Farrah Fawcett hair and him, with his slicked back do. As we relived the memories of our teenage years, I began to remember why we were such good friends. I also began to miss that friendship a lot.
“Hey, remember this?” I pointed to our prom pictures.
Jackson peeked over my shoulder at the yearbook and grinned.
“Oh yeah, I remember senior prom. You went with Martin Migglefield.”
“And you went with Shirley Williams,” I wrinkled my nose. “Oh, I hated her.”
He smirked. “You were just jealous I took her instead of you.”
“Me? Jealous?” My eyes widened. “You were the one who punched Martin in the nose!”
“Yeah, because he was trying to put his hand up your dress!”
I shook my head and smiled as I remembered how everything had gone downhill after that. Soon all the guys at the prom were fighting each other and the girls were screaming at me telling me it was my fault. When the principal finally broke things up, Martin, Jackson and a couple other guys ended up being thrown out of the prom. Knowing Jackson’s temper and not wanting him to start another fight somewhere else, I left with him. Needless to say, Martin had been more than a little upset.
“You were always dragging me into some kind of trouble, weren’t you?”
We were both sitting at the end of Philip’s old bed. I turned around to face him.
“Yeah, I guess I was,” he said, his eyes met mine. “We really were inseparable.”
“Yeah, we were.”
I couldn’t help but stare at him. He still looked like the Jackson I remembered but his features had chiseled out. He had become less boyish and more manly. He’d always been good looking, but now he was strikingly handsome. My high school friend had turned into a hunk. And the more I stared at him, the harder it was to look away. I could feel the heat radiating off his body from where he sat, close to me. All of a sudden, a memory that I had tried my best to forget drew my eyes directly to his lips. I closed my eyes.
“Why didn’t you come with me?”
I heard him take a deep breath. “I told you, I wanted to stay…”
“No.” I opened my eyes and placed my hand on his arm before he repeated what I knew would be a lie. “Tell me the real reason.”
He looked down at his hands. I watched the muscle in his jaw flex nervously.
“Dad was sick,” His voice was so low I barely heard it. “It was serious, and we didn’t know if he would make it. I couldn’t leave him. He needed me.”
The honesty in his voice made my heart ache. I slipped my hand down his arm to his hand, and squeezed gently. “Why didn’t you just tell me? I would have understood. I would have stayed.”
“Exactly,” he turned sparkling eyes on me. “I didn’t want that for you. I knew it would be easier to let you go, and easier for you to leave if you were mad at me.”
“But what if that wasn’t what I wanted?” I frowned and pulled away. “What if I had wanted to stay?”
“You wouldn’t have wanted to,” he reached over, taking my hand back gently. “Not in your heart.”
“How could you know that?”
“Because, Piper. I know you.”
I bit my lip, refusing to admit out loud that he was probably right.
“Why didn’t you come find me when your dad got better?”
He told me that he had gone to New York for a while, and had worked there for two years in a renovations company. But nothing had been what he thought it would be. So when his father offered to sell him the family business, he agreed and moved back to Port Charlotte.
“Why didn’t you ever visit?” His eyes burned into me almost accusingly.
Now, it was my turn to look away. How could I tell him that I was afraid of coming home? Afraid that I would find out what I already knew, that I would be happier in Port Charlotte than I could ever be in New York? All my life I had dreamed of being a city girl, of getting as far away from Port Charlotte as the wings of the wind could carry me. But the city had changed me. It had made me into someone desperate to survive, and that desperation caused me to do things. Things I could never tell Jackson. Things I would regret for the rest of my life.
“Things got busy,” I stood up and walked towards the window. An odd silence seemed to fill the room. I could feel the dishonesty in my words hang in the air just like I could feel Jackson’s eyes burning into my back. It was making me restless.
“Anyway, we’re basically done in here,” I forced a smile. “Just one bedroom left to go.”
Jackson said nothing, but followed me as I headed down the hallway to the final room – Grandma Pearl’s room.
As soon as I stepped inside, memories began to crash down on me like the waves of the Atlantic Ocean beating against the Florida coast. The smell of Grandma’s signature White Diamonds perfume hung in the air as if she was still in the room. The curtains by the window seat where Grandma used to brush my hair when I was a little girl were pulled back like they were waiting for me and Grandma to resume our usual positions, and the open closet showed Grandma’s favorite dresses hung in place, in the exact spot where she last left them. In this room, Grandma Pearl still went on. In this room, she was still alive.
Jackson saw me trembling and reached out a hand to steady me. Slowly and gently, he steered me out of the room.
“Let’s take a break,” he said quietly. “I know where we can go.”
I could barely speak, or breathe, so I just nodded, and let him lead me away.
Chapter 3
“Mom? Are you here?”
“Yes, dear. I’m in the kitchen.”
I followed Jackson through the dining room into the Crawford’s large country styled kitchen. The light from the evening sun seemed to stream through all the windows on each wall, bathing the room in a warm orange glow. It was the first time in years, I had felt so at home.
“Well, if it isn’t Ms. Piper Blake herself. Child, I done thought I’d never see you again.” I smiled as Mrs. Crawford pulled me into a tight embrace. She smelled like cinnamon, strawberries and fresh bread all at once. I loved it.
“Hi, Mrs. Crawford,” I beamed. “How have you
been?”
“Just hanging on in the Lord, child. Just hanging on.”
“Still taking of care of that one, I see,” I said playfully, nodding towards Jackson who had half his body stuck in the fridge – no small feat for a guy almost six feet tall.
“I wish,” Sally Crawford rolled her eyes as she rinsed her hands in the sink. “God bless the times I get a chance to get that one in here.”
I looked over at Jackson, and then back at his mother in confusion.
“So Jackson doesn’t live here?”
Sally laughed. “That boy hasn’t lived here since he moved back to Port Charlotte. Talkin’ ‘bout he’s a grown man and he need privacy. I don’t know what he need privacy for and he ain’t married.”
“I’ll tell you what he need it for – all them women chasing his tail, that’s what.”
I turned around as Joe Crawford’s booming voice echoed around the kitchen from the doorway.
“Miss Piper Blake, is that really you?”
“It is really me,” I grinned as I hugged the tall heavy-set man. From the strength in his arms as they squeezed me, I guessed that he hadn’t been spending his retirement on a fishing boat somewhere.
“Well, I’m glad to see you. It’s been a while since Jackson brought a decent gal around here.”
I looked over at Jackson leaning against the counter, and tried not to laugh at the embarrassed expression on his face, even as a tinge of something was tugging at my heart. I couldn’t help but wonder who all those women were that Jackson had been hanging around with.
“So…uh, mom, I thought we were having dinner,” Jackson said nervously.
“Yes, we are son,” Sally smiled as she patted her son’s red cheek. “And don’t worry, I promise your father and I will behave. Right, Joe?”
“Aww, now how will that be fun for me?” I teased, and then laughed as Jackson glared at me.
“Don’t worry, sugar,” Joe put an arm around my shoulder as we followed Sally into the dining room. “I ain’t promised nothing, and I’ve got enough stories on this one to last all evening.”
* * *
“Thank you so much for getting me out of Grandma’s house.”
It was dark and after a lot of food and even more laughs at the Crawfords, we finally made the short walk back to Grandma Pearl’s.