“How is the house coming along then? I love the photos you sent, by the way,” Sarah said. “It looks beautiful.”
“It is but it’s still a work in progress. I keep coming up with ideas and searching for little accents to add so I don’t know that it will ever be officially done.”
Sarah nodded but I knew that she didn’t have any true appreciation or interest in decorating. Her style of living is simple and minimalistic compared to mine and I am by no means high maintenance myself.
And then—she got around to asking about Derek.
“Okay then, so how about romance? How’s Derek doing?” she asked taking an overly exaggerated speculative glance at my hand with a raised brow.
I lifted my left hand to give her a bird’s eye view of the naked expanse of my ring finger.
“No wedding bells are in my future, Sarah. Sorry to disappoint you,” I drawled. “But Derek is doing fine. He isn’t one hundred percent sold on Fremont but he doesn’t need to be. I’m happy with the arrangement and we see each other every so often. He’ll be coming over to visit me next weekend.”
“Every so often?” she said quizzically with a derisive snort. “A visit, huh?”
“Derek is no Jerry, Sarah. He’ll never decide that I’m important enough to change his lifestyle for me. We’re very different people,” I explained carefully.
“I don’t think that you want him to change his lifestyle and he doesn’t strike me as being a man that would be there for the long haul,” she said a tad snidely but added conciliatorily. “Of course, I haven’t met him or seen you two together, so I guess I don’t have room to have an opinion about him.”
“Mindy has, and she is of the same opinion,” I said with a slight smile, taking a sip of my coffee.
“If I were to guess,” she continued more hesitantly. “I believe that you’re counting on him not being in it for the long haul and my wish for you is that you will deal with your issues and find a real relationship because life goes by so fast, sis, and I feel like you’re still waiting for it to begin while it’s passing you by.”
“Sarah,” I groaned. “Please don’t start. I am living my life and having a man in my life twenty-four seven isn’t necessary.” But even as I said it I thought of all of my grandparents who I have experienced lately and I know that finding someone to love had been pretty high up on their lists of the best parts of life.
“I’m not starting anything, Torie. I just want you to be happy and you can, if you would just let someone in, the right someone and I don’t mean Derek,” she said derisively, spitting his name out like it was a bad word.
I took a piece of soft bagel bread from the tray between us and began to slather it with a dollop of strawberry cream cheese, keeping my eyes determinedly on what I was doing and not meeting hers while I reined in my irritation about my relationship being put under the microscope again.
“Don’t get pissed at me, Torie, but you know what I’m talking about. You have a threshold of about two months in and you bail. You’ve sabotaged every good relationship that you’ve ever had a chance at—your entire adult life.”
“I think that’s a little broad brush to paint it with, Sarah,” I cut in a bit snarky but she ignored me as she continued.
“I’d hoped that you would meet someone when your books took off and you met so many new and interesting people.”
“I did and his name is Derek,” I reminded her.
“I was the same as you are, you know,” she reflected quietly, maintaining her calm demeanor. “You know that I was, until I met Jerry and he refused to let me get rid of him. I’ve thought about it and I think that it’s all about Mom and Dad splitting up when you and I were so little. I don’t think that it affected Margo because she was thirteen when they split but you and I…”
She paused and I looked up at her as I set aside my breakfast on a plate with my stomach feeling a little queasy all at once, and lifted my coffee cup again as she continued.
“I don’t even remember what it was like to have a dad or any man in our lives growing up, so I know that you don’t either. Then it was just us and Mom for all those years and I think that we just got used to having no man in the house and it felt comfortable—normal to us even though it really wasn’t. I didn’t have the first idea of how to even begin to try letting a man in or what that should look like because I had no frame of reference.”
“Sarah, I’ve been with Derek for over eleven months,” I stubbornly argued.
“It isn’t a real relationship, Torie, its make-believe. I guarantee you that if he ever wanted to commit to you, he would be history. You would be heading for the hills so fast.”
“That’s not fair, Sarah.”
“Oh really? Name one man that you’ve had a real relationship with and not Derek.”
She waited for me to give her an answer until the pause became awkwardly long and continued to grow longer and longer. I opened my mouth a couple of times forming names but had to discard them and I finally shut my mouth and glared at her in mortified defeat because I, honest to God, could not come up with one single goddamn name. Absolutely none! Zero!
I gave a heavy sigh. “What I have with Derek is real and no one is heading for the hills. We are in a committed—”
“A committed relationship, I know—I know,” Sarah said tiredly. “But for the last eleven months of your relationship you’ve been on the road promoting your books and living first in your own house in Des Moines and now in Fremont. Have you ever even discussed moving in together?”
“No we—”
“Exactly,” she interrupted before I could finish my answer. “And now you’ve actually moved away from him completely but instead of pulling the plug on it, you keep it going—playing at something that is totally bogus. You don’t make any demands on him and he doesn’t make any demands on you and I’m not sure which one of you is calling the shots.”
“There’s no one calling the shots. It’s just an easy relationship, Sarah,” I shrugged.
“He’s the perfect insulator between you and any other man who might show interest in you so that you don’t have to deal,” she said.
“What has brought this on, Sarah? Why can’t we just have a nice visit without getting into a big old discussion about my private life which doesn’t affect you in the slightest?” I snapped defensively.
“I’m sorry and I don’t mean to upset you but this thing with Derek just keeps going on and on and I can totally see you allowing it to continue for years unless he does something to force your hand. I can’t understand him either—why does he keep putting up with this?” she eyed me quizzically, gears turning behind those blue-gray eyes of hers that are so like my own.
When I said nothing in response, she continued. “You’re pretending that you’re in a relationship when actually you’re alone, Torie, like you’ve always been alone and I’m sorry for you is all,” she shrugged and then made a motion as if zipping her lips. “That’s it, end of my lecture.”
I would have argued further but I really had no defense. She was right, and we both knew it. Derek has been the most successful relationship of my adult life, but it isn’t real and if it was—if he ever truly started making demands upon me for my attentions or if he wanted to live with me day to day, full-on, I would absolutely do something to sabotage it. That’s who I am—that’s what I do. After the preliminaries of dating, when it starts to get real, I always panic and I bail and then—I’m alone again and the stretches between each failed attempt have amounted to years of being alone.
What Derek has been, is a perfect barrier between me and other men, especially with the uptick in interest the last couple of years due to my success when it has proved to be more difficult, avoiding interested suitors. I love the freedom that Derek’s simple, no-demands relationship has given me. I’m not available because I belong to Derek but I know that I don’t belong to Derek and he definitely doesn’t belong to me. Actually, he probably has the same issues tha
t I have, in fact, I’m pretty sure that I am his longest relationship too but I don’t even know him well enough to know for sure and I’m not interested enough to even ask. We are a crutch for each other—a crutch that I don’t know that I will ever be able to throw away.
“Just think about it. I want you to be happy, Torie. I don’t think that you’ll ever find it with Derek, is all,” Sarah said interrupting my musings and I looked over at her as she added the zipping her lip gesture again and we both laughed.
Sarah cares about me and her words come from a loving place but she let the subject go after that because she had said her piece and we spent the rest of our breakfast talking idly of inconsequential and safe subjects before we were joined by Jerry and Julie and all of us headed out to feed the horses and get the rescue up and running for the day.
***
In the afternoon, we picked out a couple of Sarah’s own horses and went for a long leisurely ride by the river, just Sarah and me. It reminded me of our childhood, spending every minute that we could with our horses. From the time that we were old enough to start begging, we were around horses and we had even worked at a stable out in West Des Moines as young kids and teens, saddling horses and running trail rides.
As we rode around the ranch and along the river which was so peaceful and conducive to conversation, I kept trying to think of some way to bring up the experiences that I have been having at my house in Fremont but I just couldn’t come up with any way of approaching the subject that wouldn’t end with me sounding as if I were totally going insane. I really wanted someone to talk with about the experiences and Sarah would definitely be my first choice of a confidante, but I doubted that even she could believe me and so I decided to keep my deep, dark secret to myself.
***
On Thursday evening, as the jet descended over the city of Des Moines and I watched the familiar landmarks pass below, I felt unutterably euphoric to be heading back home to Fremont. The time away had given me the little break that I had needed to regroup and I was ready for the weekend and spending time with Derek. With Sarah’s remarks still with me, goading me on, I was determined that I was going to take stock and do some heavy evaluating this weekend as to just exactly what our relationship consists of now and what if anything, our future together might hold.
Chapter 16
On Friday afternoon I was becoming more than a little nervous, the nearer time drew to the hour of Derek’s expected arrival. I was concerned about many things but uppermost, bubbling to the surface time and again was the undeniable probability of my time warping tonight and what might happen with him staying over—actually I was very concerned about that prospect. Will I be able to return early so that he won’t suspect anything out of the ordinary due to my sleeping late? Is there the possibility that he will have the experience also? I have no idea what to expect but it could be entirely possible that he might find himself having one hell of a vivid dream tonight. For myself, if it does occur, my plan is to try my damndest to play it cool, calm and generally act as dumb as a box of rocks if he wakes up tomorrow morning raving to me about some fantastical experience, although I have never been characterized as someone who has a ‘poker face’ but rather, the exact opposite.
My time travels had started up again immediately upon my return last night and I’d spent a lovely visit with Grandma Rose and Grandpa Judson in about 1872, as another of their daughters—this time I was my great-grandaunt Emily. I was about five-years-old; my sister Ivy was three and our youngest sister Mahala, was just a toddler. Grandma Rose and Grandpa Judson had been in the prime of their lives, both with tons of energy and just a joy to be around. It had been a wonderful visit and I didn’t get back until nearly 11:00 a.m.
The travel took place in this house and it had been the middle of autumn I knew, because Grandma Rose had made a couple of trips out into the garden to harvest vegetables. She had returned both times with her basket full of tomatoes, radishes, onions, turnips, potatoes, leaf lettuce and she had put me and Grandpa Judson to work snapping beans over a pewter bowl at the dining room table while she had also instructed us to mind the younger girls to keep them ‘out of mischief’, as Rose had put it.
At mid-day the entire family, including my three great-granduncles, George, Norman and John who were each a few years older than Emily, went by horse drawn wagon to visit with Alice and Henry for dinner at their newly constructed log cabin on their new homestead about a mile away.
We brought them a house warming gift consisting of a share of the fresh snapped beans and other vegetables, as well as some jarred applesauce and strawberry preserves, two loaves of fresh sourdough bread wrapped in a linen cloth, an apple pie and over the top of it all, draped across the large reed-woven work basket, was a beautiful white embroidered tablecloth with intricate patterns formed by groups of Colonial knots which is a term I only know because Rose told me when I had asked.
She had looked at me quizzically as she had explained to me that the type of white on white embroidering is called candlewicking. Whether she had been surprised that a five-year-old child would have any interest in such a topic or by my not knowing something that she may have already begun instructing Emily in, I couldn’t say but likely the latter, because at five years of age, Emily had probably been well on her way to having at least a rudimentary grasp of the skills of sewing and embroidery.
***
Instead of Derek arriving as expected, I received a call at about 5:00 p.m. from him, informing me, rather casually and without any hesitancy, that he simply wouldn’t be coming tonight. He claimed to have tried and failed to find a single available rental car for the trip, hardly plausible in a city the size of Des Moines, and he was absolutely not going to drive his precious Porsche to my house out on a mile of gravel. So for these, what he obviously considered to be good enough reasons, he was simply going to forgo the weekend with me—just like that.
This wasn’t the first time in our relationship that a get together had been nixed by him and my normal response to news such as this is to let him off the hook and say it’s okay, maybe next weekend, but with my sister Sarah’s recent comments running through my head, I decided, here and now that I was going to push or shove my way, like a frickin bulldozer if necessary, into a real goddamn relationship with Derek Bonner.
“I’ll drive into Des Moines and stay with you instead,” I offered. “I can be there in an hour.”
This seemed to surprise the crap out of him because all that I heard for several seconds was dead air on the other end of the line.
“I don’t want you to feel like you need to do that and besides I don’t think that’ll work out,” he finally managed to say.
“Why not? I don’t mind coming in. Really I don’t.”
“Torie, I’ve already made a dinner appointment with a client who’s in town for the weekend. It’s Paul Owens and his wife.”
“That’s okay,” I said honestly because of Derek’s elite roster of obnoxious, self-centered, narcissistic, shallow, boring clients; Paul Owens and his wife Brenda were by far the least offensive. “I can help you with entertaining them. It’ll be good to see Brenda again.”
“That won’t work,” he said. “I booked reservations at 801 Chophouse which wasn’t easy and it’s just too late to add another to the tab and anyway I’m already on the road heading downtown to join them for drinks right now.”
“Oh, I see,” I said. “I get it.”
“Don’t be mad, Torie. Maybe next weekend or the week after,” he offered and it couldn’t have been with less enthusiasm.
Finally, I decided I needed to come right out and say something because this was getting a bit ridiculous.
“Why don’t you just be brave enough to tell me outright, Derek, that it’s over?” I spat.
“I’m not telling you anything of the kind. Where is this coming from?”
“I think that you know as well as I do that we are pretty much done. It’s been what—almost two months since we
’ve seen each other? After all this time, I think maybe we need to face it.”
He was silent for a minute, and then I heard him take a breath and sigh heavily before he spoke.
“Torie, we’re just on different wavelengths now. You’ve change and we just don’t want the same things anymore. You seem to be perfectly contented out there in Podunk, USA, sitting in the middle of nowhere out on a gravel road and watching the damn corn grow. That’s never going to be me, babe, and I think that you know that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this month’s ago?” I asked tartly.
“Would it have made a difference if I had?” he countered.
“You knew that this was my plan practically from day one. You knew that I wanted to buy this place because I showed you the damn photos of it on our second date,” I reminded him.
“Yeah but I didn’t actually think that you would go through with it and then when you did and you moved out there I was hoping that you’d get your fill of it and be back to Des Moines in no time.”
“Why on earth would you think that? I never gave you any reason to believe that this was something that was going to be temporary and from day one you said that we would make it work.”
“Torie, when we first met in Chicago and you were this beautiful, successful world-renowned author, I had no idea, that once the millions started rolling in, that you would completely check out on life.”
“I haven’t checked out on anything, Derek. Having the success has allowed me the freedom to make choices and given me the opportunity to live a life that has meaning for me.”
“Yes, but there are two people in this relationship, babe, and it isn’t working for me anymore. I’m living a life that has meaning for me too, you know,” he paused, possibly expecting a retort.
I said nothing. It wasn’t worth it to me to remind him that I had been trying to fit the mold of the kind of woman that he wanted in his world and had spent innumerable mind-numbing evenings trying to be the ambassador of good will for those superficial shallow people who he wanted so much to impress.