Heart & Soul Read online

  Things like sleeping, reaching for a bottle of water when my throat had turned into a cylinder of sandpaper, putting on a jacket when it was cold, taking off a layer when it was hot, reaching for something to eat when my stomach was about to stage a revolt, changing the position I was sitting in when my leg fell asleep . . . kind of like it was at that very moment. Oh, and of course, blinking, because why would that come naturally?

  Shifting my position on the overstuffed chair that had been dragged into the middle of the condo, I shook my so-numb-it-was-bordering-on-painful leg and tried not to let it reflect in my expression.

  “If I wanted you to move, I’d be over there, crawling into your lap and making you move.” Rowen stuck her head out from behind the giant canvas propped up on an easel, brow raised and brush pointed my way. “Now, for the five hundredth time, hold still please.”

  “Sorry,” I mouthed, careful to move as few facial muscles as possible.

  Keeping her warning look aimed my way for a moment more, she relented with a wink before disappearing behind the canvas again. Instantly, my stare dropped to the wood floor, where I could see her feet and up to her knees before the bottom of the canvas hid the rest of her from view.

  I’d developed a nifty new tick since Rowen had flashed two pink lines in my face a few months earlier: the inability to not keep her in my sights when we were together. It didn’t matter if we were two feet apart or if she was doing nothing more ambitious than snoozing on the sofa—if she was in view, she was in my view at all times. I didn’t know where it had come from or how I’d let it develop to the extreme it had without catching it first, but my best guess was that my mind had somehow rationalized that if I could see her, then she couldn’t disappear. If I was watching her, nothing could tear her away from me. If I kept her in my sights, nothing would happen to her.

  It wasn’t logical or rational or something I could explain without feeling like I’d just escaped from a straitjacket, but it wasn’t exactly like love fell into any of those categories either. So I accepted it. I accepted what I felt and how it had manifested in the form of instinct and habit.

  Old programmed responses became replaced with new ones. The new ones consisted of resting my hand flat against her back every night I crawled in beside her and concentrating on the beat thrumming against her bone and muscle and skin. The sun rose more often with my eyes still open, hand still in place, than ones where my body had found the refuge of sleep.

  Phone calls had become another fun experiment in torture. If my phone rang when I wasn’t with Rowen, my world would blur and my heart would stop, sure the caller was waiting to reveal to me that my wife’s heart had done just that. Stopped. Given out. Given up.

  Those examples just barely scraped the surface of what sorts of new habits I’d developed as a result of Rowen’s pregnancy, but God only knew how many more would crop up in the last few months leading up to the delivery.

  “This is like the best dinner ever.” From behind the canvas, Rowen’s arm popped out. Her hand curled around the fork propped on the plate on the stool, holding a stack of pancakes. She cut a wedge off from the quickly diminishing tower, stabbed all six layers, and her arm, hand, and fork disappeared behind the canvas. “You can cook for me anytime you want. You know, for future reference,” she said through a mouthful of pancake.

  I wasn’t supposed to move, but a smile twitched at the corners of my mouth. Thankfully, she hadn’t popped her head back out to notice. “That’s because it’s not dinner. It’s dessert.”

  Her hand reappeared to drop the fork back on the plate before slipping behind the canvas. The smile kept tugging at the corners of my mouth when I noticed the smears of paint streaked along her hands and forearms. Rowen always told me you could tell how good a piece of art would turn out based on how messy you got creating it. From the looks of just her left arm and hand, she was creating a masterpiece. Monet, watch your back—Rowen Sterling-Walker’s coming to get you.

  “It’s love on a plate. That’s what it is.” She popped up onto her tiptoes, giving her just enough clearance to peer over the top of the canvas at me.

  Since I’d been laser-focused on her legs and feet, I was able to stifle my smile before I earned my five-hundredth-and-one warning. Her head tilted a bit, her eyes narrowing in a concentrated kind of way, before disappearing again. I’d gotten used to getting flashes of Rowen, pieces of her, bits at a time, every Friday night for the past couple of months. Well, this was Thursday night, but Friday was our typical night for me to cook her dinner before she held me prisoner in the overstuffed chair until an hour or two after midnight. Tomorrow night, though, we’d be rolling into Willow Springs to kick off our trial summer, so Rowen had pretty much demanded that we move up our date night by twenty-four hours. She’d been working on whatever the painting was—she wouldn’t let me see yet—since we’d found out she was pregnant, and she said she was getting close to finishing.

  “Will you make this for me next Friday night too?” she asked, her voice muffled, which meant she had the handle of a paintbrush in her teeth. “Pancakes just taste better at Willow Springs.”

  “Yeah, but those aren’t just pancakes. Those are chocolate chips pancakes with peanut butter layered in between.”

  I hadn’t been hungry, but Rowen had refused to dig into her stack until I did. She’d started noticing I wasn’t eating, drinking, or sleeping during the first couple of weeks after we’d learned of her pregnancy. At first, she hadn’t said too much, probably assuming it was a phase that would pass. When she observed it only seemed to get worse with time, she started to intervene in the way only Rowen was capable. So I’d shoveled down a plateful of pancakes I hadn’t been hungry for so she would eat her own, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover chocolate chip pancakes smeared in peanut butter didn’t taste just barely palatable but actually pretty damn good.

  “Peanut butter, yum.” Rowen sighed like she sighed my name when I slipped a sheet of her hair over her shoulder and kissed the base of her neck. “It’s manna from the gods. Manna in creamy, roasted goodness conveniently packaged in a jar.”

  “I asked Mom to stock up on peanut butter, and she said she’d swiped every last jar of Skippy, Jiff, and generic brand peanut butter on the shelves at Murray’s, so we should be good to go until next weekend at least.”

  “If your son grows any faster, it won’t make it that long.” The paintbrush wasn’t in her mouth any longer. From the sounds of it, the brush had moved from her mouth to slashing frantic strokes across the canvas again.

  Rowen thought we were having a boy. No, she was convinced we were having a boy. At the last appointment, we could have found out the gender of the baby if we wanted to, but we’d made the decision to wait to find out until the baby was born. Rowen liked a little mystery in her life and mentioned that the surprise would make the whole messy part of the Cesarean delivery a bit less so. Instead of just getting to see his or her face and count his or her toes, we’d be able to look forward to finding out if it was a his or a her. She said that would make the actual delivery less daunting and more fun . . . although I couldn’t quite comprehend how anything could make getting one’s stomach cut into “easier.” I didn’t have to comprehend it though because for her, it worked. It only endeared her that much more to me.

  Which would only make it that much more difficult to lose her.

  That was the main reason why I’d agreed to not find out the gender of the baby. Giving it a boy or girl designation usually led to a name, which led to outfitting a nursery, which led to a whole new world of expectations and anticipations I was all too okay with keeping the door closed on at that point. It felt too much like tempting bad luck to come hunt us down if we found out what the baby was, or gave it a name, or put together a nursery and prepared a diaper bag. We had enough bad luck stacked against us at it was—I didn’t want to garner the attention of any more.

  Rowen stuck her head out around the side of the canvas again, inspecting
my face in only the way a person looking to know every scar, wrinkle, and imperfection so they could capture the bad with the good would. When she disappeared behind the painting again, I snuck in a yawn. Realizing the deaths of one’s wife and unborn child were only about fifty times more likely had a way of keeping a man up at night.

  “I’m used to hearing a subtle sigh or notice a tightening in your jaw or witness that the-end-is-near expression roll across your face whenever I mention my confidence on the gender.” Rowen’s voice trickled around the canvas and filled the small space of our condo. Her voice had always had a way of doing that—filling a room from one corner to the next. It wasn’t like her voice was loud or harsh, like it sometimes got when we were in the heat of plenty of kinds of moments, but her voice, kind of like the rest of her, just had a way of filling the room. Not to mention my world. “Did you fall asleep over there?”

  I gave my head a small shake to clear it before answering. “Not asleep. Not yet at least. Just trying to obey your every command and heed your every threat to not move a muscle. Last I checked, sighing, jaw tightening, and the-end-is-near looks required moving a fair share of muscles.”

  She popped her head out around the side of the canvas with a smile, but I had to keep mine to myself or else. Her face was streaked with a few swipes of paint, the most prominent being the intensely bright green dotted on the tip of her nose.

  “I appreciate your cooperation. You will be generously compensated for it.” Her head had no sooner disappeared behind the canvas before it popped back out. “And by generously compensated, I mean in sexual favors. Naturally.” With a wink, she disappeared again.

  As I always did whenever the conversation steered toward that topic, I changed the subject. Quickly. Not because I was one of those guys who got creeped out by the idea of making love to his pregnant wife, but because her heart was already straining enough without the added stress of intimacy. “Do you still want to plan on leaving the city after your appointment tomorrow? Have you had enough time to pack?”

  “I am not planning, I am dying to leave tomorrow, and yeah, I’ve already packed. I’m ready to hit the road. Bags are waiting at the door, and I’ve got a supply of peanut butter for the road trip. I picked up kale chips and raw walnuts for you.”

  Last year, I would have laughed if she’d suggested what she just packed for our road trip fuel or even thought about implying a cowboy from Montana knew what kale was . . . but last year felt like a former lifetime. “Yum. You know I can’t resist a crunchy-bordering-on-chewy piece of glorified lettuce, and who can say no to unsalted nuts? On second thought, double yum.”

  That earned a small laugh from her as she worked on the painting. “Come on, it’s like I told you. A plate of red meat and bowl of mashed potatoes swimming in cream and butter is no longer considered the height of health food. Sorry. Besides, all we need to do is look to nature to discover how to take care of our bodies. Carrots are good for our eyes—cut one section off, and you can see it actually looks like an eye. Tomatoes are good for our hearts—cut one down the center, and you can see chambers and ventricles and pretty much a human heart drawn in nature. Crack into a walnut shell, and what does it look like? A brain, just like what it’s good for. More natural foods, less cholesterol and heart disease dripping from a plate please.”

  I’d heard that lecture countless times in three months, and it still managed to amuse me every time. “If I’m to buy into your theory that we only need to look at what we eat to know what part of our body it’s good for, what part of mine is a kale chip benefiting?” I felt my brows draw together as I considered what part of the human anatomy was flat, frilly, and putrid green.

  Rowen grumbled from behind the canvas. “Those gifts from nature that don’t resemble anything inside our bodies mean they’re good for our entire body.”

  “My butter-laden mashed potatoes don’t resemble anything in the human anatomy. So I’m going to infer, based on your conclusion, that eating a serving or five at each sitting is beneficial for my whole body.”

  Another grumble, that one louder. These were the moments that got me through our impasse in life. The light ones tempered with laughter and each of us trying to outdo and one up the other. We’d talked so much heavy lately, pertaining to a topic that was heavy in the way that leaned toward the doom-and-gloom end of the spectrum, I clung onto any chance for light and fun and laughter for as long as possible. It wasn’t just good for me; I knew it was good for her too.

  “No, mashed potatoes do look like something inside your body,” she said in a tone that gave away nothing. “Your heart after it explodes from clogging and contaminating it with saturated fats and empty carbs.”

  I laughed, loud enough for her to hear, but she must have thought I’d earned one since I didn’t get a reprimand for breaking composure. Her laugh joined with mine, along with the sounds of her brush strokes and dabs.

  You see, my health was Rowen’s thing. Her habit or fixation or whatever-have-you that had cropped up in the wake of all of this uncertainty was her interest-slash-bordering-on-obsession with keeping me healthy. The food thing was where it had started and was most obvious. Breakfasts of eggs, bacon, and buttered toast had been replaced with steel-cut oats mixed with cinnamon and raisins, served alongside an unpalatable heap of runny egg whites (no salt, of course). On the days I worked, she’d taken to packing me lunches instead of letting me pack my own or, heaven forbid, stop by one of those express-line-to-the-morgue places the rest of the world called drive-thrus. Dinner had turned into a ritual of packing as many vitamins, micro-nutrients, and healthy proteins as she could get into me . . . which translated to me forcing each bite down as I held a careful smile in place and praised her efforts high and low. It was a good thing it was my mouth doing the praising and not my stomach though. It didn’t know what to do with things like mustard greens and seared ahi and goji berries. It had been fed ranch food for two decades and wasn’t accepting the diet change with good grace.

  The Keep Jesse Healthy agenda didn’t start and end with the food thing though. No, that was just where it dug its heels in. Rowen had started collecting vials of essential oils and mixing them into what I think she called a diffuser at night to help me fall asleep and stay asleep, and she’d taken to rubbing a potent concoction of oregano oil into the bottoms of my feet every day to supposedly up my immune system.

  She’d also found a doctor for me, scheduled an appointment, and pretty much ordered a full panel work-up of my blood tests so nothing could slip through the cracks, not even my slightly elevated levels of cholesterol. You should have seen the meals that week following the blood results. I was pretty sure my stomach lining was still trying to repair itself.

  I didn’t have to ask her why that was the thing she’d latched onto—making sure I stayed healthy. I knew. She wanted to make sure our baby would have at least one healthy parent to see them through a good part of their life. One parent who’d see them through their formative years and hopefully way beyond. I tried not to think about that or give any indication that I’d connected those dots. Rowen had a right to her idiosyncrasies; God knew I had my share of mine.

  “Can you believe Garth?” she said suddenly, breaking a few minutes of silence. “It’s a miracle. A miracle among other miracles.”

  I had to consciously clear my head in order to respond. “Yeah, I know. I can’t believe he made a full recovery.”

  “Oh, not that. Though I guess that’s a miracle of sorts too.” Her brush stopped before her bare feet took a few steps back to inspect the painting. “The miracle I’m talking about is the one having to do with him finally proposing to Josie and quite possibly the even bigger one of her agreeing to marry him.”

  The longer she stared at the painting, the more her left foot rose up onto its toes, twisting on its ball. That was something she did, unconsciously I was certain, whenever she inspected something she was working on. I didn’t mention anything about it because I thought it was pretty d
amn adorable, and I kind of liked knowing something about her that even she wasn’t aware of. Her toenail color changed on a regular basis, no color too bright or unconscionable for her. I’d started to pick up that her nail polish color went with her mood for the day or week.

  Since she’d arrived at Willow Springs and spent the first half of the summer with black nails and toes, I probably should have picked up on that theme earlier, but I had an excuse for being a little slow on the uptake—I was a guy.

  Today though, she’d painted her toes a screaming bright orange so vivid I wasn’t sure the most tropical of sunsets could ever match its hue. Last week it had been a sparkly teal, almost identical to the flashy bass boat a certain Mason brother owned and had tried to invite me out on the last time I was in town. I might have liked to fish and I might have liked to fish for bass, but my family would have to be starving with no other option for food before I’d climb into a boat with Colt Mason and spend a day fishing with him. It took one full, clearing breath to rid my mind of Colt Mason before I could rejoin the conversation. From peanut butter to miracles to toenails to Colt Mason. I was all over the board tonight.

  “Garth’s wanted to marry Josie since the day he saw her.” I stopped to clear my throat when I could still hear the stirrings of resentment in my voice. The mere thought of Colt Mason made my blood boil in about two seconds flat, and it wasn’t in a hurry to cool down either. “That’s not that hard for me to believe.”

  Rowen’s foot continued to rise up onto her toes and twist to some imaginary beat. “Yeah, but how long’s he wanted to and not done anything about it? Garth’s too much like me—we don’t like to believe we’re worthy of the things we want most. He’s even worse than I am actually. That’s why it’s a miracle he proposed to her.”

  I noticed her elbows stab up into the air for a few moments before they fell back at her sides, leaving behind a paintbrush, bristles still dribbling paint, pointing toward the sky. When rubber bands were in short supply, paintbrushes were a quick and convenient way to get her hair out of her face.