Breakup In A Small Town. Kristina Knight
of the past. This list was about moving forward. He had to let those plans go, just like he was letting Jenny go. He glanced at the paper again then tore it from the notebook and stared at it. While he’d been thinking about those chairs and his old plans, he’d drawn a laundry storage unit. Four units. He’d drawn his personal symbol for cherry wood as the links between the different bags. Jenny like cherry the best.
Adam wadded up the paper and wrote the number 1 on a clean sheet. She already knew about the invoicing and bookkeeping, and the business was on solid financial ground. Maybe he should make getting his parents out of Buchanan’s the first thing on the list. He’d figure out how later.
What were some other things he could do? School runs would clear out a little more time from her day. Maybe cook a few meals. She had a shelf full of recipe books—they couldn’t be that hard to follow.
He needed something bigger, though. Something that would really show her he was making good changes in his life. There was always that service dog place. Adam cringed at the thought. A service dog was permanent.
The pen hovered over the page for a long moment, and before he could talk himself out of it, Adam scribbled it down on the list. Service dog.
It was the last thing he wanted.
It was what Jenny wanted, though.
He couldn’t stop staring at the wadded-up sheet. He sat like that for a long time, staring at it and the new list. Thinking about his old life, telling himself it was time to embrace the new. Jenny. Frankie. Garrett. They deserved new.
Slowly, Adam smoothed out the wadded-up paper. He’d certainly screwed up their lives, way more than they deserved.
He read over the first thing on his list: fix things so he could let them go. That was what he had to do.
Then something on the original sheet caught his eye. Beside the hamper he’d drawn were the words Get My Family Back.
Adam closed his eyes. His brain kept telling him his family deserved more, deserved better. But his heart... His heart wanted them back.
* * *
“YOU’RE LEAVING? IT’S barely eleven.” Nancy sat behind a broad, built-in desk that Owen had installed when they first turned the second floor of the old warehouse into offices for the business. She’d tied her bobbed hair, streaked with silver and white, at her nape and wore an orange-and-green-striped polo with her denim capris. She held the phone in her hand and scribbled something on a notepad beside her.
“I have a lunch meeting.” Self-consciously, Jenny swiped a hand at her naturally curly hair. When was the last time she’d had it trimmed? She couldn’t remember. The past few months she’d taken to simply pulling it back into a ponytail. Today it hung just past her shoulders. Maybe she would stop by the house to pick up a hair tie. She didn’t want to look like Little Orphan Annie or something for these meetings. The first was important to keep the business going, and the second important for future growth. For the plans Adam—No, the plans she had for Buchanan’s. She waved the clipboard of papers. “Two, actually.”
“At eleven? You don’t usually eat lunch until noon.”
True enough, but she wasn’t technically eating now. She just needed to get through coffee with the construction company representative so that she could meet with the Springfield distributor at Rock Pizza at twelve-thirty. Her fight with Adam this morning made one thing crystal clear: she had to take her life back.
Adam didn’t care about the business, which left its stability in her hands. This was one ball she was not going to drop. She had the designs that he’d come up with last winter, and the guys in the shop could put some sample pieces together from that. Adam might not want to move forward, but she still wanted to make Buchanan’s more than a cabinet shop.
“I didn’t have breakfast this morning,” she lied. “And I have a meeting right after, so I won’t be back in the office until at least two. I’ll have my cell phone if you need me.” Not that Nancy would call.
“We haven’t spoken since yesterday afternoon. There are things we need to discuss.”
“Like you leaving me to answer phone calls so you could do the laundry for Adam?” Jenny shook her head. “There is nothing to talk about.”
“Adam is sick. You can’t expect him to become a housewife just because you’re working now.”
Jenny gripped the clipboard tighter. She skipped over the Adam-as-a-housewife bit because that would lead to more than the two minutes she had before leaving for the first meeting. “I’ve been working at Buchanan’s since I was eighteen. First, answering phones like you’ve always done. When you and Owen retired, I took on a larger role. This is our company, and I’ll run it the best way I know how.”
“Buchanan’s is fine just the way it is.”
“Buchanan’s could be more than a cabinet shop. Adam wanted it to be more—”
“That was before he got sick.” Nancy’s words were staccato, but Jenny refused to flinch.
“Adam isn’t sick. He doesn’t have a cold or the flu. He has epilepsy, and it may never go away. He has to learn to deal with that.”
“By doing your laundry?”
“No.” Jenny put her hand on Nancy’s and felt a slight tremor from the older women. “By showing him that he can still do whatever he wants to do.”
“He can’t operate the machinery here.”
“He can still design.”
“He can’t drive.”
“He can walk.” Jenny squeezed her mother-in-law’s hand. “He isn’t an invalid, and you running to his rescue when he calls isn’t helping.”
“I just...” She cut her eyes to the big window that looked out over the warehouse floor below. Owen would be down there with the employees, working on cabinet runs and packing up trucks for shipments. “We just want him to be Adam again.”
A half smile slid over Jenny’s mouth. “So do I, but he has to want it, too. Right now, he just wants to quit.”
“And you think when I went over to fix the laundry situation, I let him quit?”
“He knows how to use Google to figure out the best bait for walleye, and to look up woodworking videos. I’m sure he could have figured out how to get those color runs out of a few shirts.”
Jenny swallowed. She should tell Nancy that she’d asked Adam to move out, should tell her about the problems the boys were having. Nancy doted on her grandsons as much as she had doted on Adam and Aiden when they were little; she might understand better where Adam’s mind was if she could see the impact he was having on their children.
Telling her, though, would be a betrayal of her husband. He didn’t want to be seen as weak or injured. He wanted all of this to go away. Putting Nancy on his case might only serve to make him retreat even further into himself. Jenny couldn’t bear to see him fade away any more. She couldn’t live with him, not this way, but that didn’t mean she wanted him to completely disappear from her life. So she held back the words.
“I appreciate that you tried to help him, but maybe the next time he calls, you let him figure it out for himself.” She checked her watch. Fifteen minutes until coffee with the contractor. She needed to hurry. “I’ll be back after two. Phone me if you need anything,” she called over her shoulder as she hurried down the stairs leading to the street.
It took only a couple minutes to walk to the coffee shop, The Good Cuppa, downtown. Jenny ordered an iced coffee with extra ice before choosing a table in the corner. The contractor, a man in his midfifties, hiding a spare tire beneath his navy polo, arrived a few minutes later. He ordered black coffee, and when he got to the table, added four sugars to it.
“I thought Adam might make it,” Leo McCartney said.
“He