Leaves Of Hope. Catherine Palmer

then what? Come sashaying back to Tyler like nothing happened? Is that what you’re asking me to do, Thomas?”

      “Is this about us having sex? Because if you’re going to go into your major guilt trip again—”

      “This is about you telling me to act like an adult by going to Sri Lanka with you, and then turning right around and telling me I’m too young to marry you.”

      “Marry me? I’m not ready to get married! I’m only twenty-two.”

      “Fine, then. I don’t want to marry you, either.”

      “Who said anything about getting married?”

      “Nobody, because it’s not happening. Ever! Go to your stupid island and see Buddha’s collarbone and grow tea and have a wonderful life. I’m staying here in Tyler where I belong.”

      “Come on, Jan. Don’t make such a big deal out of everything. I’m just talking about summer vacation. The two of us together. And maybe in the future…maybe if you like Sri Lanka…and after you get your degree…and I’m more settled…and older—”

      “No, Thomas.” She brushed the tears from her cheeks. “No, no, no. If you want us to be together, you’d better stay here in Tyler. Because this is where I live. This is my home, and that’s my family in that house, and I’m going to get a degree and teach school, and have a baby and—” She hiccuped. “I’m going to marry someone who wants the same things I do, and we’ll have babies. Children, lots of them. And I won’t have to worry about my kids being blown up with land mines, or mosquitoes giving them all malaria, or any of that stupid stuff!”

      “I love you, Jan! How can you tell me just to walk away from you like this?”

      “I have my priorities.” She folded her hands over her stomach. “I know what’s most important in my life. And it’s not Sri Lanka.”

      “It’s not me, you mean.”

      “I didn’t say that.” She was crying so hard now that her nose had begun to run, and she felt like she might throw up again. “I love you, too, Thomas. I do. But I want the guy I met at Wood’s Nursery and Greenhouse. Not this foreigner you’ve turned into.”

      “Jan, please. Try to understand. Try harder.”

      “I can’t. No matter how hard I try, I don’t understand where you’re coming from. I want security. Stability. I need it. Nothing’s going to change that about me. You can’t change who I am into someone you want me to be.”

      “And you can’t change me, either.”

      They stared at each other. He was crying now, too, his eyes red and tears hanging on the fringes of his lower lashes. He swallowed and jammed his hands into his back pockets.

      “Okay, then,” he said. “I guess this is it. It’s over between us.”

      She nodded as bitter bile began to back up into her throat. “Bye.”

      Before he could see her completely lose it, she ran across the yard, flung open the back door, made it to a bathroom and retched in the toilet.

      Jan pressed her pillow against her face, blotting her tears. Dumb, dumb, dumb to be crying about Thomas Wood after all these years! She had done the right thing. To protect herself and her baby, she had cut him out of her life. Everything about him. She had thrown away the letters he had written her from Sri Lanka. She had packed the little gifts he had given her over their two years together—a pretty candle, a picture of the Rocky Mountains, a couple of science fiction novels she had forced herself to read, photos of the two of them together. Before he was scheduled to leave town, she had taken the box over to his house and dumped it on the front porch.

      Three days later, she had discovered a box on her own front porch. Even now, the memory of Thomas’s handwriting on that brown cardboard made her heart hammer so hard, her pulse rang in her ears. She had knelt on the painted boards and pulled apart the flaps of the box. Expecting to find things she had given him, she was shocked to see a tea set sitting inside a nest of white foam peanuts.

      It was beautiful. Covered with pink roses, her favorite flower, the teapot was rimmed in shining gold. Jan had lifted the pot in both hands, holding it to the afternoon sunlight, marveling at the glow of the glaze on the ivory china. Delicate bluebells, green leaves and yellow daisies mingled with the rose blossoms. The pot itself was a strange shape, squared into four corners with four small feet, yet somehow still soft and undulant. She had lifted the lid and peered inside to find a tiny white envelope wedged at the bottom of the pot.

      Even now, lying in bed, a forty-five-year-old widow with three grown kids and a whole other life, she could see the words Thomas had written to her in blue ballpoint ink. “I bought this tea set for you at an antiques shop in London on my way back to Texas. I knew you would like it. The pattern is Summertime, and I had hoped that would be our time. I will always love you. Thomas.”

      Setting the lid on the porch floor, Jan had turned over the teapot. Grimwade, it read. Royal Winton. Summertime.

      She had taken out the creamer, a funny little squared-off thing with four feet that matched the teapot. And then she had studied the rectangular sugar bowl and the matched pair of gold lines that rimmed it on the inside. The set looked so pretty…too pretty…on the old, creaky porch.

      Crying all over again—it seemed she was either crying or vomiting in those warm days of early summer—Jan had settled the china pieces back into their foam nest and carried the box upstairs to her bedroom. Briefly she had considered putting the tea set on her bedside table. But the thought of Thomas holding that delicate china in his big, wonderful hands…walking into an antiques store just for her…writing her the note…loving her…

      “Oh, rats!” she breathed out. Jan threw back her covers and swung her feet out of bed. Plodding to the bathroom, she thought of how slender and long-legged she once had been. And how pudgy and ancient she felt these days. Thanks to her daughter’s snooping, she wasn’t going to get a wink of sleep. Tomorrow she would have swollen eyelids and a fat nose from crying all night. She would be irritable, and Beth would start bugging her about the tea set and Thomas and all the things Jan had worked so very hard to put away.

      Well, Beth was not going to get the whole story. And that was that. Thomas was a good man, just as she had written. But he had not hesitated to walk out of the Calhoun backyard that afternoon. He hadn’t called or dropped in to say goodbye before flying off to Sri Lanka again. Only four short letters with strange stamps had appeared in the mailbox in Tyler.

      Gone, just like that. Pfft. Out of Jan’s life, as though a match had been snuffed by the wind. Nothing had remained of those two years of passion, two years of insane, crazy, mad love. Nothing but Beth. Little brown-eyed, brown-haired Beth, who looked so much like her father, sometimes it was all Jan could do to keep from showing how deeply the child affected her.

      Beth would stare long and intensely at her mother, just the way Thomas had, and Jan wanted to grab the little girl and hold on so tightly that maybe she could feel Thomas’s breath against her cheek again. And other times Beth would give a toss of her hair and go wandering off from the house for hours, never bothering to tell her mother where she was. That was when Jan fought to keep from snatching her by the shoulders and shouting out the speech she had often rehearsed for Thomas.

      Stop leaving me! she wanted to yell. Stay with me, where you belong, and stop running away all the time! Don’t leave me alone! Need me…want me…be lost without me, the way I am without you.

      But Beth had too much of Thomas Wood in her to read beyond her mother’s placid face and calm words. She didn’t see or understand or even care how much she meant to Jan. Like her father, she would happily jaunt off to Sri Lanka or Botswana or some other foreign place where you could die of cholera or require armed guards and Spanish lace to keep your house secure.

      Genetics. All the nurture in the world couldn’t overcome a wanderer’s nature.

      After blowing her nose and splashing water on her face, Jan