Chapter 4 - The Gazebo
Then I did something that struck everyone as strange.
I didn't build the house.
Everyone assumed I would. The blueprints were right there. So was the land, and enough money to make it happen. Why not finally build the little white house we'd dreamed up at seventeen?
Because I already had a house. Forty-six years of one, with Edwin. Yellow brick, not white. No blue shutters. Two children, not three. A porch too narrow to ever fit a swing on it. And it had been wonderful — every bit of it. Building Tom's imaginary house would have felt like admitting my real life had only ever been a detour on the way to some other, better one.
It wasn't a detour. So I built something else instead.
A gazebo. Small, open on every side, sitting right over the creek. And inside it, I installed Tom's white porch swing.
Nate helped me build it. That surprised both of us more than a little. The first afternoon we finished, he sat down beside me on the new steps.
"My dad really proposed to you over the phone?"
"He really did."
"What did you say?"
"I asked him if he had any shame at all."
Nate laughed. "That sounds exactly like him."
"He was dying and still managed to be irritating."
"That definitely sounds like him."
We sat there a while, listening to the creek. Then he asked, "Did you love him?"
"Yes."
"As much as you loved my mom's husband? As much as Edwin?"
Wrong question, but I understood exactly why he'd asked it.
"I never knew your mother," I said gently. "But your father loved her enough not to call me the moment he learned the whole truth. That should tell you something."
"That's not what I asked."
"No, it isn't." I smiled at him. "Because love was never a measuring cup, Nate. I loved Tom when I was nineteen. I loved Edwin for forty-six years after that. And when Tom came back into my life, I loved the old man he'd become. None of those loves needed to beat the others to count for something."
He nodded slowly. "I think I needed to hear somebody say that out loud."
Over time, Tom's children became something unexpected in my life — not my own children, they already had a mother, and I already had children of my own. But Nate calls now and then. Claire sends a Christmas card every year without fail. Marcus stayed distant, and that was all right too. Nobody owes an unusual two-day marriage a perfect blended family on the other side of it.
My own daughter, Susan, struggled with it longer than I expected. One afternoon she finally asked me, "Mom — if Tom hadn't left, would Dad ever have existed for you at all?"
I knew exactly what she was really asking. Was Edwin the consolation prize. Was our whole family some kind of Plan B.
I took her hand. "Your father was never a consolation prize for a life I didn't get to have."
She started crying. "Then what was Tom?"
"A road I never got to take." I paused. "Except I didn't even know somebody else had closed it for me."
"Do you wish you'd taken it?"
I looked toward Tom's old blueprints, still rolled up on that drafting table. "No."
She looked genuinely surprised. "How can you say that so easily?"
"Because wishing for that life means wishing you and your brother out of existence, Susan. And I would never wish that. Not for one second."
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I touched her face. "I can grieve that nineteen-year-old me was lied to, without wishing seventy-three-year-old me had lived a single day differently."
It took me years to really believe that myself. Two truths can live in the same heart at once. Something precious got stolen from Tom and me. And something beautiful grew anyway, in the life that came after. One doesn't cancel the other out.
