Dare (9 page)

“I understand that you might be angry with me, and I accept that,” my mother had written. “Someday, you will have to make a hard decision about your own happiness, and whether you should pursue it or forsake it. I hope you choose to pursue it. You are a bright young woman with much life in front of you. If you find that you are not as happy as you think you should be—whether it’s on the farm or in some other place—then you shouldn’t simply soldier through it. Listen to your heart. Your heart knows what’s best for you. Life is so short, Rachel. You don’t understand that statement because you’re still so young, but in a blink of an eye another ten years will have passed. Are you in a place that will still make you happy ten years from now? Ask yourself this question. Delve in to the answers that your heart will give you. And don’t be afraid to take a leap of faith. You won’t know if it’s right for you until you’ve landed, until you’ve really given something new a try, but that’s what life is all about. If you never take a risk, you’ll never truly have lived.”

My mother had already been in her thirties when she’d left Dad and me here on the farm. I guess that was something to be admired—if I could overlook the fact that I’d been the one left behind, the one who’d been left out—for someone still trying to do what made them happy. I was twenty-two years old, and I was beginning to accept the fact that maybe I would never have my life figured out. I had no idea what I wanted to do or where I wanted to be. Until recently, I’d been fairly sure that I was doing the right thing, sticking with Dad on the farm. But was it right for me?

“I took that risk,” my mother’s email continued. “I fulfilled my dream in Las Vegas. And while I thought about you and your father a lot when I was away, thinking hard about how I had to be selfish in order to be truly happy, I have to admit that I have no regrets. I was able to bring you into the world, a beautiful and intelligent young woman who is already fighting for what she believes is right, and also be a dancer. It’s important to never have regrets, Rachel. You have one life and one life only. Live every breath to its fullest. Take all the risks you can handle. Find your happiness and don’t let go for anything or anyone.”

I felt a strange jerk of recognition. Did Sebastian really make me happy? All of his nonsensical text messages had been making me laugh, and I had been denying myself that joy. Was that wrong of me? In spite of what Sebastian had tried to do to the farm, in spite of how upset he’d made Dad, in spite of the suspicion I had that he’d tried to use me for his own motivations, should I have given him the benefit of the doubt? Should I have tried to pursue happiness with him and see what happened?

“I wish that we could’ve made contact sooner,” my mother had written, her long email drawing to a close. “Ten years is a long time. I didn’t want to contact you, though, if you didn’t want to hear from me, and I assumed you didn’t want to hear from me because you never tried to reach me. I don’t place blame on anyone in this situation—not your father, not myself, and certainly not you. I never wanted to hurt anyone by leaving, and I still have a deep affection for your father, but I had to save myself. I would never reach my potential there on the farm, and I had to be honest with myself about who would help me be happy. No one could help me be happy but myself. I knew what had to be done, and I did it. You are a part of me and always will be, and I accept and welcome the fact that you have questions about me and my life, questions about why I left and what I’ve been doing. I love you fiercely, Rachel, and I encourage your quest for your truth. Write me again. Call me. Come visit me. I don’t think that your father would welcome me back on the farm for a visit, but I would love to see you. To catch up on our last ten years apart. To learn what dreams you hold in your heart.”

My mother had left the email unsigned, just as I’d done for my initial message, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was because she was unsure about calling herself my mother. She’d forgone her motherly duties for an entire decade. It had been hard on me to not have her around, especially right when she’d left. I’d only been twelve, a girl on the cusp of womanhood. I hadn’t had anyone to guide me through that except for older sisters of my friends at school and a kindly office worker who kept a stock of feminine products at school for girls too shy to bring their own. I had been too freaked out by my own period to tell Dad that, during his weekly runs to the grocery store, I needed another supply added to the shopping list. It wasn’t until I started being in charge of those runs that I started even buying them for myself.

A mother would’ve ensured that her daughter understood what was happening to her body and knew how to keep herself safe and cleaned up. My mother hadn’t bothered to stick around for that. She hadn't bothered to stick around for any of those formative years for me.

And yet, after reading her email, I had to admit that I understood her better. I loved Dad, but maybe the farm wasn’t for me. I couldn’t exactly see myself here for the rest of my life, Dad buried beneath a tree somewhere and my hair gray at the temples, wondering how much rain we’d get this season and how much water we needed to irrigate from the river. It was hard to imagine being old here, even if it was my home. It was always Dad’s dream to live on the farm more than it had been anyone else’s. But what was my dream? What was my passion? I didn’t have anything driving me beyond confusion. I didn’t know the language of my own heart.

My mother hadn’t come right out and said it, but from the tone of her email, I thought she suspected that I wasn’t completely happy here on the farm. She had to know that I was twenty-two, and that I was different than I had been—a tomboy romping with the farmworkers’ kids, causing more problems than solving them. I couldn’t say whether Dad had kept her informed about my studies, that I’d gone away to school but came back to the farm more knowledgeable about organic farming and sustainability than I had been when I left. I could’ve gone to college for anything, but I’d gone for Dad’s dream, to continue the farm as a family.

Had it been what I truly wanted for myself? I couldn’t say for sure, one way or the other. I’d done what I thought had been expected of me, to keep on helping Dad on the farm. He told me on almost a daily basis that he couldn’t do it without me, and I was starting to believe him. He might’ve been able to keep some aspects of the place going, but I bolstered up everything else. The house would fall to pieces without me, that I knew for sure, and I was the only person he fully trusted for a handful of other tasks. Otherwise, I filled in where I was needed. It could be looking at fence lines or checking the irrigation or examining the produce for pests or driving the tractors. I could do all of it.

The question was, did I actually want to?

I wished my heart could shout my dream to me so I could actually know what it was. How could a person be so blind to what his or her own passion should be? My mother had known what hers was. Why didn’t I?

What was I supposed to do when someone told me my dreams weren’t my own? Where was I supposed to turn to?

It had been impossible to face Dad after reading that email. I’d stayed in bed for two whole days, feigning illness and hating myself for it, hating that I gave him more work and a cause to worry about me just because I didn’t have a good enough poker face to be around him after that behemoth of a message from my mother.

On the morning of the third day, I got out of bed even before I heard Dad moving around downstairs and took the hottest shower I could stand, looking to scald my uncertainties away. Couldn’t I just scrub away everything bad that had happened and start over again? Was there a soap in the world that would make me forget about what my mother had written to me?

If I could invent a magic thing like that, soap that would make a person who used it forget about whatever they wanted to, I figured I’d never have to work another day in my life ever again. I’d be rich.

I towel-dried my hair and went downstairs with it still damp, looking to fix Dad something for breakfast to make up for my own weakness. The biscuits were nearly done, the gravy hot, and the coffee poured by the time he came out to the kitchen, pleasantly surprised.

“Well, I take this to mean that you’re feeling better,” he said, giving me a peck on the cheek.

“I don’t know what got into me,” I lied. “You better not get too close. I wouldn’t want to give anything to you that would put you in bed for two days.” But that was impossible. Dad’s convictions were strong. He believed in the farm and his dreams to make it successful. I was the one who was having trouble believing in myself.

“Well, you didn’t have to go and make all this,” Dad said, unable to hide how thrilled he was at having a hot breakfast for once. “I’m just glad you’re up and about again, and feeling back to normal. Are you feeling up to making a few deliveries into the city today? If not, we can put them off.”

“Put them off?” I asked, concerned. “We can’t put off deliveries, Dad. You know that as well as I do. Our harvests are almost at peak ripeness. Have we been putting off deliveries?”

“That’s why I have three scheduled for today,” Dad said. “I was going to do them if you weren’t up and about.”

“Why were you going to do them? We can’t spare you.”

“We can’t spare anyone,” he told me. “Several people are taking vacation right now. I couldn’t tell them not to.”

“But there’s so much to do,” I argued. “Couldn’t they have waited a while? Staggered their time off? I refuse to believe that we have so many people off from work that my two days sick in bed delayed actual deliveries. That’s how we make money.”

Even as I railed against this perceived miscalculation, guilt ate at me, making me doubt my ability to eat the biscuit and gravy steaming on a plate in front of me. I hadn’t been sick at all—just shocked. It was my selfishness that had caused a setback to the farm.

“Relax, Rachel,” Dad was saying, drizzling so much gravy over his biscuits I was thankful I’d used turkey instead of real sausage. “It’s just a couple days. The produce is still fine, and if you don’t mind a long workday, I’m sure you can squeeze in all of the deliveries.”

“Of course I don’t mind a long workday,” I said quickly. “I’m just sorry I had to take time off in the first place.” A long workday was the least I could do to try to make things up to Dad.

“It happens to all of us,” he said dismissively. “Now, I’m going to take this breakfast to go. Busy day.”

“I’ll see you in a few minutes,” I said. “I’ll clean up here and then load up the truck. Don't worry about me needing any help. I know that everyone’s needed elsewhere.”

It was always a busy day—that was how business was conducted on the farm. There were precious few days I ever got to myself, and even in my despondency at my mother’s email, I’d messed schedules and deliveries up. I had half a mind to stalk into the office and figure out exactly who was all taking vacation in one block so I could give them a little piece of my mind, but that would probably only make things worse. We all had to work together to make this farm a success, and me alienating our valuable workers wouldn’t go over well.

I’d seen Dad working with a wad of tissue stuck up each of his nostrils, several days into a stubborn flu that still wouldn’t keep him away from the farm. That was devotion that I envied. I thought I was devoted to continuing Dad’s dream, but I’d hunkered down in bed for two whole days just because I didn’t feel like getting out of it. What was I going to do? What was I supposed to do?

I figured that the only real thing I
could
do, washing the pots and pans from breakfast, popping the leftovers in containers for later today or tomorrow, was to just keep working. If Dad could work through any sort of physical or mental distress, I could do it, too. He’d been so upset about Sebastian trying to buy the farm from him that he’d decided not to eat dinner. But he hadn’t ensconced himself in bed long enough to delay production on the farm.

I would keep going, too. I grabbed my wallet and the keys to the truck and drove it down to the barn to load the back myself, heaving the heavy cartons of produce into the bed before making sure everything was secured with cables.

“Got everything in there yourself?” Dad asked, making me jump as I checked the GPS app on my phone, ensuring I knew where I needed to be.

“Surprised, old man?” I teased. “Those cartons aren’t that heavy. I can do it by myself from now on. No need to pull anybody off other work to help. That’s silly to waste manpower.”

“You’re going to make a great manager one day,” he said wistfully. “You know just what to do and say to keep this place running like a well-oiled machine.”

I hoped my frozen grin and a quick hug masked the pang of regret that echoed throughout my body. If only I hadn’t emailed my mother in the first place. I would’ve felt better about life, better about everything. I would’ve been more focused on the farm, on being happy here and finding my dream somewhere in the cornfield, or the sunlit barn. I should’ve just deleted the email and purged my email’s trash folder without ever reading my mother’s response. Sure, I would’ve spent perhaps the rest of my life wondering what it was she’d decided to say to me, but at least I wouldn’t be wracked with guilt over it.

“See you later tonight,” I said, wiggling my fingers at Dad before hopping up into the cab of the truck and taking off.

Being on the road and away from the farm was equal parts relief and torture. I could let my face do whatever it wanted, away from any perceived scrutiny, but I also had to be in the truck by myself, a prisoner to my own thoughts. I opted to turn the radio up nearly as loud as it would go and belt out the lyrics to whatever parts of the songs that came on that I knew. I made up words to the rest of it, trying to think on my toes and rhyme on the fly.

Like an involuntary muscle spasm, a thought crossed my mind. Was singing my dream? Was that the thing I’d been meant to do? Is that what I should leave the farm for, the dream my mother had encouraged me to pursue?

I liked singing. I liked the glamor of it. But the idea of trying to do it for a living seemed ludicrous. Compared to singing, farming was honest work. It was what I knew and understood, what I’d always done. Singing was an alien thought, planted in my brain by a person who didn’t have anything to do with my life anymore.

I wished my mother was easy to dismiss, but she wasn’t. Even if she had been gone for a whole decade, she was more present now than ever. I couldn’t simply ignore the ideas she’d planted in my mind. She had made those ideas sprout with her email, and I wished nothing more than to be rid of them.

It was a blessing to get to the first stop for my deliveries, joking around with the guys offloading the cartons out of the bed of the truck and impressing them by helping. Driving in the city, relying on my phone for GPS, was a welcome distraction from my own thoughts.

As I was driving to the second drop-off, the sun slanting lower and lower in the sky, my phone buzzed in the truck’s cup holder, rattling noisily against the scattering of spare change inhabiting the indention. I glanced at it in case it was Dad, updating my route or wanting to know how the deliveries were going, but I should’ve known better. Yet another text from Sebastian. He was just as difficult to ignore as my mother was.

“Please talk to me,” this one read. “We have unfinished business.” There was no way. I would’ve paid
him
five hundred bucks to never speak to me again, but I wasn’t about to accept his money—if this was what his endless texts and phone calls were about. It was less painful for me to simply fail to reply to all his attempts at getting in contact with me, pretending that any link between us didn’t exist. It struck me that maybe I should just block his number, but that seemed a little extreme.

It was already deep into the evening by the time I reached my third and final destination, just a few cartons left in the bed of the truck.

“You’re out and about pretty late,” the store employee commented, as I packed up the cables in the truck’s toolbox.

“Had a few deliveries today,” I said with a small smile. “It’s straight home for me now.”

“Safe travels,” he said, tipping his hat before pushing the handcart full of the produce I’d delivered. That was that. All in a day’s work.

I threw the truck in reverse, eager to get back on the road again if only to sing my lungs out to drown out any errant thoughts, when tires screeched behind me. I braked hard, the force of it pushing my head forward, and checked behind me. The loading dock had been empty, but now there was a small, dark car blocking my path. What was going on? I waited patiently for it to get on its merry way, but the driver was stubbornly idling the car directly in my path, seemingly ignoring my white reverse lights. I revved my engine, trying to get their attention, and scowled when they revved back. Seriously? They had the entire loading dock to cavort in. I just needed to back up so I could get home.

The dark car revved its engine in response to my motoring, but it didn’t move forward or backward an inch. I was effectively trapped in between the railings of the loading dock.

More irritated than frightened, I tapped my horn several times, puzzled that the other driver thought this was some kind of fun game. I would’ve bet money on the idea that they were texting or poking around at their phone instead of paying attention to their surroundings. It was probably some distracted driver who pulled into the loading area of the store to tap out an email or a dissertation or something before making the commute home.

But then the other car’s door opened and out stepped Sebastian.

I wasn’t proud of it, but my first inclination was to floor it, force him to leap out of the way, and crush his tiny car to clear my passage. What was he doing here? What in the world could he possibly want with me now? Maybe I hadn’t been answering his texts or calls, but wasn’t
that
a clear enough message? I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to see him. And I most certainly didn’t want to be cornered, by myself, in a dark loading dock, by his stupid car.

I wished I’d never seen that car in my life; I wished that one of us had simply driven on after the scrape occurred, the other of us pulled to the side of the road, shaking our fist and hollering but otherwise better off for never knowing the other component to the crash. That would’ve been preferable to this sticky limbo we were in now, both of us helplessly revolving around each other, seemingly unable to put to an end to what had swiftly become something neither of us could control.

“Turn your truck off,” Sebastian yelled, as I refused to so much as roll my window down to hear him. “Rachel! Put it in park. We need to talk.”

“We don’t have anything to talk about,” I informed him calmly, not caring whether he heard me through the glass or over the roar of my engine. “Move your damn car, please.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “Not until you agree to talk to me.”

What could he possibly want to talk to me? Was this about the money? About the things we’d said to each other on the phone? About all of his attempts to contact me that had failed since that night? I wasn’t having it. I wanted to be done with him.

I revved my engine again, eyeing him threateningly, backing up a little to try and call his bluff.

“I’m not afraid to hit your car,” I said. “I know my truck will survive.”

Sebastian didn’t look the least bit intimidated. “I know for a fact that you care about that truck too much to wreck it again.”

“Move your car. You
don’t
know.”

I backed up a few more inches, revving the engine as aggressively as I dared to.

The corners of Sebastian’s mouth curled upward, revealing his amusement at me. “Go right ahead. I’ll get it fixed again. It’s no sweat off my back. That isn’t even my only car.”

Of course he had more cars. Of course he didn’t care if I rendered my truck useless to push his car out of the way. Sebastian had more money than he knew what to do with. He’d likely buy a new car before repairing this one again.

“Why won’t you leave me alone?” I demanded, braking hard and glaring hard at him.

“I’m a glutton for closure,” he said, shrugging. “If you really don’t want to be together, if you really want to never see me again, I have to have that conversation with you. You can’t just ignore me and believe I’ll go away. It doesn’t work like that. We’re two grown adults. We can be honest with each other.”