Authors: Jessa Hawke
But there had always been this part of him that thought about what could have been. When he day dreamed it was about the life they could have had and he saw their kids running around the yard. Sometimes in the dream the woman wasn't even Kate, though. Lately it wasn't even that often that the woman in his dreams held any likeness to Kate. It didn't matter, though, because whenever Jon woke he couldn't shake the feeling that he should call Kate and talk to her about it, needed to call her and talk to her about what could have been. Maybe what should have been. But he never did because he knew that it would sound a little bit crazy, maybe not in the bad way, but in the “oh my goodness, you're so sweet, but aren't you too old for this kind of melancholy?” That was what Jon was really afraid of, he figured, was that people would call his concerns about growing old alone silly since he was in his mid-twenties, was good looking, and had his whole life ahead of him. But that wasn't what made sense in Jon's head, even though he knew that's how he should be looking at it as well. What made sense in Jon's head was that life was passing him by, that he was going to go out of state to a graduate program just like Kate was and he'd never see any of his friends again, and he'd never be able to express his feelings about Kate to her.
“Jon? Jon are you all right?”
It was Kate. Jon realized he'd been staring at her without listening while he got lost inside his own head.
“I'm really sorry, Kate,” he said. “It's not that I'm not listening, it's just that I took some painkillers this morning to take the edge off my hip that is a little soar from a fall I took out of a peach tree yesterday.”
“Oh my goodness!” Kate said. “What happened?”
Jon waved off her concern.
“Nothing, nothing,” he said. “I'm just impulsive is all. Now what do you want me to tell Ben, since I have to run these roses to him right now so that he can start the process to separate the fungus from the leaf material and took a closer look at it.”
Kate took a deep breath before she continued.
“I don't know,” Kate said. “I guess that I want you to tell him that I have feelings for him is all. Don't say anything crazy about me being in love, because that's not what's going on at all. I'm just crushing right now, I think in part because I'm about to leave home some I'm reaching for something that will make me remember it even more than I'm already going to. I know that that doesn't make any sense at all, but please bear with me.”
“I don't have any room to judge any of the things anyone else does that don't make sense,” Jon said. “I've got a lot going on in my head that doesn't make sense right now as well. Don't worry, I'll let him know just how you told me to—without any mention of love or anything that might come across weird.”
Kate gave him a weird look.
“I hope you're doing all right with all you're plans as well. When do you think you'll be leaving?” Kate asked.
“Well,” Jon said. “I'm still on the fence about a few schools but plan on narrowing the list down a lot tonight or tomorrow. Or whenever I have time next. I've been accepted to six total schools but only, obviously, plan on attending one. I guess I'm having some of the same troubles you are, with letting go. Maybe not of a specific person or place, but of ideas and things that could have been. You know?”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Kate said.
When Jon drove away in his truck the mountains loomed large out the passenger window with angry thunderheads circling over them, but Jon didn't notice. His eyes were locked on the slim silhouette of Kate against the blue sky, as she stood in the center of her parents' property on the crest of a hill. He thought about how frail she looked the whole way to the community college, still ignoring the ominous clouds and the wind that was steadily picking up. Jon was deep in thought about how he wanted to tell Kate that he was just crushing on her like she was crushing on Ben. But why couldn't he? Why hadn't he?
Before Jon could think of a reason why something entered the very top of his field of vision and zipped out of the sky to skip off the hood of his truck with a
plunk
. Jon was instantly snapped out of his reverie and looked at the sky. He should have been paying more attention to the weather, he chided himself. Jon knew that he couldn't afford to have anything crazy happen like an accident due to the weather that would seriously complicate his immediate plans for the future. Just when he looked away from the sky back at the road two more ice balls plummeted from the sky and bounced off the hood, this time leaving two sizable rents in the paint, and dents that looked like deep grooves. Jon didn't know what kind of weather was going to hit him, but he knew that he needed to pull over to the side of the road, put his hazards on, and wait it out.
The hailstorm the likes of which Jon had only ever heard about descended on Jon. The sky turned a green color that he'd only ever seen over the Midwest when he'd visited when he was a kid. Jon watched the sky and thought about how back in the day while his family had been driving across the planes of the Midwest they'd had to pull over while a great big twister had churned up dirt and gravel off the road in front of them as it crossed. It had been a few football fields away, though, while the hail that was rattling off his truck was right in front of him, all around him. As the sky darkened the hail got worse and worse, growing larger and larger, from the size of golf balls to the size of baseballs to the size of softballs and then even to the size of grapefruits for a few seconds. Jon grabbed a blanket from behind his seat and put it over his body to shield himself from the shattering glass of his windows as his truck was pulverized around him. Jon kept thinking that there was no way that this could be going on, no way that a huge hail storm would come out of nowhere and just wreck his truck. But that didn't keep the hail from smashing his prized possession into a twisted hunk of metal and busted glass.
When it was all over Jon had to kick his door with all his might to get it to open, and when it did it was with a sound that sounded like the squealing of tires on the road. He crawled out, careful to use the blanket to shield his body from the glass all over the place, and stood on the side of the road surveying the damage. The truck was totaled, that much was certain. It looked like a giant with a ball peen hammer had smashed his car up really good. Now it wasn't even drivable because every piece of plastic and glass had been smashed out of it by the ferocity of the hail storm. Jon looked up at the clouds quickly receding back over the mountain to Denver. He thought about maybe calling the weather stations that kept track of this stuff to let them know, but then remembered he had bigger fish to fry. He looked into his truck through the smashed out driver side window and carefully picked the roses out of the wreckage. Then he called Kate.
“Are you all right?” Kate asked again.
They were on the road heading toward the community college. She couldn't believe that Jon wasn't more badly hurt; she'd been telling him over and over. She'd made him take off his shirt and turn around a few times to see if there wasn't a cut he missed. When he'd done this he'd wanted nothing more than for her to run her hands over his body. But she hadn't. And didn't blame her, really. He was sure that his wrecked truck wasn't the most romantic setting in the world.
“Yeah, I'm fine,” Jon said. “In fact, the only bloodshed out of the whole deal was when I reached back in the truck to grab the flowers and pricked my fingers on the thorns! Isn't that something?”
Kate nodded.
“Don't think I'm not grateful for everything you're doing for my family right now. I know you could have been doing something else instead of running around with those roses,” she said.
“You're right,” Jon said. “I could have been twelve feet of the ground in some peach tree when those grapefruit sized hail rained down! So in a way it all shakes out. Instead I was in my nice truck, which is now totaled, which I wasn't sure I was even going to be able to take with me out of state. Now I'll be able to get all the money back that I invested into it considering how good of a deal I got on it to begin with. It's funny how it worked out because really I should be thanking you.”
Jon stopped talking for a second, then plunged on like he always did. He wondered how much he'd regret it this time.
“You know, I think I might be crushing on you,” Jon said.
“What?” Kate said.
She kept her eyes on the road as they talked, and Jon looked out at the mountains.
“I guess I'm stupid for admitting this out loud, but sometimes I have these weird day dreams about what could have been. And there is a wife and a yard and kids and stuff like that. I know it's silly because those are all things that I very well could have someday, but probably don't want now anyway so I'm not sure why they would rest so heavily on my mind. I guess what I'm dancing around is that sometimes you are in those dreams. I know that's maybe slightly weird, and I hope it doesn't come off as too creepy or anything like that. I was just thinking while I was driving that I wish I was as brave as you are to let Ben know how you feel about him.”
Kate nodded slowly.
“I think we are having the same feelings, about,” she said. “I mean, we both know that you aren't in love with me just how I'm not in love with Ben, but we still have feelings. Kind of like phantom limbs, I guess. We feel what might have been, what could have been, just as keenly as if it had been at times. Maybe this kind of feeling is called something that we don't have a name for in English. I wish I'd paid more attention in my Arabic class, they have a bunch of different words for love.”
Jon had never looked at it that way. Maybe there were different kinds of love, and affection, and maybe it was all right for people to crush and fantasize. Not everyone was able to settle down and pursue vast relationships with sweeping goals. Some people were in a place for a very short amount of time and had to make the best of it.
“Here we are,” Kate said as she pulled into the community college's parking lot. “We'll see how Ben takes all this information at once.”
Ben stood there processing the roses while he listened to Kate talk. Jon couldn't really tell if he was taking it all that serious or not. He kept ducking his head and looking into a small microscope instead of looking at Kate while she told him how she felt, or at Jon when he told both of them how he felt about Kate. Maybe there was nothing to say simply because what had been spoken wasn't the kind of thing that needed a follow up.
“Well,” Ben said slowly. “I have confessions to make.”
Both Kate a Jon looked expectantly at Ben.
“I have a crush on both of you,” he said. “I know that sounds strange, maybe, but I'm bisexual, and since I'm about to head off to graduate school as well, probably in Florida, I've been thinking about the both of you a lot. Kate and me got pretty close a few months ago but then broke it off because we knew that things were getting more serious than we wanted them to be. Then I got really lonely and started to think about what a good friend Jon is to me. And, I mean, Jon, you are very good looking.”
Jon blushed. He had suspected for some time that Ben might be bisexual. It wasn't anything about how he dressed or acted, although Ben was in great shape and always dressed sharp, he wasn't one of those people you can pick out of a crowd as being into guys and girls. Now that Jon thought about it he wasn't even sure what kind of person he'd be able to pick out of a crowd as being bi—sexuality was a mysterious thing sometimes.
But he and Ben had been friends for a long time and he'd never heard anything like this from him before, or had he? As Jon thought back over the years his memory encountered many times that had been strange, but weren't so if he took into account that Ben had a thing for him. Like when they had gone swimming a few weeks before.
“So that's why you had a boner when we went for a swim,” Jon said. “I really wondered about that, what was going on. You just should have told me!”
“That's a lot easier said than done,” Ben said. “Not everyone is open minded like you two. Some people would never talk to me again knowing that I like both genders. I'm lucky to have people like you in my life who are real friends and who actually love me. But those kind of people are few and far between for everyone.”
Kate looked like she didn't know what to say, but she also looked very happy. Maybe this was going well, Jon thought. Maybe this whole thing was actually headed in a really great direction and they'd all be better off for it in the end.
“Oh shit,” Ben said.
“What is it?” Kate asked.
“It's the kind of fungus this is,” Ben said. “It's the worst case scenario. We'll need to spray everything, now, if we want to save the grapes.”
“What do you mean?” Kate asked.
“Well,” Ben said, standing up and stretching his back after being hunched over the table. “The kind of fungus that I'm seeing here moves very easily from roses to grapevines. We'll have to act quickly if we don't want that to happen now. Anything that this fungus touches will have to be tossed. There won't be anyway to save any of it. So we'll have to go right now and spray everything if we want to be sure. Even something very slight like an animal running through the roses then through the vines would be enough.”