CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

What was she still doing here? Other than making a huge mistake.

Edith batted a mosquito away from her face and slapped her arm. She was going to have to bathe in anti-itch cream after this evening. She should have walked the long route to Kat’s house like originally planned. But no. Edith just had to cut through the park, didn’t she? Just had to spot Henry. Just had to say hi.

And now she just couldn’t walk away. Thirty minutes after the game had ended.

She smacked her leg. “Bloodthirsty mongers,” she muttered.

“Tell me about it. Those girls about drained every last Popsicle out of me.” Henry plopped a red-and-white cooler onto the empty bleacher seat next to Edith. “But don’t worry. I managed to save you one. Hope you like banana.”

“Blech.”

“I’ll take that as a sorta-kinda?” His mouth quirked up in a half smile, making his eyes crinkle at the edges. “Thanks for staying.”

Oh yeah. This was definitely a huge mistake. She dropped her gaze and made like she was slapping another bug from her leg. “Good thing I did. What was the final score? Three hundred and twenty-three to five hundred and nine?”

Henry chuckled and sank next to her on the bleacher, his elbow brushing hers. “Something like that.”

“To be honest, I was only sticking around for the Popsicle. Now that I know it’s banana—” Edith pulled a face and leaned forward, pretending to leave.

“You know, you were a lot less high-maintenance when I thought you were an old lady.”

Henry had grabbed hold of her hand, and Edith was doing her best to act like it wasn’t a big deal. “I still can’t believe we were both under the wrong impression about each other. I thought I was sharing a house with Walter Matthau. You know, from Grumpy Old Men.”

“I thought I was sharing a house with Betty White from The Golden Girls.”

Edith snorted. “Betty White,” she mumbled. “You know who’s to blame for all of this.”

Edith and Henry spoke at the same time. “Kat.”

They both chuckled and slid into a companionable silence. Edith slipped her hand out of Henry’s, not because she didn’t relish the contact. She did. But she was also hot. And sweating. And shouldn’t be relishing the contact.

She discreetly swiped her palms against the denim fabric of her jean shorts. The sun had dipped low enough to paint the sky a mixture of orange and pink. Clouds stretched and ripped apart like cotton candy over the cornfields beyond the ballpark.

“I love that.” Henry waved his hand toward the view. “I know it’s not a majestic mountain or a sandy shore, but . . . I don’t know. To me, it’s beautiful. I like living here.”

He leaned back and propped his arms on the bleacher behind them. “Do you miss Pittsburgh?”

“No. Not really. I guess it never felt like home to me.”

“Even when you were married?”

Edith sighed and sank against the bleacher, Henry’s arm behind her. “We were never supposed to stay in Pittsburgh. Our plan was to see the world. Or at least I thought it was. Turns out it may have just been my plan.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I already did.” She bumped her shoulder against him. “In the letter. You pretty much know everything there is to know.”

“No, I don’t. Not nearly enough. I want to know more. Tell me why you want to travel. Why Pittsburgh never felt like home. Why you stayed to watch an entire peewee league game and why you’re still here with me now. Especially if you don’t like banana Popsicles.” He winked.

Edith straightened. “I don’t know, Henry. Honestly, I don’t. Because this isn’t what I want.” She pointed to the sky and the cornfields. “You’re right. It is beautiful and I get why you like it here, but . . . it isn’t my story. It’s yours.”

Edith stood, feeling restless. Needing to move. “Did you bring any baseballs to go with that bat?” She pointed to the hot-pink bat propped next to the cooler of Popsicles.

“Lance left a bag of baseballs in the dugout. Why? You wanting to do some batting practice?”

“The mosquitoes are eating me alive just sitting here.” It was as good an excuse as any. Certainly better than I need to move away from you before I fall any further in love with you and make an even bigger mistake by staying here forever.

Henry grabbed the bag of baseballs from the dugout and carried it to the pitcher’s mound while Edith took a few practice swings at home plate. There was still enough sunlight to see for a while yet. She tapped home plate. “Bring the heat, Hobbes.”

He sailed a pitch past her faster than she could blink.

“Oookay. Maybe a little less heat, more like room temperature. Somewhere in the tepid range.”

He lobbed a ball over the mound. She swung and pinged it down the third baseline. “Hey! Did you see that? I hit a homer first try.”

“You hit a foul ball.”

“Tomayto-tomahto.”

Henry tossed her another pitch.

“So,” Edith said, swinging and missing the next pitch by a mile. “My parents had me young. Like, really young. Like my mom was only sixteen and my dad barely seventeen.” She lifted her bat for the next pitch. “They ended up staying together and getting married a few years later, but let’s just say they were super protective. I think they were terrified I’d end up repeating the same mistake they did.”

Edith swung and missed again. “Would you stop throwing curveballs?”

“The only curve my pitches are making is downward. Because that’s how gravity works.”

Edith narrowed her gaze, then prepared for the next throw. “But I didn’t want to live in a bubble.” She clipped it foul behind her. “I wanted to explore, travel, live a life like my great-great-aunt Edith did.”

Henry bent over to grab another ball from the bag. “Is that who you’re named after?”

Edith leaned against the baseball bat like a cane, taking a moment to catch her breath. Who knew swinging a bat could be so strenuous? Heaven help her if she had to run the bases. “Edith McClintock. She was my dad’s great-aunt. She lived to be nearly a hundred. I used to play cribbage with her once a month when we visited her in the nursing home. She told the greatest stories.”

Henry tossed the ball up and down in his hand. “What kind of stories?”

“True stories. She was like a real-life Dr. Quinn, medicine woman. Except she never married. She became a doctor back when it wasn’t super common for women to become doctors. Her dream was to become a renowned surgeon in Bellevue Hospital. And she might have too, except for this one experience she had on a trip overseas. Of all the stories she told, that one was my favorite.”

Edith used the bat to scrape a line back and forth in the dirt. She was talking too much, wasn’t she? Sometimes she got carried away. Why would Henry care about her great-great-aunt Edith?

“What was it?”

Edith lifted the bat to her shoulder and moved back to the plate. Shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Throw me another pitch.”

“What? No way.” Henry dropped the ball in the bag. “You can’t set me up like that, then say—” he imitated her sauntering to the plate with the bat on her shoulder and shrugging—“it doesn’t matter.”

“First off, I do not talk or wiggle like that.”

“There was a bit of a wiggle.”

“And I didn’t set you up. I just wasn’t sure if you wanted me to keep talking about it or not.”

“Why wouldn’t I want you to keep talking about it?” Henry leaned down and grabbed a baseball.

“I don’t know. It might be boring to you.”

“Is it boring to you?”

“No.”

Henry looked down to the ball in his hand, tossing it lightly a few times in his palm, before meeting her gaze again. “Then it’s not boring to me, Edith.” His voice had lowered in the same manner as the sunlight. Slowly. Softly. Like they were sitting at a private table for two, rather than standing out on a muggy mosquito-infested baseball diamond. How did he do that?

“So what was it?”

Edith stared at Henry. “What was what?”

“The story.”

She blinked and tugged her shirt away from her stomach, needing a quick breeze. “Right. The story.”

Edith spun toward the fence and started retrieving balls. “The summer right after she graduated with her medical degree, her grandparents took her on a trip to Africa under the guise of a graduation gift. Really they were trying to get her away from medicine and convince her to marry a wealthy friend of the family. He was supposed to just happen upon them and join their little caravan for the summer.”

Edith used the bottom of her shirt like a sack to carry the balls to the mound and dumped them into the bag. “Nicely done,” Henry said when most of them bounced off the bag and scattered in different directions.

Since he made no move to get them, instead sitting down on the pitcher’s mound, Edith did the same. “So what happened?” he asked.

“What happened?” Edith smiled, remembering the way her great-great-aunt would recount the night that changed her life. “They went on a safari and somehow she got separated from everybody. One of those things where one group thought she was with the other group, and the other group thought she was with the first group. And she suddenly found herself alone. For an entire night. In the wilds of South Africa.”

“Sounds scary.”

“She was terrified. She said it felt like the night would never end. So she just kept moving. Even though it didn’t make sense, she thought if she kept walking, she could somehow get to the morning faster.”

“I can’t explain it, little Edith. I just knew I couldn’t let myself get stuck in the darkness. I knew it would kill me. So I kept walking. I kept searching for that first glimmer of light.”

“Right before dawn broke, she was so lost she thought nobody would ever find her and if they did, it would be her bones after they’d been picked clean by a pack of lions.” Edith held her finger up, the way her namesake used to at this point in the story. “But just as she was about to give up, the first tiny gleam of dawn crested over the horizon. And a softly singing choir of angels beckoned her to keep walking. Just a little farther.”

“A choir of angels?”

“A softly singing choir. Get it right.”

“My apologies.” Henry’s foot tapped her foot. It had gotten dark enough now she couldn’t see his eyes beneath the brim of his baseball hat, but she didn’t have to see them to know they were crinkling the way they always did when he smiled.

“But they were angels?” he asked.

“Well . . . not exactly. The choir turned out to be a group of village women gathering water. But when my great-great-aunt followed the sound, she walked down a tunnel of trees, the end looking like a big arch. And when she stepped through the arch and saw them singing beneath the first rays of daylight, they may as well have been angels. She said it was like stepping into a new life. She knew in that moment exactly what she was meant to do. She spent the next decades of her life using her medical background to do missions work all over the world.”

“Wow.”

“I know. Isn’t it a great story?” Edith rose to her feet and used her palms to swipe the dirt off her rear end. “That’s what I want more than anything.” Edith held out her hand to help Henry up, his knee making the task a little more difficult. “That one story. That one adventure. Something that I can look back on and say there. The moment my life set off on a new trajectory. The moment I answered my calling. The moment my life really started to matter.”

“Edith—”

“I know my life already matters, you don’t have to say that, but . . .” Edith looked down at his hand still clasped around hers. “My life doesn’t have a great story yet.”

She dropped his hand and took a step back. Standing close to him on the pitcher’s mound reminded her too much of dancing with him on the putting green. Reminded her too much of how his arms felt.

She needed to go. Before she grew any more tempted to stay. Before she repeated the same mistake she made with Brian. Giving up her dreams for love. Not that she loved Henry.

Okay, maybe she did. No. She didn’t.

She backed up another step. Didn’t matter. His life was in Illinois. Getting married. Raising a family. That wasn’t the story she wanted. Was it?

No. She wanted adventure.

“Have you had supper yet?”

The last thing she needed was more time with this man. “Henry, I can’t.”

“Can’t what? Eat?”

“Keep doing this,” she said. “Acting like we’re friends or . . . more. Don’t you get it? I’m not staying. We can’t be more. I’m leaving.”

“For what? Three months? So what? You can come back.”

“It’s not three months. It’s . . . longer. Three years maybe. I don’t know.” Edith shrugged, willing him to understand. “I need something more. I need—”

“You know what? I get it. You don’t have to explain.” Henry crouched down, corralling the balls into the bag. “This town isn’t enough for you.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Sorry. I’m not enough for you. Is that more accurate?” He zipped the bag and flung it over his shoulder.

“Henry, listen to me.”

“I have. I heard you. You need a big story. You need a big life. And it’s not here with me. You’re not the first person to tell me that, so believe me, I get it. I really do.”

Edith reached for his hand. “Would you just stop?”

He tugged his hand free and limped at a clipped pace toward his truck. “Thanks for keeping score tonight. See you around.”

Edith watched him go, wanting to chase after him, wanting to sit in the dirt and weep. Wanting . . . she didn’t know what. She settled for turning around and walking to Kat’s house. It was for the best. They cared about each other too much to make a casual friendship work. Better to cut it off now. Let the healing process begin. Right?

Sure. Maybe if Edith kept telling herself that, she’d eventually believe it.