Home Is Where Your Bark Is

Chapter 24

An hour and a half later, Jenna was a passenger in the Traverse once more, heading home, only this time the driver was Stuart. No doubt, he’d picked up on the clipped conversation between sisters and noticed that Jenna was largely hanging out with the boys, because he’d not even hesitated when Monica asked him to drive her back instead.

Jenna had shot invisible arrows in her sister’s direction at the question, but Monica hadn’t been looking her way, intentionally, of course. With Stuart, conversation always came easily, but Jenna still avoided being alone with him whenever she could.

While the worst of the Saturday traffic had eased up by this time of day, Stuart navigated the slower neighborhood streets rather than hitting Milwaukee. Stuart was the type to add a handful of miles and minutes to his commute to avoid sitting at any unnecessary traffic lights. He’d been this way in med school, and his work-from-home career had made him even more traffic averse.

In med school, he’d driven an eight-year-old Infiniti G35 that had been passed down from his mother when she’d gotten a new one. Jenna had traveled countless places alongside him, often with their elbows touching. There’d been dozens of trips out for coffee or late-night jaunts for fast food or simply to get out of the city to find a quiet place to study for a few hours. Countless times, people had assumed they were a couple. More than once, when their fingers brushed across the table, Jenna had made that assumption too.

Back at the house, he’d asked about her concussion and the insurance claim, offering advice with that respectful bedside manner he’d acquired. He’d asked about her first day back at the market too. Perhaps that was why the silence weighed so heavily now. They’d already talked about all the easy stuff.

The sun had been out for most of the afternoon, shining on all the bright blades of new growth and buds, promising spring, but had ducked back behind the clouds. Maybe that’s what they could talk about, the weather. “I guess they’re calling for snow next weekend.”

“Yeah, I heard that too. I figured we wouldn’t make it out of March without another big snow or two.”

“Yeah, except next Sunday is the parade.”

“I thought about that. Hopefully the storm’ll roll in after it’s over. You’re going, right?”

“Yeah, I’m planning on it.” Both Jenna’s parents had Irish roots, but her mom’s side of the family was more closely connected to them, and aside from a handful of years when the parade had been canceled due to excessive drunkenness and then again during the pandemic, they’d participated every year that Jenna could remember, all the way back to when she’d needed a stroller to make it through the long parade route. Some people counted on seeing their extended family at the holidays. Now that her grandparents were gone, Jenna often only saw them each year at the parade, and this was thanks to a great-aunt who organized the Walsh family float every year.

Stuart drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “I guess whatever that was back at the house will be all said and done by then, right?”

Jenna shifted in her seat. Stuart should know by now to leave well enough alone when it came to arguments between Jenna and her sister. “Likely, but no guarantees.”

“I’m starting to think she’s right about the baby. That there’s no doubt about it being a girl. Monica wasn’t nearly this on edge with the other two.”

He seriously wasn’t about to make this about hormones, was he? “With the other two, she didn’t have two kids under five to care for all day. There’s a big difference between caring for one small human and two.”

If Stuart picked up on the defensiveness in her tone, he didn’t acknowledge it. “Tell me about it. From right about five o’clock every night till eight or so, our house is about as peaceful as a bar fight.”

“If you’re both doing your best, maybe it’s time to call in some help. A couple moms at my work use the same nanny service, and they have great things to say about it.”

He rested his arm on top of the center console. “I’m open to that. I’m open to whatever she needs, except canceling this vasectomy. I will not do this a fourth time.” After clearing his throat, he added, “Sorry if that was too much information.”

Blinking away an unwanted image of Stuart’s testicles getting the old snip-snip, Jenna cleared her throat. “When things cool off, I’ll bring up the service with her again.”

“That’d be nice. So, I take it that was what set her off?”

It didn’t escape Jenna’s notice that Stuart was assuming Monica was the one to get pissed, not her. Jenna was the steady one; she and Stuart were similar that way. The ones not to rock the boat. “I’ll let her tell you.”

Stuart ran a hand over his mouth and chin. “Whatever it is, she’s really been riled up about you this week. About the accident.” It wasn’t like Stuart to press a personal topic, which made it clear something deeper was troubling him. “Keeps insisting it’s all her fault.”

“It isn’t her fault, and I’m fine. Really. I keep telling her both those things. Other than the fact that I’ll never not look both ways at traffic lights again, I’m okay.”

“Yeah, I can imagine you being tense in cars for a while.” He motioned to the street ahead of him, and his mouth pulled up in that same small smile as when he’d gotten a nearly impossible question correct. “Minimizing big intersections for you this afternoon.”

Surely, he realized she remembered how congested intersections all but had him breaking out in hives. “Thanks.”

After a handful of seconds had passed into the better part of a minute, Stuart was the first to speak. “It’s that guy you’ve met that’s got her unsettled, if you ask me.”

Jenna shifted in the bucket seat. “What about him?”

A flush heated Stuart’s cheeks, proving how out of his element he was to pursue this conversation. Clearly, having it meant something to him. “Everything, I guess. How you met—a car accident. How he was so quick to take the dog for you. How fast things are moving.”

Jenna held up a hand. “Things aren’t moving that fast, thank you. And his taking the dog was the result of extraordinary circumstances. I’m sure if I’d hit him up in the grocery store with the very same question, I’d have gotten a different answer entirely.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s just the way she lost her mom—”

“I lost her too. Just saying.”

“I know, but she was just so young.” Jenna was about to interject that fifteen months hardly made a difference when it came to losing a mom, but Stuart pressed on before she could say anything. “I’m not saying it’s right, but you filled—and continue to fill—a really big space for her. She gets threatened when she thinks something might pull you away from her.”

“I’m not going to pull away from her, but I am working on better boundaries with her. Not that it’s been easy. That’s why she’s mad today, if you want the truth.”

“I suspect that’s something everyone in her orbit has to do, especially people like you and me.”

Jenna stared out the passenger window, letting Stuart’s words settle in. Most of the exteriors of the houses they were passing were still winter drab, but several were decorated with bright-green wreaths and had shamrock and rainbow decorations in windows or in the landscaping.

Stuart’s comment stirred up a memory of him saying something similar a long time ago. This had been a few months after he and Monica first slept together, when it became apparent that the two of them were, at the very least, going to be an on-again, off-again couple and possibly something more. “We’re the same, you and I,” he’d told Jenna with a sheepish shrug of the shoulders. “Without the gravity of something bigger tugging us along, we’d likely get stuck in one spot and never go anywhere.”

She thought of Stuart the last several years. Maybe Monica’s gravity had drawn him in, but it wasn’t without a nearly continuous struggle. If he was intentionally sleeping with his back to her, Jenna bet it had something to do with this. From what she could make of things, he always seemed to be the one attempting to apply the brakes and failing. On a thousand different household purchases to gatherings he claimed they didn’t need to hosting progressive dinners and block parties on his only night off to the third child he apparently hadn’t wanted to have.

Even though it immediately gave her a bad taste in her mouth, for a handful of seconds, Jenna allowed herself to imagine what their life would be like if she and he had gotten together instead. Wrapped up in a new relationship as she would’ve been—and an important one to her at that—Jenna most likely would never have taken the opportunity to look deeply enough within to realize that medical school was no longer right for her.

They’d both be doctors and immersed in their careers and hardly taking time to look up at the world around them. Plants N Pots would never have come to be. Jenna almost certainly never would’ve settled in her beloved Logan Square, seeing as how Stuart had never envisioned living anywhere else but Evanston. Who knows who Monica would’ve found for a partner instead; someone similar to Stuart, no doubt. But the boys wouldn’t exist, nor the little human growing in her sister’s belly who’d someday soon be as familiar to her and as distinct as Sam and Joseph.

She’d never have met Jake—whatever ended up happening between them—and he wouldn’t have connected with Seven.

It was hard to explain the tears stinging Jenna’s eyes as she kept her head turned toward the window and blinked them away. They certainly weren’t tears of sorrow; she realized that much. For the first time in her life, without being caught in someone else’s orbit, she’d drifted off and found a path of her own.

“What you said just now about being in her orbit,” she said when she was finally composed enough to respond to his comment. “Until you said it, I didn’t even realize it myself. I’m not in her orbit anymore, and I think she’s sensing that. Not because of Jake. Not because of anyone but me. It doesn’t mean I won’t be there for her. I’m just not in anyone’s orbit anymore. Anyone’s but my own, and I like where it’s taking me just fine.”

She doubted Stuart fully understood what she was talking about, but Jenna didn’t care. For the first time in a long time, she was exactly where she wanted to be.