"No. Please, don't. Thank you. I'm fine right here. By myself."
It was almost the same thing she'd said to me when I told her she couldn't stay in Midge's cottage. She'd told me she'd seen worse. Fuck, I hadn't believed her. How could anyone believe there was worse than a house previously occupied by bats?
I hated this. All of it.
"Did it get better?" I asked.
She bobbed her head as she resumed opening and closing her bottle. "Yeah. Things always get better if you wait long enough. Eventually, my mom found work with an international airline. She'd learned Japanese while we were overseas and…yeah. That helped. But it meant I had to stay with my father's family—god, I get so angry when I think about them—and they were the worst. Old-fashioned in a horse-and-buggy sort of way but only when it suited them, you know? They loved diesel trucks and big TVs but were conveniently suspicious of pop music and anything with bright colors."
"Bright…colors," I repeated.
"Not really but at the same time, yeah. Totally. Anything neon was out of the question for them. The basic primary colors were the only ones anyone needed. Everything else was some kind of devilry. Obviously, it had nothing to do with actual colors but what color represented. They didn't want to hear about new things or variations. Differences were a waste of their time. Same with mental health. They just didn't buy into it. There was no such thing as depression or PTSD. Those were new inventions and if they were new, that meant they didn't exist before. If they didn't exist before, they couldn't be real, you know?"
"I think I follow you," I said.
"They liked their fire and brimstone, their traditional gender roles. It took me forever to figure it out but eventually I realized they blamed my mom for the suicide because she didn't pledge allegiance to the typical housewife routine. She also owned more than a few hot pink items of clothing and pushed my father to get treatment for his depression, all of which added up to her being the problem, not the disease."
"I am so sorry."
She shook her head in a way that said it's fucked-up, right? But then she said, "It's fine." It wasn't fine. "I ended up living with my aunts and uncles, and their kids, in the main house when my mother started regularly flying on international flights. It was a giant old plantation house but it was in the worst shape. Everything was falling apart. It hadn't been maintained or updated but they were fierce about that place. Like their heritage was baked right into the walls and I guess it was, when you really think about it. But it's not Georgia or the South. That sort of thing is baked in everywhere. It's here just as much as it is on the pecan plantation where I grew up."
I didn't know what to say to that. I didn't know what to say about any of this but I definitely wanted to break something. At the minimum, chop the shit out of some wood. And I wanted my mother to fawn over Jasper some more. I wanted her to have the oppressively loving family experience she'd lost as a kid.
"My mom was gone four nights out of the week, and staying alone in the cabin was only a slight improvement over staying with people who wanted to groom me to serve the needs of men."
"Jasper—" I didn't know what I was going to say next but I couldn't say nothing. I wanted to haul off and find the people who put her through that—while she was grieving the loss of her father—and teach them a lesson or two. What the actual fuck was wrong with people? What the actual fuck.
"It's fine. It is." She patted my hand like I was the one in need of comfort. "They were terrible people but they never hurt me. Not in any way that left marks." She shot a rueful grin at her bottle. "They were never more than an errant thought or one too many belts of moonshine away from it but I learned quick enough to stay quiet and stay out of the way. They didn't like listening to me anyway. My uncles did this thing where they ignored everything I said. Every single word. It made me so mad but there was nothing I could do. After high school, I left."
That was why she'd come here instead of going home to Georgia. Why she was alone. Why she had no one to lean on during this time. Why she didn't need anyone's help, ever, thank you kindly.
But— "How were you related to Midge?"
Jasper opened her bottle and took a deep drink. With a laugh, she said, "I'm not, not in any blood-relation sense, but she was still my aunt. My mom's family moved around a lot when she was a kid—it was the army for her—and she had Midge for a teacher the one year she lived in this area."
"Your mother was one of Midge's high school students," I said slowly. "Wow. I can't believe that."
"Mmhmm. Eleventh grade United States history. They stayed in touch when my mother's family moved. Midge told my mom she liked getting letters from all over the world."
"She really loved her mail," I murmured.
"Oh, I know. I remember." Jasper giggled. "When we lived in Japan, we'd send her letters and packages with all kinds of local stuff. My mother would write little notes translating everything and explaining it. Midge would send us packages from the States. It was always such a special day when a box from Aunt Midge arrived."
"And you visited her in the summers?"
"Mmhmm." She busied herself settling the blanket around her legs again. "My mother knew the Cleary house was the least healthy place on the planet, especially when I wasn't in school all day, so she started flying me up here as soon as school let out." She glanced at the street, forced one of those fake smiles into place. "Where are all the kiddos? I thought you said we'd be mobbed."
I lifted a shoulder. "It's different every year."
"We are going to have a ton of leftover candy at this rate."
She pawed at the contents of the bowl like she didn't just crack open a case of major childhood traumas and pour them out into the street. Again, I didn't know what to say but silence wasn't an option, any more than staying in this chair while she mused about candy surpluses was an option.
"All right." I stood and edged the bowl away with the side of my boot. "That's enough. Come here."
I held my hands out to Jasper but she only blinked at me. "Where is it I'm going?"
I gestured to my chest. "Right here."
She gave me a cool up-and-down study. "And why am I doing that?"
"Because I want to hold you, and if you'd stop acting like you don't need anyone for just a minute, you might decide you want to be held."
She folded the blanket and fiddled with her drink. "I don't want to need anyone or anything. That isn't a place I like being."
"I know." I took the bottle from her hands, set it down. "But I'm standing here, needing you. Do you really want to say no?" I snapped my suspenders. "To a lumberjack?"
"Are you trying to seduce me into thinking I should need you? Or anyone else?"
I hooked my thumbs under the suspenders again. "Is it working?"
With a husky laugh, Jasper pushed to her feet and stepped into my arms. "Okay. Fine. You got me. For now."
Wasn't that the truth.