Page 20 of A Field of Beauty
“I know what she’s got on her mind.” Even though Rose said all was forgiven, that it was time to come home, Tessa didn’t believe her. How could Rose forgive when she didn’t know the whole story?
“What?”
“She wants to blame me for ... what happened!”
“So what happened?”
Tessa whirled around. “Just some mistakes I made, okay?”
He seemed unfazed. “What teenager hasn’t made some mistakes?”
Tessa opened her mouth, then shut it. “Dawson, this wasn’t something you can just brush off like typical stupid teenager stuff. It’s bigger than that. I just can’t go back. I won’t go back.” She spun around and started marching off again.
“Y’know,” he said, following her, “when you can’t talk about something, it doesn’t go away. It just gets stuffed down.”
She threw her hands in the air. “Advice from a man who doesn’t talk about anything other than soil!”
“I can talk about other things!”
She stopped. Slowly, she turned around. “Like what? Like ... the fact that you’re involved with a purple-haired woman? Like ... the fact that you’re a churchgoer and never once mentioned it?”
He frowned. “More like ... I’ve done stupid stuff in high school.”
“Not as stupid as me.”
He walked up toward her. “Okay, I’ll go first. I hung around with a bad crowd. We used to siphon gas out of cars to fill up my truck.”
She looked over at his old truck. “That same one?”
“Yep.”
“Well, that might’ve been stupid but—”
“Hold on. Once, I tried to siphon gas out of an RV and ended up mistakenly siphoning from the sewage tank. The fumes made me so sick that I passed out. When I came to, cops were standing around me.”
Despite the foul mood she was in, Tessa couldn’t hold back a smile. “So, I guess that’s where your interest in composting began.”
The fans around his eyes started to crinkle. “Your turn.” He took a step closer to her. “Take some advice from Fred Rogers.”
“Mr. Rogers?”
He nodded. “He was my hero. He said that if you can talk about something, you can manage it.”
She stared at him. She had never told anyone the whole story. Not a single soul. And look where that had gotten her—stuck in the same pattern. She inhaled a deep breath and slowly let it out. “When I was a senior in high school, I got involved with a married man.”
She expected Dawson to look shocked, to show some kind of horrified reaction, but he just listened calmly as she talked, as she explained how this neighbor convinced her to keep quiet, how their relationship isolated her from her friends. And then, almost surprising herself, she told him about telling the neighbor she might be pregnant.
Again, he just listened.
“He pushed me out the door so hard I nearly fell. I was desperate and scared and went to the flower shop to get help.” She turned away from him and folded her arms against her abdomen. “From there, things went from bad to worse. There was a fire at the shop ... and I’m sure something I did was the cause of it ... but I let someone else take the blame for it. I left Sunrise like a coward, and I never looked back. I hurt people I loved, who loved me.” She turned back to face him.
“So, were you?”
“Was I what?”
“Pregnant?”
“No. Just late.” She folded her arms against her chest. “So, I think I win the stupid teenager award.” He didn’t react to her attempt at a joke; he just kept looking at her with a concerned expression.
