The triumph of it all, p.1
The Triumph of It All, page 1
It’s hard to come home again—you never know what’s waiting there for you...
Grier Warren won’t be waltzing back into Tennessee as the same woman who left it. When she flew to California ten years before, she was a loser, but now? She’s the picture of success. She’s ready to show everyone she left behind how wrong they were about her. She’ll show her former best friend, Shaw, that he made a large mistake by forgetting her and letting go of the amazing relationship that they’d had, the one that had been the most important thing in her life.
He had the chance to make something of himself, too, but apparently he wasted it. Instead of being like Grier, always successful, always a winner, Shaw has let himself turn into a semi-recluse—and that has nothing to do with their past. It’s not her fault, it’s not the fault of her family, it’s not because of the accident, it’s not because of the money, and it’s not anyone’s problem but his own. Right?
It’s hard to come home again, when old friendships turn more complicated and old problems threaten to derail all the triumph of your wonderful life. The future for Grier and Shaw will have to be something new, something beyond the what they shared in high school. But what will they do if the past just won’t let them go?
Can they hold on to each other?
The Triumph of It All
Jamie Bennett
Copyright © 2024 Jamie Bennett
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in a book review. Please contact the author at JamieBennettBooks@gmail.com.
This is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
Book cover by Angela Haddon Book Cover Designs.
Chapter 1
It was when the rock hit my windshield that I realized how much I still wasn’t welcome here.
“Get the hell off my land!”
The words came from inside the house directly after the rock struck. I’d stopped, turned off the car, and lowered the windows, so I heard them despite the distance. I thought that I recognized the voice—I was almost positive, but it had been so long, six years since I’d been back to this town. It was longer than that since I’d made my way around the rusty gate that guarded the Highsmith property.
I sat stunned for a minute, shaking, my mouth hanging open as I stared at the concave dent in the glass on the passenger side. The original break was as large as a grapefruit and cracks had splintered from it in every direction, so that it resembled a firework going off in the sky. Unfortunately, what had happened to my windshield was a lot less fun to look at than a fourth of July display.
“I said to get out! Turn your car around and leave or I will shoot. Did you hear me?”
The words startled me out of my shock but of course I didn’t leave. I wasn’t the kind of woman who got scared off by a cracked window and a threat (even if it had sounded sincere, and even if the broken glass had startled the breath out of me). I wouldn’t have gotten to where I was in life if I’d backed down or offered the other cheek when confronted with problems or opposition. No, no one had ever said that they’d shoot me before, but they’d probably wanted to and I had gotten my way in the end. Generally.
I pushed down my fear and other useless emotions because I was here for a reason, and it was too uncomfortable to sit in this car, anyway. The sticky summer heat had quickly dispelled any remnants of the air conditioning I’d run as I drove here and I felt curls of hair start to tickle the back of my neck, rebelling against the straightness I enforced every time I got out of the shower. So I opened the car door and stepped onto the gravel driveway, my legs still shaking, and I held my arms above my head and to show my empty hands. I wouldn’t back down, but I wasn’t stupid, either.
“Shaw?” I called. “It’s me, Grier. It’s Grier Warren. Is that you? Shaw? Can you come out?”
No more rocks rained down now but there was silence from inside the house. I stayed next to the car, deciding on my next move. The place looked ghostly and run-down but it had always been that way, ever since I’d first come here as a kid. Obviously, no one had been doing much upkeep in the years since I’d left either. It was exactly what I’d heard in town, that the house was falling apart, that he was living in a hovel, but I hadn’t fully believed it. It was just one of the rumors and inuendo that went around from mouth to mouth, stories that had stretched and grown as distance took them farther away from their source.
“Shaw?” I called again, and started walking forward.
He was the source: Shaw Highsmith. Not totally a recluse, because he came out for groceries sometimes. He went to church every now and then and to the hardware store and people had seen him driving out of town as well, maybe to Chattanooga, maybe to somewhere else. This was a small community and he was definitely a point of interest, so everyone watched carefully and reported what they’d seen to others, and that was how I’d heard. That was why I’d gone to church myself, so that I could discover what was happening with him—but no one knew very much.
No, they didn’t know what he was doing behind the rusty gate, but it sure was fun to speculate. Making meth, like in that TV show? Probably not. Despite his dreams of medical school, he’d struggled some in science and anyway, he’d always had such a strict moral code. How about producing pornography? No, definitely not. He would have laughed at that suggestion, I decided. Actually, the guy I’d known ten years before would have laughed at it, but I wasn’t sure if anything remained of that person anymore. I certainly wasn’t at all the same as when I’d left this town, and I was glad of it.
But whatever he was doing inside the building, Shaw wasn’t emerging from it to cut the grass or to weed because I had to pick around a lot of tall, spikey plants to get closer to the house. He hadn’t hired a crew to come in take care of things for a fee, either. His family had always been rich in a lot of ways: land, memories, and love, to name a few. But they’d never had a lot of money. At least, they hadn’t until the last ten years or so, and not that he had an excuse for avoiding a job and making some for himself. He was only twenty-six now and ten years before he’d been smart, strong, and determined. He had the capability, in other words, and there had been plenty of time to make a success of himself. That was what I had done.
I’d parked the car a way back because huge rocks blocked the driveway, four boulders almost the exact same size placed in a neat, straight row. I remembered Shaw in geometry class in high school and the way he’d carefully sketched out the figures on the graph paper in his notebook, each line precise. I was sure that he had put this obstruction across the route to his house, so that no one would be able to drive up and descend on him. I took another few steps toward them.
“Stop right there,” the voice said, and now I was also sure that it was him speaking. Who else could it have been? There was no family left, no wife or girlfriend according to the gossip, no children for certain. Not even any pets, not that I’d heard. I’d been asking around as casually as I could and it didn’t take much for people to want to talk about him. Besides his transformation into a mysterious semi-hermit, he had always been so appealing. His looks made him that way, because even at first glance you would have been attracted to how handsome he was. Like you never wanted to stop staring at him, because he just had that kind of face—his looks were irrelevant to the task at hand and I refocused.
“It’s me, Grier,” I repeated. Of course he remembered me, although he would have preferred to forget. I decided to remind him of the happier part of our past. “We were in so many classes together in ninth grade,” I called. “We sat together and did our homework together. We were friends.” But while he’d stayed here in this desolate house, I’d left. I’d gone away to boarding school and then to college and then I’d started my career, and I’d only come back a few times during vacations. They’d been darting visits, just a day or two before I was ushered away again, back to an empty dorm, off to a camp, or enrolled in a summer school. I hadn’t seen Shaw or anyone from here apart from people at church on the few Sundays and holidays when my attendance had been required. My parents had liked to make an appearance at times.
I waited for a reaction to my words and I did hear movement inside the house, faint but definitely there. It was too dark behind the windows to see anything of the interior, not with the summer sun shining above me like the light bulb inside an oven. There was no shade where I stood in the driveway, but there was plenty on the house because the big building sat well-camouflaged by tall, old trees. Shaw’s great, great-grandfather had cut down only the minimum when he’d constructed his home, preferring to live in a forest. The whole property was wooded like that, but it hadn’t been quite so wild before. The gate at the road had always been old but it had been neat, for example. Now it was disguised by broken branches and litter from cars passing by, and it was hardly visible at all. From my current perspective in the driveway, the house looked empty, but I’d heard that voice—
And then the front door opened and there was Shaw Highsmith. It had been a lot of years and he had changed, just as I had. He seemed taller than I remembered and broader through the shoulders and chest, but I hadn’t seen him since he was sixteen so that made sense. Of course he’d grown. His dark ha
His eyes seemed different, although the shade of his irises couldn’t have altered from the light brown they’d been before. They were almost an amber color that (in my teenage-melodrama stage of life) had reminded me of a wolf. Anyway, I couldn’t see his eyes very well from this distance. He hadn’t advanced out of the doorway and I had stopped next to the boulders.
Enough of this. “Can I come up?” I called.
It was very quiet, with just the sound of cicadas and birds. It was very quiet because Shaw didn’t answer me. He stood absolutely still, a talent he’d always had, and seemed to watch. He’d done that in our biology class, I remembered, when the teacher lectured from behind the tall desk at the front of the room. Shaw’s eyes had moved slightly, flicking left and right, up and down, but everything else about him had been stationary, as if he didn’t even breathe. I’d watched him instead of the teacher.
“Stay right there,” he ordered. “What was the name of our PE coach in our freshman year?”
Was he testing me? “Mr. Brown,” I answered. “He didn’t like you because you were so skinny but you could do so many pull-ups. It made him mad that you were stronger than you looked so he had you run laps.” Then the teacher had gotten even madder, because Shaw could also run forever. I’d alit with indignation on his behalf for being punished because he was good at something, and then I’d wanted to blow raspberries in Mr. Brown’s face when Shaw had gone for lap after lap and never slowed, never tired. I’d overflowed with pride.
“Why did you come here?” he asked from his position in the doorway.
I’d practiced an answer to this in the car, prepping for likely questions and concerns in the same way that I’d done in my career. “We haven’t seen each other in so long,” I announced with a friendly grin. I let my voice settle back into the Tennessee accent that I’d worked hard to polish out during my first year of boarding school. “How are you, Shaw?” It was important to say someone’s name. It helped to establish a friendly rapport, which obviously, we didn’t have anymore.
“Why did you come?”
Ok, those strategies hadn’t worked, so I went to the next one: showing my humanity and recognizing his. “I was so sorry to hear about your dad. You must have been devastated.”
“Were you sorry? I wonder why.”
I brushed my fingertips over my temple, wiping away a droplet of sweat that had threatened to run down my cheek. “I was so sorry,” I said, and I felt real tears come to my eyes. It wasn’t only a strategy because the loss had hit me, too. It would have been good if he’d seen them but he was probably too far away to notice.
“Why are you here?”
Those tactics hadn’t worked either, and I cleared my throat. If I could get inside, I could see what was really happening in his life. I could really understand and start to solve this problem. “Can I come in? It’s hot out.” I smiled and fanned myself with my hand.
“It’s not any cooler inside the house,” he told me, but he moved, finally. He walked toward me and stood in the shade of a pine tree, and when he didn’t object to my approach, I joined him there.
He did look different. It wasn’t only his increased size, although the skinny sixteen-year-old was definitely gone. Maybe he wasn’t leaving this house to hit the gym in town or coming out in the front yard to do a lot of weeding, but he was up to something to make the muscles that I saw outlined under his t-shirt. Besides that, I saw a change in his face that I couldn’t put a label on. Maturity? Pain? Anger?
“You look different,” he said, echoing my thoughts. He squinted his eyes, and I saw that they were still amber.
“I do my hair differently now.” Before, when he’d known me, it had been a blonde tornado, and those days were long over.
“It’s not just your hair. You look old.”
Furious words sprang to my lips in answer, but I shrugged slightly instead of saying them. “I guess time catches up to all of us.”
“You’re twenty-three,” he pointed out. “You shouldn’t be haggard yet.”
Again, I bit back my response. “Maybe I’m tired,” I suggested instead. I was, because I’d been working very hard since I’d come home. Not that I didn’t work hard generally, but this had been physical labor and it had been outside in the night. Anyone would have looked bad after all that.
“What do you want, Grier?”
I’d always loved when he said my name. Even now, all these years later, it made my heart pick up to hear it. “I’m back from Los Angeles and I wanted to catch up with old friends.” I smiled at him again. “Like you!”
He didn’t smile in return. “Who else is on your list?”
Well, no one, which he already knew because I hadn’t had any friends here besides him. “How long has it been? I bet that you didn’t go to the five-year reunion either,” I went on. I hadn’t graduated with the rest of them, so I actually hadn’t been invited.
“Cut the shit,” he suggested, and I stopped smiling.
“I thought—you were right,” I said, and the phrases started breaking unevenly like they’d done when I was younger. “I don’t know very many people, besides some through my parents and church, so I thought—a lot of our age group has moved away, or they don’t remember—” Or they did remember me from when I’d lived here and they still couldn’t stand me, for which I couldn’t blame them. I had been almost totally without social, athletic, and verbal skills and I had looked like I had thirty skeins of unraveled yarn on my head.
But I was different now, because I had worked very hard to get that way (and multiple stylists had toiled, too). I was no longer that girl with the bushy hair who couldn’t string a sentence together without turning red and stammering. I reminded myself that I was great, the new and improved version of Grier, and Shaw would be impressed once he recognized it.
“I wanted to say hello and to let you know that I’m here, that I’m home,” I said, and this overture emerged more coherently. He was still silent. “I would have called instead of coming over,” I offered, “but I don’t have your cell.” I had tried the old number to his house phone, dialing the digits that my finger had automatically reached for when I’d thought of him, but an automated voice had informed me that it was no longer in service. Their phone had hung on the kitchen wall, bright yellow and installed sometime in the middle of the last century. It was what we’d used to talk when we weren’t together, whispering softly and laughing.
“I don’t have a cell phone,” he stated.
“Really? You don’t have any communication with the outside world?”
He didn’t bother to answer and although I didn’t get tongue-tied anymore, although I wasn’t the tornado-haired girl always at a loss for words, I couldn’t think of anything to say that would come out right. It didn’t help that he was staring at me so balefully, as if my deodorant had totally failed and he was downwind. Yes, it probably had failed because it was so hot and sticky, but he was also probably too far away to catch anything foul.
I’d have to try again later—I’d have to—because right now, it just wasn’t working. It was important to know when to walk away, although that had always been difficult for me: I tended to want to dig in my heels and argue incessantly for another outcome. But in my short career in real estate, I had learned better. I’d seen that often when you did walk away, the withdrawal of interest and attention would lead your adversary to capitulate. When that happened, you could crush them, you could tie them into a deal so much in your own favor that they would be sorry they’d tried to jerk you around. So I smiled at him again, swiveled, and walked carefully toward my father’s car in front of the boulders as if I were leaving and didn’t care at all about him and what he was hiding in that decaying house.
This tactic worked. Shaw did capitulate, even faster than I could have hoped. I’d barely reached my car door and touched the silver handle, already burning with the absorbed heat of the sun, when I heard my name again. “Grier.”
