The next morning, breakfast was tense.
Peyton could practically feel Caleb's heat from across the table, the hunger in his body reflected openly in his gaze. Getting through breakfast was a challenge, and her mother's moody behavior didn't help things either. Something had put Lola in a mood, which only added to Peyton's worry.
"Do you work today, Caleb?" her father asked as they started putting away dishes.
"Yes, sir," Caleb replied, hesitating at the sink when Peyton held out her soapy hand for his breakfast plate. Their eyes met and Peyton felt her right knee wiggle as it began to give out like something out of a cheesy romance movie.
Then, suddenly, the heat in his eyes was gone in a flash and replaced with a cool aloofness that had her head spinning.
Caleb dropped the plate in the sink and his eyes from hers, backing away like he had been set on fire. "I have the brunch shift -- I'll be back by three."
Daniel and Lola seemed oblivious to Caleb's change in behavior. Daniel dug in his coat pocket, not even lifting his eyes up from his paper as he pulled out car keys and held them up for Caleb to take.
Caleb had the keys in his hands and his coat halfway on by the time it registered to Peyton that Caleb was leaving for work an hour earlier than he needed to. The sound of gravel kicking up and the mad dash down the drive told Peyton that he clearly needed to be somewhere -- far, far away from here.
"Peyton," Daniel said quietly.
Peyton looked away from the kitchen window to find her parents sitting at the kitchen table, staring up at her expectantly. Lola eased out Peyton's chair with her foot, her smile polite but not quite reaching her eyes.
A cold shiver went down her spine as tension rose between the three of them, again. Peyton wiped off her hands and took a seat before clasping her hands in her lap so her parents wouldn't see them shake.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
For a brief moment the three of them were lost in a tense silence.
It was Lola who finally had the nerve to break it. "Peyton, we know you aren't a little girl anymore, but we have been treating you like one," Lola began slowly, as though she was feeling her way through the conversation. Peyton knew for certain then that this was serious. "The only reason why we let you stay at the Barn so long was so our little girl could get better -- and you are, we can see that now."
Lola reached out and picked up Peyton's shaking hands from her lap so she could hold them in her own. "Your father and I understand how much you needed this place to get back on your feet, and how it helped you finish your book." Understanding flickered through Peyton then.
"But it's time for me to get back to L.A.," she finished for her mother.
Tears swelled in Lola's eyes and she rolled them over to Daniel. "I knew I'd cry like a little baby," she told him, laughing a little as she shook her head and tried to gather up her control again.
"You can't run away from your problems, Peyton," Lola sniffed, patting her hands. "It's time for you to go back and face them head on and move forward with your life." Daniel nodded in agreement with his wife, his blue eyes both sad and comforting in turns.
Peyton nodded and pulled her hands from her mother's so she could wipe at the silly tears that had formed in her eyes. She understood where her parents were coming from completely. She was twenty-five for Pete's sake, an adult now. Hiding away at sleepy little Hamish wasn't going to solve her problems or make them go away. It was time for her to head back.
Peyton eyed her father reproachfully. "But what about Caleb?" she whispered. "I can't leave him here."
Daniel and Lola exchanged telling glances that told Peyton that they must've had this conversation before.
"Well," Daniel began tentatively, "Caleb won't likely be able to get into a university somewhere this late in the game, not unless he goes to a technical school or community college. If he decides to take that route that would keep him here in Hamish, which is fine by us." Daniel shifted in his chair and shrugged his shoulders. "But your mother and I were thinking that maybe you should take him to Los Angeles with you. Let him see UCLA or the other campuses if he wants. Let him see a life outside of Hamish. If he likes it -- great. If not, well..."
Lola took Peyton's hands again. "If not," she continued, "then he will always have a place here."
"But..." Peyton squirmed in her seat, hating to sound like a little kid, but knew there was no other way around it. "But what if he doesn't like L.A.?" she asked them. "The people, the crowds, the city...Caleb may have a meltdown. What do I do then? I can't...I can't just leave him here."
Lola smiled sympathetically. "That's something you and Caleb will have to work out with one another if it comes to that."
"Don't sell that boy short," Daniel piped up. "He is full of surprises. He may bend over backwards to get his butt out to L.A. But you won't know until you go."
Peyton sniffed and nodded. "I'll talk to him about it tonight."
"We'll talk about it together," Lola said firmly as she straightened up in her seat. "I don't want Caleb to think we're kicking him out of this house. This is his home, and we're his family."
Peyton smiled a little at her mother's firm resolve. "Mom, you've already convinced Caleb of that," she said softly, laughing a little. "You two have been great with him -- he's opened up a lot more than he would have with just me. I can't thank you two enough for being here to help. Caleb will tell you the same thing."
Daniel opened his mouth to reply, but the sound of his emergency cell interrupted him. Peyton and Lola waited on edge as he scrambled to answer it, both of them unabashedly eavesdropping on the short conversation as Daniel paced the room. They watched him recede down the hall moments later before he went silent.
Daniel came back from the bedroom with his City of Hamish jacket and matching baseball cap, the look on his face grave. "Someone set a fire on the reservation. They need some extra hands."
"Call me," Lola said with a sigh as she watched him don his uniform with a look akin to pride and sadness, the lines of her face etched with worry. When Peyton had been younger, her mother's expression had been more urgent, more worrisome. Now Lola watched Daniel with almost a resigned expression, because she knew that this was Daniel's life. Nothing would change that, not even her.
"I will," Daniel promised, kissing his wife softly before moving to Peyton.
"Be safe, dad," Peyton told him, voicing the familiar mantra that she had since...well...forever.
"Always," he replied with a Cheshire cat grin. He tugged on the end of her braid before setting off, the house feeling abruptly cold with his absence. Peyton closed her eyes at the sound of a diesel engine cranking up. Her dad always used the truck whenever he went out as a volunteer, because it had the dual uses of towing cars off the bridge over the Narrows or carrying equipment for road crews or just anything really. It was a familiar sound in the Gray household, and a sobering one. Peyton knew neither she nor her mother would feel normal again until that same diesel truck pulled into the drive.
The rest of the day was a blur. Peyton's nerves were frazzled by her father's absence and Caleb's abrupt leave, so she spent most of the day fighting with her mother over chores to do around the Barn. Without her book to distract her, Peyton realized she had nothing truly constructive to do. Perhaps leaving for Los Angeles wasn't such a bad idea after all -- if nothing else, it'd keep her from getting cabin fever.
Or is it Barn fever?
Shaking her head at the terrible joke, Peyton finished folding clothes away into the laundry basket she used to carry clothes in, separating her pile from Caleb's. Normally she let him wash his own clothes, but boredom had prompted her to take over the job before her mother had. That and it grossed her out to know her mother was touching Caleb's underwear.
With a shiver, Peyton picked up the basket and walked out of the washing room and down the hall to Caleb's, pushing open his door with the basket before taking the first step inside.
Caleb's room was as neat as a pen. His bed was neatly made -- with perfect square corners, too -- and not a single article of clothing littered his floor space. He had finally added a few personal touches to the room: dinky frames with pictures of him and Chelsea, medals from cross country events, a framed article cut-out of him placing first at a robotics event hosted by MIT, and a lone frame on his bedside table holding an aged and sun-bleached photo.
Peyton put down the basket of clothes on the bed and picked up the frame gently to take a closer look. The instant photo was of a couple and their newborn baby, all three fresh from the hospital by the looks of it. The male was tall and pale-haired, his dark eyes shining with unshed tears of joy up at the camera as he held his tanned arms around his family. The woman, pale and tired looking, smiled wanly up at the camera as well, her large green eyes happy and teary, her black hair tucked back in a messy bun. In her arms was a tiny blue bundle turned white by the sun exposure. A crop of black hair peeked out from the blanket, the face beneath the hair squishy and pink.
Written in clear, beautiful cursive on the white stock at the bottom were three simple lines:
CALEB JAMES VAUGHN BORN 10-11-1991 8 LBS, 7 OZ.
Peyton's eyes turned to the handsome blonde man in the photo, her heart pounding hard and fast in her chest.
This was the man responsible for the eighteen years of hell that was Caleb's life. In the photo he looked so unassuming, so proud of the tiny bundle in his wife's arms. Nothing about the photo looked out of the ordinary. Nothing about Jeremiah Vaughn screamed "wife beater" or "drunk" or "child abuser."
They all looked so happy.
Well, except for Caleb, Peyton recanted. He looked like he had just gone in his diaper.
The sound of tires on the road drew Peyton out of her thoughts. She quickly replaced the photo on the table and dug into the clothes basket to remove Caleb's things, placing them into piles along the edge of his bed just like he did. She had just set out his jeans when she heard the hallway floorboards creak with footsteps.
Peyton gathered up the basket and turned to see Caleb standing in the doorway, his expression like stone. His right arm was raised and his pointer finger was extended into the hallway.
