“I should have figured that one out, J. Coop.” Phillip had recovered from his mirth. “I saw that look on your face before we accepted Grandma Kate’s offer. In my conversations this past week with some of the newcomers, several of them joked about wondering if anyone’s ever had the water tested.”
“That was something I’ve heard, too,” Leesa said. “From newcomers and lifelong residents alike. And now we can answer that question, finally, with a ‘yes.’” She picked up her bottle of beer and saluted him. More, the smile she gave him told her she hadn’t judged his actions to be over the top.
“I’m surprised you didn’t have the air tested, too,” Phillip said.
Jason met his gaze and grinned. “They can test for a specific substance in the air, but you need to identify what it is you’re testing for.”
“Oh, God.” Phillip’s laugh this time was less exuberant. Then he sighed. “So, Einstein, what are your conclusions after all that testing and attempted testing?”
“Absolutely nothing. No contaminants in the water, period. Thinking about it, you weren’t surprised I did that, and neither, really am I.” Then Jason looked from Phillip to Leesa. “I guess that’s as good as an opening as I’m ever going to get.” He put his attention on the woman between them. “I don’t know why I’ve always been so anal, so…rigid in how I’ve looked at things. Until Alice was born, I was the youngest of four. You hear about the middle child being the one with the most challenges in a family? In our family, the ‘middle child’ was a set of twins—Chance and Logan. They weren’t that much older than I was, and I guess I had the middle-child syndrome—right up until Alice was born.”
He remembered being in awe of this sweet-tempered, beautiful baby. Now that he thought about that, he had to admit his attitude toward her had been unusual for a boy of his age.
“I really liked having a baby sister, and I always felt protective of her. I was no longer the baby of the family, nor did I feel like the middle child any longer. I became the big brother, and I took that to heart. I was almost ten when she was born.”
Leesa nodded. “I get that. You became the elder sibling to her and felt responsible for your baby sister in a way that grounded you as nothing else had.”
She must have seen the wonder he knew showed on his face. Leesa shrugged. “I am the oldest of my parents’ children, and I know what you felt. You had a purpose. And a method, I’d bet, to achieve that purpose.”
“No real method, not at first. But sometime after I turned twelve, my parents put me in a different class. Sometime after that, everything I was learning at school began to make a wonderful kind of sense. I recall reading one book on how people could become successful in life simply by the habits they adopted.
“To me, that was a miracle discovery. All you had to do was set goals and then take steps to achieve those goals. But you know what? It became more than that. As I began to practice self-discipline, as I grew into a man and kept focused on setting and meeting goals, I extended that strict discipline to everything in my life—and every person. Including Alice.” Honesty, remember? “No, especially Alice. And I tried to mold my baby sister into the kind of driven person I’d become.”
As Jason put into words for the first time everything that he’d been thinking since coming to Lusty, he felt a calm enter him, a calm he’d never imagined he could feel. “In the last couple of weeks, I’ve begun to understand that there really is no such thing as one true way to do anything. Not even achieving success.”
He didn’t know if what he’d just said made any sense to the two people listening. But as he looked at both Phillip and Leesa to judge their reactions, he knew he’d been understood. In Leesa’s gaze he saw recognition, and in Phillip’s…in Phillip’s, he saw pride.
“My one true way was to enlist in the army,” Leesa said. “I signed up, with my parents’ consent, when I was seventeen. The only career goal I’d ever had was to become a chef. I understood there was no money for college in our family. Both of my parents worked, but there were a lot of us to feed. I felt a responsibility to help my folks and my siblings. A high school counselor suggested the army, and I, too, felt that sense of ‘eureka’ that it sounds like you felt when your education clicked for you. I could achieve my goal of becoming a chef while being in a position to send money home to help with the education of my siblings. I didn’t need to keep much of my pay. Food and shelter came with the job.”
“How many siblings do you have, and how many of them are college grads?” Phillip asked.
It was the question Jason had wanted to ask, because he saw a pride in Leesa that was genuine and, he’d bet, well earned.
“I have four younger sibs and two of them—Kaine and Serena—are twins. Eddie is the next oldest to me, and Kayla is the baby.” Then she grinned, and Jason knew in that moment that family was as important to her as it had always been to him and Phillip. “They’ve all graduated college. Eddie is an orthopedic surgeon, Kaine is a lawyer, Serena is a dentist, and Kayla is also in medicine, a psychologist.”
“And you?” Phillip tilted his head to the side, and Jason wondered what his cousin had seen that he himself had missed.
“I got fifteen years in, serving my country. I’m a certified chef, and I left the service with the rank of sergeant. And I am here, in Lusty, because, right from the first moment I came to that interview with
