[fic] & light is only now just breaking, bbtfic, s/p, part ii
Title: & light is only now just breaking -- part ii
Author: allthingsholy
Artist: juniperlane
Pairing(s): Penny, Sheldon/Penny
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Angst. The misuse of farm terminology. Bad familial relationships and lots of run-on sentences.
Word Count: 22000
For: bigbangbigbang
Summary: Penny moves back home to take care of her mother. Sheldon, for reasons of his own, follows her.
Notes: Giant huge thanks to several people for helping me get through this thing: lulabo, who has been the biggest advocate of this fic since day 1; juniperlane, who has been the best person to bounce ideas off of and deal with my general crazy, and who made a rocking awesome fanmix; and ishie, who is one helluva cheerleader.
|| Fanmix found here||
----
The first time Sheldon meets Beth and Anne and the extended family all together, she quizzes him for an hour the night before, on names and occupations and-most importantly-the crucial subjects that are to be avoided at all costs. No bringing up how suspicious and sketchy Anne’s boyfriend seems or how tired she always looks; no getting into the middle of a fight between Beth and John: they don’t need Sheldon’s opinion, and they really don’t want it.
“And what is the number one thing you’re not supposed to talk about?” she asks as she hears the crunch of gravel from a car pulling into the driveway.
Sheldon straightens the shirt Penny forced on him, tugging the collar all out of shape again. “No bringing up your brother,” he says, dodging Penny’s hands as they reach for his neck. “And if someone mentions the name Tommy, I suddenly have urgent business in the kitchen.” He only knows the basics, what he’s managed to cobble together from the bits of Tommy that manage to leak through: that he’s Penny’s older brother; that he’s not around; that he’s not welcome; that he calls once a week to talk to their mom, long conversations none of them are privy to and all of them wonder about.
Penny tucks her hair behind her ears and squints at Sheldon, her expression equal parts accepting and resigned. He stills looks more than a little awkward and out of place standing in her parents’ living room, but at least there aren’t aliens or superheroes drawn across his chest. She sees her dad holding the door open and Beth steps inside, and Penny nudges past Sheldon with a reassuring smile and heads over to hug her sister.
For the most part, Sheldon behaves himself. Penny keeps an eye on him as she hugs and teases the twins and marvels at how much bigger they seem to get every time she sees them.
Anne looks the same: tired and overworked. She hovers around Sarah while Penny keeps Matt occupied with talk of the Husker’s prospects for the fall: Coach Pellini is bringing up a stellar recruiting class, he tells her, and their ground game is sure to take them to a Bowl this year. Penny nods and out of the corner of her eye watches Sheldon and Jeremy talking animatedly in the corner. She’s taken aback for a moment at what her 13-year-old nephew could possibly be saying to keep Sheldon interested, but then she remembers: the comics. Sheldon had helped her pick out more than a few presents for her nephew, and she smiles, imagining the trouble Jeremy is bound to be in if he insults the wrong superhero.
Overall, the night goes smoothly. The food doesn’t end up burnt, and no one gets shot in the ass, so it seems like success. Every once in awhile, Beth catches Penny’s gaze and looks questioningly at Sheldon, but Penny just rolls her eyes and shrugs it off and goes back to her potato salad.
The conversation eventually turns to old stories of the past, as it so often seems to lately. Penny tries to find it charming instead of morbid, but it’s usually light-hearted enough. There are lots of stories to tell and most of them are old enough to be funny now: broken bones and near misses, hefty punishments for acts of teenaged rebellion and stupidity.
“I don’t regret it,” Beth says, shaking her head, her dark hair brushing against her cheeks. “I made it to that concert, damn it, even if I did show up covered in mud from the thighs down.”
They’re all roaring harder than is necessary, just glad to feel good and happy and alive. Under the sound of laughter, Sheldon whispers, “Who is this Cougar and why on Earth would you climb out your bedroom window to go see him?”
Penny leans over and knocks his shoulder with her own. “I’ll explain later,” she says to him, and then says to Beth, “In all fairness, this is a small town. There’s nothing to do besides find trouble. And if you can’t find any, you can always make your own.”
“Some of you were better at that than others.” It’s an off-hand comment from her father, said almost under his breath, and Penny has no doubt it was aimed at her. Her whole face goes slack and then her defenses raise up.
“No one was quite as good as Tommy though.” Penny’s voice is sharp and Sheldon goes tense beside her. She lays a hand on his arm to keep him in his seat and continues, “Tommy always had a special gift for trouble, don’t you think, Dad?”
He’s working the muscle in his jaw and Penny can feel the whole table around her buzzing, even though no one says a word. They’re stuck in a stalemate for what seems like forever when Sarah interrupts, saying, “I have an announcement,” she says. She runs her fingers over the table cloth, traces the pattern beneath her hand. It’s an heirloom or something, Penny’s pretty sure, something handed down from generation to generation, from mother to daughter. Penny finds herself wondering suddenly what pieces she’ll get, when the time comes, and the thought immediately pulls her up short. She tunes back in just in time to hear Sarah finish, “I’m not going to take the treatment.”
Penny feels her back go rigid, and her breath catches hard in her chest. She looks at her plate and doesn’t see anything, and doesn’t hear anything Beth says when her sister finally comes to and starts to argue. She keeps her head down, hands balled into fists on the table top. All Penny can think of are the stories she’s read her mother, of determined, steadfast women and the trials they lived through, of the strength of generations she’s so long relied upon.
When she finally does look up, the first eyes on her are her father’s. He’s got one hand flat against the table and the other locked around Sarah’s, and Penny knows that he knew this was coming, knew her mother had decided this and hadn’t said anything. Hadn’t told her. Hadn’t consulted her. She’s furious at the both of them, and her jaw aches from clenching it.
Sarah’s smile is brittle as she looks at each of her daughters in turn, and when she finally turns to Penny, she can’t meet her eyes.
Penny stands up, the backs of her knees roughly shoving her chair away from the table. “I can’t believe you didn’t talk to me about this first,” she says, hands pressed futilely into the tabletop. “I’m here, every day,” she says. She feels more than hears her voice crack, and with one last look at her mother, she pushes away from the table and heads outside, the door slamming loudly behind her.
She doesn’t think much about what she’s doing. She slides into the front seat of her dad’s car and heads into town, driving too fast. She doesn’t cry. Her blood’s set to boil in her veins and there’s a hard knot in her throat, where the sadness should be. Instead, all she is is angry. The whole way into town, all she thinks about is the last drive she took like this, with a box of letters in the front seat and her whole world crashing down around her. She finds her way onto Main Street, but she drives right past the post office in favor of the bar where she works. Jason’s behind the counter, rubbing the rag over the already clean wood, and she falls onto the stool with a loud, angry noise. Her chest is still heaving. Her tears still won’t come.
“Double shot of whisky,” she says. Her voice sounds strange, like she’s a very little girl, or a very old woman. She doesn’t feel like herself, and when she sees her reflection in the mirror behind the bar, her eyes are wild and her face is twisted and ugly. Jason sets the shot down in front of her, and when she throws it back, she doesn’t flinch.
She’s not sure how long she stays, and she doesn’t know how much she has to drink. Eventually, Sally comes and tries to match her drink for drink for awhile, but then she just drags Penny out onto the curb, and forces her to drink way too many glasses of water. The night is muggy and still, and there are tears streaming down Penny’s face before she even realizes she’s finally started to cry.
She’s tired, and upset, and really drunk, and if she had to name just one emotion that’s raking through her as she sits with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, it would be helplessness. She knew coming out here would be tough, that there was always the possibility that her mom might not get better and things would go this way, but Penny can’t stand how powerless she feels. Her whole world is spinning around her, and she can’t do a thing to stop it.
Sally sits with Penny until she’s all cried out, and her eyes are hot and sore, but finally dry. Her heaving chest finally slows and stills, until her breathing is shallow and raspy, and she’s almost completely quiet. Her head is throbbing and there’s still an ache inside, a wide, gaping hole behind her ribcage, but she tries not to think about it. She tries to stay focused on the feel of Sally beside her, on the feel of her hand rubbing slow, soothing circles onto Penny’s back.
They’re sitting like that, rocking back and forth, when Penny hears another car pull up to the curb. When she raises her head, wobbly on her neck like a newborn, she sees Sheldon climbing out of the cab of her father’s truck. He’s still got on the shirt she made him wear, but there are more buttons undone and some bright color is poking through at his collar. Penny squints her eyes to try to clear up her blurred vision, but her head feels heavy and unsteady on her shoulders, and she drops her forehead onto her arms instead.
She hears Sally thank Sheldon for coming, and hears Sheldon thank Sally for calling him, and if she weren’t drunk she’d be able to name the tone of voice he’s using right now.
“You sound like you’re worried, but that can’t be right,” she mumbles into her arms.
Sally bends down in front of her and lifts Penny’s head between her hands. “Penny, you need to get in the truck, so Sheldon can take you home.”
“I don’t want to go home,” she says. She knows she’s being whiney and difficult. She doesn’t really care. It’s her turn to be taken care of, she decides stubbornly, and let the rest of them deal with it for a change.
“Penny,” Sally says again, “please get in the truck.”
Penny feels like her whole body weighs a thousand pounds, like she couldn’t stand up if she tried. She opens her mouth to tell them that when she feels hands close around her elbows, and someone lifting her onto her feet.
Surprisingly enough, when she looks up, it’s Sheldon’s chest she’s pressing her cheek against. He looks down at her disdainfully and says, “I am not a cab service, and I am not a nurse. Please refrain from vomiting until I’ve deposited you at your house. In your bathroom. Away from me.”
She frowns at him, but still manages to put one foot in front of the other as he guides her back to the truck. When she’s securely deposited in the cab, she clumsily rolls down the window and yells to Sally, “Boot and rally, baby! Boot and rally!”
Sally spins on the sidewalk, her voice loud and ringing. “And if you boot all over your dad’s truck, that’s just one more mess he has to clean up!” Penny smiles at that, and leans her head back against the seat and waits for Sheldon to start the car.
Even drunk and half-asleep, Penny can tell that Sheldon’s driving way below the speed limit the whole way home. The window’s rolled all the way down, and Penny’s head is lolling back against the seat, the warm air blowing her hair around her face. Her eyes are closed, so she can’t actually see the fields they’re passing as they wind their way back to the house, but she doesn’t need to see them to know what’s there: the same fields that have always been there, being farmed by the same people who’ve always farmed them, who’ll live out their whole lives in a hundred-mile radius. She’s drunk and melancholy and feeling sorry for herself, and she’s embarrassed to be back in this town with these people, that her great escape just led her right back here.
When they finally pull up to the house, Sheldon turns off the engine and goes to open his door, but she stops him with a hand on his arm. “Just sit for a minute,” she says. The windows are down and the night is warm, and the crickets are chirping in the fields. Her tears start again, quietly, and Sheldon sits with her until she’s finally quiet.
--
When Penny wakes the next morning, her head is throbbing and her face is puffy. She barely opens her eyes long enough to flinch away from the sun streaming in through her window, and then goes back to sleep. She spends most of the day like this, drifting in and out of consciousness. She has strange dreams and wakes drenched in sweat, or freezing cold. In one, she’s an archaeologist on a dig, and she keeps shoveling handfuls of sand from a hole in the ground. She knows somehow that there is treasure there, but her hands keep coming up empty, with nothing with the fine grains that slide through her fingers.
When she wakes, she feels gritty and hot. She keeps very still until the room stops spinning, and then trudges off to the shower. She takes deep, calming breaths as she feels the grime wash away from her hair and face, and after she’s rinsed and clean, she turns the water up so hot she can hardly stand it and braces her hands against the shower wall. She lets the spray beat down on her back, rivulets running down her chest and abdomen, down her thighs and calves. Her skin stings and reddens, and she lowers herself onto the shower floor and wraps her arms around her shins and sits. She cries but she does not wail. Her breathing is labored because of the heavy steam, but she doesn’t weep.
When the water eventually starts to cool, Penny reaches up and turns off the shower. She wrings out her hair, and towels herself off. The mirror is fogged up and Penny can’t see her reflection, but she remembers the look on her face in the glass last night, and has no desire to see herself like that again. She knows that she’s heartbroken. She doesn’t need to see it.
By the time she gets back to her room, wrapped snugly in a towel, the last streaks of sunset are just visible over the treetops. Penny watches the light slide between the branches, the pinks and pale hues doing little to lighten her mood. Just past the fence is the spot where her dad set them up a tree fort, where they’d spend hours playing or lounging or sulking. Penny wonders if there’s still a pack of Tommy’s smokes under the loose floor board, or whether Anne’s magazines are still in a pile in the corner.
Penny pulls on shorts and a t-shirt and creeps down the stairs, slipping quietly to the back door. The light in the living room is blue and muted from the TV, and she can hear her mother and father, and the quiet hush of their voices. She stops to listen for just a moment and fights down the surge of feeling in her gut as she turns away.
Penny pulls the door shut softly behind her as she steps out onto the porch, and she’s down the stairs and into the yard before she hears Sheldon’s voice from the porch.
“Where are you going?”
When she turns toward him, she sees him sitting in the porch swing, rocking the seat back and forth. The grass beneath her bare feet, is cool and green and she pokes at a dandelion with her toe. “We had this place when we were kids, I just wanted to-” Her voice trails off and she looks up at Sheldon. The night’s getting dark too quickly and she can barely make out his features, but she can see well enough to know he’s looking right at her. She shrugs and says, “You coming?”
She sees him swallow and pause, but he pushes up off the swing and heads toward her, and then they’re walking to the fort. Sheldon is quiet beside Penny as she leads him through the trees, hands stretched out in front of her as she navigates in the near dark. She stumbles over a root, but Sheldon catches her arm and pulls her upright before she falls. She walks farther in and smells juniper from the creek bed beyond, and the sweet, heady hayseed scent all around. The evening primrose is blooming, she can taste it on the wind, and she wants to drag Sheldon along by the hand and comb through all the land she owns to find one. Instead, she opens her eyes and finds his on her, quizzical in the way he narrows his brow and leans in just slightly toward her.
“Not much farther,” she says.
She finds the little hut just past the clearing, right where she knew it would be. The door sticks when she opens it, but she pushes her way inside. The room is smaller than she remembers and she looks around slowly, taking in every detail. She tries to match everything to a memory, but all she can think of is the sweltering heat of summer and the dusty feel of wood beneath her feet.
When she looks back to the door, Sheldon is still standing in the clearing, a wary look on his face. “Come on, Sheldon,” she says, “it’s not going to collapse on you.”
He takes a cautious step forward. “Its structural integrity is not my foremost concern.” He lifts his chin and tries to peer around her. “Is anything living in there?”
Penny rolls her eyes and pushes the door open wider in invitation. “It’s fine, I promise. Come on.”
He makes a face like he should know better, but eventually he sighs and moves toward her, ducking as he walks through the door and standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. She can’t help but grin at the odd angle of his neck and weird slope of his shoulders, and in the dark she can just make out the scolding look he gives her.
She drops onto the floor, leaning back against the wall, and Sheldon folds himself down beside her. Their hips and shoulders don’t quite touch, but she can still feel him beside her, solid and warm.
The air in the cabin is hot and musty and the only light comes through the open door, filtering in softly from the clearing. It’s barely light enough to make out Sheldon’s features next to her, but she feels the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes beside her. She leans over and runs her hand over the floorboards, looking for one certain spot: she finds it and runs her fingers around the small hole, and comes up with Tommy’s lighter, found right where he left it. Penny flicks it on and off and watches the shadows dance around them.
“You know, Catherine the Great tried to learn Russian so hard, she gave herself pneumonia.” Sheldon doesn’t answer her, or correct her. She pulls her thighs up against her chest and sets her chin on her knee. “You know how when you’re little, everything seems so much bigger than it really is? I used to think this fort was a mansion. The biggest tree house in Nebraska.” When she was little, this was a castle and a hospital and a prison, whatever their imaginations dreamed. Most often, it was sanctuary, a giant cathedral underneath the rising trees. Really, the room is really barely big enough to stand in, especially for Sheldon, and she’s not sure he could lay end to end without hitting his head on the wall. She remembers this place as a fortress, and really it’s not much more than a hovel.
“This place is so small. This farm, the house.” Her throat starts to constrict, but there aren’t any tears left. “And my parents. God, they’re both just so-” She digs her nails into the skin of her knees. “They’re so small.”
She wills herself not to cry, to concentrate instead on the steady motion of her breath in and out. She sits still for a moment and waits for Sheldon to speak, but he keeps quiet. He’s been doing that more and more these days, letting her ramble without interrupting, letting her work her problems out aloud. He probably read in an article online that communication is necessary in the grieving process and is trying to follow it to the letter.
She’s been rambling more lately about her childhood, about her past, and it comes to the surface again as she sits beside him, the sounds of the forest filling the silence between them. She can’t get the image of her father out of her head, the way he sat at dinner last night with his hand over her mother’s. She can hear Beth’s voice and Anne’s quiet sighs, and she finds herself saying, “Beth was always Dad’s favorite. She was the most like him.” Penny flicks the lighter on and off. “And Anne was the sweetest. And Tommy was the neediest, even though he’d never accept help. And I was just. Penny. I was just here. And I’m still here, and it’s like. He doesn’t even notice. It’s like he doesn’t even care.”
Penny watches a moth flutter in through the window, the spotty moonlight catching its wings. “I wish Tommy had been at dinner last night. He’d have stood up to Dad.”
“I’d like to point out that you broke your own rule. I didn’t bring Tommy up at all.”
“I know, Sheldon, you were very well behaved.” She stretches her legs out and crosses them at the ankles. “Let’s just sit here for awhile, okay?”
When Sheldon and Penny stand to go, he holds his hand out to help her up, and when she feels his palm against hers, his skin is rough and his hand is strong. She knows he’s changed since he got out here, both in appearance and in other, little ways. She never really takes the time to notice, let alone think deep, important thoughts about it, but Sheldon’s gotten softer since he’s been out here, less likely to snipe at her or correct her grammar. And she’d be lying to say that the way he talks to her mother, the way he sits with her and listens and they seem to genuinely get along, doesn’t hit her right in a soft spot she’s always had for him.
He starts to pull his hand away but Penny tightens her fingers and leans in toward him just slightly.
“Thank you,” she says. “For last night.” She doesn’t say anything more than that, doesn’t thank him for driving all the way into town without a valid driver’s license, which she knows probably nearly gave him hives. She doesn’t thank him for helping her out of the truck and into bed, which she doesn’t remember, exactly, but she’s pretty sure happened. She vaguely remembers someone tucking her covers up under her chin and brushing the hair off her face, and really there’s no one else that it could’ve been, but she doesn’t bring that up either.
Sheldon clears his throat and his voice is strange when he speaks. “You’re welcome,” he says. Penny looks down at her bare feet, at Sheldon’s fingers wrapped around hers, and flicks the lighter on and off again. She follows Sheldon out of the cabin, silent as they walk back. They make their way slowly through the forest, back out toward the house, and she can see the porch light on, a beacon set to lead them home. The whole time he keeps his hand in hers, warm and solid against her palm.
--
There’s a strange feeling in the house now, like they’re all waiting, coiled and prepared to spring up. Penny spends more of her time outside than she used to. She feels guilty, leaving her mom’s care to Sheldon, but it’s been a week since her mom announced that she was going to forego treatment, and they haven’t really talked about it.
Penny’s still mad at her dad for not telling her first, and at both of her parents for not involving her in the decision. She moved out here to be of value to the both of them, and it should’ve earned her more responsibility than Beth and Anne. Or something. It all just kind of sucks.
After a week of tense, horrible silence, Sarah puts her foot down. Bob is in the barn and Sheldon has conspicuously made himself scarce, and Sarah brooks no resistance as she leads Penny into the living room and sits her on the couch.
“I know you think I made this decision without you because I don’t value your opinion, but you should know better than that,” Sarah says. It’s not the most graceful of beginnings, and Penny prickles at her mother’s tone. It’s too rough, too hard. It sounds strange from this woman who’s never been anything but soft.
Penny crosses her arms against her chest, defensive. “It sure seems that way.”
“Penny,” her mother starts, but Penny interrupts.
“I came home to take care of you. To help you. And I’m here every day, and you don’t even include me in a decision like this? What am I supposed to think?”
Sarah leans forward and grabs Penny’s hand. “You’d have asked me to keep going, wouldn’t you?” There’s a tremor in her voice, and Penny keeps still, keeps her eyes on the floor and answers, “Of course, I would’ve.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you no.”
Penny’s eyes are full of tears, and she feels her voice getting louder, her throat constricting. “How can you give up? How can you just stop?”
“The trial’s in Baltimore,” Sarah answers. “I don’t want to move to Baltimore. I want to be here, with my family.”
“But Mom, I-”
“No,” Sarah says, with the decided, unyielding tone Penny knows all too well. “I am your mother. It’s not for you to decide for me.” There’s a terrible kind of give in her voice, a soft crack that makes Penny’s eyes spill over. “I know you’d take care of me forever,” she says, tucking the hair behind Penny’s ear and bringing her lips to her forehead. “I know you’d stay and do for me. But I don’t want it, Penny. I don’t.”
Penny slides her arm around her mother’s thin frame and lets herself be rocked back and forth. It’s not the heaving, sobbing ordeal it was that first time in the street and the truck and the shower. By the time Bob and Sheldon come back from the pastures, Penny’s face is dry and her head is in Sarah’s lap. They make dinner together, Penny and Sheldon, neither talking much as they work.
The next few weeks carry with them this same sense of quiet, of everyone working very hard not to disturb the hush in their house. Sheldon starts disappearing into the fields for hours at a time, a notebook tucked under his arm and a faraway look in his eyes Penny hasn’t seen since he got to Nebraska. Penny asks him what he’s working on, but he answers with long strings of science that Penny doesn’t understand. She doesn’t mind his absence though. It leaves her more time with Sarah and she’s glad of it, glad to have the days back with her mother.
Beth comes by more, usually with the kids. They all crowd into the living room and sit and recollect and it’s usually awful, more depressing than Penny has the stomach for. When Anne comes, all she does is cry. Penny and Sheldon usually head to the barn when it gets especially dreary. She taught him how to groom the horses, how to saddle and lunge them, and she watches his face while he stands in the round pen, and the horses run around and around.
Bob spends more time inside as well, sitting with Sarah on the couch or in their bedroom. He starts to look haggard and Penny does her best to keep him well fed and well rested. Penny’s not sure how, but somehow, between the three of them, everything gets done. There aren’t enough hours in the day for all the work to get done and to spend so long with Sarah, and all they are all the time is tired.
Penny hasn’t quite forgiven her father for not telling her about her mother’s decision not to pursue the trial out east. She understands Sarah’s reasoning well enough, but there’s no forthcoming explanation from her father and she learned long ago to let sleeping dogs lie. Penny is wise enough and tired enough to know that there’s no usefulness in holding grudges at this point, and she’ll only regret it later. She’s come to see her mother for what she is: loving, to a fault, and devoted beyond measure. She knows her mother isn’t perfect, but she recognizes the pieces of her she inherited, and the ones she was grateful not to get. As for her father, well. There are more important things to think about right now.
Penny gets less and less sleep as time goes on. She was always up early for chores around the farm, but now she wakes just before sunrise, suddenly gasping awake and looking wildly around her room. She always wakes up feeling like she’s missing something.
One morning when she comes down from her room, she hears voices from the porch. It’s been a month since Sarah made her announcement and she’s been spending more and more time in bed, but Penny can hear her now, her voice just barely filtering in through the open back door. Penny’s about to head past her to the kitchen when she hears another voice: Sheldon. She’d been expecting her father, but it’s not his deep bass that comes through the door. Penny creeps up, her bare feet padding silently on the wood floor, and presses her ear to the screen.
“Beth was the same way,” her mother is saying. Penny can hear the dull creak of the porch swing moving back and forth. “She was always getting into more trouble than the rest of the girls combined. Not quite so much as Tommy, though.”
Penny instinctively sucks in a breath. She misses her brother, but she’s too used to avoiding his name, to quickly changing the subject and moving on. She’s about to open the door and interrupt when she hears Sheldon ask, “How are he and his girlfriend liking their new apartment?”
It stops Penny up short to hear Sheldon ask about her brother like he knows him, like he knows the details of Tommy’s life and past and history. She doesn’t usually think too hard about what he and her mother talked about in all their afternoons together, but she wonders now. What stories did her mother tell? What anecdotes and memories is he privy to? She didn’t even know her brother had a girlfriend.
“Missy and her latest victim are currently co-habitating in Dallas. I’ve been warned I am not to tell our mother, as intercourse before marriage is a one-way ticket to hell and Ma knows how to use a shotgun.” She hears her mother laugh, a light, breathy sound that makes her throat catch.
“Do you miss Texas?” Sarah asks.
Sheldon doesn’t answer for awhile, and the only sounds are the creak of the swing and the morning murmurs of the cows coming out to the pasture. She can’t see his face, can only just see the corner of a quilt dragging along the floor as the swing rocks back and forth, but she can imagine what he looks like: defensive, with his face twisted up, and a condescending look in his eye. She expects a glib answer, something like she gets whenever she asks about his childhood or family life, but when he finally speaks, his voice is softer than she’s expecting.
“With very few exceptions, I haven’t been back to Texas since my father died. It’s not-” He pauses and a bird way out in the wood starts to whistle. “It’s not a place with the happiest of memories. I’d rather avoid unnecessary conflict.”
“Conflict between who?” Her mother’s voice is soft in a way that Penny’s never is, and it’s probably this more than anything that makes Sheldon answer.
Penny hears him breathe out, long and labored, like it pains him. Maybe it does. She’s never heard him talk sentimentally about any of this, and for a second she feels bad for listening, for spying, for intruding like she is. Still, she doesn’t step away.
“My mother,” Sheldon says, “is a very religious woman. My siblings and I kept up appearances for her sake, but we were by no means devout. But we pretended. My brother told me it was the nice thing to do, but I just wanted her to stop harassing me. My father didn’t pretend. He didn’t try to appease her, or placate her.” Penny bites her lip and leans her shoulder against the door frame. “He wasn’t the type of man to do something to make others happy. Not even us.”
It all sounds too familiar to Penny, and hits too close to home. A man who doesn’t pull punches or soften his words. A man with no give at all. Penny feels like she understands Sheldon better than ever, and maybe for the very first time. She wants to run out onto the porch and wrap her arms around him, and kiss his jaw and smooth her hands over his back. With all they’ve been through, she’s pretty sure he’d let her.
“When did he pass?” Sarah asks.
“I was in Germany,” Sheldon answers. “I was studying advanced theoretical physics. I was 17.”
Penny listens to him talk for awhile about his father and his family. He doesn’t drone on, doesn’t actually say much at all, but it’s still a mouthful. It still makes her uncomfortable, thinking about her own relationship with her father, about her past and her family. About the ways things could change, should change before her mother’s not around to see it.
Sheldon’s quiet for a long while and it’s Sarah’s voice that cuts the silence. “Sheldon, why did you come here?”
“I was on sabbatical from the University,” he answers too quickly. Sarah knows as well as Penny that this is only part of the reason, and Penny can only imagine the look her mother’s giving Sheldon right now. She hears him clear his throat awkwardly and answer, “I guess you could say I was lost. And then Penny’s letters came and I bought a train ticket. You’ll find I’m not naturally impulsive, but I suppose that’s the truth.” He says it like it’s the first time he’s thought of it, like it’s the first time it ever entered his mind that things aren’t going exactly to plan. He clears his throat again. “I was lost.”
“And now? Why are you still here?” Penny’s never known her mother to be so forward, to push where people needed to be pushed. That’s something Penny inherited from her father, or from Beth maybe. But Sarah’s changed since she got sick, and especially since she gave up the treatment. It makes Penny happy and heartbroken in equal measure. She waits for Sheldon’s answer, her throat and hands tight, but instead she hears the heavy fall of her father’s boots down the stairs. She jumps away from the door and heads into the kitchen, busying her hands without knowing where they fall.
When her father comes in to the kitchen, she’s struggling with a coffee filter, unable to separate the thin paper from the pack. He stops in front of the refrigerator and pulls out bread and jelly. They don’t say anything until the sounds of brewing coffee fill the kitchen, and Penny waits with her mug between her clasped hands.
Sheldon and her mother are still out on the porch. Penny thinks about Sheldon and his father. She thinks about Tommy out there somewhere in an apartment she’s never seen with a girlfriend she’s never met. She opens her mouth to speak, but then the toaster dings and her father says, “I’ll see you out in the barn in half an hour. Don’t waste time. There’s a lot to do today.”
Penny doesn’t answer. She waits until the coffee’s brewed and then pours herself a cup, and then starts breakfast.
She spends all day outside with her father but she never says the things she wants to. They tend the cows and clean the stables, and go over the books and write the business checks. By the time she heads back inside, she’s barely got time to shower before dinner. She and Sheldon sit at the kitchen table. Bob takes his plate upstairs to eat with Sarah.
After they eat, Penny does the dishes. It’s part of her bargain with Sheldon; one cooks, one cleans. Usually Sheldon sits and reads, or scratches incessantly in the notebook he’s always carrying around now, and Penny listens to the radio while she washes up. She’s scrubbing a frying pan and bobbing her head to horrendously catchy pop music when she hears the sounds of music coming from the living room. It’s not just music; it’s Sheldon playing the piano. She’d caught him eyeing it once or twice, but when she’d asked him to play he’d declined. She dries her hands off on a towel and steps into the living room and sees him, back straight and hands moving gently over the keys.
If someone had told her three months ago that Sheldon would be the person she’d come to most depend on while her mother slipped quietly away, she’d have laughed. She’s not laughing now.
She crosses the room and stands behind him and watches him play, her eyes following the lines of his arms and swift movement of his fingers. The floor creaks beneath her feet and he pauses, starts to turn and look at her, but she says, “Keep playing,” and rests a hand on his shoulder.
He plays bright tunes and haunting melodies. His hands are strong on the hard, heavy chords and they fly too quickly over the cheery runs. Penny stays behind him, her hand on his shoulder. He sways a little as he plays and she feels the rhythm in his shoulders and her chest, and she fights the strangled feeling in her throat.
Eventually, his hands come to rest over the keys, a low chord still echoing around them. “I don’t know any more,” he says. The words sound like they stick in his throat.
“Tommy moved to a new apartment?” It’s not what she thought she was going to say and it seems odd for this to be what’s at the forefront of her mind, but Sheldon doesn’t seem to find it strange.
“He moved in with his girlfriend a month ago. Your mother sent flowers.”
Penny takes her hand from his shoulder and turns, sitting down on the bench. She’s seated opposite Sheldon but they face each other, and Penny keeps her head down and just feels him next to her. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know he had a girlfriend.” She picks at the hole in the knee of her jeans. “You know things about my family even I don’t know.”
Sheldon runs his finger up and down the key, then presses it slowly. The note sounds hollow. “Her name is Sam.”
Penny takes a big breath and lets it out slowly, and her thigh presses against Sheldon’s as they sit. It’s been like this for months, Sheldon’s weight a calm, steady force against her side. In the cab of the truck and in the fort out back. In the kitchen and at the table, their hands meeting over plates and dishes. She’s spent the entire summer with him beside her, just like this, and it seems like the most natural thing in the world to lean over and press her lips to his.
He doesn’t startle or pull away. He lets out a sudden breath and she feels it against her cheek, feels him lean into her and turn his head just slightly. Her hand comes up to rest against his jaw and when she pulls away, his eyes are still open.
They don’t say anything for a long minute. Penny pulls back and spins around, faces the piano and nudges Sheldon’s shoulder with her own.
“Play something else,” she says.
He does.
--
PART THREE
Author: allthingsholy
Artist: juniperlane
Pairing(s): Penny, Sheldon/Penny
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Angst. The misuse of farm terminology. Bad familial relationships and lots of run-on sentences.
Word Count: 22000
For: bigbangbigbang
Summary: Penny moves back home to take care of her mother. Sheldon, for reasons of his own, follows her.
Notes: Giant huge thanks to several people for helping me get through this thing: lulabo, who has been the biggest advocate of this fic since day 1; juniperlane, who has been the best person to bounce ideas off of and deal with my general crazy, and who made a rocking awesome fanmix; and ishie, who is one helluva cheerleader.
|| Fanmix found here||
----
The first time Sheldon meets Beth and Anne and the extended family all together, she quizzes him for an hour the night before, on names and occupations and-most importantly-the crucial subjects that are to be avoided at all costs. No bringing up how suspicious and sketchy Anne’s boyfriend seems or how tired she always looks; no getting into the middle of a fight between Beth and John: they don’t need Sheldon’s opinion, and they really don’t want it.
“And what is the number one thing you’re not supposed to talk about?” she asks as she hears the crunch of gravel from a car pulling into the driveway.
Sheldon straightens the shirt Penny forced on him, tugging the collar all out of shape again. “No bringing up your brother,” he says, dodging Penny’s hands as they reach for his neck. “And if someone mentions the name Tommy, I suddenly have urgent business in the kitchen.” He only knows the basics, what he’s managed to cobble together from the bits of Tommy that manage to leak through: that he’s Penny’s older brother; that he’s not around; that he’s not welcome; that he calls once a week to talk to their mom, long conversations none of them are privy to and all of them wonder about.
Penny tucks her hair behind her ears and squints at Sheldon, her expression equal parts accepting and resigned. He stills looks more than a little awkward and out of place standing in her parents’ living room, but at least there aren’t aliens or superheroes drawn across his chest. She sees her dad holding the door open and Beth steps inside, and Penny nudges past Sheldon with a reassuring smile and heads over to hug her sister.
For the most part, Sheldon behaves himself. Penny keeps an eye on him as she hugs and teases the twins and marvels at how much bigger they seem to get every time she sees them.
Anne looks the same: tired and overworked. She hovers around Sarah while Penny keeps Matt occupied with talk of the Husker’s prospects for the fall: Coach Pellini is bringing up a stellar recruiting class, he tells her, and their ground game is sure to take them to a Bowl this year. Penny nods and out of the corner of her eye watches Sheldon and Jeremy talking animatedly in the corner. She’s taken aback for a moment at what her 13-year-old nephew could possibly be saying to keep Sheldon interested, but then she remembers: the comics. Sheldon had helped her pick out more than a few presents for her nephew, and she smiles, imagining the trouble Jeremy is bound to be in if he insults the wrong superhero.
Overall, the night goes smoothly. The food doesn’t end up burnt, and no one gets shot in the ass, so it seems like success. Every once in awhile, Beth catches Penny’s gaze and looks questioningly at Sheldon, but Penny just rolls her eyes and shrugs it off and goes back to her potato salad.
The conversation eventually turns to old stories of the past, as it so often seems to lately. Penny tries to find it charming instead of morbid, but it’s usually light-hearted enough. There are lots of stories to tell and most of them are old enough to be funny now: broken bones and near misses, hefty punishments for acts of teenaged rebellion and stupidity.
“I don’t regret it,” Beth says, shaking her head, her dark hair brushing against her cheeks. “I made it to that concert, damn it, even if I did show up covered in mud from the thighs down.”
They’re all roaring harder than is necessary, just glad to feel good and happy and alive. Under the sound of laughter, Sheldon whispers, “Who is this Cougar and why on Earth would you climb out your bedroom window to go see him?”
Penny leans over and knocks his shoulder with her own. “I’ll explain later,” she says to him, and then says to Beth, “In all fairness, this is a small town. There’s nothing to do besides find trouble. And if you can’t find any, you can always make your own.”
“Some of you were better at that than others.” It’s an off-hand comment from her father, said almost under his breath, and Penny has no doubt it was aimed at her. Her whole face goes slack and then her defenses raise up.
“No one was quite as good as Tommy though.” Penny’s voice is sharp and Sheldon goes tense beside her. She lays a hand on his arm to keep him in his seat and continues, “Tommy always had a special gift for trouble, don’t you think, Dad?”
He’s working the muscle in his jaw and Penny can feel the whole table around her buzzing, even though no one says a word. They’re stuck in a stalemate for what seems like forever when Sarah interrupts, saying, “I have an announcement,” she says. She runs her fingers over the table cloth, traces the pattern beneath her hand. It’s an heirloom or something, Penny’s pretty sure, something handed down from generation to generation, from mother to daughter. Penny finds herself wondering suddenly what pieces she’ll get, when the time comes, and the thought immediately pulls her up short. She tunes back in just in time to hear Sarah finish, “I’m not going to take the treatment.”
Penny feels her back go rigid, and her breath catches hard in her chest. She looks at her plate and doesn’t see anything, and doesn’t hear anything Beth says when her sister finally comes to and starts to argue. She keeps her head down, hands balled into fists on the table top. All Penny can think of are the stories she’s read her mother, of determined, steadfast women and the trials they lived through, of the strength of generations she’s so long relied upon.
When she finally does look up, the first eyes on her are her father’s. He’s got one hand flat against the table and the other locked around Sarah’s, and Penny knows that he knew this was coming, knew her mother had decided this and hadn’t said anything. Hadn’t told her. Hadn’t consulted her. She’s furious at the both of them, and her jaw aches from clenching it.
Sarah’s smile is brittle as she looks at each of her daughters in turn, and when she finally turns to Penny, she can’t meet her eyes.
Penny stands up, the backs of her knees roughly shoving her chair away from the table. “I can’t believe you didn’t talk to me about this first,” she says, hands pressed futilely into the tabletop. “I’m here, every day,” she says. She feels more than hears her voice crack, and with one last look at her mother, she pushes away from the table and heads outside, the door slamming loudly behind her.
She doesn’t think much about what she’s doing. She slides into the front seat of her dad’s car and heads into town, driving too fast. She doesn’t cry. Her blood’s set to boil in her veins and there’s a hard knot in her throat, where the sadness should be. Instead, all she is is angry. The whole way into town, all she thinks about is the last drive she took like this, with a box of letters in the front seat and her whole world crashing down around her. She finds her way onto Main Street, but she drives right past the post office in favor of the bar where she works. Jason’s behind the counter, rubbing the rag over the already clean wood, and she falls onto the stool with a loud, angry noise. Her chest is still heaving. Her tears still won’t come.
“Double shot of whisky,” she says. Her voice sounds strange, like she’s a very little girl, or a very old woman. She doesn’t feel like herself, and when she sees her reflection in the mirror behind the bar, her eyes are wild and her face is twisted and ugly. Jason sets the shot down in front of her, and when she throws it back, she doesn’t flinch.
She’s not sure how long she stays, and she doesn’t know how much she has to drink. Eventually, Sally comes and tries to match her drink for drink for awhile, but then she just drags Penny out onto the curb, and forces her to drink way too many glasses of water. The night is muggy and still, and there are tears streaming down Penny’s face before she even realizes she’s finally started to cry.
She’s tired, and upset, and really drunk, and if she had to name just one emotion that’s raking through her as she sits with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, it would be helplessness. She knew coming out here would be tough, that there was always the possibility that her mom might not get better and things would go this way, but Penny can’t stand how powerless she feels. Her whole world is spinning around her, and she can’t do a thing to stop it.
Sally sits with Penny until she’s all cried out, and her eyes are hot and sore, but finally dry. Her heaving chest finally slows and stills, until her breathing is shallow and raspy, and she’s almost completely quiet. Her head is throbbing and there’s still an ache inside, a wide, gaping hole behind her ribcage, but she tries not to think about it. She tries to stay focused on the feel of Sally beside her, on the feel of her hand rubbing slow, soothing circles onto Penny’s back.
They’re sitting like that, rocking back and forth, when Penny hears another car pull up to the curb. When she raises her head, wobbly on her neck like a newborn, she sees Sheldon climbing out of the cab of her father’s truck. He’s still got on the shirt she made him wear, but there are more buttons undone and some bright color is poking through at his collar. Penny squints her eyes to try to clear up her blurred vision, but her head feels heavy and unsteady on her shoulders, and she drops her forehead onto her arms instead.
She hears Sally thank Sheldon for coming, and hears Sheldon thank Sally for calling him, and if she weren’t drunk she’d be able to name the tone of voice he’s using right now.
“You sound like you’re worried, but that can’t be right,” she mumbles into her arms.
Sally bends down in front of her and lifts Penny’s head between her hands. “Penny, you need to get in the truck, so Sheldon can take you home.”
“I don’t want to go home,” she says. She knows she’s being whiney and difficult. She doesn’t really care. It’s her turn to be taken care of, she decides stubbornly, and let the rest of them deal with it for a change.
“Penny,” Sally says again, “please get in the truck.”
Penny feels like her whole body weighs a thousand pounds, like she couldn’t stand up if she tried. She opens her mouth to tell them that when she feels hands close around her elbows, and someone lifting her onto her feet.
Surprisingly enough, when she looks up, it’s Sheldon’s chest she’s pressing her cheek against. He looks down at her disdainfully and says, “I am not a cab service, and I am not a nurse. Please refrain from vomiting until I’ve deposited you at your house. In your bathroom. Away from me.”
She frowns at him, but still manages to put one foot in front of the other as he guides her back to the truck. When she’s securely deposited in the cab, she clumsily rolls down the window and yells to Sally, “Boot and rally, baby! Boot and rally!”
Sally spins on the sidewalk, her voice loud and ringing. “And if you boot all over your dad’s truck, that’s just one more mess he has to clean up!” Penny smiles at that, and leans her head back against the seat and waits for Sheldon to start the car.
Even drunk and half-asleep, Penny can tell that Sheldon’s driving way below the speed limit the whole way home. The window’s rolled all the way down, and Penny’s head is lolling back against the seat, the warm air blowing her hair around her face. Her eyes are closed, so she can’t actually see the fields they’re passing as they wind their way back to the house, but she doesn’t need to see them to know what’s there: the same fields that have always been there, being farmed by the same people who’ve always farmed them, who’ll live out their whole lives in a hundred-mile radius. She’s drunk and melancholy and feeling sorry for herself, and she’s embarrassed to be back in this town with these people, that her great escape just led her right back here.
When they finally pull up to the house, Sheldon turns off the engine and goes to open his door, but she stops him with a hand on his arm. “Just sit for a minute,” she says. The windows are down and the night is warm, and the crickets are chirping in the fields. Her tears start again, quietly, and Sheldon sits with her until she’s finally quiet.
--
When Penny wakes the next morning, her head is throbbing and her face is puffy. She barely opens her eyes long enough to flinch away from the sun streaming in through her window, and then goes back to sleep. She spends most of the day like this, drifting in and out of consciousness. She has strange dreams and wakes drenched in sweat, or freezing cold. In one, she’s an archaeologist on a dig, and she keeps shoveling handfuls of sand from a hole in the ground. She knows somehow that there is treasure there, but her hands keep coming up empty, with nothing with the fine grains that slide through her fingers.
When she wakes, she feels gritty and hot. She keeps very still until the room stops spinning, and then trudges off to the shower. She takes deep, calming breaths as she feels the grime wash away from her hair and face, and after she’s rinsed and clean, she turns the water up so hot she can hardly stand it and braces her hands against the shower wall. She lets the spray beat down on her back, rivulets running down her chest and abdomen, down her thighs and calves. Her skin stings and reddens, and she lowers herself onto the shower floor and wraps her arms around her shins and sits. She cries but she does not wail. Her breathing is labored because of the heavy steam, but she doesn’t weep.
When the water eventually starts to cool, Penny reaches up and turns off the shower. She wrings out her hair, and towels herself off. The mirror is fogged up and Penny can’t see her reflection, but she remembers the look on her face in the glass last night, and has no desire to see herself like that again. She knows that she’s heartbroken. She doesn’t need to see it.
By the time she gets back to her room, wrapped snugly in a towel, the last streaks of sunset are just visible over the treetops. Penny watches the light slide between the branches, the pinks and pale hues doing little to lighten her mood. Just past the fence is the spot where her dad set them up a tree fort, where they’d spend hours playing or lounging or sulking. Penny wonders if there’s still a pack of Tommy’s smokes under the loose floor board, or whether Anne’s magazines are still in a pile in the corner.
Penny pulls on shorts and a t-shirt and creeps down the stairs, slipping quietly to the back door. The light in the living room is blue and muted from the TV, and she can hear her mother and father, and the quiet hush of their voices. She stops to listen for just a moment and fights down the surge of feeling in her gut as she turns away.
Penny pulls the door shut softly behind her as she steps out onto the porch, and she’s down the stairs and into the yard before she hears Sheldon’s voice from the porch.
“Where are you going?”
When she turns toward him, she sees him sitting in the porch swing, rocking the seat back and forth. The grass beneath her bare feet, is cool and green and she pokes at a dandelion with her toe. “We had this place when we were kids, I just wanted to-” Her voice trails off and she looks up at Sheldon. The night’s getting dark too quickly and she can barely make out his features, but she can see well enough to know he’s looking right at her. She shrugs and says, “You coming?”
She sees him swallow and pause, but he pushes up off the swing and heads toward her, and then they’re walking to the fort. Sheldon is quiet beside Penny as she leads him through the trees, hands stretched out in front of her as she navigates in the near dark. She stumbles over a root, but Sheldon catches her arm and pulls her upright before she falls. She walks farther in and smells juniper from the creek bed beyond, and the sweet, heady hayseed scent all around. The evening primrose is blooming, she can taste it on the wind, and she wants to drag Sheldon along by the hand and comb through all the land she owns to find one. Instead, she opens her eyes and finds his on her, quizzical in the way he narrows his brow and leans in just slightly toward her.
“Not much farther,” she says.
She finds the little hut just past the clearing, right where she knew it would be. The door sticks when she opens it, but she pushes her way inside. The room is smaller than she remembers and she looks around slowly, taking in every detail. She tries to match everything to a memory, but all she can think of is the sweltering heat of summer and the dusty feel of wood beneath her feet.
When she looks back to the door, Sheldon is still standing in the clearing, a wary look on his face. “Come on, Sheldon,” she says, “it’s not going to collapse on you.”
He takes a cautious step forward. “Its structural integrity is not my foremost concern.” He lifts his chin and tries to peer around her. “Is anything living in there?”
Penny rolls her eyes and pushes the door open wider in invitation. “It’s fine, I promise. Come on.”
He makes a face like he should know better, but eventually he sighs and moves toward her, ducking as he walks through the door and standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. She can’t help but grin at the odd angle of his neck and weird slope of his shoulders, and in the dark she can just make out the scolding look he gives her.
She drops onto the floor, leaning back against the wall, and Sheldon folds himself down beside her. Their hips and shoulders don’t quite touch, but she can still feel him beside her, solid and warm.
The air in the cabin is hot and musty and the only light comes through the open door, filtering in softly from the clearing. It’s barely light enough to make out Sheldon’s features next to her, but she feels the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes beside her. She leans over and runs her hand over the floorboards, looking for one certain spot: she finds it and runs her fingers around the small hole, and comes up with Tommy’s lighter, found right where he left it. Penny flicks it on and off and watches the shadows dance around them.
“You know, Catherine the Great tried to learn Russian so hard, she gave herself pneumonia.” Sheldon doesn’t answer her, or correct her. She pulls her thighs up against her chest and sets her chin on her knee. “You know how when you’re little, everything seems so much bigger than it really is? I used to think this fort was a mansion. The biggest tree house in Nebraska.” When she was little, this was a castle and a hospital and a prison, whatever their imaginations dreamed. Most often, it was sanctuary, a giant cathedral underneath the rising trees. Really, the room is really barely big enough to stand in, especially for Sheldon, and she’s not sure he could lay end to end without hitting his head on the wall. She remembers this place as a fortress, and really it’s not much more than a hovel.
“This place is so small. This farm, the house.” Her throat starts to constrict, but there aren’t any tears left. “And my parents. God, they’re both just so-” She digs her nails into the skin of her knees. “They’re so small.”
She wills herself not to cry, to concentrate instead on the steady motion of her breath in and out. She sits still for a moment and waits for Sheldon to speak, but he keeps quiet. He’s been doing that more and more these days, letting her ramble without interrupting, letting her work her problems out aloud. He probably read in an article online that communication is necessary in the grieving process and is trying to follow it to the letter.
She’s been rambling more lately about her childhood, about her past, and it comes to the surface again as she sits beside him, the sounds of the forest filling the silence between them. She can’t get the image of her father out of her head, the way he sat at dinner last night with his hand over her mother’s. She can hear Beth’s voice and Anne’s quiet sighs, and she finds herself saying, “Beth was always Dad’s favorite. She was the most like him.” Penny flicks the lighter on and off. “And Anne was the sweetest. And Tommy was the neediest, even though he’d never accept help. And I was just. Penny. I was just here. And I’m still here, and it’s like. He doesn’t even notice. It’s like he doesn’t even care.”
Penny watches a moth flutter in through the window, the spotty moonlight catching its wings. “I wish Tommy had been at dinner last night. He’d have stood up to Dad.”
“I’d like to point out that you broke your own rule. I didn’t bring Tommy up at all.”
“I know, Sheldon, you were very well behaved.” She stretches her legs out and crosses them at the ankles. “Let’s just sit here for awhile, okay?”
When Sheldon and Penny stand to go, he holds his hand out to help her up, and when she feels his palm against hers, his skin is rough and his hand is strong. She knows he’s changed since he got out here, both in appearance and in other, little ways. She never really takes the time to notice, let alone think deep, important thoughts about it, but Sheldon’s gotten softer since he’s been out here, less likely to snipe at her or correct her grammar. And she’d be lying to say that the way he talks to her mother, the way he sits with her and listens and they seem to genuinely get along, doesn’t hit her right in a soft spot she’s always had for him.
He starts to pull his hand away but Penny tightens her fingers and leans in toward him just slightly.
“Thank you,” she says. “For last night.” She doesn’t say anything more than that, doesn’t thank him for driving all the way into town without a valid driver’s license, which she knows probably nearly gave him hives. She doesn’t thank him for helping her out of the truck and into bed, which she doesn’t remember, exactly, but she’s pretty sure happened. She vaguely remembers someone tucking her covers up under her chin and brushing the hair off her face, and really there’s no one else that it could’ve been, but she doesn’t bring that up either.
Sheldon clears his throat and his voice is strange when he speaks. “You’re welcome,” he says. Penny looks down at her bare feet, at Sheldon’s fingers wrapped around hers, and flicks the lighter on and off again. She follows Sheldon out of the cabin, silent as they walk back. They make their way slowly through the forest, back out toward the house, and she can see the porch light on, a beacon set to lead them home. The whole time he keeps his hand in hers, warm and solid against her palm.
--
There’s a strange feeling in the house now, like they’re all waiting, coiled and prepared to spring up. Penny spends more of her time outside than she used to. She feels guilty, leaving her mom’s care to Sheldon, but it’s been a week since her mom announced that she was going to forego treatment, and they haven’t really talked about it.
Penny’s still mad at her dad for not telling her first, and at both of her parents for not involving her in the decision. She moved out here to be of value to the both of them, and it should’ve earned her more responsibility than Beth and Anne. Or something. It all just kind of sucks.
After a week of tense, horrible silence, Sarah puts her foot down. Bob is in the barn and Sheldon has conspicuously made himself scarce, and Sarah brooks no resistance as she leads Penny into the living room and sits her on the couch.
“I know you think I made this decision without you because I don’t value your opinion, but you should know better than that,” Sarah says. It’s not the most graceful of beginnings, and Penny prickles at her mother’s tone. It’s too rough, too hard. It sounds strange from this woman who’s never been anything but soft.
Penny crosses her arms against her chest, defensive. “It sure seems that way.”
“Penny,” her mother starts, but Penny interrupts.
“I came home to take care of you. To help you. And I’m here every day, and you don’t even include me in a decision like this? What am I supposed to think?”
Sarah leans forward and grabs Penny’s hand. “You’d have asked me to keep going, wouldn’t you?” There’s a tremor in her voice, and Penny keeps still, keeps her eyes on the floor and answers, “Of course, I would’ve.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you no.”
Penny’s eyes are full of tears, and she feels her voice getting louder, her throat constricting. “How can you give up? How can you just stop?”
“The trial’s in Baltimore,” Sarah answers. “I don’t want to move to Baltimore. I want to be here, with my family.”
“But Mom, I-”
“No,” Sarah says, with the decided, unyielding tone Penny knows all too well. “I am your mother. It’s not for you to decide for me.” There’s a terrible kind of give in her voice, a soft crack that makes Penny’s eyes spill over. “I know you’d take care of me forever,” she says, tucking the hair behind Penny’s ear and bringing her lips to her forehead. “I know you’d stay and do for me. But I don’t want it, Penny. I don’t.”
Penny slides her arm around her mother’s thin frame and lets herself be rocked back and forth. It’s not the heaving, sobbing ordeal it was that first time in the street and the truck and the shower. By the time Bob and Sheldon come back from the pastures, Penny’s face is dry and her head is in Sarah’s lap. They make dinner together, Penny and Sheldon, neither talking much as they work.
The next few weeks carry with them this same sense of quiet, of everyone working very hard not to disturb the hush in their house. Sheldon starts disappearing into the fields for hours at a time, a notebook tucked under his arm and a faraway look in his eyes Penny hasn’t seen since he got to Nebraska. Penny asks him what he’s working on, but he answers with long strings of science that Penny doesn’t understand. She doesn’t mind his absence though. It leaves her more time with Sarah and she’s glad of it, glad to have the days back with her mother.
Beth comes by more, usually with the kids. They all crowd into the living room and sit and recollect and it’s usually awful, more depressing than Penny has the stomach for. When Anne comes, all she does is cry. Penny and Sheldon usually head to the barn when it gets especially dreary. She taught him how to groom the horses, how to saddle and lunge them, and she watches his face while he stands in the round pen, and the horses run around and around.
Bob spends more time inside as well, sitting with Sarah on the couch or in their bedroom. He starts to look haggard and Penny does her best to keep him well fed and well rested. Penny’s not sure how, but somehow, between the three of them, everything gets done. There aren’t enough hours in the day for all the work to get done and to spend so long with Sarah, and all they are all the time is tired.
Penny hasn’t quite forgiven her father for not telling her about her mother’s decision not to pursue the trial out east. She understands Sarah’s reasoning well enough, but there’s no forthcoming explanation from her father and she learned long ago to let sleeping dogs lie. Penny is wise enough and tired enough to know that there’s no usefulness in holding grudges at this point, and she’ll only regret it later. She’s come to see her mother for what she is: loving, to a fault, and devoted beyond measure. She knows her mother isn’t perfect, but she recognizes the pieces of her she inherited, and the ones she was grateful not to get. As for her father, well. There are more important things to think about right now.
Penny gets less and less sleep as time goes on. She was always up early for chores around the farm, but now she wakes just before sunrise, suddenly gasping awake and looking wildly around her room. She always wakes up feeling like she’s missing something.
One morning when she comes down from her room, she hears voices from the porch. It’s been a month since Sarah made her announcement and she’s been spending more and more time in bed, but Penny can hear her now, her voice just barely filtering in through the open back door. Penny’s about to head past her to the kitchen when she hears another voice: Sheldon. She’d been expecting her father, but it’s not his deep bass that comes through the door. Penny creeps up, her bare feet padding silently on the wood floor, and presses her ear to the screen.
“Beth was the same way,” her mother is saying. Penny can hear the dull creak of the porch swing moving back and forth. “She was always getting into more trouble than the rest of the girls combined. Not quite so much as Tommy, though.”
Penny instinctively sucks in a breath. She misses her brother, but she’s too used to avoiding his name, to quickly changing the subject and moving on. She’s about to open the door and interrupt when she hears Sheldon ask, “How are he and his girlfriend liking their new apartment?”
It stops Penny up short to hear Sheldon ask about her brother like he knows him, like he knows the details of Tommy’s life and past and history. She doesn’t usually think too hard about what he and her mother talked about in all their afternoons together, but she wonders now. What stories did her mother tell? What anecdotes and memories is he privy to? She didn’t even know her brother had a girlfriend.
“Missy and her latest victim are currently co-habitating in Dallas. I’ve been warned I am not to tell our mother, as intercourse before marriage is a one-way ticket to hell and Ma knows how to use a shotgun.” She hears her mother laugh, a light, breathy sound that makes her throat catch.
“Do you miss Texas?” Sarah asks.
Sheldon doesn’t answer for awhile, and the only sounds are the creak of the swing and the morning murmurs of the cows coming out to the pasture. She can’t see his face, can only just see the corner of a quilt dragging along the floor as the swing rocks back and forth, but she can imagine what he looks like: defensive, with his face twisted up, and a condescending look in his eye. She expects a glib answer, something like she gets whenever she asks about his childhood or family life, but when he finally speaks, his voice is softer than she’s expecting.
“With very few exceptions, I haven’t been back to Texas since my father died. It’s not-” He pauses and a bird way out in the wood starts to whistle. “It’s not a place with the happiest of memories. I’d rather avoid unnecessary conflict.”
“Conflict between who?” Her mother’s voice is soft in a way that Penny’s never is, and it’s probably this more than anything that makes Sheldon answer.
Penny hears him breathe out, long and labored, like it pains him. Maybe it does. She’s never heard him talk sentimentally about any of this, and for a second she feels bad for listening, for spying, for intruding like she is. Still, she doesn’t step away.
“My mother,” Sheldon says, “is a very religious woman. My siblings and I kept up appearances for her sake, but we were by no means devout. But we pretended. My brother told me it was the nice thing to do, but I just wanted her to stop harassing me. My father didn’t pretend. He didn’t try to appease her, or placate her.” Penny bites her lip and leans her shoulder against the door frame. “He wasn’t the type of man to do something to make others happy. Not even us.”
It all sounds too familiar to Penny, and hits too close to home. A man who doesn’t pull punches or soften his words. A man with no give at all. Penny feels like she understands Sheldon better than ever, and maybe for the very first time. She wants to run out onto the porch and wrap her arms around him, and kiss his jaw and smooth her hands over his back. With all they’ve been through, she’s pretty sure he’d let her.
“When did he pass?” Sarah asks.
“I was in Germany,” Sheldon answers. “I was studying advanced theoretical physics. I was 17.”
Penny listens to him talk for awhile about his father and his family. He doesn’t drone on, doesn’t actually say much at all, but it’s still a mouthful. It still makes her uncomfortable, thinking about her own relationship with her father, about her past and her family. About the ways things could change, should change before her mother’s not around to see it.
Sheldon’s quiet for a long while and it’s Sarah’s voice that cuts the silence. “Sheldon, why did you come here?”
“I was on sabbatical from the University,” he answers too quickly. Sarah knows as well as Penny that this is only part of the reason, and Penny can only imagine the look her mother’s giving Sheldon right now. She hears him clear his throat awkwardly and answer, “I guess you could say I was lost. And then Penny’s letters came and I bought a train ticket. You’ll find I’m not naturally impulsive, but I suppose that’s the truth.” He says it like it’s the first time he’s thought of it, like it’s the first time it ever entered his mind that things aren’t going exactly to plan. He clears his throat again. “I was lost.”
“And now? Why are you still here?” Penny’s never known her mother to be so forward, to push where people needed to be pushed. That’s something Penny inherited from her father, or from Beth maybe. But Sarah’s changed since she got sick, and especially since she gave up the treatment. It makes Penny happy and heartbroken in equal measure. She waits for Sheldon’s answer, her throat and hands tight, but instead she hears the heavy fall of her father’s boots down the stairs. She jumps away from the door and heads into the kitchen, busying her hands without knowing where they fall.
When her father comes in to the kitchen, she’s struggling with a coffee filter, unable to separate the thin paper from the pack. He stops in front of the refrigerator and pulls out bread and jelly. They don’t say anything until the sounds of brewing coffee fill the kitchen, and Penny waits with her mug between her clasped hands.
Sheldon and her mother are still out on the porch. Penny thinks about Sheldon and his father. She thinks about Tommy out there somewhere in an apartment she’s never seen with a girlfriend she’s never met. She opens her mouth to speak, but then the toaster dings and her father says, “I’ll see you out in the barn in half an hour. Don’t waste time. There’s a lot to do today.”
Penny doesn’t answer. She waits until the coffee’s brewed and then pours herself a cup, and then starts breakfast.
She spends all day outside with her father but she never says the things she wants to. They tend the cows and clean the stables, and go over the books and write the business checks. By the time she heads back inside, she’s barely got time to shower before dinner. She and Sheldon sit at the kitchen table. Bob takes his plate upstairs to eat with Sarah.
After they eat, Penny does the dishes. It’s part of her bargain with Sheldon; one cooks, one cleans. Usually Sheldon sits and reads, or scratches incessantly in the notebook he’s always carrying around now, and Penny listens to the radio while she washes up. She’s scrubbing a frying pan and bobbing her head to horrendously catchy pop music when she hears the sounds of music coming from the living room. It’s not just music; it’s Sheldon playing the piano. She’d caught him eyeing it once or twice, but when she’d asked him to play he’d declined. She dries her hands off on a towel and steps into the living room and sees him, back straight and hands moving gently over the keys.
If someone had told her three months ago that Sheldon would be the person she’d come to most depend on while her mother slipped quietly away, she’d have laughed. She’s not laughing now.
She crosses the room and stands behind him and watches him play, her eyes following the lines of his arms and swift movement of his fingers. The floor creaks beneath her feet and he pauses, starts to turn and look at her, but she says, “Keep playing,” and rests a hand on his shoulder.
He plays bright tunes and haunting melodies. His hands are strong on the hard, heavy chords and they fly too quickly over the cheery runs. Penny stays behind him, her hand on his shoulder. He sways a little as he plays and she feels the rhythm in his shoulders and her chest, and she fights the strangled feeling in her throat.
Eventually, his hands come to rest over the keys, a low chord still echoing around them. “I don’t know any more,” he says. The words sound like they stick in his throat.
“Tommy moved to a new apartment?” It’s not what she thought she was going to say and it seems odd for this to be what’s at the forefront of her mind, but Sheldon doesn’t seem to find it strange.
“He moved in with his girlfriend a month ago. Your mother sent flowers.”
Penny takes her hand from his shoulder and turns, sitting down on the bench. She’s seated opposite Sheldon but they face each other, and Penny keeps her head down and just feels him next to her. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know he had a girlfriend.” She picks at the hole in the knee of her jeans. “You know things about my family even I don’t know.”
Sheldon runs his finger up and down the key, then presses it slowly. The note sounds hollow. “Her name is Sam.”
Penny takes a big breath and lets it out slowly, and her thigh presses against Sheldon’s as they sit. It’s been like this for months, Sheldon’s weight a calm, steady force against her side. In the cab of the truck and in the fort out back. In the kitchen and at the table, their hands meeting over plates and dishes. She’s spent the entire summer with him beside her, just like this, and it seems like the most natural thing in the world to lean over and press her lips to his.
He doesn’t startle or pull away. He lets out a sudden breath and she feels it against her cheek, feels him lean into her and turn his head just slightly. Her hand comes up to rest against his jaw and when she pulls away, his eyes are still open.
They don’t say anything for a long minute. Penny pulls back and spins around, faces the piano and nudges Sheldon’s shoulder with her own.
“Play something else,” she says.
He does.
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PART THREE