Quest and Tillie

Chapter 22: For Us

I found myself knocking on an unknown woman's door, unsure as to my reception.

Unsure if I'd be successful in my mission, but still hopeful.

When Quest had given me a tour of the house he'd built for me, I'd been watching him to see how he felt about the house. I already knew how I felt about it, but he wasn't giving much away and I was honestly curious, not because how he felt was going to change my mind, but because I wanted to know. Building this house had been a promise he'd made to me and kept. He'd built it by himself, pretty much, and I could tell that instead of it feeling like he was building my dream home, as we'd talked about so long ago, he was performing penance. He was building it for me, not us.

So when he finished the tour and we were standing on the deck he'd built, looking out into the backyard, I turned to him.

"Tell me how you feel about it. About the house."

Quest didn't want to talk about, I could tell. "Tillie, I'm so fucking relieved it's done, it's not even funny."

The truth but not what I wanted to know. "But tell me how you feel about it," I pushed.

Quest looked away from me for a minute before meeting my eyes. 

"OK. There's a lot of pain in that house for me, Til. It hurt every single minute being in there, like agony, building a home that should have been ours. And I'll be honest: I cried a shit ton when I was in there working on it, thinking all the time about why I was building it for you and not for us, and knowing that as horrible as I felt, it was nothing compared to what you have to live with. I was just glad when I got the bathrooms done so I didn't have to keep going outside to throw up. A lot of times, I just had to walk out and leave for the night, even before I finished everything I wanted to for that day, and that's why it took so fucking long to build."

For a minute, I just took in his words and his raw honesty. Quest would never have told me that before, and I never would have pressed.

"So what if I said I wanted to live here in this house with you?"

"I'd say we needed to talk about it because I don't want to live in this house." He ran his hands up and down my arms. "You're home to me, Til. Not a building or a place. You. But this house would be hard for me to live in, even with you."

"So, you won't be upset when I sell it?"

His arms drew me to him. "Hell, no, Tillie. Not at all. It's yours to do whatever you want with. Told you that from the start."

I didn't need to see his face to recognize the relief in his voice. That only reinforced the idea I had that was taking shape in my head and had been bubbling in the back of my mind for months.

Four weeks later, I wandered the house as I waited for a real estate agent, thinking about Quest building it by himself. It had been our dream, something he'd promised me from the time we were still in high school. 

"Gonna build you your dream house, someday, Tillie," he'd vowed as we lay on blankets in the back of his pickup truck, those eyes of his shining with determination and happiness as he leaned over me. "We'll have our children and raise them in our home and when I walk through the door every night to all of you, it'll always be the best moment of my day." 

Those pretty pictures of the future had grown and been refined over the years. Our own home had been something we'd looked forward to, something we'd wanted to work toward together. Then Quest had crushed our dreams. 

But Quest had built this house for me because of that long-ago promise. He'd sold the trucks that had been so important to him, held such personal meaning for him, so he could keep that promise to me after breaking the most important one of all. He'd lost me so nothing else had mattered to him, not even those trucks that had held such memories for him. He let go of everything because, after losing me, nothing mattered to him.

As I admired the beautiful workmanship and thought about the months and months of labor Quest had put into this house, I could imagine him working here, night after night, hammering, drilling, measuring, cutting -- every movement made more difficult by the weight of his guilt pressing down on him. I could picture his face, see the pain he felt every minute he spent building a home for his wife whom he'd betrayed.

This house had been built from his remorse and tears, and I could feel the heaviness in every room. But I could also feel the love that had built it as well. The commitment to me despite what he'd done.

The realtor and I signed the contract, she put it up for sale, apparently not able to pick up on the sadness permeating the house, and one month later, I closed on it.

And now I was here, and the beautiful, silver-haired woman who had just opened her front door to me was looking at me curiously.

"Are you Beryl Nevins?" I asked.

"Yes. And you are?"

"Tillie Sullivan. I believe you bought my husband's 1956 Ford F-100 Shelby pickup truck?"

Her head tilted. "Yes, I did."

"This is going to sound really strange, but would you be willing to meet me for coffee in town? I'd like to talk with you and tell you a story about that truck."

"That sounds intriguing," she said after studying my face for a moment. "Let me grab my purse and I'll meet you at Brewsters. 

Fifteen minutes later, we each had a cappuccino in front of us, and I began telling her a story. My story. Quest's story. Our story.

Of two teenagers falling in love, thinking love would always be easy.

Of our heartbreak at finding out it wasn't when Quest had betrayed our love.

Of living apart and working on ourselves, discovering who we were apart from each other and what we wanted to do.

Of discovering that being apart didn't help the hurt and the emptiness we both felt.

Of exploring if there was a way back to each other and forging something new, welding together the places where we'd broken with what we'd learned.

"He never should have sold his truck, Tillie. It meant so much to you both," Beryl said when I finished.

"He told me he didn't care about anything after he betrayed me," I said. "The trucks, the business, none of that. The only thing that mattered to Quest was building the house so he could keep one promise to me."

"And what do you want, Tillie?"

"I want to buy his truck back from you," I told, meeting her eyes.

Smiling, she took a sip of her drink. "I think that can be arranged," she said.

Then she told me her story, of her husband's death and buying Quest's truck because her husband had always wanted a Shelby pickup but had never gotten around to buying one before he died.

"But after I bought it, I realized it was a mistake because my husband was the one who wanted it, not me, and buying it after the fact...I missed him so much but the truck didn't bring him back."

We worked out a price, and the following Friday when I didn't have classes, I had my mom drop me off at the coffee shop right by Beryl's bank where I was meeting her. I'd arrived early so I could send my mom on her way before Beryl arrived since I didn't want anyone knowing about this before Quest. Mom assumed it had something to do with a classmate and didn't ask too many questions.

When Mom left, Beryl arrived not too long after. She deposited the cashier's check, transferred the title to me, and I drove her back to her house, where she hugged me and wished us luck.

Then I drove the hour back to town, pulling up in front of Sullivan Autobody. I honked the horn several times until Quest walked out in his coveralls, his eyes going wide at the sight of me in the truck.

He looked confused, then stunned and then he was hurrying to me as I opened the door and hopped out of the truck. Before I could say anything, he grabbed my face in his hands -- for the first time ever not caring if he got grease on me -- and kissed me long and hard.

"This truck started us off," I said by way of explanation. "I missed it."

"I missed you. Didn't give a damn about the truck," he said, kissing me again. "I can't believe you got it back for me, Til."

"I didn't," I said.

At his surprised look, I continued. 

"I got it back for us."