"Oh, Bill dear, I think you're making entirely too much of this. So she has a boyfriend. It's not as though they've announced marriage."
"Don't even joke about such a thing. God knows what they've been up to all this time, right under our noses."
Quite certain she had heard enough, Martha pushed open the door of their large study to face her mother and father, each of whom were dressed for an evening that would undoubtedly include generous gratuity and conversation that was less so. From what little she had heard during her short stint in the hallway, her father was convinced his little cherub had been corrupted by no less than Lucifer himself.
"Martha, where have you been?" he asked, his words clipped.
The sharpness in William Clark's tone was just as it had been when she was a child and had broken the crystal vase that once sat upon the mantle over the fireplace to her left. All at once, she was five again, trying to hide broken fragments under the rug.
She swallowed, her eyes focused on his, but her words were faint. "I went to see Jonathan."
"Smallville Jonathan? That Jonathan? That's where you've been all this time?" At her brief nod, he turned to her mother, threw up his hands, and pointed an accusing finger in her direction. "You see? What did I tell you? The entire thing was probably his idea, her gallivanting about the countryside--"
"I went to apologize to him. Someone needed to," she announced matter-of-factly -interrupting what was most likely to be the verbal equivalent of a mule's backside-and crossed her arms, more bold.
"Bill, what is she talking about?"
He took three steps in Martha's direction, bent forward at the waist, hands on his hips. "I don't need you to do any apologizing for me, young lady, least of all to some hayseed from Smallville, Kansas trying to get a few rungs higher in life using my daughter. And since when do you use that tone with your father?"
Martha flung her hands down and balled them into tight fists, furious. "Since my father started behaving like someone else! I'm not going to dinner," she said brusquely, not bothering to wait for a response before whirling around and marching heatedly out of the room.
---
"Hey, Jon-boy, you got that minute? I know they're hard to come by around here."
Jonathan was stooping down, fastening new hinges on the stall doors with the same screwdriver that he had used for what must have been thousands of other repairs around the Kent farm. "One or two," he replied, not paying full attention to the conversation as he continued to work.
"I wanted to talk to you about--well, about a lot of things. Um..." Hiram took a seat on the old workbench behind him, bowed his head, hands touched together at the fingertips as though in prayer. Jonathan hadn't yet looked up from his task. "Son, things aren't going so great with the farm."
Not taking notice of the gruff, troubled tone, still busily replacing old parts with new, Jonathan answered glibly, "The place has never been a cash cow, dad. No pun intended." He chuckled a bit at his own humor, but his laughter died when, finally, he looked up and caught sight of his father, hunched forward, face in his hands, looking frail and defeated under the soft light cast from an overhead lamp.
The screwdriver dropped to the ground. "Dad, what is it?"
"You're a good boy, Jonathan. I know you spend a lot of time here when you'd rather be someplace--anyplace else. I know that," Hiram repeated, as though concerned his son might not have believed it the first time, and rubbed a hand lightly over his brow. "I suppose I can't blame you-I-I just always-it was never about money. It was about looking out that kitchen window day after day and knowing that my father and I had built those fences out there together. Mama wanted a storybook house, with a pretty white fence." He drifted off into the distant memory, then shook his head. "It was about working the land. Making something in this world, instead of tearing it down or selling out to the highest bidder."
Neither father nor son would ever claim to be an authority on the other, or even remotely well-acquainted in recent years, but if there was one thing Jonathan knew about Hiram Kent, it was that this was not him. The father he knew would have come in here, rolled up his sleeves, and pitched in beside him with a word or two about the news, grades, or other things that needed to be done that day. He would have complained about the never-ending length of their bank statements and the unerring shortage of daylight hours.
But this? No. This was not his father.
Jonathan placed a hesitant hand to the man's left shoulder. "If there's something wrong..." he urged, unease rising in his chest and seeping into his belly.
Hiram turned away, looked down, then up again, facing his son. He cleared his throat with a half-laugh and dropped his hands into his lap. "Your dad's being a sentimental fool, Jonathan. I just wanted you to know that I appreciate all the long hours you've spent keeping an old man's dream afloat."
Sentiment wasn't something either normally did well. Having it thrust prominently between them like an extravagantly wrapped gift, when all you've brought to the party is a dime-store card, left the younger man groping blindly for a response. "Dad ...before, when I said I had a lot to do, I didn't mean..."
"I know you didn't." Hiram shrugged off any further conversation on the matter, got to his feet, placed a friendly arm around his son's shoulders, unsure and awkward with the gesture but genuine with its intent. "Don't you worry about this," he said, referring to the repairs. "It'll hold till tomorrow." They walked out of the barn together.
"So...Martha seems like quite a girl."
"Yes, she is," young Jonathan agreed proudly, allowing the inner child that still craved his father's approval to tiptoe out of the corner he'd been left in for so many years. The tension of earlier faded to a reverent peace that settled in the soft reflection of his eyes. "She's-" He paused thoughtfully, searching for just the right description before finally settling on "special."
"Ah. I know the feeling," the elder Kent reminisced, as they strolled along, an arm still hugged around his son's shoulders.
The sun eased its way slowly from the evening sky, taking its time as it dipped beneath the dark horizon; the Kent men were sharing something more than hellos, and it seemed as if even the heavens above were sitting up and taking notice.
TBC...