Work Text:
Lyla Garrity doesn't make plans any more.
That's what she thinks of when she thinks of Dillon, plans that never turned out the way she meant them to, things she believed in with all her might and then watched slip away.
Five years ago, she had a vision of how college would be. She and Jason would be engaged, maybe even married. Her parents would still be together; they'd visit on weekends and she'd walk her family around campus showing them her favorite coffee shops, the places she and Jason studied, the cozy little apartment they’d decorated together. On Saturday, they'd sit on the sidelines cheering Jason on. Later, when things fell apart with Jason, those plans shifted to include Tim.
Those dreams, and she realizes now that's all they were, left her disappointed, stumbling for footing when carefully laid foundations crumbled under her feet. So she doesn't plan anymore. Instead she sits on the steps of the downtown Nashville library and reads Faulkner while sun warms her skin and spends more times in libraries and museums than she does in bars.
She doesn't attend a single football game in her first year at Vanderbilt, though sometimes when she drives past a stadium, even when it's empty, she can still hear the crowds cheering. And, though it's been years since she wore the Panthers uniform, she has to steady her feet and hands as the muscle memory of some Panthers cheer that seems years and millions of miles away rushes through her body.
She has a feeling Dillon will echo in her forever.
She calls her daddy every Sunday after church. They talk about the sermons they listened to but first he tells her Friday night's scores, recounts the best plays of the night with a level of detail that surpasses any attention he ever paid to her activities. She thinks he comes closer to crying when Eric Taylor leaves Dillon than he did the day she packed her things and set out for Nashville. Still, it's a comfort to hear his voice, to know he and Dillon remain ever the same.
She prays every night, for her daddy and Buddy Jr., for Tim, for Jason. (For her mother and sister too, but she has a feeling they don't need it as much.)
So much of her heart is in Texas. But she can breathe here in Nashville in a way she couldn't in Dillon.
There is a boy, a boy who doesn’t seem as life and death as Jason or Tim. Her heart doesn't break with every missed phone call or canceled dinner. They laugh and kiss in the library in between study questions for their final exams. She sleeps in his shirts and he makes her breakfast on Saturday mornings. But she doesn't map out their future together, doesn't even picture them having one. She isn't sure if that's because she's getting older or if Tim really was the love of her life and she'll never feel that intensely for someone again. It's easy, falling back into Tim when she returns to Dillon. (It's always come too naturally, slipping into other people as parts of her dissolve, fade away.) Weeks later she’s back in her Nashville apartment, surrounded by the life she's built here, brick by brick. It’s a breath released when she realizes, even if he was the love of her life, she can live without him.
At the start of her junior year, she takes a job at a phone bank fundraising for the university. Just a few weeks after she starts, her name is at the top of the board for most funds raised. Her supervisor pulls her aside one night as she's putting on her coat to leave, says she's good at this and she should consider fundraising as a career. When she tells him about on the phone later that week, she can hear the pride in her daddy's voice.
She was good at cheerleading but it was never her dream. It was the only natural path for a Garrity girl who craved her daddy's attention. There was no guarantee he'd show up at her dance recitals. As a young girl, she'd spent a lot of time staring out into the audience to find him, only to spot an empty seat by her mother. But, he'd show up to watch her cheer for the Panthers. It really wasn’t about her and it wasn't enough but it was better than nothing.
This is different, his pride in something she came to on her own.
That summer she takes an internship as a fundraiser for the youth ministry programs at her church. She talks to people about church, how it saved her when she was lost, how she sees it saving other kids. People respond and soon the church is expanding their youth ministries and developing programs for at-risk teens in the community. She cooks dinner with the kids on Sunday night in a kitchen her work helped pay for, feels God has shown her where she needs to be and she alone has gotten herself there.
Before Jason was hurt, she didn't realize life could be cruel to good people. If she met that girl now, that girl who believed so fiercely in the fairytale, she's not sure if she would shake her or just hold her tight and not let go. She had a lot of hits coming and she was in no way prepared for them.
Because those things she planned, she realizes now, they revolved around other people - what they needed from her, what they expected from her, what she thought she needed from them. Her certainty back then was an illusion born out of naiveté, her desire for things to be simple. She's learned now people don't fit into her life easily, nor she into theirs. People change, shift when you least expect them to, they have accidents, they make mistakes, so does she. She's becoming okay with that, learning to navigate it with fewer bumps and bruises, learning to treasure the ones she does have because they're her own now, no one else's.
The Bible her mama gave her when she was five years old sits on her nightstand. Margins that were once pristine are now filled with notes and questions in Lyla's neat cursive. The Bible is no longer a map, but a lighthouse. It illuminates her path but does not guide it.
She no longer has the blind certainty of someone who knows exactly what's around the corner.
What she still has is faith. She’s come to realize it’s more than enough.