Crossing Oceans (7 page)
She opened her mouth to answer but hacked instead. She continued to cough until her face turned an alarming shade of purple. I took the handle of her tank in one hand and with the other I led her to a chair to sit. Pink returned to her skin as she sucked in several breaths.
I sat on the armrest and rubbed her back. “In case you forget that my time is short, I’m reminding you. I have no other options. I need Dad’s promise to raise Isabella. I know he’s not the world’s greatest father, but at least he won’t abuse her and will provide for her physical needs. I need to get my ducks in a row now. I have to tell him.”
When she started coughing again, I walked back through the kitchen and descended the stairs. Unlike the ones leading to the second floor, more than just the last step of these creaked. Every other one squalled under my weight. The sound was familiar and comforting. I had long ago memorized which ones would shriek and which would merely groan as my weight passed over them.
A wave of soft music met me at the bottom. It was a song that stopped my heart. “Sea of Love.” It was her song, or rather, theirs. The song my parents danced to at their prom, then wedding. The song my father softly hummed over my mother’s casket as he leaned in to kiss her one last time.
My insides knotted as I remembered today’s date. July 10—the sixth anniversary of my mother’s death.
I crept toward the studio door, which stood open just a crack, and peeked in. A portable CD player sat upon a rustic wooden shelf, serenading my father with the mournful tune.
He had his back turned to me, and I could clearly see the canvas he was painting on. The portrait was amateurish at best. If he hadn’t made the woman’s dress lavender, I might not have known it was her. Lavender had been my mother’s favorite and the color of the dress we buried her in. Seeing my father mourn her anew flooded me with crude emotion. Grief tore at my heart like barbed wire. Why did she have to leave us? It made everything that was right in our family wrong.
The steps creaked behind me, but I couldn’t take my eyes off my father long enough to turn around and look. Craig whispered my name, but I didn’t answer. His hands turned me around. I hadn’t realized I’d been crying until he wiped the tears from my face. My shoulders trembled as he pulled me to him. There was solace in feeling his chest rise and fall against my cheek and his strong arm wrap around my shoulders. He smelled of pine and hard work, and that too comforted me somehow.
When I pulled away, I caught a glimpse of disappointment in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m sorry you’re sorry.” He drew me against him once again and held me.
I patted his back twice to replace any notion of romance with one of friendship, then stepped backward. “Why aren’t you at work?” I glanced at my father through the cracked door. He continued on, either oblivious to our presence or ignoring us.
Craig ran a hand through his hair, making it spike. “I know today’s a hard one for your dad. I just popped in to check on him.”
Craig’s remembering the anniversary only served to make me feel worse for forgetting it. He rubbed his neck and peeked in at my father. “At least this year he got out of bed.”
It seemed strange to me that this man who had been a mere acquaintance of mine would now be so intimately connected to my family, so intimately connected to me. It struck me as more than a little odd that while most people our age had left home or were anxious to, Craig would take up residence with my family. Curiosity got the best of me. I had to know what his deal was. Besides, I told myself, he might stick around awhile. I needed to learn more about him for my daughter’s sake. “Have you got time for a cup of coffee?” I asked.
He seemed taken aback by my question and threw a glance at his watch. “I’ve got at least three hours’ more work to do on this job. I promised I’d have it wrapped up today. How about if I take you and Bella to dinner when I finish?”
“Make it pizza at Chuck E. Cheese’s and you’ve got a deal,” I said.
He slapped a hand over his heart as though he’d been shot. “Only for you would I agree to that torture. I’ll warn the old lady she doesn’t need to cook for us.”
Normally someone referring to my sweet grandmother as
old lady
would get my dander up, but Craig said it with affection.
He told me good-bye, then bolted up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and disappeared out of sight.
It of course dawned on me that Craig might have felt more than brotherly toward me. I had entertained that same assumption a few times back in high school when I’d turned around in class and found him staring.
He was handsome, intelligent, hardworking, and all the other things I would want in a man, but romance was the last thing a dying woman needed. And the last thing a young man in his prime needed was to develop a crush on a dying woman. I decided, for his sake, I would tell him everything over dinner.
For my father, the truth would have to wait. I leaned into the doorjamb, resting my shoulder against it as I watched him. “Sea of Love” faded to silence. He set his paintbrush on the easel, walked over to the CD player, and hit a button.
The song began again.
I stood next to Craig as he studied the lit Chuck E. Cheese’s menu hanging above the glass counter.
Taking Isabella’s face in my hands, I guided her to look at me. “Do you want plain or pepperoni?”
“Pepperoni!” The way she bounced around, I’d have thought she needed to use the bathroom if I hadn’t just taken her.
The teen behind the counter pulled a loose thread from her red polo shirt as she waited.
I stepped forward and ordered the family value meal. Turning to Craig, I asked, “Do you want anything besides pizza?”
He tilted his head as though considering his choices, then said no. The teen set four paper cups on the counter, a small sandwich board with a number twenty-three on it, and a cup full of gold coins. Isabella snatched them up, bent her neck over the cup, and shook it. She jangled behind us as Craig and I made our way toward the empty booth straight ahead. While I filled Isabella’s pockets with tokens, he slid into his seat.
A dark smudge ran under Isabella’s left eye like Indian war paint. I licked my thumb and rubbed it away before she could protest. “You want me to come with you?”
Of course I already knew the answer. She required my assistance at Chuck E. Cheese’s as much as I required hers at Pier 1. She mumbled something I couldn’t make out and left.
Craig held up the hand the staff had stamped when we’d entered. “Invisible ink—how cool is that?”
I watched dirty white socks emerge from the end of the tube slide, followed by the little boy who wore them. When his gaze met mine, I wiggled my fingers at him. Sheepishly he looked around, jerked his hand halfway up, then ran off. “Bella thinks everything about this place is cool.”
Bells rang, whistles blew, and children all around us shrieked. Craig looked around and shook his head. “This place is like Vegas for kids.”
I set our small plastic number in the center of the table and grabbed the cups. “C’mon, let’s go get our drinks.”
Craig followed me to the fountain machine, his eyes darting from preteens riding mock Jet Ski video games to the little boy pedaling like mad on a bike that rose on a pole from his efforts. An Asian girl zinged by, nearly toppling Craig. He caught her right before she plowed into him. Muttering an apology, she tore away, chasing after a blonde girl about the same age.
He glanced around. “Where’s Bella?”
I held a cup against the Hawaiian Punch lever, watching ice cubes bob in the rising red liquid. “She’s around. I don’t worry too much here. You can’t leave without matching numbers. She’ll be fine. Besides, hawkeyed mothers lurk everywhere.”
I filled my own cup with Sprite and Craig got himself a Coke. I snapped a lid on each, and Craig came behind me, stabbing in straws.
Just as we set our drinks down on the table, Isabella popped up in front of us like a jack-in-the-box, took a sip of her punch, slapped three rows of paper tickets she’d won on the seat, and raced off again.
Craig squinted at me, dimples sinking into his blond scruff.
“What?”
“What what?”
“Why are you grinning at me? Do I have something on my face?” I patted my fingertips around the corner of my mouth.
“Just a nose.”
“Then stop looking at me like that. You’re making me nervous.”
Dropping his gaze to his hands, Craig ran a thumb over his knuckles. “You know I never got what you saw in Preston. He was such a geek.”
My first thought was that Craig had been a bigger geek than David—overweight, acne-prone, and shy—but I decided it wouldn’t be particularly kind to say so. “I guess I clung to the first guy who showed me attention. I was really starving for it back then.”
“You, starving for attention? That’s hard to believe. You were the prettiest girl in school.”
Looking into his eyes, I saw my reflection. In it I looked lovelier than I felt. Mama Peg had told me long ago that I would know a man loved me when I could see myself in his eyes. It was nonsense, I knew that, but my stomach still fluttered nonetheless. Pulling my gaze away, I took a sip of soda. I felt the coldness of the liquid slide down my throat all the way to my empty stomach. “So how in the world did you end up living at my dad’s house?”
“I’m sure you remember my mom left us when I was little?”
I didn’t but nodded just the same.
“So it was just me and Dad. He did nothing but work, drink, and have an occasional pajama party with a bleach blonde. I pretty much raised myself. When I dropped out of college, he started charging me rent, so I left.”
An infant cried behind us. I snuck a glance over my shoulder at the father scooping her from the mother’s arms. I turned back around. “What’s the difference if you pay rent to your father or mine?”
“My dad was trying to charge me more than he was paying for the mortgage.”
“Nice,” I said, thinking it was not nice at all.
“It was his way of trying to force me to go back to college, I think, but I didn’t want to. He thought if I didn’t get a degree, I’d end up just like him. I guess that was the last thing either of us wanted. Anyway, I got to thinking about you one day. Wondering what you were up to. I drove to your house, hoping maybe you had broken up with Preston and . . .” His cheeks flushed crimson. “As Providence would have it, there was a For Rent sign on the saddle barn.
“So I didn’t get to see my friend Jenny, but I did get a decent place to live that cost about a third the price my old man was charging. Your dad’s the one who talked me into starting the landscaping business. That’s how I lost the weight, by the way. Who needs a gym when you’re shoveling dirt and hauling tree limbs all day? I love your dad and Mama Peg. They’ve become the family I wish I had. I know someday I’ll have to move on, but I just can’t imagine leaving them.”
I cleared my throat, feeling defensive. “Yeah, well, someone might feel the same way about your father, not knowing the whole story.”
When his callused finger brushed mine, I found myself liking his touch more than I should. “Easy. I’m not judging you, Jenny. I know there’s a lot that’s happened that I don’t know about.”
The waitress picked up the number from our table and replaced it with a pepperoni pizza and a stack of paper plates.
As she walked away, Craig lifted a steaming triangle from the pie and placed it on a plate in front of me, then took one for himself.
I scanned the perimeter for Isabella and found her at a toddler’s version of a video game. She clapped her hands, then ripped off a row of tickets sticking out of the machine like a paper tongue.
“So whatever happened between you and David?”
Trying to keep my pain from showing, I leaned back in my seat. “Well, basically, he told me he didn’t love me.”
Craig shook his head. “Wow.”
Wow
was right.
“Was that before or after he fathered your child?”
“Take a wild guess.”
He picked at a piece of pepperoni. “You really loved him, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Has he been a part of her life at all?”
I shook my head, feeling miserable.
“Man, what a jerk. If I had you two, no way I’d ever—”
“He didn’t know,” I whispered.
Craig’s eyebrows shot up.
I tore off a piece of napkin and began to roll it between my fingers. “I’m guessing he knows now. My father told his father last night.”
“Didn’t you want him to know?”
“I wanted to tell him myself.” I took a small bite of pizza.
Isabella’s cheeks blazed red as she plopped next to me and sucked down a gulp of her drink. I laid a piece of pizza before her.
“Mommy, I have a new boyfriend.”
“Oh, really?” I took another bite.
She spoke around a mouthful of cheese and crust. “Uh-huh, his name is Jimmy. We’re gonna get married.”
Craig stared at her with such a disapproving expression that I couldn’t look at him without wanting to laugh. I focused instead on Isabella, trying to make it at least appear as if I took her engagement seriously. “Well, congratulations, sweetness.”
As Isabella inhaled her slice, Craig gave me a look that asked what I intended to do about this situation. When I said nothing, he crossed his arms. “You’re a little young to be into boys, don’t you think?”
She reached over and grabbed a piece of pepperoni off his half-eaten slice.
My mouth dropped open at her rudeness. “Bella!”
“Pepperoni’s fattening anyway.” Craig patted his stomach. “Go ahead and take them all.”
Without missing a beat, Isabella picked off the remaining two circles. “Mommy, are you going to marry Craig?”
My daughter had been obsessed with marriage lately, so the question didn’t catch me off guard. “No, honey, Craig and I are just friends.”
“You’re never gonna get married!”
Craig’s gaze fixed on her as he sipped his Coke. “Why do you think your mother is never going to get married?”
“Because she doesn’t have any boyfriends.” Isabella planted her fists on her waist and rolled her eyes. “You need a boyfriend to marry you.” She gave him a look that screamed
duh
.