Full of Grace (18 page)

“What’d I tell you about taking apart other people’s things?”

“To not to.”

“That’s right,” she seethes, but she turns her laser beam glare to the three others. “What else do I need to know about?”

“Beck was jumping,” Sher’s sister whispers.  Beck’s eyes get wide.

“Whitman threw that guy’s poopy cereal all over the floor!”

“Dani was using his perfume!”

The little girl elbows her squealing brother.  “That wasn’t perfume!  It was granola oil, and it didn’t even smell good!”

“It’s
canola
oil, stupid,” Whitman corrects her under his breath.

“Enough!” Sher stomps one foot and the kids clamp their mouths shut.  “This is
my
house now.  All of you had better behave while you’re here, or you can’t come back, you hear?”

They nod and Chandler loses it.  He sniffles as if Sher just beat him, and Dani joins in.  Sher doesn’t ease off.

“You are all going to sit here until I’m done with my hair.  If anybody gets off this couch, so help me, they’re in
big
trouble, got it?” 

When they nod, the last two finally start sucking wind, their lips flapping as they try to stop themselves from crying.  Sher seems satisfied.

“If you behave,” she says a little more softly, “we can have fun, but we won’t do anything if even one of you acts up, understand me?  Now sit and watch your cartoons.”

“Okay,” they answer in unison.  Sher turns and blows past me with an apologetic grimace.  “Sorry.  They won’t do anything else.”

“No problem,” I say.  I’m absolutely floored.  I pretty much just watched Sher single-handedly dismantle the atomic bomb of her siblings.

The bathroom door closes and when I turn back to the couch, the four of them finally look up at me, each with teary, remorseful eyes.  Their lips are all quivering, trying to hold back the waterworks.  I look back at the bathroom door and then at the four kids again.

“I can’t jump on the bed when she’s around either,” I whisper.

“Is that why she put a spider on your face?” Dani giggles.

***

It’s a surprisingly easy afternoon.  I pick up pizza, which is it’s own adventure, since I have a skating spider on my face.  The pizza is a reward for the kids, for not destroying my apartment, and when I get back with it, the kids cloud around the table, actually sitting on their butts and chewing with their mouths closed, like Sher tells them to. 

The kids act like Sher’s their mom, doing what she tells them and ashamed of themselves when they don’t.  Whit has an accident in his pants and after Sher cleans him up, he clings to her leg and is only comforted when she rubs his back and tells him it’s okay.  Chandler begs her at least thirty times to come back home.

“I can’t,” Sher tells him with an uplifting giggle. “I live here now.  With Landon.”

She doesn’t look at me when she says it, but I stare at her.  She says it simply, warmly even—as if she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world.  Her words soothe me, as if I were clinging to her leg too.

“Trent said you’re gonna be just like Mama,” Dani chirps. 

“He did, huh?”  Sher drops her crust on her plate with a frown.  It’s obvious to me what he meant and that Sher’s taking it the same way.  Having spent the afternoon with the Traifere clan, it’s not hard to notice that Sher and her sister are the only two that look anything alike.  Since Sher mentioned that she and her sister have different fathers, it seems to be just luck of the draw.  Every one of Sher’s brothers is distinctly different, almost marking the heritages of Lisa’s lovers, as if she went in phases of preference.  To say Sher is going to be like Lisa, is calling Sher easy, and I won’t let that happen.

“I can see what Trent means,” I say, and Sher turns a stunned, painful and horribly agreeable stare on me.  I know she could give me her resume of bad habits and short comings.  She could sit here all night and try to convince me that she’s nothing.  But I see what she is.  She can’t hide it from me.  I continue as casually as I can,  “You’re not made of hairspray and make-up.  You’re stronger than that.  You’re loyal to your family.  You’ll defend your own, take care of your own, and you are a good person.  Your mom’s epic, Sher, and in that way, you’re just like her.”

“I wanna be like Mama too,” Dani says.  A blushy kind of giggle wiggles out of Sher, even though she continues to stare at her plate.

***

Lisa is late and I’m a little disappointed when she shows up.  The kids have charmed me and I—almost—hate to see them go.  Beck has got an impressive career possibility as a stunt man, Chandler reprogrammed my remote, Whit is happy to tell me all of Sher’s secrets, and Dani thinks I poop unicorns.

The minute Lisa walks in, though, everything changes.  The kids go haywire.  Three of them spring across my couch and Chandler stands next to the door, kicking the wall, as Lisa repeatedly shouts at the kids to get their shoes on.  The chaos goes to a fever pitch, until Sher finally steps in.

“Knock it off!” she shouts.  Everyone freezes.  Even me.  Sher turns on her mom.  “You got to say something, Ma.  You can’t just let them run wild!”

Lisa tips her head and rubs her temple with two wary fingers. 

“Don’t get that tone with me.  It’s not like I ask ‘em to act up, Sher.”  Lisa turns for the door and Sher herds the rest of her siblings out with their mom.  The kids flow away, down the steps to the parking lot.  They chase each other around the family’s old boat of a car as Lisa pauses on the top step.  She shakes a tired finger at Sher.  “Tomorrow, I might need you too.”

“I can’t,” Sher says.

“How come?  What’s so important?”

Sher’s body tenses. “Because Ma.  You can’t just…I’m not your…”

“It’s my fault,” I interject.  Sher and Lisa both turn on me.  “I’m taking Sher out to a friend’s cottage.  We were invited through the weekend.”

“Oh great,” Lisa grunts.  She doesn’t buy it, I’m sure of it, but she hobbles down the steps and shouts over her shoulder, “I’ll try to get Marcy to watch ‘em, then.  Hope you have fun.”

Sher’s lips are open and her brows steepled, like a question is trying sneak out of her face, but can’t.  Her siblings pile into Lisa’s car and Lisa turns over the engine with a vroom.

“What?” I ask.  Her gaze shifts from Lisa’s car as it finally leaves the lot, to me.

“She said
have fun.
”

“Yeah.  So?”

“She wasn’t angry.  It sounded like she meant it,” Sher says, and instead of tears, she giggles.  “We’ll have to hide out though.  My ma will probably drive by here to catch me in the lie.  She hates lying.”

“We don’t have to hide,” I shrug.  “It’s not a lie.  We aren’t going to be here.”

Sher scratches her elbow, her gaze suspicious.  “Where are we going?”

“Oscar’s beach house, if we can.”

“With Hale and Oscar?” Her tone takes an elevator straight to the top floor of Giggle-opolis.

“No, I think it should just be us,” I tell her.  I can tell she’s trying to maintain the maximum level of excitement, but she drops her clasped hands and fidgets with her fingers.

“Just us?”

“We won’t have to hide out here,” I say.  “Besides, I’ve got some sour memories from the last time I was there that I wouldn’t mind erasing.”

“You think I could erase them?” Her voice, her eyes, her fidgeting fingers relax into a happy softness.

“I do,” I tell her with a grin.  “Let me call Oscar and see if the house is available.”

***

The next morning, we’re up early and on our way to O.C.’s cottage.  The last time I was here, it was with a hot psycho.  This time, I’m here with the mother of, possibly, my child.

We listen to the radio and Sher catnaps and the whole time I’m driving with my mind going in circles.  What if the baby really does belong to Bull-Ring?  Do I spend nine months with this girl, just hoping it’s mine?  What if I get a negative paternity result right after the baby is born?  What do I do then?  Walk away?  Could I?  Or raise Bull-Ring’s kid, pretending it’s mine?  Could I?

I just don’t know.

We stop at a grocery store on the way, after Sher reminds me three times, in increasingly angrier tones each time, that her bladder-alarm is going off.  There is only a single bathroom in the store and Sher just about throws an old woman out of the way that is trying to enter the facilities.

“Sorry, sorry, I’m pregnant!” Sher squeals as she dodges the woman and slides inside the open door first.

“And I’m 85!” the woman protests, banging her cane once on the floor. 

“I know!  It could take you forever!”  Sher slams the door on the old woman.  The lady grumbles under her breath and grunts, until she turns and sees me.  She studies the skating spider glued to my cheek.  Her face blooms into a smile.  She adjusts her teeth with a cackle.  “Well, if she’s going to steal my turn, at least she left me a nice boy to look at.  Is that a gang thing, on your cheek there?”

“No.” I smile.  I think I actually blush.

Sher whips open the bathroom door and shoots the old lady a relieved grin upon exiting.  Sher grabs my arm and I let her lead me away from the 85-year-old cougar with the cane.  It’s the first time Sher’s reached for me and her touch straightens out my car-seat-curled vertebrae.  We walk through the aisles, attached at the elbows. 
We.
 

I push the cart with one hand and Sher decides which groceries make it into the basket.  She compares prices, mostly choosing whatever is lowest, and criticizes the store for gouging its customers on milk.  The only thing I care about is that she doesn’t lift her one hand from the crook of my arm the whole time.  We move, linked, toward the shelves and coolers, and the one time I miss the cue, she gives me a gentle tug instead of just letting go.

I’m as good as a dog on her chain.  Maybe I was right the first time when I told her I would be here, no matter what.  Maybe I knew what I was talking about after all, because right now, she can lead me wherever she wants, and the sad part is that I’m totally okay with it.  Happy even.

***

We finally pull up to the cabin and Sher gasps.

“This is the place Oscar took Hale?”  she asks.  I nod and Sher giggles.  “This is so cool!”

She scrambles out of the car and I unlock the place with the key that the Maree’s always keep under the welcome mat. 

“Isn’t Oscar worried people will break in?”

“Around here?”  I laugh, motioning to the woods all around.  “Nope.” 

We drag in all our stuff.

“Where are we going to sleep?” she asks. 
We.

“Upstairs,” I say.  I don’t mention the one bed.  I let that slide, with a hopeful silence on the subject. Sher hauls her stuff upstairs and she doesn’t come down screaming, so I figure she’s fine with it. 

I hear her phone ring.  I drift to the edge of the stairs with my gym bag when I hear her say hello.  She says it with a different brightness than what she gives Hale.  She obviously knows who is calling her, and I’m wondering who it is myself, especially when her voice drops to that hushy whisper that has
secret
all over it.

“Thanks for calling…yes, that’s right…I’ve thought it over and I’m sure I want to do it…I’ll pay you back…no, I definitely will…Landon’s got a huge heart, but he doesn’t know yet and he needs to...I appreciate you not saying anything right now…of course I’ll tell him!...I want to go as soon as we get back…”

What is she hiding now?  Why does she keep hiding things at all?  At least this sounds like a happy secret, but where is she going?  This can’t be about the abortion clinic again, it can’t.  We’ve been through it over and over again and I thought we were through with it this time for good.  Aren’t we?  I shift my feet and my gym bags clangs into a vase sitting on a tiny table against the wall.  The vase wobbles and I catch it, but I curse and the whole commotion is too loud.

“I’ve got to go,” Sher whispers upstairs.  “Thanks again!  Bye!”

I go up the stairs, since I’ve been found out anyway, but when I hit the top, I still try to look all nonchalant about it. Sher is doing the same, pulling a bathing suit out of her bag.  She gives me the
what huh
doe eyes when I set my bag down on the opposite side of the bed. I don’t want to pry at her; I want to give her a chance to tell me what’s going on.

“Who’re you talking to?”  I inquire with a polite grin.

“Hale.”  Her answer is too quick.

“Oh.  I just caught the tail end and I thought it might’ve been someone else.”  Ok, so I’m going to pry.

She stops with her bag and plants her little hand on her hip instead, to give me an extra hint of attitude with her words.  “Oh yeah?  Like who?”

“Like I don’t know.” I shrug.  “That’s why I was asking.”

She holds up her phone, flashing me with the last number that dialed her.  It says Maree.  It was Hale after all.

“You don’t have to prove anything.”  I say, looking away from the phone screen.  “I was just asking.”

She drops the phone on the bed with a stiff nod.  I don’t think she expects me to let it go so easily.  I’m not sure I should either, but I can see I’m not going to get anything out of her by asking her directly.  She looks out the wide windows across from the bed.  A tiny slice of the beach and water is visible through the trees.

“Do you think the water’s still warm enough to go swimming?” she asks.

“I’d doubt it, but it’s an inland lake.  It might be okay.”

“We should try it,” she says.  We.  Her little grin warms me up inside.  She flicks her fingers toward the stairs.  “Let me change then.”

“Don’t get all shy now.  I’ve seen everything you’ve got, and besides, I’m going to change in front of you.”  I just unzip my pants and she giggle-squeals, hiding her eyes.  I pull my board shorts from my bag and toss them on the bed as she peeks through her fingers with more wild giggles.  She pulls a string bikini from her bag and flags it in the air.

“You gotta give me a minute to change, for real!” Her high laugh scriggles up her words.  “I don’t even know if it’s going to fit right!  C’mon, Landon!  It’s embarrassing!”