Slightly Imperfect (6 page)

Her silence gave him time to second-guess his decision to surprise her. He thought her smile escaped in spite of her.

"Hello, Zac." He heard more resignation than fervor.

Her gaze fell on the gear on the step. A duffel bag, a carton wrapped in brown paper, tied with a rough cord. And Samson in his mesh-sided Louie Vuitton carrying case. She raised her ebony eyes to the taxi backing into the street. The yard boasted a realtor's sold sign, and Zac had asked the driver to wait, to make sure Maggie was there.

"The wandering husband isn't quite home yet." She indicated his belongings, mouth grim, but her eyes began to take on a more lenient quality.

"He isn't?" He gave her his best smile, the one he'd been saving and could once have counted on to work.

She stood back and swung the door open, tabling the discussion. "You'd better set those things inside. The neighborhood didn't improve while you were gone." The old house was in a fringe area, near the Houston ship channel.

After taking her advice, he stood looking around the foyer. He had been there only once before, but remembered the house well. Now he noted new wallpaper that managed to look old, gleaming white woodwork, refurbished hardwood floors.

Maggie had always held a penchant for hardwood floors.

"Good job,
querida
," he commended. "You saved this old house."

"I like to think I gave it new life. It and me." She spoke softly, tilting her head to meet his eyes. "It's sold. That was the bottom line."

Light streaked her dark hair when the sun caught it, and he began swimming in more familiar waters. "I guess so." He wondered if she had gotten attached to the structure in the year and a half she had lived there, considering the sweat equity expended to transform it. Probably not, based on what had happened to Allie, right there in that busy street fronting the house. "Do you have any of that pecan coffee? I thought about it all the way around the world."

She nodded, smiling.

"Could I please see Angel? I've lived for this since the moment I knew you carried her." Did she hesitate, or was it his guilt-ridden imagination?

"She's sleeping. But you can watch her sleep."

They stood beside the crib, gazing at their seven-month-old daughter. Even though their bodies didn't quite touch, Zac knew their minds and hearts were in complete accord for the first time in a long while. Too long.

Intermingled emotions rushed through him. Guilt, excitement, curiosity and something so intense it left him breathless. Before him in that pink-shrouded crib, among the toys and soft quilted blankets, rested the essence of perfection. Love rose in him, perfect as well, purified by a father-daughter relationship as yet unmarred. He prayed it would never be.

Angel's skin was cast in bronze. The morning sun filtered across her face, streaking her dark, curly hair with amber. He ran his index finger along the contour of her cheek, into the moist folds of her neck. A part of him began to live again.

"Thanks, God," he whispered.

Maggie's head jerked up. She met his full gaze, her eyes moistening for a split second. Then he watched her settle into resolve.

"Thank you, Maggie. I know it wasn't easy. Alone." But she had believed it to be the only way, shackling him with her convictions. "I'll be here for you now. Please remember that."

"We call you Poppie," she said softly. Stepping away, she took up a photograph of the two of them with Allie, taken before Angel's conception. She held it to her breasts. "I tell her about you, Zac. And about Allie. I've never said a word against you. I tell her you love her. I want you to know."

Heart twisting, he said, "Thanks most of all for that."

In the kitchen, sunlight poured through panes showing the slightest trace of white paint around their edges. Black-and-white checked linoleum gleamed up at them, forming an island for the kitchen table where they sat facing. Zac held Samson, stroked him and wondered about the feet that would tread these new floors, dulling their glow to normalcy as years passed.

He broke the silence he knew she could have sustained indefinitely. "Do you know where you'll be moving?"

"Back to Ramona."

He didn't bother hiding his jubilant surprise.

"I found a house to refurbish. Jan is investing with me again. We got a grant from Gerald Fitzpatrick on a great old house in an area of Ramona he wants to revive."

Gerald Fitzpatrick.

Zac rolled the name and a scene involving Gerald around his mind. Gerald's pink face had worn a reluctant smile as he had sat across from Zac and Carron that day. Gerald had asked about Zac's wife and son, his intentions, how he planned to balance it all and have Gerald's daughter, Carron, too.

Zac could hear Gerald's hearty voice asking if he knew Carron was a very sick woman, warning him about encroaching on her wealth. If Zac's intentions weren't honorable, Gerald would see that he never got a dime. Zac's motives hadn't exactly fallen into the honorable category then. It was more like being caught up in an avalanche. He had just tried to hang on in the descent. Part of the accumulated debris sat across from him now.

"Gerald Fitzpatrick," he said. "How did that happen?"

She tried to shrug, gazed out the window, then studied her cup. "He called here one day, out of the blue, looking for you." She lifted her eyes. "He knew you were gone, but he thought I might have your itinerary."

He couldn't feign indifference. "What did he want?"

"I don't know. I didn't ask him. He started asking me questions—said he was sorry about Allie." She faltered.

He saw her throat move as she swallowed emotions he would like to hear voiced, like to examine and exorcise, if possible.

"He apologized for Carron, actually. A strange conversation. He told me she had been sick since she was a child, that it influenced—his word, not mine—the way she behaved." Her smile was a little crooked, derisive, reactivating the familiar guilt in Zac's soul. "We got past that, and he asked about me, what I was doing. He thought he and I had a lot in common, since we're both into refurbishing. When I reminded him I do it for a living instead of a pastime, he asked me to come down to Ramona and look at some of the old houses he had his eye on." She stopped, her smile turning triumphant. "This house sold within days." She managed an ebullient shrug. "It's a done deal, as they say in the world of commerce. My world, now."

"That's wonderful." He wasn't that confident.

"He seems like a nice man. Still, I keep thinking he must have a motive." She was an altered person now, skeptical after Zac and Carron's travesty against her. "We'll see."

"What about Ben?" Her partner, the carpenter. Her housemate, as of when Zac left on the freighter. He hadn't known the actual circumstances of the partnership and had never felt privileged to ask. "Is he moving with you?"

"That's over. His investment in this house paid off. He doesn't want to leave Houston."

Zac waited. He watched to see if she was devastated, if Ben had hurt her, too.

"Ben is gay, Zac. You misinterpreted our relationship."

In the hours after Allie's accident, Ben had stuck by her side, shutting Zac out, exactly as he deserved. She had chosen Ben over him, Allie's father, influencing so many of the decisions he made later. He reserved comment now, suspecting his voice would betray the resentment coiled within his relief.

"Ben was a good friend when I needed one," she concluded.

"What about us?"

"What
about
us?"

If his question truly hadn't surprised her, she had learned to act in the time they had been apart. "You tell me,
querida."

"We're divorced. Luke signed all the papers with his
little power of attorney."

Her contemptuous tone let him know he had been fatally expedient in granting his brother that legal right. Zac touted it as one more mistake.

"Didn't Luke tell you about the divorce?" she asked.

"He hinted, but I wouldn't let him tell me. I wanted to hear—or not hear it—from you. I only gave him that power for your sake, Maggie. Considering my misunderstanding about Ben, I didn't want you to have to wait a year for freedom, if that was what you chose."

Everything had happened so fast after Allie's accident, after Carron's death, when there had been so much strife between him and Maggie. At the time he hadn't seen how things could ever be rectified. A year on a freighter provided a lot of down time. Time to re-evaluate. "Tell me the divorce isn't final."

"To me it is." She glanced away and then back. "Yes. It is."

He looked into her eyes, not quite believing her. "All we have to do is pick one of these many unused bedrooms, Magatita." He let his gaze lift upward to the bedroom area. "Let me give you all the love I've stored up for a year, and that legal work goes right out the window." Visions of his proposal flashed in his mind. He held her gaze, hoping to impart the picture to her.

"Very tempting," she said softly. "I'd enjoy that I'm sure, but unfortunately we could only cancel the legal work. The memories will live forever."

He fought back old visions, entertained new ones. "Only if we let them. We can make new memories, starve the old ones out."

"A new Allie? New babies to take his place? I don't think so, Zaccheus. And I don't think we could make love often enough—probably not good enough—to keep me from wondering where you were going and what you might do every time you left the house. I won't let Angel grow up in that kind of home."

He could see she had given it as much thought as he had. Her dry eyes told him her wounds were too deep, scabbed over.

"I still love you." He had promised the day of Allie's accident, the day she screamed her anger and hate, he would never tell her that again. "Do you
still
love me?"

"Too much to go back to you and make your life a living hell." She rose from the Formica-topped breakfast table and crossed to the big window, her hands gripping the rounded edges of the new porcelain sink.

Gripping her resolve, he thought.

"Trust is like the soul." Her voice floated so softly that he strained to hear. "Once departed, it never returns."

Listening to the traffic whipping by outside, he thought of Allie sitting on that front step in the twilight waiting for him. He heard an imaginary screech of brakes and knew she was right.

"Then, will you do something for me?"

She nodded, her back to him, the jet-black mass of her Dutch-boy-like hair bobbing up and down.

"Will you give me a haircut? I can't walk into Papa's house like this."

She turned, smiling. "So you were saving that for me, too."

He put Samson on the floor and went to her, took her in his arms. "Because you're the best, Maggie." He held her, rocked her, took his fill and then stood back, knowing she wanted, yet didn't want, to be released.

They sat on the ground in her backyard, beneath the shade of a jacaranda tree. He didn't take off his shirt. That rite of passage had been canceled. As she snipped and combed, he tried not to react to the feel of her hands in his hair.

He sensed her straining from a kneeling position for the best vantage point. "You didn't get any taller while I was gone."

"No, but I stand straighter now."

He glanced over his shoulder, conceding a smile.

She said, "But you're even more beautiful. Especially with all this gray in your hair. Male beauty isn't fair. I've always known that."

His physical attractiveness provided surprise every time he passed a mirror or a storefront and caught a glimpse of the body housing his soul and spirit, his intellect. Every time he caught a surreptitious glance across a room.

Across a piazza.

He affirmed her insinuation. "My beauty hasn't been one of my greatest assets."

"Nor had your beauty been one of my assets." Her laughter made him wonder if it was possible they could now be friends. "There," she said with finality.

She had simply taken the thick rope of hair hanging between his shoulder blades, whacked it off at his nape, then spent a long, careful time shaping, layering the rest. She handed him a mirror. Silver threads ran prominently through the shorter hair. He smiled, pleased.

"The prodigal son can return in style," she assured him. "Alejandro will never know you were a
vagamundo
."

He swiveled on his haunches to face her, bracing his elbows inside his folded knees, leaning forward in emphasis. "Maggie, I was so wrong. I want you to know—" Her chin shot up, eyes going wary, but they softened when he spoke again. "Forget that. You already know I was wrong. What I really want you to believe is how completely
I
realize it." He held her gaze, driving the words home. "I've had time to think about blame and I've never been more sure where it goes in my life."

She placed her tiny brown hand in his, squeezed a little. He looked at her bare ring finger. A thin, pale line marked the absence of the band they had chosen together. Hers had matched the one in his pocket, rings meant to solidify them for eternity. He stroked her hand. "Please don't think I'm absolving myself when I tell you something went crazy in me when I met Carron. I'm not pleading guilty by reason of insanity." Smiling proved difficult. "I'm afraid to even examine what happened. All I know is I threw away a marriage that just the day before I met her, I held more sacred than anything on earth. I hurt you. I can see now I hurt you beyond repair." Had he imagined the slight negative twist of her head? "I changed your life and even the way you think. You were loving and trusting. I threw it in your face. Ultimately, I cost Angel a normal childhood."

She looked away, fingers whitening where they still gripped the scissors. He caught her chin, turned her face back to him in order to drive the words into her maimed spirit.

"I blamed you for not letting me come back—after Carron died—for not wanting me to be a part of Angel's birth. I hated you a little. It took all those lonely nights in that ship bunk to realize you had no choice—or believed with your sweet heart you didn't." He let it run through his mind as he listened to a car pull into a near-by drive, children's laughter, then running feet. "I know you reached out to me at my craziest point. I can see that now. But I gave you no hope. I wish I was the only one to pay, but it doesn't work that way, and that's what's so wrong with cheating. It never involves only one person... or two." He searched her somber gaze. "I ask you to forgive me for that, Maggie."