Just Come Over

by James, Rosalind

  Zora hesitated, then asked, “How did she die?”

  “Suddenly. Hit by a car.”

  “Poor thing. And poor Casey.”

  “Yeh.”

  “Which is why,” she said, “you’re so concerned, obviously.”

  “That, and that I like her,” he said, which was so unexpected, she laughed. “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I just think it’s awesome.” She slid the dried pasta into the pot and stirred. Standing so close to Rhys jangled her nerves, and it felt right at the same time.

  She’d had another of those uncomfortable moments when she’d looked in the mirror at him, there in the bath. The size of him, the intensity of his eyes, the unruliness of his dark hair, and the scruff on his hard jaw. The strength of his arms. And then there was that dimple in his chin.

  If it had been somebody else standing there, if it had been a movie, he would have put his hand on her jaw, tipped her head up, brushed her hair aside, leaned down, and kissed her. Gently. Tenderly. He’d be tender, she somehow knew, because he knew his strength, and it would thrill him to take it easy with a woman. And if that was devastating in such a rough man—it was no secret that she had a thing for hard men. She may not have known that when she was twenty. She knew it now.

  It wasn’t a movie, though. It was her absolutely regular, all-too-real life, and this wasn’t a love story.

  “Thirty dollars a day OK?” he asked.

  “What?” She stopped stirring pasta. The fraught moment had been on one side only, clearly.

  “To pay you to watch her. I looked it up. It could be four hours a day, by the time I get back, and that’s what it costs.” He flipped the chicken. “That looks about right, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. You don’t have to pay me, Rhys.”

  “I do, or I can’t ask. Especially as I’m about to ask you to take her on Saturday as well. It dawned on me, sometime today, that I’ll be gone from noon until late, and that it’s only a couple days away. A week after that, we’re on the road for twelve days. If I don’t have somebody hired by then, I’ll be stuck, and I’ll be asking again.”

  “Oh.”

  “And before you say anything—I know you’re not my personal daycare provider. Short term, that’s all, until I can hire a nanny. And I’ll appreciate the hell out of it.”

  “We can start,” she said, “and see how we go. She’s Isaiah’s cousin, and looking after her won’t be much harder than looking after Isaiah. And honestly?” She sighed and admitted it. “I can use the money. I’d like to do it for nothing. I’m a bit ashamed to ask for pay, but I will anyway. I need it.”

  Rhys had turned off the fire under his chicken and, without her asking, slid the cutlets onto a cutting board. When she started to lift the pasta pot, he said, “Thought I said to let me do that,” She glanced at him, startled, and he said, “That’s my coach voice. How’d I do?”

  “Very authoritative. Go on, then.” Her heart was beating harder, just from standing here with him, just from being honest.

  He wasn’t her dream man. Her dream man was solid as rock, strong to the core, and absolutely trustworthy. Her dream man had mana. He just happened to look and sound like Rhys Fletcher.

  He drained the pasta in the sink, then turned to her and said, “Yes. Please. Please look after her. I told you that I couldn’t let you do it without paying you for it, and that was the truth. You’ll ease my mind, though, because there couldn’t be anyone better.”

  “I’m not a perfect mother,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, “I think you are. I’ve always thought so.”

  She’d lost her breath, somehow, even though that was perhaps the least sexy thing anyone had ever said to her. She said, “If you’ll cut that chicken into strips and go get the kids, then, I’ll put the dressing on the salad and the pesto on the pasta, and we’ll be set.” And thought, Not your man. Not your life. No.

  Zora said, during a dinner that felt weirdly intimate and oddly comfortable to Rhys, which must be his fatigue talking, “You may want to stay over tonight, Casey. I’m guessing your dad has your school uniform in the car. Changes always make a person tired, and you’ve had heaps of changes. You could sleep on Isaiah’s bottom bunk. That’s fun.”

  Casey didn’t answer. She just looked at Rhys, and he wondered what that meant, and what he was meant to say. Having Casey stay here sounded good to him. She’d be in bed faster, and he’d have a night to regroup and no hair to do in the morning. He could focus on the job, which would be a brilliant idea right now. But that too-somber look on her little face—what did it mean?

  That she had no expectations anymore, that was what. That she was waiting to see what life was going to do to her next, and that she knew she had no choice.

  He asked her, “What do you think?” Nobody had ever asked him that. They’d just told him. But hadn’t he been thinking, these past days, that he didn’t want her to have a childhood like his?

  “I thought I was going to live with you now,” Casey said. She still hadn’t called him “Dad,” he realized. He wondered how that would feel.

  “You are,” he said. “But I have to work, so you’re going to spend some time with Zora and Isaiah.” He hesitated, then told her. Better to be straightforward, surely. “I spend a week or two at a time away from home, because I’m a rugby coach. When the team travels, so do I. And that’s a lot.”

  “Oh.” She ate some more noodles, working hard on it, like she did on everything, and thinking things through, like she also did. “Are you a teacher?”

  A teacher? “Uh . . . no. Just a coach.”

  “Coaches are teachers, though. Like, at my school, they have a soccer coach for the big kids, but really, she’s a teacher. She doesn’t go away, though. She’s always there. I think she lives at school.”

  “Teachers don’t live at school,” Isaiah said. “They live in houses. Or apartments, because teachers don’t make a lot of money. Coaches make a lot of money, I think. All Blacks make heaps, and they have flash cars, so I think coaches must, too. They’re the boss, and the boss always makes the most money. Uncle Rhys was an All Black for a really long time, even though he isn’t now, so he probably saved heaps of money from that. My dad was an All Black, too, but only a little bit, and then he died. That’s why we only have a little house.”

  Casey studied Rhys. Dubious, he’d call that look. “You’re not black, though,” she said. “You’re not even kind of brown. Lots of black people are just kind of brown. My friend Charliece is a black person, and she’s brown. Her hair’s a lot curlier than mine, too. So I don’t think you’re a black person.”

  “It’s a team,” Rhys said. “Called the All Blacks, because they wear black uniforms. You can be any color to be on it. You just have to be the best at rugby.” He debated explaining that Maori wore their brown on the inside, no matter how they looked on the outside, but it was a pretty subtle concept, and one his brain wasn’t up to right now.

  Casey’s eyes got wide, and she forgot to eat the noodles on her fork. “The Chicago Bears have a coach. Are you that?”

  “No,” he said. “That’s American football. This is New Zealand football, the kind we were playing before, out on the lawn. Different.”

  “Oh.” She heaved a sigh and stuffed some more noodles into her mouth. He’d disappointed her again.

  Isaiah said, “Being an All Black is better. It’s the best thing.”

  Casey studied Rhys some more, and he could hear it without her saying it. Yeh, right. He had to smile.

  Zora asked Rhys, “Do you have sheets for Casey’s bed, or do you need to borrow some?”

  “Oh.” He rubbed his face with a palm and tried to think. “I do somewhere. In a box. Some box. I have a fair bit of unpacking still to do.”

  “What size is the bed?” she asked.

  “Normal.”

  She sighed, looking exactly like Casey. Rhys looked at Isaiah, who shrugged again. Somebody here was on his wavelength, anyway. P
ity he was eight.

  Zora said, too patiently, “Listen carefully. Twin size—single bed. Full size—not as big as a queen. Queen size—most common. King size—big. Probably what you have in all those hotel room. Which is it?”

  “I have a king size.”

  “Surprising nobody,” she muttered, which made him smile.

  “The other two bedrooms have something smaller. I had a woman who bought extra furniture for me, since the house is bigger than I’ve had, but I haven’t paid much attention yet.”

  “I have an extra set of queen sheets,” she said. “Even if it’s a full, queen sheets will work. Just tuck more of them in.”

  “Good. Fine. We’ll go home, then,” he told Casey, “and make the best of things. We’ll be camping out a bit for now, because it’s a new house for me—for us—but we can make it more, uh, cozy. Eventually.”

  “OK,” she said, and focused on stabbing a dried cherry. “If it has a rabbit house, it will be more cozy. Because rabbits are—”

  “Yeh,” he said. “Soft. I got it. For now, we’ll get sheets on your bed. One step at a time.”

  Zora popped her head into Isaiah’s room an hour later, holding a laundry basket, to find him on the floor, working on his jigsaw puzzle in his PJ’s, which were navy and gray and absolutely plain. Last year, he’d rejected anything with a design, even Star Wars, as “babyish.” She missed the Ninja Turtles and superheroes and rocket ships. She was proud of who he was growing up to be, but she still missed her baby.

  “Do you want me to read to you tonight?” she asked.

  “No, thanks,” he said. “I’m reading a very interesting book about a teacher who taught somebody who was blind and deaf, in the olden days. She had to think how to help her to communicate. She finally figured out how, though, by putting her hand in some water and spelling the word for ‘water’ in sign language into her hand at the same time. That’s very interesting, because if you couldn’t hear anything and you couldn’t see anything, you wouldn’t even know that things had names. You wouldn’t know how to think about them, or what was happening at all. You wouldn’t have any words in your head, or any sentences. So I think that teacher was very smart. Except she was poor. When she was a kid, she was in an orphanage with her brother, and her brother died. She never had a home or a family or anything until she taught that girl. Then she got famous, but the girl got more famous, because she was the one who was blind and deaf. I think the teacher should have got more famous.”

  “I think the girl was Helen Keller,” Zora said.

  “The teacher’s name was Annie,” Isaiah said. “They were American, like Casey. It would be weird to be American.”

  “And to come to New Zealand, too.” Zora decided to sit down on the floor. “You could help me fold this laundry.”

  Isaiah did, carefully picking out his own clothes. He’d told her that touching “girl underwear” was “weird.” Apparently, even his mum’s counted.

  Zora said, after a minute, “It’s a sudden thing for everybody, having Casey here.”

  Isaiah didn’t look up, just continued folding his T-shirts in the way he liked, which consisted of putting a shirt flat on the floor and then folding it into a tiny rectangle, the way absolutely nobody else would have. He said it was neater. Now, he said, “Yeh.”

  She said, “I guess you know how she feels. Her mum died, just like your dad.”

  “I didn’t have to go anywhere, though,” he said, “because I was already here.”

  “That’s right.” She wondered, as always, how much to say. Isaiah was so grown up in some ways, so relentlessly logical, and still a little boy in others. She settled on, “And I was already here, too, with you. I knew how to be a mum. Uncle Rhys doesn’t know how to be a dad. They both need some help, and they’re our whanau.”

  “I know,” Isaiah said. “I thought he didn’t like us, but now he acts like he does.”

  “It’s all pretty confusing. And it could be especially confusing,” she decided to say, “because it’s been just you and me for a long time now. And you could think, if I’m caring for Casey as well, that I don’t love you as much. It could be odd to have to share your mum like that. Uncle Rhys is paying me thirty dollars a day, so it’s a job, but it’s more than that. Casey’s my niece, and I’m going to love her, too. I feel like I’ve already started.”

  Isaiah shrugged. Boy shrugs usually meant, You’re getting close, so she went ahead. “Here’s the thing, though. I don’t think love works like that. I don’t think it’s subtraction. It’s more like addition, or multiplication, even. I think people have lots of different rooms in their hearts. You only see the room you’re in, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more. Or maybe love is like seeds, just waiting to grow into flowers. Maybe love is potential, and you always have more potential. That’s how a mum can have lots of kids, and love every one of them with her whole heart. You wouldn’t think that was possible, but it is.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Isaiah said.

  “I don’t think hearts always make sense. Or maybe we just don’t understand the sense they make.”

  “It could be like space,” Isaiah said. “Like there are more things that we don’t know yet, but scientists can learn them.”

  She smiled and put her hand on his head, smoothing his dark hair. “It could be exactly like that. But there’s one thing I do know for sure. I know that when they put you in my arms after you were born, I put my hand on your head just like this, and I thought—where did this love come from? How did I not know this existed? I knew that nothing could ever make that love any less, because that flower bloomed whole and bright and perfect just as it was. I knew who you were from the beginning, too. I could see you being clever and thoughtful and serious, even when you were a baby. I’m glad I have you to help me with Casey, and that you’ve got such a caring heart. Even though you may be sad sometimes, if I’m not paying enough attention to you. If that happens, though, I guess you’ll tell me. You can say, ‘Mum, I need your attention now,’ and I’ll listen.”

  “Just like you say,” Isaiah said with his wicked little grin, the one time when he looked like his dad, ‘Isaiah, I need some quiet time now.’”

  She laughed, leaned over, and kissed his head, and for once, he didn’t shift under that. “Yeh. Exactly like that. We’ll love each other enough to tell the truth, even if it feels hard. That’s our deal.”

  When Rhys pulled into the driveway, Casey asked, “How come your house looks like the doctor’s office?”

  Still asking. Still stroppy. His body and mind might feel as battered as after a one-point loss to South Africa, but he liked this kid. A lot. He said, “It’s an unobtrusive entrance,” then pulled into the garage and cut off her view of the low wooden structure. Its narrow vertical windows were the only thing visible on the front—well, actually, the back of the house—in the purely rectangular, absolutely plain façade, and that was fine by him. Anonymous was good.

  He considered explaining that New Zealand had only four and a half million people, and that he couldn’t buy groceries or get a coffee without having a chat with half of them, but he saved it for another day, climbed out of the car, and said, “The good stuff doesn’t always show on the outside. Life lesson. Or just say that not all houses look alike. You saw the inside this morning. That didn’t look like a doctor’s office, did it?”

  “Other people’s houses still look like houses, though,” she insisted. “Or mopartments. They have curtains, and you don’t have any curtains. And they have pretty things in them. You don’t have any pretty things. My real house is a mopartment, but it doesn’t look like your house, either.”

  He didn’t know how to answer that, so he didn’t. She waited, shifting from foot to foot, while he hauled her school uniform, the clothes Zora had bought, the groceries, the bag of hair paraphernalia, and the borrowed sheets out of the back of the car. He’d always been a minimalist sort of fella. It looked like that was another part of his lif
e that was about to blow up. He grabbed one last bag and told her, “Run on ahead, if you’re that impatient.” She was practically hopping up and down now.

  “I have to go to the bathroom really bad,” she said.

  Not this again. “Why didn’t you go at Zora’s?” he asked. It wasn’t easy to juggle everything and still get the door into the house open. It was dark in here, but he could hear Casey jumping around. He also couldn’t remember where the light switch was, though, especially since he was fumbling around for it and trying to get his trainers off while still holding his bags.

  “Because Isaiah was there,” she said. “You can’t tell about going to the bathroom to boys.” When he got the light on, she sat on the floor and started untying her shoelaces. One of them was in a knot, and she tugged at it. “And you’re supposed to remind me.”

  “Next time,” he said, “go on and ask. Ask Zora. Ask whoever. You can ask to use the bathroom, surely. We went through this on the plane, remember?” He tried to remember where the bathroom was up here. He’d spent less than a week in the house, and putting Casey’s suitcase into one of the bedrooms this morning marked the sum total of his exploration of the upper level thus far.

  He was heading down the passage to turn the lights on, toting a collection of purchases that would have done justice to a Maharani visiting a neighboring state, when he realized Casey wasn’t with him and looked back.

  She was still on the floor in the entry, one shoe off and one on, looking stricken.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I wet my pants.” Her chin was wobbling. “I tried really hard not to, but a little bit came out anyway. And then it all came out, and I couldn’t make it stop.”

  She was going to cry. Bloody hell. This day just kept giving. “Stay there,” he told her. “I’ll get towels.”

  He found her bedroom, tossed everything but the groceries onto the bare mattress, went into the bathroom, once he remembered where it was, and realized there were no towels up here. Of course there weren’t. There wasn’t even any toilet paper up here. He had to go all the way down the stairs and around the house to his own ensuite bath to get both. When he came back, Casey was crying. Silently, not even trying to wipe the tears away. And still sitting exactly where he’d left her.