Cutting it Close

by Olivia Gaines

  “I plan to pin you to that mattress when I get back. I’m going to put you to sleep too,” he said with a wink.

  Tae-Tay twirled her hair again, “You oughtta stop!”

  He bit his bottom lip. “Yeah, this is going to be a real short story,” he said, before kissing her briefly. “Be right back.”

  He was right. Although her father was out of prison, he was worried about other things and not thinking about her. Leviticus went to jail when people were still using payphones. The technology changes and the entire cell phone driven culture was going to take some getting used to as well as how much the world had changed since he went away. Tonight, all she wanted to think about was Thurston and getting Douglas ready for interviews for schools in the fall. But first things were first. Tonight was all about her and her husband. A man who was about to run for Congress.

  A new adventure for her was about to begin. She was ready.

  Chantal watched Cody go over the list of items Omari said they were going to need for next weekend. She eyed the pile of equipment, gear, flashlights and other things, not sure what went where or in what hole. It chapped her hide a bit to know he had been right when he suggested they go out for the weekend camping so Cody could be familiar with the equipment. He is doing this for Cody. He is doing this for Cody. I can do this for my own son.

  “Ma, you okay over there?”

  “Yes, sorry. I am just looking at all this stuff, wondering how we are going to sleep in this little tent,” she said. “I am also worried what will happen when I have to go to the bathroom.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Oh, I never thought about that,” he said. “You sure you want to go?”

  “Does this mean a lot to you?”

  Cody set down the flashlight and walked over to the couch to sit next to her. “Yes, it does. I mean, those kids go away for the weekend and do stuff. I want to know what that’s like. I know I messed up. I’m always messing up, but I don’t mean to, Ma. I don’t. I want ...,” he stopped speaking.

  “What is it that you want, Cody?”

  “I want to know my dad. I want to know what it is like to have a father,” he said softly.

  “I’m sorry you don’t have him in your life,” she said truthfully.

  He shrugged. “I’m not so mad about it anymore. I mean, if you’re going to go camping to make sure I’m safe, then my dad must not be a very good person,” he said as he nudged her with his elbow.

  “Camping is not in my wheelhouse and neither is sleeping on the ground,” she said to him. Chantal leaned forward and touched the sleeping bag.

  “I love you, Ma,” Cody told her.

  She couldn’t hide the surprise on her face. It had been so long since he’d said the words that she teared up.

  “I love you too, Cody,” she told him.

  “Yeah, I know. You love me enough to go camping. This is going to be so much fun!”

  The weekend at the lake was one that Chantal Mooreland would never forget nor live down. It may have been plenty of fun for Cody, but for her, it was a comedy, a tragedy, and a horror story rolled into one. Omari Cromwell was also never going to let her live it down either.

  Chapter 14 Okay...?

  All week, Chantal walked around on pins and needles. Much to her surprise on Wednesday, she received a call from Omari to check on her.

  “Hello,” she said into the phone.

  “Hey! I wanted to make sure you had a chance to pick up all the items on the list for this weekend,” he said to her.

  “I did...we do...yes, we have everything,” she mumbled.

  “Good. I’m looking forward to the weekend,” he said.

  “Okay,” was all she could muster.

  “Chantal, I take it you are not so excited.”

  “No, not at all. Seriously, I am a girl. Are there facilities on site for women?” she wanted to know.

  “Nope,” he said. “We will be on the back side of the lake in a wooded area that has great fishing. Other families may be there, but I will teach you how to be safe and things.”

  “It’s the and things that worry me, along with what you’re going to want in return for doing this,” she said.

  “Honestly, I don’t know why I am doing this either, other than your son walked into my shop and my life and reached out to me for help. I don’t know if I can make a difference in his life, but all I can do is not let him down or hurt him,” Omari said.

  “Please, please, don’t be some kind of perverted asshole or anything. I am stepping out on faith with you because my son likes you. He doesn’t like or trust many people, but for some reason, he likes you,” she said then paused. Chantal inhaled deeply. “You know there are five barber shops on your street? We went into two, he walked by two other, and he decided to come into yours. I don’t know if you are supposed to be in his life, but the coincidences and the chance meeting are too much.”

  Omari’s chest felt tight.

  “I won’t let him down or you, either,” he told her. “I’ll pick you up at 5:30 on Saturday morning. It’s a 3-hour drive to the lake.”

  “Okay,” she told him.

  “It will be okay, Chantal,” he said to her.

  It was all she had to go on, so she went with it. He did not make her feel safe. Omari Cromwell did not make her feel safe at all.

  Saturday morning came entirely too quickly. Dressed in loose-fitting jeans, Chantal and Cody waited in the lobby with all of their gear. The weekend doorman eyed the equipment suspiciously. Cody was happy to tell him, “We’re going camping!”

  “That’s nice. It’s a good weekend to do it, too. I hear the fish up at the lake are really biting this time of year,” the doorman said.

  “I am gonna catch me some fish and cook ’em up right there at the lake over an open fire,” Cody said with pride.

  The doorman’s next words were cut short by Omari’s arrival in a deep blue Suburban. He hopped out of the driver’s seat with a smile on his face. At 5:30 in the morning, Chantal didn’t see anything to smile about.

  “Good morning,” he said cheerfully. I will stow your things in the back and we can be on our way.

  Cody, in his excitement, ran to the vehicle and opened the front door to find a beautiful, brown skinned woman in the front seat of the car. The expression on his face changed even more when he looked in the back seat to see a kid about his own age- only taller.

  “Mr. Omari,” he said softly.

  “Oh yeah, this is my sister Taylah and my nephew Simel,” Omari. “I thought it would help to have them along this weekend.”

  Taylah stepped from the vehicle. “It is a pleasure to meet you,” she said to Cody as she shook his hand. Her gaze went to Chantal. “You as well.”

  Chantal didn’t know she could be so relieved to see any one human as she was to see his sister. It also helped to have the boy along, whom Cody took an immediate liking to as well. Chantal grabbed Tyalah in her arms, squeezing the woman tightly.

  “Okay then...,” Tyalah said, pulling Chantal off of her. “Here, you take the front seat and I shall sit in the back and sleep. It is entirely too early for me to do anything remotely human, and asking me to make conversation at this ungodly hour is plain mean.”

  Just like that, she climbed in to the third row of seats, pulled out a pillow, and lay flat on the seat. Omari said, “Let’s get a move on.”

  “It is also too early for you to be pushy,” she told him as she got in the front seat and closed the door. “Do I need to navigate or anything?”

  “Nope. We go camping often,” he told her.

  The early morning hour made maneuvering the large vehicle through the streets of New York seem easy. In no time, they were on the interstate and rolling out of town. Chantal could not remember the last weekend she’d gotten away from the city. Her life was work, work, and more work. During her free time, of which there was never enough, she tried to do cultural enrichment activities with Cody.

  “Tell me about you,” Omari asked
.

  The boys were in the back seat, making small talk.

  “Nothing much to tell,” she said.

  “Surely there is a story there. Are you from New York? Your parents are from here as well?”

  Chantal stared out the window into the darkness of the morning. “I don’t have any. I grew up in foster care.”

  “Oh,” he said quietly.

  “It wasn’t so bad. You learn key words and phrases early, which keeps you safe,” she said to him.

  “Key words?”

  “Yes. In elementary school you learn to tell your foster parents, ‘My teacher is married to a policeman,’ which works well for one school season. The trick is to get transferred the next school year or pretend you still have a relationship with last year’s school teacher,” she told him.

  She sighed deeply. She’d never told anyone this before but for some reason, she felt he needed to know who she was and her story. Nothing was going to change, but she still wanted him to know.

  “There are rules with foster kids. After you stop being cute and begin to grow little buds on your chest, they want to get rid of you. This, of course, brings on a whole new set of issues and weirdos to fight off. It’s not hard to outthink them or to get your hands on pepper spray that you learn to sleep with to prevent late night visits,” she whispered.

  “By the time you reach your teen years, you are basically aging out and no one wants you except money hungry women with bad men in their lives. Some of them are easy to handle by throwing a pair of lacy red panties in the laundry,” she said.

  “How does that help the situation?” he asked.

  “I would just say, ‘I thought you bought those for me, I found them in my drawer,’ which of course meant a phone call to social services and I would be out of there the next day,” Chantal told him.

  “I am trying to understand what you are saying to me about your childhood. Did you run away?”

  “Of course not. I actually got lucky. Really lucky,” she told him. “A librarian had just retired and came by the center where I was, or rather I had just been returned by some lady and her creepy man, and she wanted help filing some papers. The administrator at the center was so tired of me, she didn’t even bother to have the lady sign any paperwork. My bags were still at my side when she pushed me out the door with the little old lady to go help her.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes, my life was in the hands of a stranger who could have been a sex trafficker, but it was better than taking a chance on some other home where next time I might not get so fortunate on a late night visit. Her name was Heather Purifoy, and I walked into that apartment in midtown that had crap from the floor to ceiling. It was like a hoarder had gone to estate sales all over the world,” she said with a chuckle.

  “It took me five years to get it all catalogued, organized, and sorted. I opened an online seller’s account and together we cleared out her house. She gave me a percentage of each sale, which helped with my bank account, high school, and other things. Ms. Purifoy also helped me get into college,” she told him.

  “That’s where you met the boy’s father?” he asked softly.

  “I met his father on my internship. He wasn’t that bad of a guy. He helped me study for the CPA exam and facilitated me getting into grad school. I received my master’s and had my son in the same month,” she said with a wry smile.

  “Ms. Purifoy passed when I started grad school so she never got to meet Cody. She did leave me a nice little nest egg, which is partly how I started my company, Mooreland, Carlisle and Burns Accountants. It also helped having hush money from his father,” she whispered. “The apartment is bare because I lived in it for so many years with all of that stuff. Ms. Purifoy put me in her will and I got the apartment. I still have a few of the collectible pieces, but not the clutter.”

  Omari’s eyes were one the road.

  “I bet you have never told all of that to anyone,” he said.

  “You’re right. What are you, the privacy whisperer?” she said jokingly. “I dished my most personal stuff. Your turn.”

  “My parents are anthropologists. Unlike my cousin’s father, who took over the Cromwell businesses, my dad went to college, traveled the world in the summers, and then came back to do his graduate work. He met my mother in Tanzania, fell in love, and got married. You ever seen that cartoon The Wild Thornberry’s? Well, that’s my dad. My dad is Nigel Thornberry personified. He is brilliant and clueless at the same time. He is a professor at Colombia and my mother is a women’s studies professor at NYU,” he told her.

  “Nope, you still haven’t told me anything personal about you,” she said.

  “All right, let me see,” he said as he exhaled. “In the summers we would travel around the world. In some places that were very remote and in others that were heavily populated, like Uttar Pradesh in India. I contracted some sort of virus when I was 13 while we were in Botswana. By the time my parents realized what it was, it was too late,” he said.

  “Too late for what?”

  “It was too late to properly treat the virus and it left me sterile,” he said softly. “I can’t have children.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay? I tell you my most intimate secret and you just say okay?”

  “You are sterile not impotent ...”

  “No, I’m not impotent,” he said louder than he had planned. His gaze went to his rear view mirror to make sure the kids or his sister didn’t hear him.

  “Then okay...”

  Omari looked over at her for a brief second. He unwillingly found himself frowning at the woman. She was an odd duck and he was starting to think he didn’t like her at all until her next words.

  “The inability to make children does not lessen the value of a man, nor your value. There are men who make a baby a day and could not care less about the human life they have created that has to live in this cruel world. Or you have men who will write you a check to get rid of a life so they won’t have to explain it to their wives, yet here you are taking a kid you don’t know camping. You showed up at his school in a suit pretending to be his father because you received a called you determined to be an SOS,” she looked at him.

  Chantal shrugged her shoulders. “So what if you can’t have kids? You are more of a man than half the ones walking down the streets, pretending they are,” she said. In the same breath she asked, “Can we stop and get some coffee. I think my brain is trying to turn on but it needs some jet fuel.”

  “All right,” he said to her. That was the only answer he could come up with as a response.

  Her brain seemed to work fine to him. Suddenly, he felt taller than he ever had in his life. He looked over at Chantal Mooreland with fresh eyes.

  I like her.

  Maybe there are no such things as coincidences.

  Chapter 15 Put that down...

  Taylah Cromwell was possibly the funniest person Chantal had ever met. Much of the two days in the woods was spent laughing, either at herself or something Taylah said. Camping was the furthest thing outside of her comfort zone and the first twenty-four hours in the woods showed as much.

  As the campsite was prepped for the three tents to go up, the boys collected rocks to create the fire pit. Simel was a handsome young man who was ridiculously tall for a 12-year-old, and he had a dry sense of humor that matched well with Cody’s smart assedness. Chantal was happy to find out that Simel and Cody would share a tent and the moms would share the other, leaving Omari to himself. Two hours into the camping adventure, nature snuck up on Chantal and the coffee from the morning drive needed to run free. Uncertain what to do, Chantal snuck off to locate a quiet place to release the stream of coffee pressing onto the bottom of her bladder.

  Crap. I forgot to bring some tissue.

  Chantal grabbed the first leaves she saw to use as toilet paper. Ten steps toward the campsite, her hands began to itch. Then sting. Then burn. What in the hell? She arrived at the tent to find Taylah
perched precariously in a chair with a glass of wine at 11 in the morning.

  “I’m itching,” Chantal said.

  “Are you having an allergic reaction or something?”

  “No, I used a few leaves when I went to tinkle and I think maybe...I dunno,” she started twitching.

  Taylah sprang to her feet. “Chantal, was it really green leaves that were growing together in the threes on a vine or did it grow up from the ground?”

  The panic in her voice made Chantal panic as well. “I don’t think so... I don’t know.”

  “Holy crap, let’s go to where you picked the leaves,” Taylah tried to say calmly. A quick trip into the wood line brought them to the leaves she used.

  “Dang it, did you wipe your vi-jay-jay with this stuff?”

  “Yes,” Chantal said as she started to twitch. She was starting to itch and burn down there as well.

  “It’s stinging nettle. This is bad, really bad,” Taylah said.

  Chantal’s eyes were wide in fear. “What do I do? Soap and water? What?”

  “In the tent. Now!” Taylah said, rushing her back to the camp site. Inside the tent she urged Chantal, “Drop ‘em.”

  Out of fear, confusion, and not being prepared, Chantal did as she was told. The jeans came down as Taylah used a spray on Chantal’s hands. The adrenaline rushed to her head as she watched Omari’s sister rummage around in a first aid kit to retrieve some unlabeled crème.

  “Bend over,” she said to Chantal.

  Not thinking, she did as she was told. First came the cool spray. Three pumps of the mister and the same solution that went on her hands went down there. Chantal wasn’t prepared for it to sting, no, it burned. It burned so hot, she ran out of the tent with her pants around her ankles, making gorilla sounds then realizing her pants were around her ankles, she hobbled back in the tent.

  “Dear Jesus, that burns!” she said through watery eyes.

  “Bend over. I need to put this crème on you,” Taylah said to her. “I have to touch you.”

  “Wait! Why can’t I put it on myself?”