Pretend To Be Mine

by Suzie Nelson

  Lauren bit her lip. “It’s that bad, huh?” she asked.

  Lewis sighed pathetically and shrugged. “Sometimes things just don’t go your way, even when you’re a famous star,” he replied, his voice sad.

  “Well, I really shouldn’t be telling you this but, if you’re really, really desperate, you could probably find Rosie at the L’Arch center down in Midtown. She goes there after running errands on Saturday mornings.”

  “Really?” Lewis perked up considerably at this tidbit. “That’s amazing. You’re a star, Louise,” he said, running out of the office.

  Lauren frowned as the door slammed shut behind him. “My name is Lauren,” she said to the empty waiting room.

  Back out in the street, Lewis flagged down another taxi, once more gasping the directions as he launched himself into the back seat. The taxi inched through the congested traffic and Lewis drummed his fingers impatiently on the armrest, forcing himself to keep his cool. When they hit their fourth red light in a row, he even began doing the deep breathing exercises that Rosie was so fond of.

  To his surprise, by the time they finally arrived at the L’Arch nursery, he was actually feeling pretty calm and, instead of grinding his teeth, he was wondering what an anger management therapist was doing at a nursery for kids with Down syndrome. Did she do volunteer work or something? He scoffed, it would be just like Rosie to give back to the community or some bleeding heart shit like that on her day off.

  Getting out of the taxi, he tossed the driver a few folded bills and hurried towards the nursery’s front doors. The taxi driver opened his mouth to ask if he wanted the change but, realizing he’d been handed two one hundred dollar bills, quickly closed it again and drove off. His passenger certainly didn’t seem to be worried about it.

  Before Lewis could reach the front doors, Rosie herself appeared – hand in hand with a young boy. Oh shit, thought Lewis as he began to put the pieces together. Then Rosie caught sight of him and frowned.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I came to find you,” he admitted. “You quit,” he added unnecessarily.

  “Yeah,” Rosie replied, tugging the little boy towards her protectively. “I did.”

  “Is this your son?” Lewis asked. “I didn’t realize you were married.”

  “He is and I’m not. Angelo’s dad isn’t in the picture anymore. Not that I expect that changes anything for you.”

  “Of course it does,” Lewis told her, indignant. “I don’t do married women.”

  “Just like you don’t beat women?” Rosie replied sarcastically.

  “One time. It was one time,” Lewis insisted. “You know I mean that.”

  “Sure, Lewis,” said Rosie, clearly unconvinced. “But we’ve got a lot to do today, so, if you’ll excuse us, we’ll just be on our way.”

  But her son had perked up at Lewis’ name and he peered around Rosie’s arm to get a better look at the tall stranger. “Mom,” he said, tugging her hand, “Mom, is that Lewis? Lewis Maserati? The best baseball player of all time? Mom, is it?”

  Rosie and Lewis both looked down at the little boy, who was biting his lip and staring up at Rosie with his enormous brown eyes. Rosie swallowed, gently pushing the boy’s hair off his forehead. For the first time since he and Rosie had appeared, Lewis took a good look at the boy. He was pretty cute for a kid, with silky blond curls, a button nose, and the tell-tale almond-shaped eyes of Down syndrome. He was also wearing one of Lewis’s baseball jersey. It must have been an adult size or something, Lewis thought, because it fit Angelo more like a dress than a shirt. As Lewis watched the boy, who was clearly over the moon to be in Lewis’s presence, something in the star broke. Here was this innocent kid, who clearly had no idea what Lewis was really like, thinking he was some kind of hero. Lewis knew that no one should be so excited to meet someone like himself.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” Lewis answered before Rosie could decide what to say. Kneeling down so that he could look Angelo in the eye, he smiled at the boy. “How are you doing today, Angelo? Are you excited to be with your mom all day?”

  Angelo beamed at Lewis, nodding frantically. “Yeah!” was his answer to all Lewis’s questions. “Do you wanna come play catch with us?” Angelo asked, waving one hand at the small park next to the center. “I’m really, really, really good at catching. We always play catch in the park when mommy comes to pick me up. Are you going to come with us?”

  Lewis swallowed and smiled. “We should ask your mom if that’s okay,” he answered, brushing Angelo’s cheek with his thumb. The boy’s skin was impossibly soft. Lewis glanced up at Rosie and gave her a lopsided smile. Her face was stony.

  “Mom, can we? Can we? Please?” Angelo leaned against Rosie’s thigh almost shaking with excitement.

  Rosie glowered at Lewis for a second before smiling at her son. “Sure, honey,” she said. “Let’s go play catch with Lewis.”

  “Yaaaaaaay!” Angelo shouted, letting go of his mother and throwing his arms around Lewis’s neck. Caught off guard, Lewis instinctively wrapped his arms around the tiny boy and stood, cradling the child against him. Rosie looked horrified.

  “I won’t drop him,” Lewis told her.

  “If you do I’ll kill you,” she hissed.

  “Are you gonna give me a ride to the park!?” Angelo leaned back a little to grin at Lewis.

  “Sure thing, buddy,” said Lewis, gently bouncing the boy in his arms.

  “I’m too big for Mommy to carry now,” Angelo told Lewis, his expression serious. “Nobody’s given me a ride in ages.”

  “Well, now I can do it,” Lewis smiled, wondering where Angelo’s father had gone. His own dad might have been an alcoholic, but at least he’d stuck around. Lewis wondered who could have abandoned a woman like Rosie and a son as cute as Angelo.

  “You’re a lot bigger than my mom,” Angelo agreed, nodding solemnly as is they were discussing serious, grown-up subjects.

  “That’s very true,” said Lewis. “Luckily for you!” he smiled, putting Angelo down in the middle of the park’s soccer field.

  Angelo reached down and felt the soft green grass with his hands. “I like it when grass is happy,” he told Lewis. “Brown grass looks so sad and then I feel bad for it.”

  Lewis nodded. “I like green grass better too,” he said, wondering how on earth a kid who worried about the happiness of grass could ever think Lewis was someone to idolize.

  “Here’re the ball and mitts,” said Rosie, offering Lewis a canvas bag. She’d stuck close to his side the entire short walk over to the park, eyeing Lewis as if she expected him to drop his precious cargo at any minute, despite the fact that Angelo was tiny and Lewis was nearly six and a half feet of pure muscle.

  “Aren’t you going to play too?” Lewis asks, taking the bag.

  Rosie shook her head. “I’ll be the referee.”

  Angelo sighed, shaking his head. “They’re called umpires, mom!”

  “Oh, right. My mistake,” Rosie smiled down at her son. “I’ll be the umpire.”

  Angelo gave his mother a quick hug then grabbed the smaller baseball glove from Lewis, scampering off to stand a few meters away. “I’m ready!!” he shouted at Lewis.

  The baseball star laughed, pulling on his glove. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!”

  “Absolutely, positively sure?”

  “YES!”

  “Okay, here it comes!” Lewis gave the ball a gentle toss straight to Angelo’s waiting glove.

  Angelo caught it, wrapping his free arm around the glove just in case the ball tried to escape. “I caught it! Mommy, did you see? Lewis threw it and I caught it!!”

  Rosie nodded. “I saw it! You were amazing!”

  When Rosie looked at Angelo she had a smile on her face that Lewis had never seen in their sessions together – wide, open, and happy. When they were together, she always hid her smiles, turning her face away or pressing her lips toge
ther so that it couldn’t escape. Lewis began to wish that he could make her smile like that. It made him realize that his constant flirting had only made things worse between them. Instead of growing comfortable with him and trusting him, Rosie had only grown more wary, no matter how much she enjoyed his company. He wondered if it made her unhappy to like him and the thought upset him. He wanted her to be happy that he made her happy, otherwise what the hell was the point? Tossing the ball to Angelo once more, Lewis realized that he’d never thought about another person’s feelings so much before. To be honest, he’d never thought about another person’s feelings at all since his mom had died. He frowned.

  “Throw it harder this time!” Angelo instructed Lewis, breaking into his reverie.

  Lewis grinned. “Are you sure you can handle it?”

  “Yes!” Angelo shouted delightedly. “I can do it!”

  Lewis nodded. “I bet you can.”

  Angelo smiled back at him. “Throw me the ball!!”

  As Lewis tossed the baseball back and forth with her son, Rosie watched them play and marveled at this new side of the man she’d thought she’d known. But the Lewis she knew was arrogant, spoiled, and completely self-centered. There was no way he’d have taken the time to play ball with some random kid, even if they were a fan. Not only that, but the way he talked to Angelo made it clear that he was not only listening to the boy but was actually enjoying their time together. Rosie knew all too well how Lewis acted when he was bored or resentful and it was not like this. She wondered if Ben had been right after all: if there was a small, deeply-buried part of Lewis that was still the confused little boy who loved his both parents desperately but wished that his father would be nice to his mother and that his mother could be happy, and didn’t know how to make either of those wishes come true. A part that was still generous and good. She hoped so.

  After a while, Angelo’s arms got tired and he flopped down onto the grass to rest, staring up at the bright blue summer sky. Crossing the distance between them in a few strides, Lewis lay down next to the boy. “You really are a pro at catching, Angelo,” he said.

  “I told you!” the boy crowed.

  Lewis nodded. “And you know what I think, Angelo?”

  “What?”

  “I think that playing so well deserves an ice cream. What do you think?”

  Angelo grinned then frowned. “We should ask my mom,” he said. “She doesn’t like me to eat too much dessert.”

  Lewis propped himself up on his elbows. “Rosie?” he called. “Is it okay if Angelo and I get an ice cream to reward all his hard work?” he asked.

  Rosie smiled at the two boys in the grass. “Only if I get one too,” she answered.

  “Yeaaaah!” Angelo shouted, rolling over to give Lewis a hug.

  Laughing, Lewis picked up the boy, mitts, and the ball and carried them all over to Rosie. “My treat,” he told her. “I know you have a rule about only spending time with me if I’m paying for it.”

  Rosie shook her head, smiling. “Glad to see you remembered,” she replied. “Why don’t we go down to Antonio’s?” she asked Angelo, drawing her car keys from her back pocket.

  The boy nodded enthusiastically. “They have the best ice cream in the whole world,” he told Lewis.

  “Oh really?” Lewis asked. “Well, I guess we’d better go there then.”

  “You mean you’ve never gone?”

  Lewis shook his head.

  “Yeah,” Angelo agreed, “then we’d better go and really fast too.”

  Lewis laughed, ruffling Angelo’s blond curls with one enormous hand. “I can’t wait,” he said.

  At Antonio’s Lewis bought the three of them enormous waffle cones and they sat outside under one of the ice cream parlour’s large red and white striped umbrellas, licking their cones and watching the people go by. Angelo sat in between Lewis and Rosie, slurping his dripping treat and humming happily to himself. He couldn’t imagine a better afternoon.

  The two adults, on the other hand, sat in silence. Lewis was dying to learn more about Rosie’s life, but he knew it wasn’t his place to ask, and Rosie, who felt she owed Lewis some kind of explanation, was trying to work up the courage to explain it all.

  Finally, just as Lewis finally opened his mouth to speak, Rosie said, “His dad couldn’t deal with it.”

  Lewis raised his eyebrows. “You mean Angelo’s dad?”

  Rosie nodded. “I was so in love with him. We were young, I was only 22 and Mike was 23. And you know what it’s like when you’re that age. You think you’re going to be with that person forever. And I did think that. I couldn’t imagine ever loving anyone but Mike.” She sighed, looking out at the traffic. “But, then, when Angelo was born and the doctor told us about his condition, Mike just couldn’t deal with it. He said that it was too much for him and he needed some time to come to terms with everything. So he left.”

  “He never came back?” Lewis asked softly.

  Rosie shook her head. “Nope. I thought he’d get over it in a few weeks…a month, maybe, but we never heard from him again. Not even a phone call or an email. He’s never even spoken to Angelo. He has no idea what a wonderful, caring—” Rosie sniffed, trying to wipe her eyes without Lewis seeing, “—beautiful boy he has. And, since then, it’s just been me and Angelo. I’ve never needed anyone else. Angelo is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I love him so much that, even if I liked a guy and everything seemed great, I’ve never wanted to bring anyone else into Angelo’s life if I couldn’t be sure that they’d stay for good. It wouldn’t be fair to Angelo to get his hopes up about having a new dad, only for us to break up or for the guy to decide he wasn’t up to it. So I always broke it off sooner rather than later. It was easier that way.”

  Lewis was silent, watching Rosie try to keep from crying.

  “So, please, Lewis,” she said, looking right at him. “Please go. Please leave us alone. Because I kind of like you, but you’re a selfish asshole and you’ll break his heart. And I can’t let you do that.”

  Each one of Rosie’s words hit Lewis like a sucker punch to the gut. He knew she was right and that he didn’t deserve to be part of a family like this. He knew he owed her an apology for his behavior – he even felt like he should apologize to her for Mike’s behavior too, even though obviously he’d had nothing to do with it. But he also knew that there was no point. No apology and no promises would ever be good enough. Nor would they make up for what she’d already gone through. Slowly, silently, Lewis nodded.

  “Of course,” he said softly. “I get it. You won’t ever see me again, I promise.”

  Swallowing back tears, Rosie nodded. “Thank you,” she said, just as softly. “That may be the nicest thing you’ve ever done.”

  Lewis laughed dryly. She was probably right. He didn’t mention his aborted career – the whole reason he’d come down to find her in the first place. He couldn’t ask her to be his therapist again and he didn’t want her thinking that it was her fault. Because it wasn’t. As much as Lewis had tried to run from the truth, this whole disaster was all down to him.

  Slowly, he got to his feet. Now that it came down to it, he didn’t want to leave them. He’d had a really fun time playing with Angelo and the idea of never seeing Rosie again hit him harder than he thought it would. Somewhere along the line, he’d gone from trying to trick her into bed with him to actually really caring about her. It was a new experience for Lewis.

  “I guess I’ll see you around—I mean, I guess not…I…have a nice life, Rosie. Thanks for everything,” he told her, stumbling over his words.

  She nodded. “You too, Lewis.”

  Lewis turned to Angelo, who was still completely absorbed in eating his ice cream and oblivious to the world around him. “Hey, buddy,” said Lewis, his words catching in his throat. “I gotta go.”

  The little boy started, his dark eyes focusing on Lewis. “You’re leaving?” he asked, looking sad. “But I tho
ught you were coming home with us for dinner!”

  “I…” Lewis glanced at Rosie desperately.

  “Lewis is a very busy man, Angelo,” Rosie told her son. “He’s got a lot of things to do.”