by Hannah Paige
“Yeah, that’s right. You show this polyester monster who’s boss.” The rewarding ‘zip!’ sound resonated in April’s ears and she turned back around to face Rick who was wearing his sad, yet seasoned smile. It was strong, real, but was still edged with the heartache that he must have recently left behind, or maybe was still wrestling with. April was going to find out.
Rick was just opening the front door again when she stopped and ran back to her bedroom. She shoved the pile of clothes on her desk aside, exposing the cedar box.
“What are—” Rick started, appearing in April’s bedroom doorway right as she pressed a kiss to the box.
She turned to face him, “I’m not a crazy cat lady, promise. I just…I used to say goodbye to him every time before I left, now it’s just habit.”
He frowned, “The box?”
“My cat, Skittles. He died a couple years ago, so I had him cremated. Now he’s right there, curled up next to my laptop, his favorite spot in his later days.”
Rick let go and doubled over laughing. For a split-second April almost felt embarrassed that he was laughing at her weird custom, but then the joy that accompanied making someone laugh that true, that pure, hit her as he came up for air, grinning.
“Is it so strange that I wanted to cremate my most beloved furry friend?” she joked.
“Oh, April. I can’t believe you named your cat after candy and then had him put in a box. You are something else, April McCann.” He looped an arm around her shoulders, and they left, laughing.
“Two root beers, please,” April ordered from the waiter: a college kid most likely, with acne still having a firm grip on his forehead. He must have been new here, since he’d taken their food order ten minutes ago and only now come back, remembering that people usually liked to sip on something cold while they waited for their meal.
“You know, you can order something a little stronger,” Rick offered, but April saw him relax when she shook her head.
“I’ve never been a big drinker. Soda’s my ‘outing’ drink.”
“I think you’re showing your age. Nobody says ‘outing’ drink,” Rick teased.
“That may be true, but I’m not really old until I start saying ‘the hots’. That, my friend, is when you need to ship my ass off to an old folk’s home.”
He smirked at her as the waiter laid out two napkins, along with their drinks.
“Your pizza should be out in a few minutes.”
Rick nodded at him while April took a sip from the fizzy drink in front of her.
“I was kind of surprised when you offered a pizza joint for the date. I know I haven’t dated in,” he blew air out of his cheeks, “I’m not going to say how long, but I assumed you’d want to go somewhere nice. Why this place?”
April slurped down more of her soda and leaned back against the wooden chair, hearing the comforting creaks that it offered up to her ears. “Well, first of all, I’m usually too loud for nice restaurants,” she laughed, then saw that Rick was still waiting, anticipating, somehow that there was a serious answer to go with the first one. “And second, I like the feel of this place, you know? With all the families, the kids over there,” she nodded towards the cluster of children playing with the claw machine, the air hockey table, and smacking the buttons on the pinball machine, “and the parents chatting with each other. But if you notice, you can tell that the moms at the tables…” She glanced over at a mother at one of the booths near the front wall; she was spoon-feeding a toddler in a high chair, but her attention was divided with another kid who was over in the arcade area. “They always have one eye on the kids on the other side of the room.” She blinked a couple of times and brought her eyes back to Rick, “Just interesting, comforting.”
His mouth hung open for a second while he contemplated the words in his head, “Why didn’t you ever have kids?”
She felt the dull ache that had settled in her chest years ago perk up, sputter a few lively sparks just to let April knew it was still there, “You don’t want to hear that story. It’s sad and I don’t want to make you feel worse than you might already feel.”
The neon green lights from the air hockey table reflected in his eyes, giving them a young, vibrant jolt for a second, “I feel great, April. For the first time in a long time, actually. I’m reaching out to old friends, making some new ones. I don’t drink anymore, or at least I’m trying not to. About two months ago, if somebody told me that I would be out on a date with a beautiful woman, not chugging down a beer, I wouldn’t have believed them. But I’m here and I think Grace would have been proud.”
“Tell me about her, and these new friends you’re making. I mean I can only assume that I’m one of the old friends, but who are the new ones that are making you so happy? I want to hear more about these ‘friends’ that have changed you so much, pulled you out of whatever hole you fell into over the past few years.”
He leaned closer to her, “Well, I’m not sure I would put you in the ‘friend’ category as of the moment. That’s where your dad belongs, and I wouldn’t offer to take him out on a date. How about this: I will tell you whatever you want to know, if you tell me one serious thing about yourself first. Deal? That way we can both get something off of our chests.”
April frowned, not used to having someone reverse her own tactics on her. “You drive a hard bargain, Rick. Fine, deal.” She hugged her arms to her chest and waited a minute before going on. “I wanted kids, I did. But I just never saw myself as getting married, I was always too independent, you could say. Or maybe I just never found somebody who could put up with me. So, I looked into adoption eight years ago. At the time, Darin had been gone less than a year, my dad and I weren’t speaking, and of course my mom…well, she hadn’t been in the picture for quite some time. So, I thought it was the perfect time to adopt.” She smiled, recalling the pictures of the little girl she almost had, almost.
“Her name was Tatenda. She was nine. She was from Uganda. I read her story and almost cried that day. She’d been rescued from the slave business, the mother hadn’t come forward, so she got put up for adoption. I remember”, She cleared her throat, tightening her grip on her shoulders, “after I had gone through the whole process of getting approved, I flew out to get her. There were a couple of other adoptive parents there, waiting for their kids in the same village as I was. And I remember watching them, one by one receive their kids. Some of them would…would run right into their arms and then others were shy and would hide for a little and then the parents would have to go get them, show them that everything was going to be okay. I stood there for close to four hours, waiting for her to be brought out. Then one of the social workers came out to tell me that the mother had come forward that morning and taken Tatenda with her. They had tried to call me, but I was already on the plane. I could never do that again.”
She looked up at Rick and wiped her eyes, not realizing she had even started to cry. It was a foreign action for her, one that she avoided at all costs. Laughter. Laughter was her chosen expression, the one that she exhibited the most often.
But Rick knew tears all too well, that much was obvious in the way he reached out and gently took April’s hand, giving her a look of understanding, “I can’t imagine how that must have felt, getting that close and then having your child taken away from you.”
April forced fresh oxygen down into her lungs, “Yes you can. Grace was taken away from you too.”
He was wounded at first by that, but then he shook his head, “That’s different. I had memories with her. I got to hold her and live with her. I have the luxury of remembering what her laugh sounded like, I got to see her cry and dance and sing. You never got that same chance.”
She swallowed hard, feeling the knot in her throat dissolve with his positivity, “I thought you would say those were curses, remembering all that about your daughter.”
“Not anymore. I used to, but I know better.”
“Glad to hear,” she whispered, not knowing if he co
uld even hear her over the sounds of the restaurant. She scooted forward in her seat, pressing her spine into a straight line. “Now, tell me about this new friend of yours.”
A soft smile accompanied the story, “Her name is Lena, she leads my AA meetings. She’s…a strong woman.”
April felt the need to ask, “Pretty?”
“I guess. For someone who could be my mother,” he chuckled at April’s flash of jealousy, “But she’s really helped me through this. She says that the first month is the hardest and I’ve been sober longer than that now.”
April squeezed his hand, “That’s amazing, Rick, I mean it. I’d like to think that if I was in your position, I would be as strong as you’ve been, but I just don’t think that’s the case.” April considered making a joke about how she might have also handled it with far more grace and managed to come out on top with a smile and a helping hand to the next person in line. But that would have been too far; there was a line between trying to loosen the mood and making a joke out of someone else’s trials. She’d learned that the hard way.
They made it through the rest of the meal with mostly small talk. April gabbed on for too long, this she was sure of. But Rick only silenced her stream of thoughts a few times—a talent that most people couldn’t master with her—with his own interjections. He spent the rest of the time adding in practical side notes, the occasional joke, but mostly just keeping that heartbreaking soldier smile of his right on her. She wondered if he knew he held it almost the whole way through dinner, if he was even conscious that it drove her nuts how she couldn’t figure out if it was nostalgic or happy or hurt or completely content. She was an open book. The topic of her mother aside, she shared everything with people, if it meant getting closer to them for their benefit. But Rick was a puzzle. No, harder than that. He was a Rubik’s cube with the stickers recently peeled off: a clean, white surface.
“I’m not going to say that I had a nice time tonight. That’s cheesy and quite overused,” April said as he walked her up to the door after dinner and ice cream—both had been her idea, she realized, just now.
He swung her around, holding on to her hand still, so that she could face him, “I agree.”
She was centimeters from him now, looking up at his eyes, “Can I ask you something?” She watched his squared-off chin, with a tiny scar on the tip—maybe from the days before he mastered shaving—nod in response. “What are you going to do tonight when you get home?”
He frowned, thinking, “I don’t know yet. I’ll have to catch my breath first, come to terms with the quiet of my own house. Then I’ll figure it out. Right now, I don’t want to think about that.”
She gently pressed her lips up against his chin then pulled away, “Do you remember when you danced with me? And we sang ‘Help Me, Rhonda’ as loud as we could? That’s still my favorite song.”
The edges of his lips twitched up for a second before broadening, slightly, at the memory, “Yeah, my eardrums never recovered.”
“Ah yes, well I never did advertise that I had stellar vocal skills.”
She felt herself lean into him and she pressed her cheek against his chest, felt the slow ‘thump, thump, thump’ rhythm of his heart. Steadfast. That was the only word suitable to describe it. April hoped he couldn’t hear her own heartbeat in the quiet of the night. All she could hear was that constant beat under her ear. Her own voice startled her, sounding alarmingly loud, “Come dance with me, Rick.”
April interlaced her fingers with Rick’s. He wasn’t awake yet and it made her remember all of the romance movies she had seen when the woman always woke up first and she never knew why. She still didn’t but enjoyed the tendency more when she was the one living the moment. She got to see his face completely relaxed, at peace. His eyelashes fluttered and he slept with the tiniest of smiles on his lips. It was mischievous, almost boyish, but she wouldn’t tell him that. It might make him feel uncomfortable, knowing that he displayed such vulnerability. Knowing Rick, he might try to change it, keep himself from showing that side of him, even if it was just within that slip of time between consciousness and REM sleep. He seemed like the kind of person who would do that.
She crawled out of bed and wrapped a red-and-white polka dotted blanket around her. Then at the memory that it had been a Christmas present from her dad a year before, she dropped it, feeling dirty all of a sudden. Instead she threw a tank top over her head. She opened her bottom dresser drawer to pull out some sleeping shorts, but her pair wasn’t in there. She frowned, glancing around her whirlwind room. Her father was horrified by how messy she was, astounded that all of his military bed-making and room-cleaning lessons never stuck with her. She crossed the scuffed wood floor to her desk, where a pile of clothes sat on top of her laptop and Skittles. She stuck her hand under the heap, feeling for the soft, worn cotton shorts.
“Aha,” she hissed, feeling the familiar drawstring, and gave it a good yank. The heap tumbled off her desk and a loud ‘crack!’ followed suite. April cringed, shoving the clothes aside to see the picture that she had knocked off in the process of locating her shorts.
Upon seeing the women—one tall with greying, brown hair pulled into a loose ponytail and a middle-school-age girl with blonde pigtails and a smile full of crooked teeth—in the photo, April dropped the shorts in her hands and bent to pick the photo up. A long crack scurried along the top of the glass, upsetting the flawless blue sky smeared above the women when the picture had been taken. The edges were faded. April knew that, remembered having to tuck them behind the frame when she’d placed the picture in it.
“What’s that?” Rick asked in a husky, morning voice.
April couldn’t take her eyes off the picture. She hadn’t seen it in so long, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d looked into those matronly eyes. They’d looked so forgiving, so honest back then.
“April?” She wasn’t aware that Rick had climbed out of bed. She only felt, barely, his hand on her cold wrist.
“It’s my mom.”
Chapter Three
“I haven’t spoken to her since I was eighteen. She left right after I graduated high school, a few days after the ceremony. And it was because of me.”
She took a deep breath, but the air somehow felt old already, bottled up; she hadn’t talked about this to anyone, ever, “I overheard an argument that she and my dad had, a few nights earlier. It was about this kid, Johnny. I didn’t know anything about him, and I’d never even heard his name before. But my mom sure did. I remember her telling my dad that he had shown up at her work that day, ‘ran away from foster care to find me’, she said. I remember her crying, sobbing, and telling my dad that she never wanted him to find out like this, but she couldn’t lie to him anymore. That’s when she told him that she’d cheated on him twelve years ago. They’d been going through a rough patch and she’d had a weak moment while he was overseas. Johnny was her kid, Rick, and my dad never knew about him. My mother lied for almost thirteen years. Thirteen years.”
April shook her head, remembering how that had felt that night when she’d heard it from her bedroom across the hall: like her whole world had shattered and the shards were sticking in her chest, all digging for her heart like eager miners.
“I ran in their room, started yelling at her…I called her such horrible names. I told her to go to hell, right there in my parents’ bedroom. I said that I wish that she had never come back from that night, from the night she slept with somebody besides my dad. I joked about her ‘keeping her legs closed’ and hoping that she got an STD so she’d learn her lesson from that night. How could I have even joked about that? To my mother? I was horrible, horrible, Rick.” She shook her head at her own naive nature. Of course, now, there was no changing what she’d done. She’d been rash and eighteen and her mother had lied. They were the perfect ingredients for a Molotov cocktail. Her mother had simply lit the fuse.
“I can never make that right, what I did to her that night. I watched her fall apart. I tor
e her to pieces, ripped her from top to bottom until she couldn’t stand anymore.” She felt her eyes well up, glaze over so they weren’t looking directly at Rick anymore, “Darin didn’t know. He never did.” April felt a hot tear trickle down her cheek and she swiped it off, exasperated. “This is the second time I’ve cried in twenty-four hours. Gotta be a record for me. You know, here I am, the kind of person who lives to make people laugh. I love it, seeing joy on other’s faces, it makes me a better person. And yet, you somehow manage to come in here and bring out the waterworks in me. Why do you do that?” April demanded and made Rick laugh; at least she had that going for her.
“For ten years I didn’t feel anything except for sorrow, regret, disappointment. I didn’t let myself feel anything positive, because I didn’t think I deserved to, not without Grace. I didn’t think I could find anything worth smiling about in the world after she was gone. Then I met this kid, crazy kid,” he shook his head and images of the blonde boy who had come looking for April the other day flashed through her head.
“William Thomas Clark,” April interjected and Rick’s eyes flashed to meet hers.
“How did you know that?”
“Because I met him too, yesterday. He was looking for his mom.” She frowned, thinking harder, “Or, he might have been looking for me. I don’t know. But there was something weird about him. I still don’t even know what he wanted from me.”
“What did he say to you?”
April could tell she had piqued Rick’s interest with this topic, but she didn’t know why, “Well, he said that he had lost his mom and he needed me to help him find her. So we walked around a bit, and he cried about how his mom was going to be mad at him for running away and then I said…” She stood up from the bed and started pacing, needing to move, “Then I said that his mom wouldn’t be mad. That moms always forgive their children.” Her toes dug into the carpet as she spun to face Rick once more, “You don’t think…”