Taking a Chance

by Jan Feed

He hated to lie to them, but some truths shouldn’t be told.

  “I think your stepfather didn’t want you. Or your mom thinks, for whatever reason, that the problems she’s having with him will go away if you’re not there all the time. After being divorced once, she really wants to make this marriage work.”

  The subtext couldn’t be hidden: she wants the marriage to work more than she wants to have you with her. Even Tyler at only eight was smart enough to understand that much.

  “We’ll have to buy stuff for you guys, too. More bedding, posters for the walls…uh, whatever your mother doesn’t send.”

  Still his often pouty eleven-year-old daughter amazed and impressed him by not saying rudely, “I can’t share a bedroom with him!”

  He continued, “Melissa, if you’ll be patient, I’m going to open up the rest of the attic and create another bedroom. When I’m done, you can choose which one you want, since you’re the oldest.”

  “But…what if Mom wants us back?” Tyler asked, voice trembling. “And you’ve gone to all that work and everything?”

  Another truth had to be told. This one might be unwelcome, but Ryan would not let them live with any more uncertainty.

  “You won’t be going back to live with her.” He looked them in the eye, made sure they saw the steel that underlay those words. “I won’t lose you again, and I won’t have you two put through another move. Having to make friends again, remember what bed you’re waking up in, know who you can count on. You’ll probably visit your mother sometimes, but your home will be here. For good.”

  “Oh.” Tyler looked shell-shocked, Melissa only slightly less so.

  Ryan dropped to his knees and held out his arms. “Come here.”

  They flung themselves at him, burrowing against him, clutching him so tightly it hurt, their arms overlaying each other. He hadn’t cried in a long time, but his eyes were wet right now, blurring the sight of their heads against his chest, Tyler’s darker than his sister’s.

  They spent the day prowling the Northgate mall, partly to give themselves something to do. Tyler picked out new sheets and a comforter for his twin bed. Melissa didn’t know what she wanted for hers. Tyler asked for a Mariners pennant to hang on the wall, “Since I live here now,” he said firmly. “In Seattle.”

  Ryan had the guilty feeling that he was spending money as if doing so would patch emotional wounds, but he wanted to believe that instead, with a few new possessions to make the bedroom theirs, he was helping to root them, to convince them that this really would be home.

  Melissa didn’t pick out anything, Ryan noted. Of course, her room would take him several weeks if not months to carve out of unfinished attic, especially if he added a dormer, but he guessed her disinterest stemmed instead from her tighter bond with her mother. This was going to be harder on her. Tyler and Ryan had always been buddies, nothing complex to their relationship. But Melissa…she looked like her mother. She identified with her.

  And now, at a particularly difficult age, on the brink of puberty, she’d been abandoned by her.

  A man who rarely had violent tendencies, right about now Ryan would have liked to kill Wendy. Or make her sit down, look Melissa in the eyes and explain why she didn’t have it in her to be the mother her daughter needed so badly.

  By evening, he was exhausted. The strain of maintaining an upbeat front all day was showing. The kids got quieter and quieter while he got jollier and jollier. He couldn’t seem to stop himself.

  He called Wendy for them, handed Melissa the phone and left the kitchen to give them the privacy to say anything to their mother. Out in the living room, he paced, able to hear only a low murmur of voices.

  The conversation was a hell of a lot shorter than it should have been. They came into the living room with the same pinched expressions they’d had that morning, the same stiff, mechanical way of moving. “I’m sorry,” he said simply, and held out his arms again.

  With Melissa nestled under one arm and Tyler under the other, he kissed the tops of their heads. “Did you have a good talk with your mom?”

  Sure they had, he mocked himself. They just loved discussing why, after sending them off to visit Dad for Christmas, their mother had decided she didn’t want them to come home again.

  Tyler shook his head. “She just kept crying and saying she was sorry.”

  In a small voice, Melissa asked, “Doesn’t she love us at all?”

  He explained the best he could. He concluded, “She does love you. A whole lot. As much as she can. But sometimes I think she isn’t completely grown up herself. It’s one of the things that led to our divorce. I needed her to be completely adult, a mother and wife, and she still wanted to be twenty years old and fun-loving. She is fun, which is one of the great things about your mother, but it can also be really frustrating.”

  Tyler’s head bobbed against him. “She was always forgetting stuff she’d promised to do. Like, she was supposed to go on a school field trip to this TV studio, only she didn’t show up and my teacher had to find someone else at the last minute.” His humiliation and disappointment could be heard even in this flat recitation.

  Melissa stiffened. “She explained! She told you she didn’t forget, she just had an appointment and then traffic was really bad and she couldn’t get there in time. Things happen!”

  “She forgot!” Tyler yelled.

  “She didn’t!” Melissa’s voice choked with tears. “You’re trying to make her sound bad!”

  “Hey! Hey!” Ryan shook them gently. “Enough! It doesn’t matter whether she forgot. People do forget things that are important to other people, and we can forgive them. Okay?”

  They went quiet and sullen. Finally Ryan got them to agree to watch a TV show they usually both enjoyed, and, leaving them sitting as far as they could get from each other in the living room, he went to the kitchen to call Jo. A cowardly part of him wanted to put off giving her the news, but he wouldn’t let himself.

  “Hey,” she said, sounding pleased to hear from him. “Did you have a good day with the kids?”

  “No. Actually, today sucked.” He heard the exhaustion and anger in his voice. “Any chance you could come over? We can talk after the kids are in bed.”

  She agreed to come and didn’t question him, for which he was intensely grateful. The doorbell rang just as he was ushering Melissa and Tyler upstairs to bed.

  “Jo must be here,” he said.

  Their glances at each other crackled with unspoken communication, a sign that they had restored a semblance of solidarity.

  “We’ll go brush our teeth,” Melissa said. “Won’t we, Tyler?”

  Her brother nodded, but his expression became anxious. “You’ll come and say good-night, won’t you, Dad?”

  He ruffled Tyler’s hair. “Of course I will. Now, go on.”

  Ryan let Jo in. “Sorry to be so slow. I was just sending the kids up to get ready for bed.”

  She unwound her scarf. “I’m too early.”

  “Nope.” The anguish that hadn’t left him since last night twisted in his chest. “You’re never here soon enough for me,” he muttered, just before he kissed her.

  Her lips held the chill of a night that might bring snow. They warmed quickly under his, and she sighed and parted them.

  Forgetting where he was, that his children were just upstairs, he deepened the kiss and dragged her up against him, letting his desperation show.

  How was he going to live without her?

  She was the one to ease back, her eyes searching his. “It’s only been one day, and you missed me.”

  “You could say that.” He sounded ragged.

  Jo framed his face with her hands and stood on tiptoe to press a sweet kiss on his mouth, a complete contrast to the raw sexuality of a moment before.

  “I missed you, too,” she said softly. “Last night, after I looked at my mother’s things, I wanted so much to talk to you.”

  In his own troubles, he’d forgotten the package from her father
waiting for her at home. Ryan felt like scum.

  “Talk to me now.” He smiled ruefully when they both heard the voice call him from upstairs. “Well, in a minute.” He nodded toward the kitchen. “Get yourself a cup of coffee if you want. I’ll be back.”

  “Okay.” She smiled. “Go. You’re wanted.”

  Upstairs he found the kids in their own beds, Melissa already with her light turned off and her back to the door. Ryan went to her first, bending to kiss her cheek and murmur softly, “I love you, ’Lissa.”

  Her arms shot out for a quick, fierce hug. “I love you, too, Daddy,” she whispered.

  He smiled, hiding the pain he felt for her, and smoothed first the hair back from her face and then her covers over her shoulders. “I’ll see you in the morning. Hey, maybe there’ll be snow.”

  “I want it on Christmas.”

  “This might be the year. You never know.”

  Tyler still sat bolt upright, bedside lamp on. “You’re not going anywhere, are you, Dad?”

  “Nope.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “I wouldn’t leave you and Melissa alone. Your sister isn’t old enough to be in charge yet.”

  Tyler muttered, “She already thinks she is.”

  “I heard that!” his sister snapped from the other bed.

  Ryan and his son exchanged wry grins. “Okay,” Ryan said, “scoot down. Time to go to sleep.”

  He arranged Tyler’s covers, made sure his dinosaur was within reach and turned out the light before leaning down to kiss his forehead.

  “I love you.”

  Tyler nodded. “Dad?”

  “Um-hm?”

  “I’m glad we’re staying,” he said with astonishing force. “I want to live here, with you. I hated Denver.”

  Melissa kept quiet this time. Ryan said, “I know you hadn’t made friends. I’m glad you still have some here. And you know what?”

  “What?” his son asked.

  “I know you’ll miss your mom, but I’m glad you’re staying, too.” He kissed Tyler’s forehead, too. “Good night,” he said softly.

  From habit he left their door open about six inches and the bathroom light on so that they weren’t in complete darkness.

  Outside, he stood for a moment listening, but heard nothing. Tyler would have wanted him to dry his tears, but Melissa was old enough to prefer to cry alone, into her pillow. He had to respect that.

  Tiredly Ryan started downstairs. Time for phase two in the day from hell.

  In the kitchen, Jo turned to face him, setting down her coffee cup. “Okay. What was so awful about your day?”

  No reprieve. “More than a day. The past twenty-four hours.”

  Creases formed in her brow. “But I’d barely left you twenty-four hours ago.”

  “Wendy called.” Ryan pulled a stool up to the tiled counter. Fittingly, Jo stayed on the other side of it, waiting. Ryan was blunt. “She doesn’t want the kids back. They’re going to stay with me.”

  Except for a widening of the eyes, Jo didn’t react. Slowly she said, “Aren’t you glad?”

  “Hell, yeah!” he said explosively. “For myself. Maybe for Melissa and Tyler, long term. In the short term, they’re hurting. Your mother died. Imagine if she’d left you on purpose.”

  Jo flinched, and he cursed his big mouth. “I’m sorry….”

  “No.” She shook her head. “You’re right. Poor Melissa! That day at the Pike Place Market, she talked about her mother all the time. This is going to be hardest on her, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.” Ryan rotated his head, trying to ease tension that gripped his neck and shoulders. “Tyler just told me he was glad he was staying, that he hated Denver. He might have just been trying to get in good with me because he’s scared and now he depends on me, but I don’t think so. He’s seemed unhappy ever since they moved.”

  Jo nodded. “I noticed. I think after Thanksgiving he didn’t want to go back.”

  “Yeah.” Ryan released a long breath. “Here’s the problem. You and I are supposed to leave for New Orleans in eight days.”

  Supposed to.

  He saw in her eyes that she understood.

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  “Yeah.” Ryan tried to smile, felt his mouth twist. “I know Kathleen would take Melissa and Tyler, and normally that would be fine, great, but…”

  Jo gave him a fierce stare. “But you can’t leave them.”

  Confused, he said, “No. They’re reeling from the news that Mom doesn’t want them. I’m assuring them they’re mine for good, that I won’t let them be yanked around anymore. I don’t see how I can say, ‘Yeah, I know you’re sad, and we can talk about it when I get home,’ and go off on a trip. No matter how much I want to go.”

  “Of course you can’t!” Jo exclaimed. “Ryan, did you think I wouldn’t understand?”

  No. What he’d thought was that she would understand all too well.

  His life had just changed. He was no longer a free-and-easy bachelor. Now he was a single father, and his kids would always have to come first.

  He didn’t say anything. At least, not soon enough.

  Her eyes narrowed. “You did. You thought I’d be mad.”

  “No.” His voice sounded strange, not his own. “What I think is that I’m blowing it with you. I’m proving your point. Obligations do get in the way of romance and adventure. Mine are. I can’t help it, Jo. I love you, but I have to put them first right now.”

  She came around the counter at last. “Of course you do,” she said with astonishing gentleness, and, as he swiveled on the stool to face her, wrapped her arms around him.

  Ryan buried his face in her hair and held her, too. She smelled wonderful, like Christmas, as if she’d been hanging fir boughs and candy canes. She murmured his name, her voice comforting.

  “It’s okay,” she said against his neck. “It’s okay.”

  When they finally disentangled, he knew he must look like hell.

  “I’ll, uh, cancel our reservations.”

  Jo nodded and backed away, her expression suddenly…shuttered.

  Now what? he wondered. Would she start making excuses when he called? And what was he supposed to do? Hire a baby-sitter every Friday and Saturday night, as Wendy had wanted to do when they were still married?

  “We can go another time,” he said, knowing they wouldn’t.

  She nodded again and smiled meaninglessly.

  She was slipping away, sawdust through his fingers, Ryan thought with panic. He’d known she would.

  “Your mother.” He grabbed for any lifeline. “You were going to tell me about what your father sent.”

  “Oh.” Jo shook her head. “Just old photos and letters and some jewelry. It was…nice. I’ll tell you about it another time.”

  She’d chosen the same words, the same fiction: another time. A hazy future that somehow would never happen.

  Ryan wanted to fall to his knees and beg, “Don’t leave me.” He wanted to pound his fist into a wall. He wanted to rip off Jo’s jeans, lift her to the table and bury himself in her. Claim her, in the most primitive way a man could.

  He did none of those things. He sat on the goddamn stool and said, “You don’t have to go.”

  “You look tired.”

  He shook his head. “Not sleepy.”

  “Um…Ryan?”

  Made warier by her tentative tone, he said, “Yeah?”

  “You’ll have to take a loss when you cancel the tickets, won’t you?”

  Taken by surprise, he said, “You mean, will I lose money? Uh… Yeah. I guess. It doesn’t matter.” Right now, a few hundred bucks seemed like the most trivial thing he had to lose.

  “Well, I was thinking.” She knotted her fingers in front of her.

  “About?”

  “This is maybe a terrible idea.”

  Patience deflated, he asked, “What is a terrible idea?”

  Jo flushed. “I was just thinking…what if we went anyway? Only, we took the kids. It would
n’t be the same, but we might have fun, and, well, it might be a distraction for them. You know?”

  Ryan stared at her. “Take Melissa and Tyler.”

  “Maybe you don’t want to vacation with me and them,” she said hastily. “Make them think…you know. That’s okay, Ryan. I understand. You could just use the reservations to take them on a trip.”

  Stunned, he shook his head. “You wouldn’t mind taking a trip with my kids?”

  “I’d rather we had the romantic week we planned,” she said frankly. “But, under the circumstances, going anyway might be better than canceling.”

  “We couldn’t sleep together,” he warned.

  She blushed again. “No. I know. Melissa and I could share. Maybe one night we could get a baby-sitter and go out? Or send them on a tour while we go to a nightclub? I’ve been reading about New Orleans, and I’ll bet they’d love the voodoo tour of the cemetery at night.”

  Dazed, Ryan said, “I think that’s safe to say.”

  “Um…” Jo backed a few more steps toward the door. “Let me know. I’d better go now. I’m sorry, Ryan.” Her voice was soft, infused with compassion. “But glad, too, because I know how much you love them. You’ll be a wonderful parent.”

  “Thank you,” he said numbly. “You’re leaving?”

  “Shouldn’t I?” Her eyes were huge and dark.

  “No.” Somehow he got to his feet and stumbled toward her. “Don’t go, Jo. Please don’t go.”

  She met him halfway and let herself be folded into his arms. He leaned on her as much as held her.

  “Oh, Ryan.” She rained tiny kisses on his cheek and neck.

  “I was so afraid,” he whispered hoarsely. “Jo, if you mean it, I’d love to go to New Orleans with you and the kids. It’ll mean a lot to them. God, I love you, Jo.”

  “I think,” her voice wavered, “that I love you, too.”

  They stood there a long time, held in each others’ arms.

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE, miraculously, snow started to fall. Tiny flakes at first, just a few scattered so far apart Jo thought she was imagining them as she knelt on the window seat and searched the dark sky. But the flakes thickened and swirled until she was sure.

  “It’s snowing!” she called in delight.