Wait for It

by Mariana Zapata

  The little bit of neat freak in me sobbed that I couldn’t leave it until the next day. I didn’t want to wake up knowing what lay outside the door. But as I stared at it, I was fully aware that it would take hours to clean up. Hours and hours and a few more hours. All the swallowing in the world didn’t do enough to help my suddenly swollen throat get any smaller.

  “Diana?” Dallas kind of laughed. “Are you about to cry?”

  “No.” I didn’t even believe myself.

  Obviously, he didn’t either because one of those rare, belly laughs of his escaped him. “I don’t have anything to do tomorrow. You, me, and the boys can knock it out.”

  I couldn’t look away from the destruction, no matter how hard I tried. “It’s okay,” I mumbled, swallowing an imaginary golf ball again. “I got it.”

  There was a pause. A sigh. “I know you got it, but I’ll help.” There was another pause. “I’m offering.”

  He’d used that soft, smooth tone that seemed so… inappropriate on his raspy voice, and it made me glance at him, sniffling. Since when had I become this person who was the annoying kind of stubborn and didn’t accept help? I hated people like that. “I wouldn’t want to take advantage of you,” I admitted.

  It was too dark to tell whether he was staring me down or not. “You’re not taking advantage. I’m offering. I’ve been up since five, and I’m about to keel over. All I’m asking is that you don’t make me stay up all night and half tomorrow morning cleaning up. We’ll do it first thing.”

  I must have taken too long to answer because he crossed his arms over his chest and tipped his chin down. I didn’t look at his big biceps. “I won’t bail,” he seemed to promise, making me move my gaze away.

  A small, tiny part of me didn’t want to take his promise seriously.

  That must have been apparent because Dallas kept going. “You look exhausted too, and Louie is already passed out on the couch. If he hears you doing stuff out here, he’ll eventually wake up and wanna come help.” I think he might have coughed. “I know you’re not planning on molesting me, okay?”

  I was so upset I couldn’t even laugh. But in that moment, the exhaustion overwhelmed my inner OCD, and I nodded.

  “You need help with anything else that isn’t….” He lifted a hand and vaguely pointed to the disaster zone I suddenly didn’t want to look at any longer.

  “No. Not really. I have some food to put up, but that’s about it. Thanks.” Closing both eyes, I reached up to pinch the tip of my nose and thought for a second, opening one eyelid in his direction. “Did you forget something?”

  Tipping his head toward the door, he answered, “No. I just got home from meeting up with some old friends in town and was in my garage about to go inside when I saw everybody had left. I wanted to check and make sure you were all good. Josh let me in.” He slid his gaze toward the yard again and winced.

  For the sake of my mental health, I told myself I’d imagined it.

  I also made sure not to make a big deal about him wanting to come over and make sure I was good. Nope. I wasn’t going to think about that for one single second more. How many times had he told me he owed me by that point?

  “You have a shit ton of dirty dishes. You scrub and I’ll rinse,” he offered unexpectedly.

  What the hell was happening? Had he backed into my car, felt guilty, and was now trying to make it up to me? “You don’t have to do that—”

  “I haven’t eaten food that good in a long time, and I have two days’ worth of dinner in the fridge your mom made me take home. I can rinse some dishes, and if you got any beer left, I’ll take one afterward. Deal?”

  Maybe he had hit my car. Or broken something. I didn’t get why he was being so nice. Two days of food didn’t seem like enough of a reason to go out of his way, especially when just about everyone had taken off with leftovers. But…

  I sighed and made sure to meet his eyes. “You really don’t have to be this nice to us.”

  Dallas’s head tilted to the side just a little, and I could tell he let out his own breath in what might have been resignation. “I know it’s tough being a single parent, Diana. I don’t mind helping,” he said. He shrugged those broad, muscular shoulders. “You three remind me of my family when I was a kid,” he explained, smiling almost sadly. “It’s no huge burden helping you out and getting fed at the same time.”

  It was the single parent thing I had working for me. All right. I’d be an idiot not to take the help he was so willing to offer.

  “Deal,” he said. The one word should have sounded like a question, but it didn’t. Not really. It was more like he was telling me we had a deal.

  Which we did. “Deal. But knowing my family, chances are, there’s only a couple of beers left, but they’re all yours. I won’t drink them when I have the boys.”

  Dallas nodded and followed me inside, locking the door behind us. I started organizing the dishes as he asked, “Mind if I get one from the fridge?”

  “Nope, make yourself at home,” I called out over my shoulder, still arguing with myself about having him help me or not.

  Soon enough, I had the plates and glasses organized on the side of the sink and partly inside of it, and Dallas came to take the spot right beside me. Like he’d suggested, I scrubbed and handed them over, letting him rinse and set them in the drying rack. Maybe in a few months, I could invest in a dishwasher, I thought. But all it took was a look at the floors to know that was a dumb dream. I would rather get new flooring put in than get a washer. I was just tired.

  “Most of the people here today were your family?” he asked after a few minutes of silence.

  “Yeah. Almost all of the adults. Half the kids are related to us somehow and the other half were friends of Josh’s from his new school and his last.”

  “He looked like he had a good time,” he noted, probably remembering the image of Josh doing the Slip-N-Slide over and over again.

  “He better have. I almost had to beg him to have a party to begin with. I hope Louie’s okay with us going to Chuck E. Cheese’s for his because I’d rather not ever do this again.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. You know, it was our first birthday here at this house….” I trailed off and shrugged as I handed him a plate. “The last two years we lived in an apartment and couldn’t do much there. We had to celebrate at my mom and dad’s house. When I was a kid, my parents always threw me a birthday party at home. I felt like I owed him since we have our own place now that isn’t tiny.”

  The deep grumble in his chest said he understood.

  “Next time, I’ll just save up more money to hire a cleaning crew afterward, or make my family stay and clean before I let them leave. I’ll keep their keys hostage or something. Even my mom and dad bailed.”

  He laughed, and the sound seemed to travel right along the sensitive skin at my neck. It had a beautiful, deep ring to it. When he finally spoke again, it was to say the last four words I would have expected. “I liked your parents. I could tell your mom didn’t like my tattoos much, but she was still nice.”

  “My mom, yeah, she is really nice.” And because I couldn’t help myself, thinking about the incident at the table with Sal, I muttered, “As long as you aren’t me.”

  There was a brief moment of awkward silence, and I thought I had gone too far talking about my mom, but then Dallas said, “I kinda noticed she gives you a hard time.”

  I hummed. “Thanks for defending me, by the way.” Did I sound as bitter as I felt? “What she doesn’t remember or tell everyone is how when I was younger, she would get mad when I’d go outside and get dirty. She’d say that’s what boys did, but girls weren’t supposed to do that kind of stuff. There was a brief phase when she didn’t let me wear pants, if you can believe that, but it didn’t last long.” Just thinking about that made a nerve somewhere on my face throb.

  I sighed. “She just… thinks I do everything wrong. She always has, and for a long time, I did do a bunch of stupid s
tuff. I’m not my cousin or my brother, and I never will be. I think it’s her weird way of pushing me, but sometimes all she does is make me feel like I can’t do anything right and I never will.” I coughed, embarrassed I’d even said that out loud. “That was deeper than I wanted it to go. Sorry. It’s fine. We’ve always had a weird relationship. We still love each other.” When we didn’t want to kill one another.

  God. Had I really told him all that? Why?

  “You think she likes your cousin and your brother more?”

  I scoffed. “I know she does. My brother was awesome. She always said he was her treasure. Her miracle. It’s fine. I was the accident baby that almost killed her.” Now that I thought about it, maybe she did have a good reason for me not being her favorite. Huh.

  “But your cousin? The one that was here today? You think she likes her more?”

  “Yes.” Of course she did.

  “Why?”

  Why? Was he serious? Had he been zoned out the entire time we sat at the table with Miss Pearl talking about Sal’s achievements? “Do you know who she is?”

  “Your cousin.”

  “No, ding-dong—”

  The laugh that cut out of him was loud and abrupt, and it made me laugh. Standing there so close together, his body heat against the side of mine, for some reason, only made me laugh more.

  “I’m sorry. I spend way too much time with the boys. No. I mean, yes, she’s my cousin. But she’s like the best female soccer player in the world, and I’m not just saying that because she’s family. They have huge posters of her plastered all over Germany. When you watch anything with women’s soccer, they’re going to have her on there in some way. She’s the kind of person, when you have a daughter, you tell her be like Sal. Shit, I tell Josh all the time to be like her. She’s one of the best people I’ve ever met. I get why my mom loves her. It makes sense.”

  His elbowed bumped my upper arm by accident. “She’s married to that famous soccer guy, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.” I shot him a look. “He was here almost all day with her.”

  He stopped what he was doing and turned that big upper body to face me. I wasn’t going to admire how impressive it was. Nope. “You’re fucking with me,” he scoffed.

  “No. Did you see the guy with the hat sitting with her parents and some of my family? The tall one? The only other white—Caucasian—man that wasn’t chasing after little kids?”

  He nodded.

  “That was him.”

  “What’s his name again?” he asked.

  Blasphemy. I wasn’t even a big soccer fan but still. “I’m going to tell you the same thing I tell Josh: when you ask a really stupid question, you’re not getting an answer.”

  That had my neighbor bursting out with another laugh that made me think I didn’t know him at all. Not even a little bit. God, he really did have a great laugh.

  For a married man.

  A married man, I repeated to myself.

  The look he gave me over his shoulder as he handed me a plate, still chuckling, made my stomach warm. “You shouldn’t sell yourself short. There’re some people who you’ll never make happy no matter what you do,” he said to me so evenly, I glanced up at him. It sounded like he’d learned that from experience.

  “Buttercup, I’m hungry,” came Louie’s sleepy voice from somewhere close behind us.

  He was standing right where the vinyl flooring of the kitchen met the carpeted flooring of the living room. “Give me a second to finish these dishes, but what do you want? Cereal or leftovers?”

  “Chicken nuggets.”

  I crossed my eyes and faced forward again. “Cereal or leftovers, Goo. We don’t have chicken nuggets.”

  “Okay. Cereal.” Silence. Then he added, “Please.”

  “Give me a few minutes, all right?”

  Louie agreed and disappeared.

  Dallas’s elbow hit me again as he rinsed off the second to last dish. “Why does he call you Buttercup?”

  I laughed, remembering exactly why. “My brother used to call me that, but when Louie was still really little, my best friend used to babysit the boys, and they’d watch cartoons together. There’s this one we used to watch when we were probably thirteen called The Powerpuff Girls, and she’d take those DVDs over for them to watch. It’s these three little girls with superpowers, right? One of them is named Blossom, she was the nice, levelheaded one, and he said that was my best friend, Vanessa. And there’s another one named Buttercup. She has dark hair, and she’s the most aggressive of the bunch. She’s the loudmouth, tough one, and for some reason or another, Louie just insisted that was me. He’s been calling me Buttercup ever since.”

  “But why did your brother call you that?”

  I shot him a look out of the corner of my eye. “I used to watch The Princess Bride all the time and used to say I was going to marry someone just like Westley someday.”

  He made a choking sound.

  “Shut up,” I muttered before I could help myself.

  Dallas made another sound that was something between a cough and a laugh. “How old were you?”

  “How old was I what?”

  “When you watched it all the time?”

  I smiled at the dishes. “Twenty-nine?”

  He laughed as he set the last plate on the drying rack at his side, his body turning in my direction as he raised his eyebrows, giving me this little smirk. “You remind me more of Princess Peach.”

  I looked down at my shorts and tank top, and caught the ends of my multicolored brown hair courtesy of careful instruction to Ginny. “Because of my beautiful pink gown and blonde hair?”

  Dallas’s mouth went flat. “She’s surrounded by men, but she’s still herself, and she’s got her shit together on Mario Kart.”

  I couldn’t help but smile, taking in the sloping bone structure of his face and the way his mouth was shaped at a slant and said, “I always did think I should have been born a princess, Mr. Clean.”

  The choke that came out of him made me laugh.

  “Mr. Clean?” he eventually got out, all choppy and broken.

  Peeking at him, I shrugged and tipped my chin toward his head.

  “I have hair.”

  I squinted at him and hummed, trying so hard not to laugh. “Uh-huh.”

  “I shave it every two weeks,” he tried explaining.

  “Okay,” I coughed out, my cheeks hurting from the effort not to laugh at how bent out of shape he was getting.

  “It all grows in evenly—are you laughing at me?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Lou, you wanna go with me and see if Miss Pearl and Mr. Dallas want to come eat dinner with us?” I asked.

  His hands paused on the remote in his hands as he seemed to mull over my proposal. “Mr. Dallas?”

  “Yes.” Josh was over at his friend Kline’s house, so it was just the two of us. “Since he helped us with the backyard earlier,” I explained.

  While I’d been in the middle of a shower, I came up with the idea of inviting him over for dinner as a thank-you for helping us clean up the yard hours ago. It was the least I could do. I knew he had leftovers, but that way they would last longer. He’d shown up at ten o’clock on the dot and stuck around for the next two hours, going above and beyond the neighborly and friendly call of duty.

  Problem was, I didn’t want to make him feel weird. So I figured, why not invite his nana too? The nana I still didn’t understand he had.

  With more grace than I figured the average five-year-old was capable of, Louie nodded. “Okay.”

  “Okay, come on.” I gestured toward the door, and Mac, who was lying on the couch besides my kid, sat up, expectantly thinking he was going to get another walk. “I’m making your favorite at least, buster.”

  “Chicken nuggets?” he gushed.

  I blinked at him. “Spaghetti and meatballs.”

  His shoulders slumped forward. “Oh. Yeah. I like that too.”

  I sighed. “Let’s g
o.”

  He followed me, pausing his game as he got to his feet. He’d dressed himself this morning and had on a bright green T-shirt with a pizza on it and red and black striped pajama pants. I thought about telling him to change, but who cared? It was only dinner.

  Louie and I crossed the street, holding each other’s hands. I reached down and pinched him on the butt as we walked up the path to Dallas’s house, and halfway up the steps to the porch, the little turd smacked me on the butt. We were bickering as I knocked on the door and stood back, waiting. I wasn’t even sure if he was home or not. I was sticking my tongue out at Louie as the lock was turned.

  I faced the door as it opened, expecting it to be a certain brown-haired, hazel-eyed man that I owed big time….

  But it wasn’t him on the other side of the screen door.

  It was a woman. A pretty, natural auburn-haired woman, and she was smiling. “Hi,” she said.

  It took me maybe two seconds, but I managed to get out, “Hey. Is—”

  The door opened wider and the woman stepped back as another face I recognized came forward with his eyebrows furrowed and the sides of a thinner mouth turned down into a frown. “Yeah?” was the ugly, unfinished greeting I got from the man I hadn’t seen in a while. Jackass Jackson.

  “Hi. Is Dallas here?” I asked slowly, with as much patience as I could drag together—which wasn’t much, especially when this small part of my brain wondered if the woman was here with Jackson or… not.

  She couldn’t be. Could she? Dallas wouldn’t do that, would he?

  “What do you want?” Mr. Not-Mr.-Rogers asked.

  I blinked and ground down on my teeth. “To talk to him.”

  “Hold on,” Jackson droned, scowling as he closed the door in my face.

  “Why is he so mean?” Lou asked almost immediately.

  I shrugged at him and whispered, “Someone didn’t take a chill pill today.”

  Moments later, the door opened wide. Dallas stood there, an uncomfortable expression on his face that didn’t sit well with me. “Hey.” His eyes landed on Lou and his smile got a little easier. “Hey, Lou.”