by Nicole Deese
“That sounds really cool,” Brandon said. “I like the crown idea.”
“Yeah? Well, good. Your dad liked it, too. We just need to figure out the dimensions and angle of it. The way it needs to tilt on her head has been hanging me up a bit. Which one of these sketches do you like better?”
The two moved to a makeshift table—a two-by-four stretched across a couple upturned five-gallon buckets. Hunched and focused, they studied the graph paper held down by rocks.
I stood there, Callie’s box in my arms, watching the two of them interact as if they’d passed the milestone of new friends long ago and had entered a place of familiarity and comfort—a process I’d come to know as the Callie Effect.
The lack of contention on Brandon’s face as he spoke to her brought a surge of hopefulness through my center. All the masks he wore with me were just that. Masks. The well of his frustration might tunnel deep, but he was still soft underneath. Still pliable. Still the boy I’d raised. Anger hadn’t corrupted his ability to make eye contact or smile. And neither had it stolen his ability to speak with confidence and respect.
I set the tote down and unloaded another burden I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying.
While they chatted about the placement of tables and chairs and towers of pastries, I continued to eavesdrop under the guise of reinforcing a beat-up extension ladder. How did she do all this mural work with only an extension ladder?
“You’ll really let me?” Brandon asked.
“Of course. I have every confidence in you.” Callie squeezed his shoulder.
Brandon swiveled around to me. “Callie said I can fill in some of her outline work.”
I smiled, knowing she’d decided on this days ago. “That’s awesome, bud.”
He turned back to Callie. “Can I take pictures of our progress? I want to send them to my oma.”
I barely managed to hold my face in check at the mention of Vivian. How often was he communicating with her, anyway?
“Of course.” Callie saddled up beside me, looping her arm through mine. “And it will also be fun for your dad to see our progress, too. I might save a couple jobs for him.”
Brandon raised his eyebrows. “A job for my dad? On the mural?”
“Yep.” Her confidence in my nonexistent artistic ability was astounding.
“But he’s—”
“Gonna be awesome,” Callie cut in.
Brandon let his reservations drop. “Whatever you say. So what can I do first?”
“Go ahead and take one of those wet rags from the red bucket and remove any traces of my first chalking.”
I reached for my wallet, removed a few twenties from the billfold, and handed them to Callie. “For lunches.”
Her face contorted. “I don’t need that.”
“It’s the least I can do.”
“I can afford to feed us both lunch. Besides, I thought we agreed we’re even now. No debts between us.”
I traced the pretty pout of her mouth with my gaze. “We are even. That has no bearing on you accepting this.”
She contemplated my argument for the better part of a minute before conceding. “Fine. But don’t blame me if I take your son to eat at Sombrero Hat without you. A girl can’t wait on chips and salsa forever, you know.”
I laughed at Callie’s nickname for El Ranchero. “How ’bout I take you this weekend? Saturday?”
“Really?” She quirked a brow. “Are you . . .”
“Asking you out on a date? Yes, it might be shocking to believe, but I have more up my sleeve than kissing you in a pantry.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
CALLIE
In only the first hour of mural work with Brandon, I realized I couldn’t have handpicked a better assistant. He was astute, conscientious, and hardworking. He’d remained half a step ahead of me all afternoon, diligently scrubbing the remaining chalk from the brick and allowing me to redraw without a bunch of unnecessary starts and stops. It struck me as odd, actually, Brandon’s die-hard determination. He certainly didn’t fit the slacker image he tried so hard to project with his fashion sense.
Considering what Davis had told me about his son’s plummeting grades, I’d wondered if he struggled with attentiveness. But after today I realized my assumption couldn’t have been further from the truth. The boy had the creativity of an artist and the precision of a scientist. A smile curved my lips. Davis might look at his son and see his late wife, but I could see so much of the man I’d come to care about.
Brandon hopped off his step stool and tossed the chalk rag into the bucket labeled “Dirty.” “I think I got it all. Can I help finish the rest of the outlining with you? I have a steady hand.”
From the top of my ladder, I assessed his eagerness. I’d never shared this part of the work before. Actually, I’d never shared any part of my contracted work before, but this was one of those moments when Brandon felt so much older than twelve—wiser, more discerning. Another trait of his father’s.
“Yes, sure. In the tote your dad carried over there should be some more chalk like this.” I held it up to show him. “You can help me sketch the table. With both of us chalking, we can get this thing outlined by lunch. After that, we’ll start on the fun stuff.”
Facing the wall once again, the brick cool and rough against the side of my hand, I feathered several more soft strokes around the baker’s torso and hips. Hopefully, this time around she’d appear whimsical and feminine. Perched on the second-to-top step of my ladder, I arched back a bit to get a broader view. Much better.
“Uh, I don’t think this is the right tote.”
Not bothering to turn around, I said, “Yeah, it is. The chalk is in a mason jar near the bottom.”
“Well, this has, uh . . .”
At his hesitation, I twisted around. “Oh! Uh, nope. That is most definitely not the box.” I dusted my hands off and climbed down the ladder.
Hadn’t I specified for Davis to bring out the blue tote? He must have dug his way through seven storage containers to find this green misfit box of horrors.
Cocking his head to the side, Brandon stared at the sea of photographs. My sister had handed the sorting job off to me after our mother’s marriage to our Canadian stepfather. She’d taken her new marriage vows of forsaking all others to the extreme—as in, no remnants of the past in her new life—Clem and I excluded, of course. My sister didn’t want the old family photos any more than our mom did, but I couldn’t bear to throw them away.
I also couldn’t bear to look at them.
“Is this your family?” he asked, mesmerized by a picture of all four of us snuggled inside the belly of a pop-up swimming pool. We looked happy, which meant I couldn’t have been much older than eight. “Is that you in the middle—wearing the pink goggles?”
“Yep, that’s me.” Apparently, I thought I needed goggles in eighteen inches of water. Absentmindedly, I roughed his hair the way I did Collin’s, and something about the action made me pause. Brandon wasn’t my nephew, yet the familial instinct I felt for him was quite similar. For the briefest moment, I wondered if he felt it, too.
I stretched my neck side to side and answered his other question. “And yes, that was my family.”
It would have been so easy to lift the lid from the ground and snap it back in place, close off the past and forget it had ever existed. But Brandon looked so enraptured that when he reached his hand into the glossy pile of photographs, I didn’t stop him.
“Is this Collin’s mom?”
I studied the picture in his hands: teenage Clem, a pink bubble popped over her nose and lips. “She was the best bubble blower I knew.”
He chuckled. “Really?”
“Yeah. She’s tried to teach me a hundred times, but somehow I could never get it right.”
“But I bet you drew better.”
“Yeah.” I chuckled. “I guess we all have our lots in life.”
My father had said that to me once, too.
Flicking through the next few sh
ots, the moments captured were nothing out of the ordinary. A simple home. A simple family. A simple kind of happiness. A snapshot of a childhood whose only real permanence or stability was a four-by-six glossy.
“These your parents?” His gaze drifted to my face. “You kinda look like him. Your dad.”
“We have the same red hair.” And the same toxic personality issues.
“Where do they live?”
I held out my hand to take the pictures back. “They divorced when I was a little younger than you. My mom lives in Ontario, Canada. She remarried a pilot, actually. They travel quite a bit, but I visited her for about a month last spring.”
“And what about your dad?”
What could be said about Leo Quinn? “He was an artist—brilliant with clay and pottery. But . . .” I looked out across the road and then farther still. “I don’t know much about him anymore.”
I blinked, tucked the pictures away in the box, and then refit the lid.
“You mean, you don’t talk to him?”
For a kid who usually minded his own business, there was a whole lot of questioning going on. But maybe a truthful answer would be more beneficial than harmful. Maybe he’d understand how lucky—or blessed, as my sister would say—he was to grow up with a dad who stuck around.
“Actually, Brandon, he was the one who cut contact with us. I’m not sure where he lives or what he’s up to. Last I heard he was headed off to Europe, and that was years and years ago.” A thousand questions passed over his face in the time it took me to formulate an age-appropriate explanation. Although, even at the age of twenty-nine, I still wasn’t sure I had one to offer. “My father decided that he wasn’t the kind of man to have a family.”
Brandon scrunched his face. “He just . . . left?”
“Yes.”
“But why didn’t he want a family?” The note of sincerity in his voice endeared me to him even more.
And while I could still hear the echo of my father’s proclamation through the hollows of my heart, I pushed those words aside. This wasn’t the moment for blanket generalizations. Not when I knew men like Chris. And Davis. Men who pushed through their struggles for the sake of their families.
“I’ve wondered that many times myself, and while I don’t have all the answers, I do know one thing: men like your daddy, men who stick around even after life goes sideways and nothing looks the way they planned . . . those men are rare.”
He didn’t blink or look away.
“Your daddy may wrestle with his own issues—everybody does—but he’s not a quitter. Just the opposite, I’d say. Especially when it comes to you.”
Brandon stuffed his hands into his pockets and sighed. I could see his mental wheels turning. He’d been tracking with me just fine. Good. At least I could check therapy session off today’s agenda.
“Now, would you mind helping me exchange this tote for the right one? I guess your dad didn’t hear me say the blue one.”
Brandon tilted his head at an odd angle before reaching for the tote. “Oh, he did.”
“Did what?” I gripped the hard plastic handle of the box of pictures, and together we waddled our way back to my Subaru.
“Hear you say you wanted the blue one. He just couldn’t tell the difference.”
Maneuvering to pop the latch on my hatchback, I heaved out a hard breath and pushed the container into the back of my car. “What do you mean?”
“My dad can only see the difference between a few shades. He’s color-blind.”
“He’s color-blind.”
Brandon’s casual explanation had ripped through me with the force of a category-five hurricane. How could I have missed something so pivotal?
While we cleaned brushes and hauled the last of our buckets and containers to the mini storage behind the bakery, I grilled Brandon on everything he knew about his father’s condition. And now I was analyzing every moment I’d spent with Davis in an entirely new context.
One void of color.
If Davis couldn’t distinguish blue or green or red or pink, then he’d never witnessed the awe of a summer sunset. Never captured the gradient shades of a wildflower field in springtime. Never seen the changing leaves in autumn.
Or the brilliant color palette in his son’s artwork.
I almost wept at the cruelty of it.
But perhaps the saddest realization of all was that, while Davis had lived in a washed-out world for his entire life, he would never know any other reality. I understood now why he’d chosen to hire a designer to decorate his house. And why he’d asked for my opinion regarding wall color at Shep’s Place while offering no personal preference of his own.
Davis didn’t have a preference. Because every swatch must have looked the same to him.
“Hey, Callie?”
Brandon’s voice pulled me out of my rabbit hole.
“My grandma is on her way to pick me up.” Brandon looked up from his phone. “I won’t need a ride home.”
“Your dad’s mom?” And then, like an idiot, I realized how stupid a question that was to ask out loud. Of course it was Davis’s mother. The garden club lady. Brandon’s maternal grandparents lived in California, and by the sound of it, Davis wasn’t opposed to the distance.
“Yep. John won a few radio tickets to some MMA fight tonight in Bend. They asked me to go.”
“Who’s John?”
“My grandma’s . . .” His cheeks reddened at his hesitation. “She calls him her special friend—that’s all I know.”
I hid a chuckle and worked to collapse the ladder. “Sounds sweet.”
“I guess,” he said in a please-don’t-ask-me-to-keep-talking-about-this kind of way.
An older-model pickup truck, fire-engine red, pulled into the alley. Pots of flowers overflowed the bed liners in back, and a circular logo with the words “Garden Lady” were tattooed on the side door. A silvery brunette of average height with pear-shaped curves emerged from the vehicle. Her eyes winked at me before she even opened her mouth.
So this was Davis’s mother.
“You must be the Callie Quinn I’ve heard so much about.” Her peach blouse and denim slacks had obviously been put to good use. Several smears of potting soil streaked down her thighs. “I’m Marti Carter—oh, and please forgive my attire. I came right over from planting at Anne Marie Fenton’s place. When John called me, it was like he’d just won the golden ticket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I’m not even sure what MMA stands for, but he’s sure over the moon about it. Who knew people actually won real prizes from radio contests anymore? Go figure.”
I had no clue who Anne Marie Fenton was and only a vague understanding of MMA, but I knew I liked Marti Carter immediately. “It’s very nice to meet you. You have a wonderful family.”
Her handshake was friendly. “I’m pretty fond of them. Well”—she shot Brandon a facetious grin—“most of the time, anyway.”
Brandon cocked a grin of his own. “You really don’t know what MMA is, Grandma?”
“Hmm.” She thought for a minute. “Marinated Meat of America? Are we going to a giant cookout? I hope so. I love a good barbecue.”
I laughed and so did Brandon.
“Mixed martial arts,” he corrected as he slung his backpack over his shoulder.
“Oh my. Well, that’s sure to be . . . interesting.”
“A safe perspective.” I laughed.
“I wish I had another ticket I could offer you, Callie. But the station only gave us four.”
“Wait—is my dad going?”
“Yep. He just rescheduled his last appointment.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “I’m sure you’ll all have a great evening out together.” And I would have a great evening in. Just me and my color-blindness research.
Brandon headed to the truck and hopped in the cab. “See ya tomorrow, Callie.”
As I waved at him, I felt the distinct gaze of a nosy mother. A harmless one, but still, a mother looking out for her son n
onetheless. Not that I could blame her.
“Davis told me how you invited Brandon out here to help with the big mural.” Marti scanned the chalk outline on the side of the building. “Wow . . . that looks great so far! What an experience this will be for Brandon.”
“It’s coming along for sure. And honestly, after Brandon’s help today, I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to working solo. He’s been a great assistant.”
“Oh, I’m delighted to hear that.” She stepped closer and lowered her voice a notch. “Between you and me, I’ve been hoping something would change for them this summer. Fathers and sons, you know?” She rammed her fists together. “Like oil and water some days. I’ve been praying for someone to come along who could”—she smiled in a way that made my cheeks flood with warmth—“brighten things up a bit.”
What had Davis told her about me? He hardly seemed the type to indulge in over-sharing, but then again, maybe it wasn’t Davis who talked about me at all. Brandon wasn’t nearly as tight-lipped as I’d first suspected. The boy had plenty to say when he wanted to say it—today was proof enough of that.
But whatever Marti thought she knew about me, it was obvious her hopes for Davis went beyond what I could fulfill.
“Well, I always enjoy my summers in Lenox.”
“Your hair is so lovely,” she said, studying me.
I laughed at the abrupt change of subject. “Oh, thank you.”
“It’s just so vibrant and lively. You know, the shade actually reminds me of one of my favorite flowers. I have it in the back of my flatbed right now, actually.” She gestured for me to follow her.
Marti popped open the tailgate to expose several rows of calla lilies. I gasped at their beauty.
“These are called—”
“Fire Dancers,” I finished, mesmerized by the hot flames of color climbing the tubular blooms. I hadn’t seen one in years.
“You know it?” Marti’s glee was contagious.
“Actually, I was named after that flower. Calla Lilly Quinn. When I came out with this fiery red hair”—I patted the top of my head—“my dad remembered a flower he’d painted once with the same coloring. But I’ve gone by Callie since I was a young girl.” Only my father had nicknamed me Fire Dancer.