His arms went numb.
His ears rang with a flash of recognition.
“Nothing in my life’s been easy for a very long time,” he admitted. “Except for those few days when it started to feel like you were going to be part of it. But being with me can’t possibly be good for you. Look at what I’ve already put you through.”
“Don’t tell me I’m the one you’ve been protecting.”
“No. I’m a selfish, closed-down son of a bitch. But I don’t want to stay away from you any longer. Unless you tell me you need me to. And you probably should.”
“Because you liking me is—”
“Me wanting you is dangerous. Because it’s possible I’ll hurt you anyway. And being careful to avoid people who can hurt you is something else we have in common, right?”
She looked down at the pavement. “Maybe careful isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Or I wouldn’t have been missing you so much.”
“I really am sorry.”
She looked up and smoothed a hand down his arm. She nodded, still unsure. “You’re the most dangerous thing I’ve let myself need since I needed my mother to love me…and she never did. My dad either, not really.”
Law took her hand. He kissed it, wanting to kiss away every bad memory, and then to keep kissing her until he’d replaced each one, loving her until she could only think about how amazing they were together.
“I won’t rush you,” he said. “Take your time deciding. But if it’s not too late, I’d like to try this again. You’re the music I hear, Kristen Hemmings. The last two months, thinking of you late at night has kept me sane when nothing else could. I wanted you to know that. And from now on, when I think of you, I’ll be hearing the sexiest jazz I know.”
“Jazz can be pretty sad.”
He shook his head. “Not when it’s you. Your notes are deep and moody, and always looking for a way in, until one day they catch you off guard and you’re lost in the music. And when jazz is that good, darlin’…one note, one perfect chord, can last forever. That’s why I know, even if you can’t give me another chance, I’m the luckiest man alive just for the few days you let me get to know you. And for the few minutes you’re giving me now.”
He laughed at himself.
He sounded ridiculous.
And yet, he hadn’t felt this inspired since he was in college, to write down the music swirling through his mind.
“Coffee and ice cream?” Kristen asked again. “And jazz…That’s going to be a funky first date.”
“Whatever you want,” he rushed to say. “Whenever you’re ready. Call me. I’ll wait to hear from you this time, Kristen. Forever, if I have to.”
He kissed her softly, quickly. Stepping back was near to impossible, but he did it. I need you, he didn’t let himself add, as she turned and disappeared into the gym. Please come back to me…
“I thought maybe you could think of a use for this again,” Uncle Dan said to Chloe’s dad, after they’d all gotten home from the park.
She was doing her homework at the kitchen table. Her dad was sitting in one of her aunt and uncle’s fancy recliners, watching a hockey game on their humongous TV and scribbling something onto a notepad. Her aunt was cleaning up the kitchen the way she always was, even though everyone had eaten out tonight. Sally had disappeared upstairs with her dad, only Uncle Dan was back now. And he was holding a guitar.
Her dad looked up. He stared at the guitar, and then he looked back at the TV without answering Chloe’s uncle. He tore the top sheet off the notepad and crumpled it with his fist.
“Is that yours?” she asked.
He never talked about his music, but she’d heard enough of her parents’ fights to guess how good he’d been at it once, before he’d gone to prison—and how her mom always thought he should have been better. Chloe had always wondered what he’d been like before things had gotten so bad.
“Is that what you used to play in your band when you and Mom were dating?” She’d tried over and over to picture him up onstage in front of everybody, singing and happy. He spent most of his time alone now, when he wasn’t at work or with her.
He looked at her and then at her uncle, but he still didn’t say anything.
“He’s a genius with this thing.” Uncle Dan crossed the living room to where Chloe sat at the end of the kitchen table. He handed her the guitar. “You should get him to show you how to play. You take after him with soccer. Maybe you will with music, too.”
Uncle Dan headed to where her aunt was doing something with one of her cookbooks, probably planning tomorrow night’s dinner. Aunt Charlotte loved to cook. Chloe’s mom hated it. He put his arm around Aunt Charlotte and hugged her. Her aunt leaned against him like it was the best thing in the world to rest her head on his chest—the way Chloe wished she had the memory of her parents hugging each other, like a real family, like everything was going to be okay.
She walked over to her dad, carrying the guitar.
She held it out to him.
“Is this part of what you miss?” She’d figured out a long time ago that her dad missed a lot of the things he didn’t talk about from his life before her. “Don’t you wish you still played?”
He sighed and turned off the hockey game. He took the guitar from her, but he didn’t hold it the way people did on TV or in movies. He laid it across his lap. Instead of trying to play it, he reached for her. He took her hand and pulled her closer, until she was sitting on the recliner’s arm and leaning against him a little in a kind of hug.
“I gave up my music,” he said, his voice deep and real, like when he sang in the shower and didn’t know she was sitting on the other side of the closed door, listening. “And I’ve always been grateful I did.”
“Because you didn’t like it anymore?” Every time she heard him sing, she couldn’t get over how good he was at it. Uncle Dan was right. Dad was even better at music than he was at soccer.
“Because I loved you.” He laid his head back against the recliner. He was staring at the TV again, even though there was nothing on now. “I couldn’t have both you and music. And I’ll never be sorry about the choice I made.”
“I don’t understand.” But whatever he’d said, whatever it meant, she suddenly felt better than she had all day.
“There were things that came with being in a band like mine. Drinking, like your mom does. I used to do that a lot, too.”
“A lot, like her? Is that what caused the accident when you got in trouble?”
Her dad looked so sad. “A lot more than her, honey. And yes, that’s what caused the accident. I promised myself I wasn’t going to do that anymore, and the rest of my band was into it heavy. And I’d have had to travel, to places I couldn’t take you once I got out…”
“Of prison?” They never talked about it, but it came up almost every time her mom and dad fought.
“Yeah.” He brushed his hand down her hair. And then he smiled, instead of looking sad. “And once I came home, I wanted you more than anything. I’d have done anything to stay with you.”
Chloe thought of playing soccer earlier, with him and Fin, and how it should have felt good. But nothing today had, until just now. She wanted to ask her dad to say it again, to smile again. She wanted to tell him that this was the stuff she’d missed so much. Just talking with him, being with him, with nothing bad happening around them—without whatever her mom might do next ruining it all.
She reached for the guitar and rubbed her fingers over the parts on top of it that were a darker wood than the rest.
“You wanted me more than anything?” she asked.
Chloe believed him. A part of her had always known that was how he felt. Why couldn’t her mom ever say things like that, feel them, the way Dad did? Why hadn’t she wanted Chloe enough to help make their family better?
Uncle Dan was standing in the doorwa
y between the kitchen and the den. Her dad looked up at him, and then covered her hand, pressing it against the top of the guitar.
“You’ll always be my number one, Chloe,” he said, his smile back. “No matter what it takes. I decided that before you were even born. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep you safe and happy. I know you haven’t been happy, and I promised you I’d fix that. And I will. Can you try to believe that, no matter how bad things still are?”
She nodded, loving this, hearing how much he loved her.
“I chose you,” her dad said, somehow knowing she’d needed to hear that part again. She’d never, ever hear it enough. “I’ll always choose you, Chloe, no matter what.”
Law’s little girl threw her arms around his neck and held on tight.
He held her with his free arm, and then he set his guitar aside and held on even tighter. It had been too long since she’d hugged him this way—since he’d gotten through to her and shown her how much she meant to him. Whatever else was still off-kilter in Chloe’s world, tonight he’d found a way to say something, do something, be something that had made his little girl happy.
He committed to memory the scent of her shampoo and the perfumed powder Charlotte had helped her pick out at Nordstrom for Chloe’s Christmas gift. He’d cherish this moment forever. The smell and feel of his daughter’s happiness was…everything. He was going to find a way to be worthy of it.
He’d once wanted to do the same for her mother. For too many reasons, it was too late to salvage that for them. But he had a chance still with their child. Walter had helped him wake up and see that today. Law was going to keep Chloe close, keep her talking with him just like this. He was going to help her believe in all the good things she could have in life—the way he was trying to believe in what he and Kristen might still have.
“I love you, Daddy,” she whispered, her head tucked against his neck.
She slid away in the next moment. But her words stayed etched inside him—deep, where he’d worried he was losing her.
“I can’t wait for practice to start tomorrow,” she said, even though he’d been able to tell earlier at the park that she wasn’t enjoying their workout with Fin nearly as much as she should have.
Chloe scampered out of the den and up the stairs, leaving Law gazing across the room at Dan.
“She’s going to hear about it tomorrow,” his brother said.
“What?” Law pulled his guitar across his lap, his hand and fingers poised but not moving.
“You and Kristen.”
The chord played itself—Kristen’s sound, or at least one of the endless sounds she made in his mind. “Nothing’s happened for Chloe to hear about.”
“Something happened outside the gym before Sally’s game.” Dan lifted his root beer to his mouth and drank deeply. “The rest of the town has probably heard by now, if it was the same sort of something that was going on between you and Kristen at Pockets in the fall.”
Law had been writing about Kristen while Chloe did her homework. Notes and snatches of lyrics that had all been Kristen had begun pouring out of him as soon as he’d picked up a pad of scratch paper and a pen from Dan’s coffee table. His fingers brushed out another string of half-imagined notes. They made him think of long legs beneath a prim, pastel skirt, sparkling green eyes and golden hair and a smile that melted him the same as his daughter’s hugs.
“I tried to stay away from her,” he said.
“The way you’ve tried to bury your talent for music all these years, but it doesn’t want to stay buried?” His brother stared pointedly at the guitar. “You look good holding that. Playing again.”
“This isn’t playing.”
“It isn’t ignoring the damn instrument that used to be your best friend, while it’s sat in the corner of your bedroom upstairs since you moved in. It’s a start.”
Another chord sounded, Law’s fingers finding it without him putting thought behind how they moved.
“You’ve been writing since you got home with Chloe,” Dan said, “as if you couldn’t stop whatever was coming out. I watched you do that when we were kids. I used to be so jealous of how easy music was for you. You were going to be so much better at it than I’d ever be at anything I did.”
The melody flowing from Law’s fingertips took a deeper turn.
“You’ve never even asked how I managed to have that thing here,” Dan pointed out. “Were you just going to stare at it upstairs forever, if you hadn’t seen Kristen today? Is it too much to ask for us to have a conversation about your damn guitar, at least, instead of what your lawyer thinks you should do, and how much it’s going to cost, and how obsessed you are with paying me back for every dime I’ve spent helping you that I don’t give a damn about being paid back for? Or are we gonna go on like this forever, back in each other’s lives but not figuring out how to be brothers again?”
Law winced at the pain in Dan’s voice. Twice in one day, he was facing someone he’d unintentionally hurt, because he’d been so hell-bent on white-knuckling through dealing with Libby on his own. “I figured you got the guitar from my ex-wife.”
“It was the only thing I asked for.”
“You mean when you started giving Libby the money that I told her not to take from our family, when I went into the system.”
“Yeah. When I would have done anything to help you, even though you hated my ever-living guts, just because we have the misfortune of being born to the same parents. Libby was selling everything to raise cash, she said when she called me. She said you didn’t want anything left from your time with your band when you got out of prison. I told her I’d send whatever money I could, but not to sell your guitar. It was too much a part of you. You shouldn’t have to give that up, too.”
Law stopped playing. He looked from the brother who’d been his first friend in this world, down at the instrument that had become his second. Only Dan could have known how much it had meant for Law to see his guitar again, when he’d moved to Mimosa Lane—or how hard it had been for him to hold it again today.
“I don’t have anything from before my parole,” he admitted, when he hardly ever let himself think about it. “I never wanted anything to remind me of how much I’d lost.”
“I know.” His brother seemed to be remembering, too. His voice sounded younger, and older. “I’ve watched you since you moved to Chandlerville. For so long, there was nothing familiar there. My brother was…gone. At least until a few months ago, when you and Kristen stopped circling each other and finally broke the ice. That’s when I saw you start…needing something again. That’s when I saw my kid brother in you—the one who needed Mom and Dad to be the kind of parents they were never going to be.”
Law feathered his fingers over the too-loose strings. He caught Dan watching him play, his brother’s frown softening.
“Why did you go see her today?” Dan asked.
“I don’t know.” Law kept playing softly, feeling the invisible vibrations of the music. Feeling his brother trying to understand, trying to help. Law couldn’t tune him out the way he had so many times before. “That’s not true. Walter Davis started throwing a bunch of stuff at me today at lunch. We were both pretty steamed by the time he was through. But it started me thinking... About Kristen and Chloe. About you. Was it ever hard for you?”
“What?”
Law made sure his sister-in-law was still busy in the kitchen. “Hooking up with Charlotte. Not running away from something that good, you know, after Mom and Dad?”
“It was terrifying. But I figured fighting for better was just as hard as settling for worse. I wasn’t the easiest man to live with for a few years, until I got some things straightened out in my mind—mostly with Charlotte’s help. Until I walked away from our parents, too, so I could have the life I wanted, instead of the ‘better’ one they would have always insisted I try for. By then Sally had
come along, and we’d settled here. Somehow, we made it work.”
Law studied his finger placement. More of the melody that had been rattling around his mind for weeks found its way out and into his brother’s den. He could remember thinking he’d never want a speck of the moneyed life Dan had made for himself in Chandlerville. But his brother’s family, the love he’d claimed for himself and Charlotte and Sally on Mimosa Lane…Law found himself craving it like a starving man staring at a banquet through a locked window.
“You always were an overachiever,” he said.
“Damn it, Law. That’s all I get?”
Dan’s voice was furious, but so in control it commanded Law’s attention the same as if he’d shouted. His brother got quiet when he was angry. Law had always been the scarier of the two of them, intimidating and loud.
“I didn’t achieve anything,” Dan bit out, “but the chance to start over with nothing, the same as you. I may have finished college and grad school and been making money. But my parents were malignant, too. A couple of narcissists who took too much from both of us. They had to have everything in their world be all about them, or no one else could have anything at all. They messed with my head and my life. They made my brother my enemy, the same as they did you. I found a way to get them out of my life for good. Maybe you should, too.”
“I have.”
“Then why haven’t you played or sung a note since you went to prison? Why are you still chained to the hip of a woman who’s been just as bad for you as our parents were? Why in God’s name has it taken you two months to stop pissing away the opening Kristen gave you, and let yourself face wanting something for a change? Why haven’t you told Chloe, shown her before now, that there’s more to loving someone and family than the damage you and Libby heap on each other, and the zero our relationship has been since you moved to town?”
Law had no comeback. He had no defense. The absolute silence in his mind screamed that each word of Dan’s accusations was the truth.
He couldn’t hear Kristen anymore. He could no longer remember Walter’s well-intentioned advice. He couldn’t recall his daughter’s priceless hug. All that remained was every unfair, loveless, hate-filled thing his parents and ex-wife had thought and said about him. And every time, as a kid, that he’d wondered what other boys’ lives were like, the ones who had real families to take care of them.
Love on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel) Page 20