For the Girls' Sake

by Janice Kay Johnson

  "Maybe," he whispered, too, "because your hair is the same color as hers. How many people have curls like my Rose?"

  She giggled, but shakily, because even her three-year-old intuition knew something was up.

  He gritted his teeth. They looked so much alike. Everyone in the store must notice. They probably all thought he was the proprietor’s ex-husband, and this her daughter. How was she going to explain the resemblance?

  "Rose is anxious to meet Shelly," he said, too loudly. He didn’t so much want to meet his daughter, as he wanted this woman to quit staring at Rose as if she were royalty. Or a baboon. Something she might never see again.

  "I..." Lynn blinked and turned her head, cheeks pale and her eyes unfocused. "I...I’m not sure..."

  He glanced around and saw that the shoppers had gone about their business. A young woman behind the counter was ringing up a purchase. At the same moment, a giggle wafted from the sunporch.

  "I’m here, Mommy! Remember?"

  The playhouse. It must be two-story, because framed in an upper window of the fake castle was a little girl’s face, flushed with delight because her presence had been a secret.

  The rock that had been sitting in his stomach was suddenly a boulder, craggy and painful. It pressed his lungs until he couldn’t breathe.

  Rose was wriggling, so he set her down without tearing his gaze from the child. He felt his lips move, knew they formed a name: Jennifer.

  Even the voice. Sounding confident and open, she invited Rose to come up. Shyly his daughter went, bending to crawl across the mock drawbridge and inside. As if Rose couldn’t figure out how to climb a ladder, Shelly gave her directions and told her what she’d find up at the top and how Mom had said they’d go to the beach and did Rose like hot dogs ’cuz Mom said maybe that’s what they could have for lunch. The words flowed like a stream over stones, making a kind of song, and all as inevitable as water finding its way downhill.

  Jennifer, he thought in agony.

  She peeked out the window at him, her face, alight with laughter, looking for all the world like a nineteenth-century children’s book illustration of an elf perched on a flower stem. Shelly’s ears stuck out just a little. Jennifer had hated hers, though he had thought them cute. Just like Jennifer’s, Shelly’s face narrowed from high cheekbones to a pointy chin, and just like Jennifer’s, her eyes shimmered with amusement and mischief.

  "It’s worse than seeing the picture, isn’t it?" the woman beside him said softly.

  Taking a ragged breath, he turned his head and met Lynn Chanak’s eyes. "So much."

  She nodded.

  "Do you see yourself?" he asked, keeping his voice low.

  "I suppose." Like him, she gazed toward the playhouse. Neither girl was visible in the window, although whispers and laughter drifted out. "She does look like pictures of me at that age, but I don’t exactly remember my face in the mirror from when I was three, so it’s not quite as big a shock as Shelly must be for you."

  He fumbled for his wallet and, with shaking hands, took out a photo of his dead wife and handed it to Lynn.

  She looked at it for a long moment. When she lifted her head, her gray-green eyes were misty. "She was beautiful."

  "Shelly is going to look like her."

  A tear dropped, shimmering, from her lash. She wiped it from her cheek. "Oh, I wish..."

  "This hadn’t happened?"

  She squeezed her eyes shut, as if willing back further tears. "No," Lynn said finally. "Because then I wouldn’t have Shelly, and she’s my life. No, I was going to say, I wish we’d never found out. But now..." She gazed again toward the playhouse where first one girl’s laughing face, then the other, popped up. "But now, I’m not so sure."

  “Jennifer’s parents want to meet her," he heard himself say.

  Lynn squeezed her hands together without looking at him. "I thought they might. But how can we do that, without Shelly knowing who they are?"

  "I told them they might have to wait."

  She smiled with obvious difficulty. "Thank you."

  "What about your parents? And your ex-husband’s?"

  "My mother and stepfather love Shelly, and I’m sure they’ll love Rose, if you give them the chance. They’ll support whatever we decide. Brian’s parents..." She hesitated. "I don’t know. At the moment, he’s washed his hands of the whole thing. My pregnancy wasn’t planned, and..." She swallowed whatever she had been going to say, perhaps suddenly aware that she had been going to reveal too much that was private to a relative stranger. "Well," she said, a little awkwardly. "Certainly there’s no rush, where they’re concerned. Right now, it’s just Shelly and me."

  "Not anymore," he murmured.

  Her startled glance became troubled, but she said nothing, although the small creases stayed between her brows. He understood how she felt. They were both between a rock and a hard place.

  "Does Rose want to go to the beach?"

  Adam cooperated with her desire to put their visit on conventional ground. "She can’t talk about anything else."

  "Then shall we?" Lynn nodded toward the register. "I have someone to mind the shop for me."

  Belatedly he noticed that she wore jeans, faded canvas sneakers and a T-shirt the color of the Aegean Sea. Her hair was gathered into a ponytail, making her look absurdly young, with that round face and sprinkling of freckles. The fact that he couldn’t help noticing her long legs and tiny waist was a useful reminder that her husband had suspected her of infidelity. He couldn’t let her resemblance to Rose disarm him.

  "Rose wanted to pick out a couple of books first," he said. "Maybe I’ll do it for her. Any suggestions?"

  Lynn led him into the children’s area and offered several of Shelly’s favorites.

  "We’ve read this about two hundred times," he said, setting one aside. "I liked it the first hundred."

  She grinned, her nose crinkling. "Yeah, me, too. But, hey, most of them wear thin after five or ten repetitions."

  Under other circumstances he’d have been attracted to her, Adam realized in dismay. Don’t, he told himself sharply. Talk about messy.

  He grunted and probably glowered, and pretended to concentrate on the book he was flipping through. After a moment Lynn turned away and began straightening a rack of paperbacks for middle-grade readers, but he didn’t forget her presence. He’d never be able to forget her, he thought grimly. How could he? She was the mother of his daughter. Of both his daughters, one way or another.

  How many men could say that about a woman they’d never touched?

  Irritated with himself at a thought, Adam raised his voice. "Rosebud, you want to go to the beach?"

  He heard whispers above his head. Then Rose said, "Okay, Daddy. If Shelly can go."

  "You bet." Lynn smiled as if she hadn’t noticed his withdrawal.

  The sounds of scrambling within eventually produced both girls, his Rose in her pink flowered overalls with matching shirt, and Shelly in a bright red dress—he thought it was a dress, made out of T-shirt fabric—over purple leggings.

  "I know, I know," Lynn murmured, evidently seeing his astonishment. "She wants to dress herself, and mostly I let her."

  "Ah." Rose accepted what he laid out. A difference in temperament? Or was Rose, as he feared, immature for her age? What if there was even something wrong with her?

  But her language was well developed, he reminded himself.

  "Hey, kiddo," he said. "You still want some books?"

  She approved his selection and added two more with scarcely a glance inside the covers. He carried the pile to the register and let Lynn ring it up, not even wincing at the total.

  "Let me give them to you at cost," she offered.

  He shook his head brusquely. "Don’t be ridiculous. This is your business. If I weren’t buying them here, it would be somewhere else."

  "I thought..." Her expression closed. "Thank you."

  She was a stranger, he told himself. He hadn’t hurt her feelings in some way he d
idn’t understand. How could he? She didn’t have the power to hurt his.

  Lynn smiled brightly as she came out from behind the counter. "Shelly, Rose, let’s go use the bathroom before we head off." She raised her eyebrows at him. "Adam?"

  "No. If you don’t mind taking Rose..."

  Her sidelong glance reeked of irony. Oh, no. She wouldn’t mind taking his daughter. He couldn’t help a minor feeling of loss when Rose willingly took Lynn’s hand and went without a look back.

  They returned hand in hand, the pretty woman, his Rosebud and Shelly, so much like Jennifer that his heart spasmed again.

  His face revealed too much once more, because Lynn said in an achingly gentle voice, "Shelly, this is Rose’s daddy."

  "Hi, Shelly." He sounded gruff to his own ears. "I see you have a sweatshirt. Rose had better get hers from the car."

  "I have buckets, too," Rose confided. "An’ shovels, an’ everything."

  "Wow." Lynn’s smile was wide and unaffected for the girls, tentative for him. "Then how about we go make some sand castles? Or chase crabs, or hunt for shells and agates?"

  She and Shelly had both tied sweatshirts around their waists. He grabbed sweaters from the car for Rose and himself, as well as the beach paraphernalia.

  Rose took his hand and they walked behind Lynn and Shelly the two blocks to the public pass-through to the beach. Rose stared at the tourists and shop windows. A toy store brought her up on tiptoes as they passed. Adam watched the pair ahead, the woman’s springy auburn ponytail, the child’s sleek brown one just as familiar to him. The way Shelly danced instead of trudging obediently along as Rose did. He loved every placid, thoughtful bone in Rosebud’s body, but something in him ached at the sight of Jennifer reincarnated, a sprite in constant movement.

  All that distracted him from this child was the sway of Lynn Chanak’s hips, her faded jeans snug, and the sight of her pale, slender nape when she bent her head to listen to the little girl.

  Dressed like this, she seemed not so much young as vulnerable, Adam decided. Here was who she was, how she lived. In letting him come to her home, she had bared herself for him, in a way. Their meeting at the hospital had had an anonymity, a sense of the impersonal, that was lost now.

  At the ocean, broad concrete steps led from a paved boardwalk down to the pebbly beach. Once at the bottom, Shelly let go of her mom’s hand and spun eagerly.

  "Come on! I’ll show you the best places."

  Rose’s grip tightened on her dad’s hand. "The birds won’t hurt me, will they?" she asked uncertainly.

  Seagulls gathered only feet away, their beady eyes searching for handouts.

  "Nah." He waved his arm, and the nearest hopped backward. "See? They’re not interested in you. They want a peanut butter sandwich."

  She giggled a little weakly. Instead of prying her fingers loose, he walked with her and Shelly, Lynn trailing. The gulls stayed behind, hoping for bread thrown from the diners eating outside just above.

  At a safe distance from the scary birds, Rose proved willing to let go and join Shelly. The adults strolled behind as the girls ran ahead, scrambling up a favorite driftwood log and jumping over and over again to the forgiving pebbles. Finally Shelly took Rose’s hand and led her onto slick rocks where they crouched to stare into a tide pool.

  As Adam looked over their shoulders, Shelly was saying earnestly, "We can’t take anything out. Sometimes I touch. See?" She dipped her hand into the cold water and let a swaying anemone brush her fingers. Her face scrunched up. "But if you take them home, they get icky. They stink and stuff. So we leave ’em."

  Rose nodded, not wanting to admit she didn’t have a clue what her new friend was talking about. Not two minutes later, she slipped over to her father.

  "Why do things get icky if we take ’em home, Daddy?" she asked, not bothering to hush her piercing voice.

  Death and decomposition was not what he wanted to talk about.

  "Because those are sea creatures. They can’t live out of the sea. Just like we need air, they need water."

  "But they could take a bath with me." Her mouth was pursed with perplexity.

  Lynn stepped forward. "They need this special kind of water. See? Put a drop on your tongue?"

  Rose stuck her tongue out, then made a horrible face at the taste. When she could speak, she exclaimed, "They want that kinda water?"

  "Just that kind." Lynn smiled at her. "And no matter how hard we try, we can’t make the bathwater right for them."

  "Oh." Rose thought it over. After a moment, her forehead smoothed. She nodded and went back to her friend, squatting beside her to stare down into the tidepool.

  Adam stayed near Rose as Shelly led the way next across mussel-and barnacle-encrusted rocks to a blowhole. Each incoming wave rushed beneath the rock in a froth of white, sending a thin jet shooting upward through the hole like a geyser. Here the roar of the surf surrounded them and spray hung in the air, dampening their hair and filling their nostrils and lungs with salty wet air.

  "Ooh," breathed Rose, clutching Adam’s hand and watching with wondering eyes.

  Eventually they made their way to a tiny cove of gritty sand between arms of basalt worn by the pounding of the waves. Adam dropped to his knees and helped build a sand castle grander than anything the girls could have done alone.

  He wondered wryly whether he was trying to make points with Lynn by showing what a great parent he was, or whether he was just avoiding having to talk to her.

  She gave no sign she noticed either way. Instead, under her daughter’s orders Lynn willingly ferried water by the bright plastic bucketful from the foamy fingers of surf. At the sound of her laughter, Adam sank back on his heels and watched her squelch back toward the construction site, her sneakers and the hems of her jeans soaking wet.

  Like Rose, she wasn’t a chatterbox, and her face didn’t have Jennifer’s animation, but it was bright and good-humored.

  "The wave got me," she announced. "I think the tide is coming in."

  Sure enough, each wave licked onto dry sand and inched toward the tide pools.

  "Let’s dig a moat," Adam declared. "We can watch the water rush around the castle."

  "Good idea." Lynn dropped to her knees and began hollowing out a trench with her hands, sand flying.

  "What’s a moat?" Shelly asked.

  Adam grinned at her. "It’s filled with water to keep the invaders away from the castle walls."

  "Oh. What’s ’vaders?"

  "Um." Almost unconsciously, he looked to Lynn for help.

  "Invaders are the enemy," she said in mock growl. "Like Ian and Ron at your play group, when they want to grab the dolls and run over them with their trucks."

  Shelly’s chocolate-brown eyes widened. "I don’t like them.” She began scooping sand. "Come on, Rose. We don’t want no ’vaders in our castle!"

  They stayed long enough to see the water fill the moat but not long enough for the girls to watch their magnificent castle crumple. By that time, the girls were getting tired anyway. When Rose whimpered after her foot slipped in the loose pebbles, Adam swung her up onto his shoulders.

  Her mood revived. "Giddap, Daddy!" Her heels drummed his chest. "You’re my horsie, Daddy."

  Shelly stopped in her tracks. "I want you to be my horsie, Mama."

  "Only if I can take you piggyback, punkin." For a fleeting second, Lynn’s eyes met Adam’s, revealing a complex of emotions he didn’t know how to read. "I’m not big enough to lift you onto my shoulders."

  Had he somehow made her feel inadequate?

  Shelly’s mouth trembled. "But I wanna ride like her.”

  "Her daddy’s bigger than I am."

  Shelly’s expression became calculating. "Maybe he could give me a ride."

  "But he’s already carrying Rose—"

  "Tell you what," Adam interjected. "We’ll switch back and forth. Okay, Daisy?"

  "’Kay, Daddy," Rose agreed. "But I’m not Daisy."

  He bounced her a cou
ple of times. "Nope. Guess not. You have too many petals."

  She giggled.

  Shelly climbed onto her mother’s back. "Why’d he call her Daisy? That’s not her name. Her name is Rose."

  "Her daddy is just teasing," Lynn explained. "It’s like me calling you Belly when I tickle you."

  "Oh." She booted her heels into her mom’s hips. "Giddap, horsie!"

  Halfway up the beach, Adam stopped. "Okay, Shelly Belly, your turn."

  "Daddy!" Rose whined.

  "Nope. Fair’s fair. Besides, you want to try out the other horse, don’t you?"

  Rose being Rose, she didn’t say any more when he lowered her to the sand, but she clutched his leg, the afternoon’s acquaintance not enough to let her go to this lady. Shelly, on the other hand, had already taken a handful of his shirt and was demanding, "Up! You’re my horsie, now."

  Lynn’s smile never wavered as she said, "Do you think we can beat them to the stairs, Rose?"

  But she had to hurt, looking at her own daughter none too eager to trust her. Never mind that Rose had no idea. He knew how Lynn must feel, because something in him had soared at Shelly’s eagerness to climb onto his shoulders.

  "I’ll tell you what," he said. "Let me lift you up, Rosebud."

  He set her on Lynn’s back, where she had no choice but to wrap her arms around Lynn’s neck. In the breeze both had lost tendrils of hair from their ponytails, and the two auburn heads looked so much alike, his heart squeezed. They looked up, reminding him of an advertisement for a skin-care product, maybe, their complexions both creamy with the delicate scattering of freckles, the shape of their mouths so much alike, even their eyes, although Lynn’s were green and Rose’s blue. Mother and daughter.

  For an instant, he couldn’t breathe.

  "Up!" Shelly demanded again.

  And a hint of mischief sparkled in Lynn’s eyes.

  "Race you to the steps!" she announced, and took off.

  "Hey!" Adam protested. "No fair!"

  She had a good ten-yard head start by the time he’d swung his daughter—his heart cramped again—onto his shoulders and grabbed Rose’s bucket and shovel that he’d earlier set down.

  "Go! Go!" Shelly screamed in delight.

  She was so light, as fine of bone as her mother, a wiry little bundle of energy. She twined her fingers in his hair and bounced, urging him on the whole way, her shrieks happy and uninhibited.