Fireside

by Susan Wiggs

  “All righty, then,” she said, flinging back the quilt. She caught a glimpse of her long red hair in the mirror over the dresser. Yikes. “On that note, we’ll get up and see what the day brings.”

  * * *

  She went downstairs to find a stranger in the kitchen, with the countertop TV playing cartoons. Well, not exactly a stranger. One of her mother’s boarders, Daphne McDaniel. Kim would have to get used to seeing strangers around the house.

  “Wow, that takes me back,” said Daphne, turning down the volume as she eyed Kim’s Camp Kioga sweatshirt. “Coffee?”

  “Thanks.” Kim accepted the steaming mug and took a grateful sip. She was wearing the ancient jeans and camp hoodie, thick socks and Crocs her mother had given her yesterday. Prior to coming downstairs, she’d hastily washed the sleep from her face and pulled her long red hair into a ponytail. “These clothes are left over from...a hundred years ago. That’s what it feels like, anyway. I, um, traveled light, coming here.” All her worldly possessions were in L.A., most of them in a storage unit off Manhattan Beach Boulevard. She’d given up her apartment in order to be with Lloyd. She would have everything shipped to her eventually, but she didn’t want to think about that just now.

  She had a funny urge to unload on Daphne, although they’d only just met. A girl needed her girlfriends. In her world—former world—friends and enemies blended together and morphed from one role to the other. There was even a word for it—frenemies. You couldn’t always trust them. It struck Kim that she didn’t have many friends. There were coworkers, sure. But there was no one she could point to and say, This is my friend. She hoped Daphne would turn out to be more genuine.

  “I’m going to need to run into town to grab a few things,” she said.

  “Try Zuzu’s Petals in the town square. Best shop there is.”

  Kim used to shop in boutiques haunted by movie stars in floppy hats, and women with more money than common sense. She now counted herself a member of that group and vowed to change. “Thanks. Did you go to Camp Kioga when you were younger?”

  Daphne laughed, but not with humor. “Honey, I was never younger. FYI, I’m having my childhood now, because I missed it the first time around.”

  Kim stirred a partial packet of Splenda into the coffee. She sneaked a peek at Daphne, who was sitting on a bar stool at the kitchen island, eating FrankenBerry cereal from a bright yellow bowl. With daring facial piercings and pink-streaked hair, she looked like a punk rocker. In contrast to Kim’s buffed-and-polished L.A. friends, Daphne was refreshing—quirky, but genuine.

  Daphne fished a clear plastic packet out of her cereal bowl. “Yes,” she said. “I got the prize. I love when I get the prize.”

  Given the type of cereal she was eating, she wasn’t likely to have much competition.

  She wiped the toy on a napkin. “Troll doll,” she said, holding it up like a tiny trophy. “God, I love these things.”

  Kim touched her hair, feeling an uneasy kinship with the troll. Then she lifted her coffee mug in salute. “Here’s to enjoying your childhood.”

  “On the weekends, at least.”

  “What do you do during the week?” She pictured Daphne working at a roller rink or surfing the internet, bookmarking anime sites.

  “I work in a local law office. It’s up over the bookstore in town. It’s okay. I prefer Saturdays, though. Back-to-back Looney Tunes, you know?”

  Kim offered a bright smile. “My fave. So, a law office?”

  “Parkington, Waltham & Shepherd. A full-service firm. I’m the receptionist and office manager.” Daphne lifted the bowl to her mouth and took a sip, leaving a milk mustache. “So, really, you can relax. Your mom’s not running a group home for wackos here. The tenants are just regular folks, who happen to want to live simply.”

  “I’m relaxed,” Kim protested.

  “Nah, I saw your face when your mom introduced us. You were worried I’d turn out to be a one-woman freak show,” Daphne said easily. “Most people do, when they first meet me. Trust me, I’m totally normal. Just—like I said—having a late childhood. In my family, I was the eldest of five siblings. My mom got sick and my dad took off, so I ended up raising my brothers and sisters. I did a lousy job, too, seeing as I was all of eleven years old when it started. That’s why I never want to have kids. Heck, I don’t even want to have a place of my own.”

  “Because you missed out on your childhood?”

  “Yeah.” Daphne took her bowl and spoon to the sink, and grabbed a pitcher of orange juice. “I decided to have my childhood now, and that means living here, where I don’t need to worry about adult responsibilities. Those responsibilities include, but are not limited to, property taxes, utility bills, meal preparation and long-term commitments.”

  Kim stared at her for a few seconds. She studied the black wool leggings, the snug leather skirt and Doc Martens, the black manicure. Daphne just looked so comfortable, being herself.

  “Good plan,” she said. “Is there any orange juice left?”

  Daphne poured her a glass. “Cereal?” she asked, offering the box.

  “No, thanks. Without the prize, what’s the point?”

  Daphne grinned. “I like the way you think.”

  Kim grinned back, liking the ease she felt with this girl.

  “Good morning,” said her mother, bustling into the kitchen. She looked fresh and younger than her age in a Fair Isle sweater, jeans and Ugg boots. In fact, she looked younger than her old self, the upper Manhattan maven in St. John’s suits and pearls. Tying on an apron, she said, “Did you sleep all right?”

  “Well enough.” Kim sipped her coffee. “I was fired. By email.”

  “Harsh,” said Daphne.

  “Cowardly,” her mother said.

  “They’re not being cowardly. I’m not important enough to scare them. It’s just more convenient.”

  “I’m so sorry,” her mother said.

  “Don’t be. It was the worst job ever.” Not really, but she felt better, saying it.

  “And here I thought you enjoyed it,” her mother said.

  “What do you do?” Daphne asked. “Or—past tense. What did you used to do?”

  Kim took a seat across from Daphne and peeled a satsuma for herself. “Sports media relations. It seemed like a good career for me. I was always into sports, all through school and college. After graduation, I went to L.A. to look for a job. On a whim, I tried out to be a Laker girl. I was completely shocked when they chose me as an alternate. It was probably the most grueling three months of my life. And the steepest learning curve. The training I could handle. Even the politics—I watched other girls crumble, but I got along fine. It turned out what I was best at was PR. When I was injured—”

  “You were injured?” Daphne asked.

  “Tore my rotator cuff.” Unconsciously her hand went to her right shoulder. “It put an end to a very short, inauspicious career as a Laker girl. Going into sports PR seemed like the obvious next step for me. Clearly I didn’t have the chops to be a top athlete, but I knew what it took to represent them.”

  She’d been assigned to look after a second-string rookie, Calvin Graham. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he was being hounded by the press about the Lower 9th Ward neighborhood of New Orleans, where he’d been born and raised. Seeing him floundering, she’d stepped in. Within a week, Calvin Graham was serving as honorary chairman of a relief effort, raising money to help people rebuild. He’d never had much of a career in the NBA but he’d gone on to create a foundation that, to this day, provided low-interest loans to Katrina victims. Kim had found her role incredibly gratifying.

  In time, however, she forgot how much she liked her work. Well, not forgot, exactly. The role of mentor got lost as she was assigned to other players. She found herself saying things like “Get your drunk ass out of bed” and “Learn to verify a girl’s age befor
e you sleep with her.” She missed guys like Calvin. She missed the good guys.

  “Sounds like a cool job,” Daphne remarked.

  “Sometimes, I have to admit, the work was so satisfying. A lot of people with a God-given athletic talent are brilliant to work with. It was my job to smooth the rough edges.”

  “How rough?” asked Daphne.

  “I worked with guys who were fearless at facing a wall of defensive linebackers out for blood, but who tended to crumble in front of a microphone. I helped them with that part of their career. It went well most of the time. But something happens when you work with people like that. It’s hard to describe. You’re working with clients on a strangely intimate level, even though it’s just a job. I never let things get too personal—until Lloyd.” She shook her head, remembering. “The two of us just clicked—at first, anyway.” She felt again the bittersweet joy of falling for a guy while doing media training with him. It was like a second-rate romantic movie—if she succeeded in grooming him, then that meant losing him, because once he had mastered the art of handling the press, he would move on.

  Except that didn’t happen with Lloyd. Her mistake was in letting herself believe it could work out for them. She wouldn’t be that stupid again.

  Chapter Six

  Bo woke up early, shivering from the cold as he groped for his comforter. Then he remembered he’d given it to AJ last night, and that thought caused him to sit up instantly, squinting through the morning light.

  There, the lump on the sofa confirmed it. His kid was staying with him. His son. Bo waited to feel...what? Paternal? Not happening. The kid was his flesh and blood, and Bo was going to do everything in his power to reunite AJ with Yolanda. But fatherly feelings eluded him.

  He yawned and stretched, tried not to make any noise as he got out of bed and headed for the john. He never got up this early unless he was in training. It was funny, how easy it was to get up in the morning when he hadn’t sucked down a bunch of beers the night before. Well, not funny ha-ha, but funny as in, he might ought to consider doing it more often.

  Call me, read a message scribbled on a Post-it note stuck to the bathroom mirror. Chardonnay—and her phone number. The message was punctuated by a lipstick kiss. It was kind of depressing to realize he had actually dated a woman named Chardonnay. That was really all he remembered about her.

  Bo snatched the note and stuck it in a drawer. Then he changed his mind and stuck it in his pocket. In the drawer, he spotted a box of rubbers. Whoa. He shoved the box in the cabinet under the sink, back behind the pipes, then gave the place a once-over to make sure there weren’t any other sketchy things lying around.

  He didn’t consider himself the kind of person who kept secrets, but for the time being, there was a kid in his life, and he had to make room for that. The sudden responsibility felt crushing, but what was he going to do? Clean up his act, for one thing.

  When Bo himself was a young boy, his mother had shielded him from nothing—not the late-night visitors, not the laughter or the fighting, not the strangers he encountered in the house when he got up in the night to take a leak. Things like that had taken a toll on him, made him a distrustful and cautious child, who had grown into a distrustful and reckless man.

  He had enough sense to know there were some things a kid just didn’t need to see. At least until someone other than Bo could explain them.

  Although Bo and his brother, Stoney, had grown up without a father, they’d had a lot of uncles. Not uncles by blood, of course. “Uncles” was a euphemism for whatever shitkicker or oilfield trash happened to be banging his mother.

  So even though he didn’t know a damn thing about raising a kid, he understood that you didn’t put stuff in their face before they were ready to deal with it. He remembered lying awake too many nights, feeling sick to his stomach as he listened to the low voice of a stranger through the thin walls of the trailer where they lived. One of his earliest memories was hearing his brother say, “I swear, if you piss the bed again, I’ll pound your face. Swear to God, I will.”

  He and Stoney had taken to peeing in empty Coke bottles rather than getting up in the night and risking an encounter with Uncle Terrell or Uncle Dwayne, or whoever else was keeping their mama from getting lonely that night.

  That was how she explained the visitors to her boys. “It keeps me from feeling too lonely.”

  “I can do that,” Bo used to tell her, when he was really little and didn’t understand. “I can keep you from getting lonely. I’ll sing to you, Mama. I’ll play the guitar.” He wasn’t very good, but he knew all the words to “Mr. Bojangles,” his namesake song.

  His mama had tousled his hair, offered a sad smile. “This is a different kind of lonely, baby boy. It’s the kind you can’t help me with.”

  In time, Bo had grown into an understanding of what she meant, but he never forgot the feeling of being a scared kid. He would never subject AJ to that. For the rest of the weekend—or however long the boy was with him—Bo Crutcher would be a monk.

  Yeah, right. He could just hear his friends now. People who knew him had never seen him go more than a week or two without a date.

  He tried to be as quiet as possible as he moved around the apartment. Until last night, he had considered it a luxury to live in a place that didn’t require him to get behind the wheel at the end of the night. Situated above his favorite bar, where he worked most nights, it allowed him the world’s shortest commute after work. He simply went upstairs and did a face-plant in the bed.

  Unless, of course, he got lucky, which he did with decent frequency. It was always a pleasant feeling, waking up with a woman in his bed. He loved everything about women. He loved their soft skin and all the good-smelling preparations they used to keep it that way. He loved the sound of their sweet voices, laughing at something he’d said or sighing with pleasure in his ear when he held them close. He’d had a lot of girlfriends over the years and he’d loved each and every one of them as thoroughly as he knew how.

  And when each one left him, she always walked away with a piece of his heart. He never told them, though. Never complained. He was grateful for whatever time and whatever loving they’d given him.

  Most of his girlfriends left believing he’d forget them the moment they were out of sight. They couldn’t be more wrong, though. The women he’d loved and lost were etched in his mind like beautiful dreams that never quite vanished with the morning.

  Knowing how to love a woman had never been a problem for Bo. Knowing how to keep her, now, that was a different story. A lot of them left as soon as they realized he didn’t know shit about sharing his life, planning a future, keeping a bond strong enough for a lifetime. Others took off when they discovered that all professional ballplayers were not created equal. Yes, the Can-Am League was an organization of professionals. But the players were in it because they purely loved the game, not because they were being paid a fortune. To some women, this was a bit of a rude awakening.

  In the case of Yolanda Martinez, she’d walked away with more than a piece of his heart.

  * * *

  It was only months later, after Yolanda had forced a goodbye on him, that Bo learned he’d become a father. There was no way to pinpoint the exact moment of conception because the fact was, once he and Yolanda got started, they did it all the time. They were just kids, seventeen and revved up by hormones, and they were in the first flush of tenderness and excitement.

  They had met in English class, when they’d both been struggling through the leaden phrases of Last of the Mohicans, which felt like a punishment, yet gave them a feeling of kinship in their shared suffering. They took to staying late in the library to study, quizzing each other on vocabulary words no living human would ever have occasion to utter: Vaunted. Cunning. Chaste.

  The study sessions were only an excuse to sit close, to eye each other over the pages of the musty tomes, to trad
e smiles first, then touches that escalated from accidental to deliberate, and finally whispers that bloomed into kisses. She roused in him a sense of protectiveness that made him feel as though he could take on the world. Although she was an only child of strict parents, he persuaded her one hot September day to drive out to a rice well he knew of, where cool water cascaded through a thick pipe, emptying into a vast natural holding tank the size of a baseball diamond. For people who had no money, there was no better swimming pool to offer blissful relief from the heat.

  Holding hands, they leaped into the crystalline depths, laughing and paddling, kissing while the water eddied around them in a swirl of sensuality. Later, they lay together on a bed of towels in the back of his rusted-out El Camino.

  Bo wondered if Yolanda knew he’d never been laid. While all his friends were getting it on, Bo had foolishly clung to some chivalrous ideal about girls. He didn’t want to be that close, that intimate with a girl unless he loved her. There were tons of reasons this made no sense, not the least of which was that he wasn’t real sure what love was. How could he, growing up the way he had? His mother drifted from fellow to fellow the way a bee gathered nectar from flower to flower, sucking one dry and then moving on to the next without a backward glance.

  Bo had grown up watching this changing array of guys parading through their lives. Sometimes she admitted she liked a guy because he let her drive his nice Volvo whenever she wanted, or because he worked at a music store and gave her free CDs. When Bo was old enough to question his mother, she explained herself with a self-deprecating laugh. “Baby boy, I got to use my looks while I still have them.”

  As a little boy, he’d wondered where a person’s looks went. Did they get left in a heap in the bottom of a closet, discarded like last year’s Halloween costume? And why would guys quit liking her, unless the only thing they liked was her looks?