by Kent, Alison
“Can I pet her?” the girl asked, her hands balled in her lap as if she could barely contain them. “What’s her name?”
“I don’t know his name,” Brooklyn said. “But you’ll need to ask your dad if petting him’s okay.” She waited a few seconds until her heart settled before lifting her gaze from Adrianne to her dad.
“Can I, Daddy? Please?”
Callum had been staring at the cat, but now looked at Brooklyn as if asking her permission, when Adrianne was his daughter, not hers. He was frowning, his eyes dark, as if uncertain, or caught off guard, his defenses down; strangely, she couldn’t tell if what he was feeling was about his daughter and the cat, or about her.
“He’s been completely friendly,” she said, not wanting to make a wrong move. “But it’s up to you. Is she allergic?”
He shook his head, then gave Adrianne a single nod. “Sit by Ms. Harvey and pet its back very softly.”
“I will,” Adrianne said, crossing her ankles and bending her knees and folding herself into a sitting position then reaching out with a tentative hand. “Hello, Mr. Kitty. You’re very pretty. And you’re very soft.”
Brooklyn watched Callum’s daughter stroke her hand down the cat’s back repeatedly, watched the cat shudder as if the pleasure was nearly unbearable. The look on Adrianne’s face said she was experiencing the same.
It wasn’t quite as easy to look up and meet Callum’s gaze; he wasn’t anywhere near as transparent. He stood with his hands shoved in his jeans pockets, much as he had in her classroom last week.
His hair was messier today than it had been then, most of it in a knot but enough falling free that she wanted to tuck it back. And, while she was there, to pull aside his oxford’s collar and read the inscription that ran in cursive letters from beneath one ear around his neck to the other.
“I didn’t hear your bike.” It was a struggle to get the words out. It was a struggle to breathe.
He shook his head, reached up with one hand to clear his hair from his face. Then he looked at his daughter and smiled, his dimples, like slivers of the moon, cut into the scruff on his face. “We’re in the truck today. I’ve got a rebuilt ’72 GMC. We had to go to Austin for supplies for the shop.”
“That’s right. I forgot the shop was closed for the holiday.”
He gave a single nod. “Good thing, too. Addy didn’t feel so hot yesterday. She spent most of it curled up on the futon watching Reading Rainbow. I had a feeling we might be putting off today’s errands and seeing Dr. Barrow instead.”
“No Dr. Barrow,” Adrianne put in vehemently, her nose a little too close to the cat’s for Brooklyn’s peace of mind.
She put her own hand on the cat’s head and scooted back, then reached out to sweep the girl’s hair over her shoulders. “Well, I’m glad you’re feeling better today, but I’m sorry you were sick yesterday.”
“I wasn’t sick,” Adrianne replied matter-of-factly, her focus not the least bit diverted. “I didn’t feel like a fireplace. I was just sleepy.”
Like a fireplace? Brooklyn mouthed the words and Callum nodded, then said. “She didn’t have a fever.”
“Ah.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes, pumpkin?”
“Can I get six books since I’m six years old?” she asked, causing Brooklyn to press her lips against a grin.
“Didn’t we talk about this this morning?” he asked, getting a reluctant nod in answer. “And what did we decide?”
“That I could pick out three. And that I had to choose three from home to give to Kelly Webber. But, Daddy?”
“Yes, Addy?”
“Can Ms. Harvey come with us to get ice cream?”
“Fine with me,” Callum said before Brooklyn could think of a way to let him off the hook. “Assuming Ms. Harvey likes ice cream.”
“Oh, Daddy. Everybody likes ice cream.” She scooted closer to Brooklyn’s crossed legs and leaned toward the cat, whose purring was about to put Brooklyn to sleep. “You are just so silly all the time.”
He looked at Brooklyn and shrugged as if no one could ever understand the things he had to put up with. “And there you have it. An invitation to ice cream with a girl who loves cats and her father who is silly all the time.”
“That wasn’t a planned ambush, you know,” Callum said, walking beside Brooklyn on their way to the park, ice-cream cone in hand. His bag from Cat Tales swung from his free hand as Brooklyn’s did from hers. “I had no idea you’d be at the bookstore.”
“You couldn’t have,” she said, unable to get the picture of Callum shopping for books with his daughter out of her mind.
Leaving the cat in the medieval romances, they’d headed for the children’s section. It was set up in the middle of the store, four walls of low shelves, with bean bag chairs, and fuzzy throw rugs, and books that weren’t for sale but for reading. There were building blocks, and wooden trains, and plastic dinosaurs to ride on top.
Martha Prescott, the bookstore’s owner, had taught at Hope Springs Elementary the same years as Jean Dial, though she’d retired earlier with one goal in mind: to instill a love of reading in children before they knew how to make out the words. Brooklyn couldn’t remember a time she’d stopped by Cat Tales when every chair wasn’t shared by two kids and every rug by three.
Callum had walked into the area scaled to his daughter’s size and hunkered in front of the shelves. Adrianne had dropped to her knees beside him, pointing out the books she wanted to see. He’d flipped through the pages, smiling when she’d excitedly shown him one picture or another, teasingly tugging at the books she took from him to make a perfect stack of three to buy.
Brooklyn had been teaching kindergarten for thirteen years, and she couldn’t remember ever being sucked into a father-daughter dynamic as she’d been into this one. Adrianne was adorable, yes, and Callum irresistible, true, but it was the bond between them, the absolute attention Callum gave his daughter, the complete trust Adrianne showed in him that Brooklyn couldn’t get over. It filled her with so much hope and such absolute, unfathomable joy.
Their love was undeniable, and honest, and so beautifully transparent that it got to her, when letting it was a huge mistake, and for so many reasons. Her leaving being the biggest one. Which brought her back to the present.
She licked at the ice cream threatening to drip down her thumb to her wrist. “I didn’t even decide until this morning that I was going.”
“You did mention the other night that you had nothing to read.”
“That wasn’t exactly the truth. I have more books loaded on my e-reader than I’ll ever get through in a lifetime. And let’s not even talk about my bookshelves. I just wanted something . . . else.”
“I’d say that makes perfect sense . . .”
“It doesn’t. I know. I’m hopeless.”
“No. Really it does.” He lifted the bag with Adrianne’s three books and the two military thrillers he’d bought for himself. “Three books at a time, and yet the shelves in Addy’s bedroom look a whole lot like the ones in Cat Tales.”
“That’s not going to be any fun when you move. If you ever do move. Trust me.” She thought of all the books she was going to have to pack. “Besides. At least you’re not parking her in front of mindless television for hours on end.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I do plenty of that. The parking, anyway. Not the mindless part so much. At least I hope not. At home and at the shop we have rules about what she can watch. It’s when she stays at my mother’s that I have to worry.”
“Soap operas?”
He shook his head. “Twenty-four-hour news. I’m thirty-four years old, and I don’t want my head filled with all the garbage those pundits spout. Addy hears too much, then asks questions, and I’m the one left to answer them.”
He was thirty-four, which made her the older woman, him the younger man. Or such would’ve been the case if theirs was a relationship defined in those t
erms. It was not. “It’s good that she’s curious.”
“Some things I’d rather her not be curious about,” he said, glancing ahead where Adrianne had turned to run back toward them. “Not at six.”
“Daddy! Daddy! I need you to hold my ice cream”—she held it out toward him—“so I can go swing!”
Callum looked at the mess of her sugar cone on the verge of collapse, then pointed toward the park’s closest seating area. “I’ve got a better idea. You and me are going to sit on this bench while you finish your ice cream. Then you can swing.”
“And Ms. Harvey, too?”
“I don’t think Ms. Harvey will want to swing.”
“Not swing, Daddy. Can she sit with us on the bench? And she can eat her ice cream and I can eat my ice cream, too.”
“What about my ice cream?” he asked as he popped the last bite of his cone into his mouth.
“You don’t have ice cream anymore,” she said, and skipped down the sidewalk to the bench.
Callum followed, and Brooklyn ate the last of her cone on the way, then sat next to Adrianne. Callum tossed the book bag on his daughter’s other side, digging into his front pocket for a tear-packet with a cleansing wipe. Adrianne finished off her ice cream and held out both hands, letting her father wash her fingers before she ran off to play.
When he caught Brooklyn watching him clean his own, he shrugged. “Being a father’s a whole lot like being a Boy Scout.”
“So I see,” she said, then took the second packet he offered. “Thank you. The ice cream hit the spot. But that’s it for me and caffeine today.”
Laughing, he tossed the packets and wipes into the nearest trash can. “With that espresso machine of yours, I should’ve guessed you’d choose coffee.”
“Is there any other flavor?” she asked.
He smiled, laugh lines like a starburst at the corners of his eyes. “What’s your favorite? Kona? Blue Jamaican? Sumatran?”
Coffee. One of her favorite subjects. “So many people sing the praises of Kona, but I find it too . . . fruity, maybe? Too floral? I like Sumatra’s earthiness, I guess it is. It’s very . . . I don’t know. Brooding, maybe?”
“It’s the same with chocolates,” he said as he sat beside her. “It’s all about the soil. Well, and with coffee, how the beans are processed, though that plays a part in chocolate as well.”
“How so?” she asked, knowing some of how chocolate and coffee got their flavors, but wanting to hear more from him.
“Well,” he began, looking toward Adrianne, where she’d draped her midsection over the seat of a swing and was kicking up a cloud of dust as she dragged her feet through the dirt beneath. “In Hawaii you get these notes of banana and coconut, even lava. In Venezuela and Brazil,” he added, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, “you’re going to taste mango and other tropical fruits. There are cocoa beans from Bolivia that have hints of licorice. And in Jamaica . . .” He paused and glanced over at her. “In Jamaica, you’ll get notes of wood, earth, spice, and tobacco. Right up your alley.”
She wasn’t sure how she felt about him knowing her that well. “Do you have a favorite?”
“I like them all, and for different reasons,” he said, and shrugged, twists of his hair blowing in the breeze. “How they pair with other flavors. How they behave when I work with them. How they smell. There’s a chocolate maker in Italy,” he said, waving at Adrianne as she flapped her arms to get his attention. “He owns his own cacao plantations in Venezuela, and he has a bar of unsweetened chocolate, no sugar at all, that’s not the least bit bitter. He even roasts one particular cacao bean whole for eating. Dude is hard-core. Amazing stuff. I’m into him for thousands.”
“You make chocolate sound like a drug,” she said, and when he didn’t answer right away, she looked from his daughter to meet his gaze.
It was solemn, his throat working as he swallowed, his jaw tight, his eyes harsh and dark. “Isn’t it?”
He held her gaze for several long moments, his pulse ticking at his temple, hers beating sharply at the base of her throat. She wondered if he could see it there in her sweater’s V-neck. Wondered, too, what he was thinking, if her comment about drugs had dragged up bad memories, and if she should have kept her mouth shut, or at least thought more carefully about what she was saying.
And to whom she was saying it. “In some ways, I suppose. Like coffee. And ice cream. We all have our passions. And passions, well, some are addictive.” And now she was just making things worse. “I liked hearing you talk about it. The chocolate. I’ve never thought about—”
“Excuse me for interrupting,” said a voice at Brooklyn’s side. She turned from Callum, strangely thankful for the intrusion, to see an older woman with her arm crooked through that of an older man.
They were so cute together, small and stooped and comfortable, as if they’d been walking through parks arm in arm their whole lives. Something told her they had. “It’s not a problem. Can we help you?”
“I saw you earlier, when you were eating your ice cream, and just had to tell you both what an adorable daughter you have.”
Brooklyn blushed. “Oh, she’s—”
“Thank you,” Callum said before she could correct the woman’s assumption. “We think so.”
“I’ll bet she’s a handful, that little one.” The woman smiled, shaking her head as she patted her companion’s hand. “Those pigtails, that grin.”
“She is that.”
“Well, she’s incredibly well behaved,” the man leaned closer to say. “You’ve taught her well.”
This time Brooklyn was the one to say, “Thank you,” returning the couple’s waves as they continued on their way. She waited until they were out of earshot before looking at Callum again. “Well, that was awkward.”
“Not really,” he said, leaning back against the bench and stretching out his arms. One of his hands touched her shoulder, but he didn’t move.
She didn’t move, either, just reached up to tuck her hair behind her ear. “Why did you let them believe we were a family?”
“They don’t know us, it’s doubtful they’ll ever see us again, and it made them feel good. Besides, they were right about everything else. Addy is a handful, and you have taught her well.”
“I’ll take credit for what she’s learned in class, but you’re the one who’s instilled all the things that make her who she is. Unless you want to credit your parents with some of that.”
“Better than crediting her mother,” he said, biting off a sharp curse, then saying, “Sorry. I usually do a better job of keeping the bad-mouthing to myself. I figure the less I say, the less chance Addy will hear something she shouldn’t.”
Another opening, but his comment was enough to convince Brooklyn not to press for more. She’d pressed enough on Saturday night; there was no reason, other than curiosity, for her to know anything more about the woman who’d given birth to Adrianne Drake. Callum wasn’t married to her. As far as she understood, he never had been, and Adrianne’s mother had given up all claims to the girl—
“Actually,” he said, sitting forward again, “I’m still trying to deal with saying as much as I have to you.”
She frowned and glanced over, but he was looking down at his hands, flexing them between his knees. “What?”
“I haven’t even told my parents a quarter of what I’ve told you,” he said, and raised his head, watching Adrianne fly off the end of the slide into a cloud of dirt.
Brooklyn didn’t have time to process his admission, or deal with the sharp hitch in her chest, before the girl came rushing up to where they sat. Though Callum had cleaned the melted ice cream from her hands, they were still as grimy as her pink shoes and her ankles beneath her leggings.
“Daddy?” The word came out in a breathless rush as she collapsed across his thigh. “Can Ms. Harvey come over tonight and watch my Frozen DVD with us?”
Callum fought back a grin. “I don’
t think Ms. Harvey wants to watch Frozen, pumpkin.”
“I would love to watch Frozen,” Brooklyn hurried to say when Adrianne’s eyes widened, “but I have plans tonight.”
“Okay,” the girl said, then bounced away again.
Callum shook his head and grinned. “Do you really have plans tonight? Or are you just the type to break a little girl’s heart?”
She sputtered at that. “Actually, I was letting you off the hook. Though,” she rushed to add, “I’ve had a huge mess of clothes for donation on my bed since yesterday, and I really need to get them sorted.”
An old maid. That’s what she was. Choosing to go through things she should’ve gotten rid of years ago instead of watching a movie with a chocolatier. What is wrong with me? Because surely something was.
Sane women, ones who were not old maids, not dull and boring, ones who did not own cats, who knew how to have fun, would always choose the Irish ex-biker with the hidden tattoos.
“Another time then. Because trust me. She’ll want to watch it another. And another. And—”
“Another. Got it,” she said, trying not to laugh at his pain.
SIX
“Grammy, can I feed the fish before I go to bed?”
Still in full makeup, shoes with low heels that made Callum think of golf tees, and hoop earrings the size of saucers, Shirley Drake turned from the deep stainless-steel sink and reached for an embroidered dish towel. Her gaze moved from Callum’s, as he shut the kitchen door, to her granddaughter, as Addy twirled on her toes around the eating nook’s circular table, dancing with her plush Olaf.
A hand at her hip, bracelets jangling inside her yellow gloves, she said, “Hello to you, too, Miss Adrianne.”
“Hello to you, too, Grammy.” The words were delivered with a mock exasperation, though knowing his chip-off-the-old-block little girl, Callum mused, there was probably very little mock to it. She pirouetted to a stop, knocking into one of the chairs, which bumped the table, causing the vase in the center to wobble and his mother to stiffen. “Did PopPop already feed them?”