by Kent, Alison
I like Daddy’s Oreo candy, but he makes them ALL THE TIME and I know all about how he crunches the cookies into little pieces. Sometimes I get to crunch them, and I want to raise my hand and tell Ms. Harvey I know how.
But we can’t ask questions on field trips until she says so. I hate rules. I hate time-out chairs. I don’t like it when Kelly Webber’s mom looks at Ms. Harvey. I think she wants to yell at her, because she has a mean face.
But Daddy’s face is happy, and Ms. Harvey’s face is happy, and that makes me happy, even if I have to listen to BORING stuff about making candy when I could be playing at my desk with my Olaf and Anna and Sven and Elsa and Kristoff toys and watching Frozen on my tablet.
Then I feel Ms. Harvey’s hand on my shoulder, and I look up and her eyes tell me I’m not paying attention, but she smiles, too, and she looks happy, and I wish I could hold her hand, but I don’t want to hear Kelly Webber’s mom say TOTALLY INPROPRATE again because I really want a kitty.
I don’t want Ms. Harvey to stop smiling so I put my eyes on Daddy and listen to all the words he says. He’s smiling, too, so I smile. And it feels good to be happy with Daddy and Ms. Harvey. I think my kitty’s name will be Candy.
TWENTY
Brooklyn had agreed to meet Callum at Bliss after the shop closed on Saturday three weeks later, and go with him to show Addy their house. He’d asked her a few days after she’d taken her class on their field trip. She’d been as surprised as she’d been honored; she’d thought for sure he’d want to share the moment with his daughter alone.
But, no. He wanted her there because she’d helped him pick out the furniture that had finally been delivered—a bit of a stretch, since all she’d done was tag along and make suggestions. He’d argued the point, and he’d cajoled, but he hadn’t needed to do much of either. She’d known when he’d asked that she’d say yes.
Her attempt to beg off had allowed her to hide her excitement. She didn’t want to appear too eager, since she was seeing him less often these days than she had the first month they’d met. During February, and even early March, they’d crossed paths a lot, and on a few occasions made actual plans.
Now, however, she was busy with her house, and he was busy with his. And what a metaphor for their lives that was: her selling and leaving, him buying and staying. Her looking for her life, his already found. It sure would’ve been nice if she’d met him when she had things figured out.
Then again, she had a feeling figuring things might take longer than a lifetime. All she had to do was look at Jean Dial to realize that. Jean, who had family to keep her from being lonely, and friends with whom to share gossip, and a male dinner companion to fulfill another sort of need.
Jean Dial, who at seventy-three years old had admitted to never moving beyond the loss of her love, but who had never stopped living. Brooklyn was going to miss Jean more than any of her friends. Except for Callum.
Angling her car into a parking slot in front of the empty storefront next to Bliss, she shifted into park, glancing up as Callum pushed open the front door and walked out behind a woman. They were deep in conversation, the woman gesturing expansively and Callum laughing.
If Brooklyn hadn’t known who he was, she wouldn’t have any trouble imagining the two as a couple, exiting a shop where they’d gone to pick up a gift, laughing over a story the store’s chocolatier had told them, caught off guard by the prices his chocolates commanded and rushing to escape.
This woman, whoever she was to Callum, and other women, too, like Lindsay Webber, or the room mothers who’d so appreciated him at story hour, would be here to keep him company and . . . other things, when Brooklyn was not.
She was going away. For Artie. To see his family. To teach with Bianca. To scatter his ashes. To prove that she was over her mourning and moving on with her life.
What had happened to doing things for Brooklyn?
And why was it so hard to ask herself that? Why did doing so seem so selfish when it was anything but?
Once she returned from abroad, if she returned from abroad, in a year, or two, rather than finding a small terraced home overlooking the Mediterranean and staying on, she had no reason to come back to Hope Springs at all. Her job was gone. Her house, with its sale pending, would be gone. Her friends were already out of touch.
Except she did have a reason. And she was looking at him now. Her Irish rogue. Her chocolatier. The man she loved. The man she knew loved her.
She swallowed hard, blinked back the threat of tears. How in the world was she going to be able to get on that plane next month? How was she going to be able to stay and work with Bianca when Callum would be on her mind?
Opening her car door caught Callum’s attention. He raised a hand. He grinned. He waved her over.
“Brooklyn Harvey, this is Juliana Bower. Her daughter Grace is going to be Addy’s sitter for the summer. Brooklyn is Addy’s kindergarten teacher.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Harvey.” Juliana held out her hand.
“Brooklyn, please,” she said, and took it, so pleased that he’d found reliable help. And strangely relieved that the woman’s connection to Callum wasn’t anything more.
Just then, Addy came out of Bliss with a teenager wearing red athletic shorts, white socks and sneakers, and a gray T-shirt with the Hope Springs Bulldogs mascot and logo.
Addy ran for her father and he swung her up in his arms. “Ready to go, pumpkin?”
“Ms. Harvey! Daddy’s got a big surprise for me!”
“I know,” she said, grinning as she hiked her purse strap higher on her shoulder. “He told me.”
“Do you know what it is? He won’t tell me!” the girl said, gesturing dramatically with both hands.
“If he told you, it wouldn’t be a big surprise, would it?”
Addy pouted. “I don’t like surprises.”
“Oh, I think you’ll like this one,” Brooklyn said, laughing along with Juliana while Callum rolled his eyes.
“Can Grace come, too?”
“That’s not up to me, sweetie.” Brooklyn looked from Addy to Callum to Grace, who shook her head.
“I can’t,” the teenager said. “I’ve got to go wash some cars.”
“You don’t have to wash cars, silly,” Addy said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “You can drive through the washoteria.”
Grace laughed, her black ponytail bobbing. “We’re doing it to raise money for a band trip next year.”
“Can I come? On the trip? I like to take trips.”
“Well, you have to play an instrument, and you have to attend Hope Springs High, and you have to be at least fifteen.”
“I’m almost fifteen. I’m six already.”
“C’mon on, Addy,” Callum finally said. “You’ll have plenty of time this summer to go places with Grace. But she needs to get to her car wash, and you have a big surprise waiting.”
“Is it a kitty? Is it the kitty from the bookstore?”
Callum glanced at Brooklyn as if to remind her why he hadn’t told his daughter about the new house before now. “No, pumpkin. The bookstore kitty lives at the bookstore.”
“Kitties don’t even like books!”
“The bookstore kitty does. He reads The Cat in the Hat every night when the store’s closed,” he told her, waving at Juliana and Grace as they headed the opposite way.
“Oh, Daddy. You’re so silly sometimes. At night, there’s no one there to turn the pages.”
Addy’s reaction to the house was classic six-year-old: excitement as she rushed through the rooms with no real grasp of what it meant to move. After all, she hadn’t done so since she was an infant. “But what about Olaf? Can I bring him, or does he have to stay at the loft?”
Callum stood in the doorway of the library, his fists in his pockets as if trying to keep himself from grabbing her before all her running sent her crashing through a wall. “We’ll be bringing everything, pumpkin. Al
l your clothes and toys. All the food in the kitchen.”
“And Olaf, too? And all my books? And your motorcycle? And a kitty?”
He leaned close to Brooklyn, who stood opposite him, and said, “Notice how she slipped that cat thing in there?”
“And your bike,” she pointed out. “I told you you’re going to be the most popular dad on campus.”
“Campus. Ugh.” He reached up and dragged both hands down his face as if he were the weariest man in the world. “That makes me think about her leaving elementary school, and things like braces and makeup and . . . bras.”
He added the last with a shudder, this big bad biker so out of his element that Brooklyn couldn’t help but laugh. Loudly. He was too adorable for words. “Just keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll be fine.”
“Is that your opinion as a professional educator? Because I gotta say, that cackle of yours doesn’t instill a lot of confidence.”
“It’s my opinion as someone who’s seen the two of you together several times the last three months. Trust me. You’re a good father. And that’s speaking as both a friend and an educator. Because I’ve seen bad. And indifferent. And you may not like my laugh, but I know what I’m talking about.”
“I know you do, and I love your laugh, and it’s a bit of a relief to know I haven’t effed things up completely.”
She looked down at the bamboo hardwood they both stood on, her pink floral ballet flats so at odds with his tough black boots. “I don’t have a single worry about Addy’s future.”
“The first time I buy her the wrong bra and you hear her screaming all the way across town, I’ll remind you of that.”
“They have bra-fit specialists, you know,” she said, instead of reminding him she wouldn’t be living across town anymore.
“Seriously? That’s a job?”
Shaking her head, she pushed away from the door, catching a glimpse of Addy as the girl ran down the hall into her room. The library sat in the front of the house. A big bay window took up the front wall, and across from it, a pass-through fireplace opened to the den on the other side.
She hadn’t seen this room since he’d outfitted it, and he’d done that without her input. At least verbal input. He’d shopped with her. He’d seen her classroom, her house. He knew what she liked. Knew her taste in things. Or so she surmised; how else could he have come up with . . . this?
It was her. The whole room. The lampshades. The throw rugs. The end tables and the coffee table and the chair-and-a-half with the ottoman in a rust and pine green and navy tartan, and the complementary one in a dark paisley floral. The copper spittoons on the fireplace, one holding cattails, one the fireplace tools. The scrollwork on the grate made her think of Jane Austen.
“Did you do this?” She stopped in the middle of the room, the carpet beneath her feet like marshmallows, and looked at him. “The decorating?”
“Yeah, well,” he said, coming into the room, his hands still in his pockets, shuffling, “with some help from Lena, Dolly Pepper, your neighbor Jean, and about a hundred salesmen.”
She held his gaze, her heart racing, his expression so hopeful that it stole her breath. Then he added, “I thought you might need a place to come back to. You know, when you got tired of Italy and needed somewhere to land.”
Somewhere to land. Did he know what those words did to her? Hearing them come from him when he was where she wanted to be? When she wanted nothing more than to close her eyes, lay down her head, and rest?
Her eyes burning, she turned away, pressing her hand to her mouth. How was she going to leave him? How was she going to walk away?
He hadn’t asked her to stay, but he wouldn’t because his doing so would make things harder. He knew how important this journey was for her, how vital that she reach this destination she’d been preparing for for a year.
Except she didn’t think it was. Not anymore. Not because any of what she wanted for Artie mattered less, but because it wasn’t what she wanted for herself. Artie was gone. And she’d done the very thing she’d promised him she wouldn’t: she’d stopped living her life when he’d lost his.
Taking a deep breath, she shook off the melancholy; this was not the time or the place. Callum and Addy had this gorgeous new home, and if she ever wanted a quiet place to sit and read—
“Wait a minute,” she said, crossing to the closest of the wall-to-wall shelves and running her fingers along the books’ spines, reading the titles, pulling one of the hardcovers from the shelf and opening it to look inside. “These are my books, aren’t they? The ones I brought over to store?”
He nodded, then shrugged. “I figured since it’s a library, and a library needs books, and I’ve been too busy with the furniture and Addy’s things to pack mine . . . anyway, I heard it’s not great to store them in cardboard. Silverfish. Roaches. Sorry,” he said, as if he didn’t want her to think about her books being eaten by bugs. “I thought they’d get some air in here, and it’s not like they’re in the way, and when you’re ready for them, I’ll pack them back up. I’m not holding them hostage for any nefarious ransom or anything creepy—”
“It’s not that,” she said, shaking her head. The day she’d brought over the boxes . . . she’d thought then that he’d never know how important to her the books were. She’d been wrong. Because he did. What he’d done in this room proved it, and for a very long moment she found it hard to breathe. “It’s just . . .” She stopped, tried again, struggling for the words. “You saw the shelves they came off of. They were never this neat and organized.”
“That control freak thing. Rears its ugly head even when I don’t want it to.”
“I love that you’re using them. I do, really. They deserve a nice, OCD, bug-free home.”
“Good,” he said, clearing his throat. “I was worried you’d turn it into a big deal, thinking I was trying to keep them so you’d stick around or something.”
“That might’ve been nice.” She tried for a grin, not sure it came out the way she wanted. “Except for it being creepy.”
“So,” he said, facing her, his oxford shirt wrinkled, the lowest two buttons undone, the very edge of his dragon tattoo exposed in the open placket, “you don’t want me to try to convince you to stick around?”
What was she supposed to say to that? “You know I can’t.”
He looked at her like he didn’t know it at all. “I know you have a ticket to fly. That doesn’t mean you can’t stay here. It’s just money. The airline isn’t holding your firstborn hostage or anything.”
She thought about his Pooh Bear and Piglet tattoo. The promise of a grand adventure his life with Adrianne Michelle Drake had lived up to. She wondered, and for not the first time, about his love of literature. How he had come to find solace and absolution and joy in the words of others.
Then she took him in, head to toe, wishing she could save this moment and take it with her, because she didn’t want to ever forget. You don’t have to forget. There’s this thing called a camera. “Don’t move,” she told him, digging into her jeans pocket for her phone.
His mouth quirked. “You’re going to take my picture.”
“Why not?” She centered him on the screen, then took a step to the right, taking her time setting up the shot. She wanted it to be perfect, though seriously, with her subject matter, how could it be anything else?
“Weren’t we just talking about creepy?” he asked, one brow going up, one dimple deepening. The light from the front window lit his hair until the hint of auburn was no longer a coal but a flame.
She took a shot and said, “This is not creepy. This is me commemorating the moment I realized you and I are kindred bibliophilic spirits.”
“Thought you might’ve realized that when I showed you the Nietzsche and the Tennyson.” He started to pull his fists from his pockets; she stopped him with a sharp shake of her head. “Or when you saw the Frank Herbert. Though, really, Pooh should’ve clinched i
t.”
“I didn’t know you as well then,” she said, wanting to get closer, to photograph the words on his wrist, the ones on his neck. “I thought you might’ve just pulled quotes out of the air. Or off the Internet.”
“Not to burst your bubble, but a couple of them, I did.”
“What?” She looked away from his framed image to the man in front of her. “Say it isn’t so.”
He shrugged. “Can’t keep it all in my brain. No matter how big my head is.”
She centered him again and touched the button. She wanted to capture all of him: his boots, his jeans bunched around them and hanging low on his hips from the weight of his fists. The strip of his abdomen and the text from Dune that showed above his jeans’ copper buttons.
She took another shot. She wanted every wrinkle of his shirt. She loved his wrinkles. This shirt was a faded-to-white pink; she liked that he’d owned it in its original color. The collar was twisted, the sleeves cuffed up his forearms; both allowed for more of his tattoos to show.
She lined him up once more. She wanted his dimples and his grin and the scruff on his face. His sharp cheekbones. His blade of a nose. His green eyes and long lashes and his brow that even when frowning wasn’t heavy.
But mostly she wanted his hair, every ginger-brown strand. The ones wound into the knot he always wore, the ones sticking out, the ones hanging in twists that made her think of his daughter’s corkscrew pigtails.
She didn’t want to forget anything about him, or lose a single memory of their time together, or get to Italy and wonder if she’d made the right choice for fear of losing what she’d had with her first love.
“Got it,” she said at last, because she couldn’t stare at him forever. At least not the him across the room in the flesh. “And your head’s not that big. So I forgive you for having to cheat.”