“Some days I just get kind of tired of all the dirty diapers. Noah” she stressed directing her remark loudly at his brother “doesn’t help out much.”
“Help out?” he called from the couch. “I work, don’t I? I pay for those damn diapers. Those things are expensive. You should use the cloth ones.”
“Are you going to wash them?”
Noah ignored the question.
“Speaking of which, we need more diapers, can I have some money to go buy more?”
This started a massive argument over how many diapers they went through in a day. It was probably a common argument between young parents. David expected his mother to intervene at any moment, but she seemed to be humming a little tune to herself in the kitchen, probably drunk.
He gently took Jessica back from Holly’s arms and took her outside where she couldn’t hear the fray indoors. She looked a little upset. “Noah mad.” she scowled.
That frown on her face wasn’t fair. “No.” he said to her. “Noah is a stressed out kid and he doesn’t mean to sound like that or scare you. He just doesn’t really know what to do. Okay?”
Jessica had watched him talk as though she understood all of that. She brightened as she heard “Okay” because that was something she could understand.
“Okay.” She responded cheerily, a smile replacing the scowl.
He’d gotten a job at a restaurant near the school making crappy money and crappier tips from fellow college students, but he looked through his wallet to see what he could find… enough for some diapers, anyway. He had fallen prey to the numerous credit card company freebies his first week on campus too, so he was pretty sure one of those cards in there had some room on it.
He picked up Jessica and walked over to his car before he realized she probably needed a carseat. He walked over to his mother’s car and found it unlocked. The carseat in the back wasn’t even buckled in. David took another deep breath. Was it really possible that all three of them had forgotten to strap the seat into the car for the last two years? The thought was too hard to stomach. He imagined a plausible scenario in which they had to move the carseat the night before and had not gotten around to buckling it in yet. It made him feel better.
He put the seat in the back of his car and looked at the funny straps dangling down. There was a diagram on the side of how to install the thing. It took him a few minutes to figure it out. Strapping Jessica in took a few more minutes, but she was excited to go somewhere and she waited patiently for him to figure out the buckles.
As he started the car to leave, he wondered why neither of Jessica’s parents had come to find out if they were doing okay. He shook his head slightly and headed for the nearest all purpose store.
It had never occurred to him until that moment that diapers came in multiple different sizes. Babies wore diapers… where was the one size fits all? He tried calling Noah’s cell, but Noah didn’t answer the phone. He stood there staring at the brightly colored packages until he realized that there were weight ranges for the various sizes. He looked over at Jessica, who looked back at him and grinned.
“What size are you?” he asked her, pointing at the packages.
She pointed at the packages too and repeated “Size you.”
He picked her up out of the cart and tried to compare her weight to the free weights he lifted at the gym… maybe 20 pounds, 25 pounds he thought. She giggled at being jostled about. He grabbed two packages and then, on the way by, he picked out some wipes. Jessica started to get fussy after he put her back in the cart and he was wondering why he hadn’t brought Holly with him.
The fussiness gave way to a full blown tantrum by the time he got out of the store, but Jessica calmed down as soon as he started to drive. She stuck her thumb in her mouth and fell fast asleep before they made it home. He was amazed that she trusted him, even though she didn’t know him very well. And even though he didn’t know her very well, he loved her.
The family made it through the weekend of Thanksgiving and most of the time one of the adults in the house made an effort to take care of Jessica, so David justified going back to school and not worrying too much about them. He did look up the installation instructions for the carseat on the internet and made sure he hooked it into his mom’s car properly before he left, though.
He made up an excuse not to go home over winter break and spent a semester abroad in Italy like he had already planned. To make up for the number of classes that didn’t go toward completing his major, he took on a couple of independent study projects chronicling American authors who had spent time in Europe. He spent the semester exploring the countryside and not worrying how he would pay back the massive loan he’d taken out. When summer came, he stayed on in a flat with some friends he’d met in the program until he ran out of money and had to return home. By then, Holly and Noah barely spoke to each other.
Jessica didn’t seem to mind and filled the silence with myriad questions and monologues about her toys. She was the only one who didn’t seem to be uncomfortable.
When he moved back to school, he started worrying about Jessica between classes. He came home on weekends and made sure she had clean clothes and milk in the fridge. He met Holly’s sister, Janna, a couple of times when Janna ran out of places to crash and stayed on their mom’s couch until she’d worn out her welcome. David hated those weekends because he had to sleep on the floor, but Jessica made it into a campout when she got old enough to know what that meant. His frequent trips home put a serious crimp in his dating life, but David had a hard time finding a girl who was mature enough, someone that he wouldn’t mind introducing to his niece.
He really didn’t know what was in store for him after graduation. It seemed to David like he’d spent his entire life trying to reach that one goal and then he didn’t know what came after that. His mother came to graduation with Jessica and Noah, but Holly wasn’t there. It wasn’t until he was out drinking with Noah afterwards that he found out Holly had left and not said goodbye.
His excitement turned to anger. Rage at the whole situation. Whether David knew it or not, that was the moment he decided he would take care of Jessica himself. Going home to find his mother passed out was just the added incentive.
He had a long talk with Noah that night after they put Jessica into her own bed. They sat on the floor beside their drunken mother. Somehow it made David feel like she was a part of the decision process. He didn’t really give Noah a choice. He explained that Noah was a screw up without a diploma or a job or the maturity to raise his own daughter. Noah didn’t disagree. David knew Noah had been trying to do the right thing, but he wasn’t in love with Holly and didn’t want to be a father. It was probably painfully obvious to Holly, too, but it didn’t make David any less angry at her.
For a week or two, the three of them tried to be a good set of parents, with David being the primary one to cook, clean and take care of Jessica; but it wasn’t working. Noah wasn’t working, Theresa wasn’t working and David felt like Jessica had been left in front of the television all day when he got back from work.
Even during the move, Noah acted like an arrogant idiot. For thousands of miles across the country, his mother had pulled a trailer with his motorcycle on it. Then suddenly, the morning before they planned to arrive in Palmetto, Noah wanted to arrive in style and insisted on riding his motorcycle into town. David scoffed at the thought that anyone would believe he’d ridden three thousand miles on that clunker bike, but appearances meant a lot to Noah.
2
Theresa had often described her mother as a hard woman to love, usually after a third or fourth glass of wine. David remembered her differently, as a woman with strict rules, but generally kind. He was old enough to remember the last time they had been to her house, but he didn’t have the luxury of being embarrassed by the amount of time that had passed since they’d spoken.
There was a lot of tension between his mother and his grandmother, a nuance that seemed to completely escape Noah who bar
ely acknowledged his grandmother’s presence before he proceeded to raid her fridge. If grandma was annoyed, you wouldn’t know it. She fawned on Jessica like she’d finally seen the pivot around which the world turned.
For the first time in a long time, David was grateful. He knew he had made the right decision. That was, until he discovered that his grandmother did not believe in clothes dryers. Jessica was tired from the drive, but she refused to go to sleep that night. David tried to make this move as easy as possible for her, but she was pretty wound up and worried that her mother might not be able to find them here.
The second time he was grateful in a long time was for the pretty girl at the Laundromat. He had already noticed that people in this town were a little slower moving, a little more relaxed. He noticed her right away reading a book with her long hair tied back and looking perfectly comfortable in her own skin. He envied that kind of ease. He recognized her as the girl he saw assisting another woman crossing the road as they drove through town the previous day. It wasn’t really the girl he noticed as much as the older woman, who he recognized immediately from the summer years before.
When Andy responded so calmly to Jessica’s outburst about her mother and then distracted her with the game so David could finish their laundry, he almost felt like he could feel a ray of sunshine through the clouds. She was very kind and it didn’t hurt that she really was very pretty too. In another life, he might have asked her on a date.
That summer turned out to be one of the best he’d ever had. Andy started coming by the house for cooking lessons from his grandmother, which he initially thought serendipitous until he realized that she had orchestrated the visits to try and get close to Noah.
By all outward appearances, Noah probably did look pretty attractive to girls. He was young, single, in shape and as far as anyone knew unencumbered. In this new town, Noah perfected the bad boy image that David knew wasn’t an image at all.
Noah brought over a handful of different girls in those first weeks, but their grandmother had strict rules about girls not going into the bedrooms. Noah started spending more and more time out of the house and away from the rules, but also away from Jessica. One early morning when Noah crept back to the house after being gone all night, David was waiting for him.
“How’s it going?” David asked from the darkness of the porch just off the kitchen.
Noah was startled. “What the hell are you doing out here?”
“Waiting for you.” David said in a deep tone.
“Hey, you don’t have to wait up for me.” Noah joked. “I’m doing just fine.”
“Are you doing just fine?” David stood up to his full height and got very close to Noah.
Noah stood there, staring at David for a few moments before responding “There’s no reason why we both have to give up having a life.”
David found it hard to believe that he shared a gene pool with a tool like Noah some days. Like it or not, they were brothers. He knew as well as Noah did that when trouble came calling, David would always back him up and bail him out.
“It’s always all about you, isn’t it?” he accused. “Well, it isn’t about you anymore. It’s about that little girl who’s sleeping in there and who’s basically an orphan thanks to you. She deserves a little stability. She deserves to have someone who is there when she goes to sleep and there when she wakes up and for all the hours in between.”
Clearly Noah was not keen on the gravity of the conversation. “That’s what she’s got you for.” he explained “And I’ll be there for all the other girls who need someone to be there when they go to sleep. Deal?”
“You’re an idiot.”
“No, I’m just having fun.”
“Do you think those girls would like you so much if they really knew you? Go on and tell them all about your little trouble obeying the law. Tell them you have a daughter.”
“You want me to? Why don’t I start with that cute little twinkie that keeps coming over here? She sounds like a pretty forgiving type… maybe the kind of girl that wants to help a guy like me see the light, get on the right path. You said she was smart, right? Hell, she’s probably figured out that Jessica’s not your daughter anyway.”
“She’s smart all right. Too smart to fall for the crap you shovel.” David realized at that moment that he had cleaned up his language considerably since he started taking care of Jessica because there were a lot more descriptive words he wanted to use.
“Girls just wanna have fun, too. You used to know what that was like.”
“And then I grew up, you should try it sometime.”
“No way. If you recall, I tried that and it didn’t work out so well for me. You are so much better at being the grownup than I am. And since you’ve volunteered for the job, maybe Jessica doesn’t need me at all.”
David knew that Noah wasn’t as vicious as he sounded right now. He could be a jerk, but deep down David believed that Noah wouldn’t intentionally hurt anyone. He softened a bit now, realizing that being pushed out of being a father was as painful for Noah as it was for him to assume the role.
“She’s always going to need you. She just needs you to …”
“Be something that I’m not.” Noah finished David’s sentence.
“No, just be a better you.”
“I can’t. I’m not you. I’m never going to be the perfect brother. My grades always sucked and trouble just follows me wherever I go. I am man enough to admit that you are a better man. What she needs is you.”
David didn’t understand how what started out as being a confrontation over Noah staying out all night turned into this conversation. “She needs us both and probably Holly too. You really need to try to get ahold of her again. This is just messed up, her leaving like this. You guys can get your crap together. I’m always going to be here for you and for Jessica… Holly too; but you guys just aren’t even trying.”
“Whatever.”
“Whatever?”
“Yeah, whatever. Just leave me alone right now.”
Noah went inside the house and David didn’t see him at all again that weekend. Who knew where he went, if he was crashing at some girl’s house, but he couldn’t be reasoned with right now and David had a daughter to raise.
Jessica made it really hard for David to be in a bad mood. In spite of her occasional temper tantrums when she was tired, Jessica was just the sweetest kid ever made. She always wanted to help him look for a job in the paper. He let her have a different section of the classifieds and she studiously circled ads like she’d seen him do.
When he woke up in a funk, she would get a hairbrush out of the bathroom and start belting out a song she made up until he laughed.
He started looking forward to Andy’s visits and running into her around town. The tip about the mall in Greenville was a godsend because he basically took Jessica around to all the stores and started filling out job applications. She was anxious to suggest that he apply at the colorful store that sold candy and stuffed animals and David obliged. He’d be willing to take just about anything.
With his grandmother’s help, they were able to get into a routine and life started looking up for once. On a beautiful day in June, he went out for a jog down Main Street. They’d been there for weeks and he’d never properly gotten the lay of the land. He was happy to find a real gym in town with a fair amount of free weights and a variety of machines. They were much older than at the gym in California, but it was something.
The owner was a burly man with an excessive amount of back hair, but a friendly enough guy named Tony. While he “toured” the large single room facility, he noticed a woman dancing in the mirror. The gym was directly across from a dance studio and Andy was inside alone dancing. Her hair was up, but some of the hair had escaped and danced around her face while she moved to music he couldn’t hear. He was staring and the gym owner noticed.
Tony said in a thick New York accent “My wife owns that studio across the street.”
�
�Oh” David said, not taking his eyes off Andy.
“I hear you’ve got a little girl, she might like to take some lessons over there. Celia’s real good with the kids. Andy used to be one of her students.”
“It’s beautiful” David said absent-mindedly.
“Yeah” he agreed “I couldn’t do nothing like that, but it sure is nice to watch. It’s what made me fall in love with her.”
David didn’t respond. Something inside him shifted a little bit. He hadn’t ever really thought that Andy was a one dimensional girl, but she never mentioned dancing. He wondered suddenly if he was intruding on a private moment and looked back toward the gym owner who was standing there, hands on his hips, smiling at him.
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