My wet ponytail flopped on the back of my neck, causing a portion of my T-shirt to become moist against my skin. Duke must have already been out with Dad, because he never made his way to the door. So I headed straight up Seaside Avenue and toward the Town Center to see if they were in their usual spot. And that was the only reason I went that direction. Just to check on Duke. I’m serious. It was for no other reason at all.
Dad was sipping coffee with Mr. Modica in front of the market. It was the crack of dawn, so I’m sure they were already fully vested in each other’s accounts of the previous evening. I almost wondered how these men survived the other fifty-one weeks of the year that they didn’t share their coffee together.
“Savannah, you look a little tired this morning,”Mr. Modica said, his snow-white beard moving below his small curved lips.
“Why don’t you join us, baby girl,” Dad said, patting the seat next to him.
“Sit down with your father here,”Mr. Modica said, standing up and holding the back of his chair for me.
“I can’t risk seeing Joshua,” I said, scanning the streets, wondering where his curls might pop up.
“He’s come and gone,” Dad said, taking a sip of his coffee and reaching over to pat Duke’s head.
“Oh really? Already? Well, that’s as it should be.” I sat down slowly. Mr. Modica pushed my chair under and patted me firmly on both shoulders.“Mr. Modica, may I ask you a question?”
“It’s my day off from questions,” he said.“But not from statements.” So he gave one. Of course. “He’s a fine boy, Savannah. Those don’t come along often.” Then he sighed a heavy sigh. “Well, back to the rest of the world.”
Yet none of his world was awake yet. They never were. Just him and Jake and a few other insomniacs who meandered through.
The metal seat beneath me felt cold. Everything had felt cold since I watched Joshua’s curls bounce their way right out of my life. Even the Southern humidity felt cold without him.
“How was he?” I asked nonchalantly.
“About as pathetic as you.”
“Really? Oh, who cares . . . and I don’t want any of your advice this morning. Just keep that for your little blackboard at your coffee shop.”
“I don’t have advice for you. But I do have this.” He reached into a brown paper bag and pulled out a Coke.
I almost cried.“How did you know I would be here?”
“I didn’t. Joshua did. And he bought this and said to give it to you when you got here. He’s crazy about you, you know.” He rubbed the side of his cup but never took his eyes off of me.
“Well, like I said, it’s a beautiful morning, and we don’t need to worry ourselves with Joshua. So, how was your movie?” I asked. I took a sip of the Coke and let it burn all the way down. Maybe it would burn out the yuck in the pit of my gut.
“It was good.”
“You know, this wasn’t how I wanted to spend my vacation.”
He chuckled. He knew I was incapable of not talking about it. “I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“I mean, my life was perfectly fine until he showed up and wrecked it.”
“You’re overreacting, Savannah.”
“How do you even know? You don’t even know what I’m so angry about.”
“Yes, I do actually.”
I felt the last swig of Coke shoot up into my nostrils and singe the nose hairs.“You do not!”
He looked at me calmly.“Yes, I do. Joshua told me everything.”
“There is no way he told you everything.”
“He told me that he had been intimately involved with his last girlfriend. The one who is getting married this weekend. The one that you saw him kiss. The one you jumped to conclusions about.”
I felt my jaw come unhinged.“He told you all of that?”
“Yes, he told me all of that. And then he asked me to forgive him for hurting you.”
“He asked you what?”
“You heard me.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him that if he felt he needed my forgiveness, then he had it.”
“Why does everything have to be forgiven?” He took a sip of his coffee. He loved to make me wait, because he knew I’d get impatient and ask another question. “Plus, if you forgive, then you’re basically saying it’s okay.”
“No, I’m not. That’s absurd. Forgiveness is releasing. Letting something go. Or letting someone else go from their own mistakes. Just like the city let you go from that first horrible article you wrote. They did that because you asked them to forgive you.”
“Well, that could be debated. I still get hostile letters.”
“He’s a wonderful man, Savannah. A man who loves you, I might add. Though I’m not sure why.”
“What did you just say?”
“I said I’m not sure why. You’ve hidden him all week from your mother and Amber. You’re holding something over his head that he dealt with years ago and was forgiven of by a far greater authority than yourself. And now you’re worried about your precious little vacation being ruined. A vacation, I might add, that is actually mine, that you claimed you were coming on because you needed to work. So, like I said, maybe you don’t deserve Joshua.”
“I cannot believe I’m hearing this!” I threw my hands up in the air for added measure.“I have waited all my life for the man of my dreams, to give him the gift of myself. And let me add for the record I cannot believe that I am even having this conversation with my father. If I leave this conversation scarred, you will pay the therapy bills. I am the one who didn’t cave in those moments with Grant, when I could have, I might add, because I am a very desirable woman, and I’m the one who doesn’t deserve him?”
“I believe that is what I said.”
“So, you don’t think, after the hell of losing Grant, having to move back near my mother, and suffering through her interference in my life, you don’t think I have a right to be upset that my vacation has been held hostage by a blubbering beauty queen and a man who can’t keep his britches up?”
Dad stood, and I could see the minutest amount of seething in his eyes. I’m not sure I had ever seen that look on his face before. He took Duke by the leash firmly and spoke to him instead of me.“I’m going to give the frightened little girl in front of me a vacation from the back of my hand, only because I know she’s scared to death. But she better not talk about my wife that way again. Because she is a mother who loves her daughter very much. And you’re just scared, Savannah.You’re scared of loving anyone completely. Because the last relationship you gave your heart to didn’t work out the way you thought it would. Well, not everyone or everything will, Savannah. Not everything will run according to the Savannah playbook.” I felt the hot tears burn their way into my eyes. I blinked hard, refusing to allow another dam to break in the same twenty-four-hour period.“You’re even scared that Amber is trying to come in and steal the love your mother and Joshua and I have for you, and for you alone.”
I puffed.
“But that can never happen.” He started walking off with Duke, then turned around to add one final thought. “And remember this, baby girl, the junk in your life and the junk in Joshua’s life aren’t really all that different when you compare them to the holiness of the One who forgives them both. They’re both just pretty much junk.”
He left me there. Staring at his backside. His always right backside. Wishing I could kick it. Or kick myself. I kicked the table instead.“Ow!” I hollered.
Who knew mornings could last so long. I wish Duke would have stayed with me. At least then my angst would have a companion. I rounded the corner of Natchez Street. I saw Manuel and Alexandra sitting on the front porch and could hear their laughter from the street.
“You won again!” She laughed.
“I can’t help it!” He chuckled in response. “You took your hand off. You can’t take your hand off.”
“Hey, Savannah,” Alexandra called out.
Oh, for a less m
emorable face.“Hey, Alexandra.”
“Want to join us? My dad always wins, but you can still play. Maybe together we can take him down.”
“I could use some aggression release this morning,” I said, joining them on the porch.We played cards for well over an hour, and I listened as they talked and laughed and Manuel gave advice and Alexandra gave way too much information to us both. But it was beautiful and perfect and unbelievable that he could love her so.
She left us for a few moments to talk on her cell phone.
“You look like you’ve had a bad morning already,” Manuel observed as he scooted his chair back and propped his feet up on the table.
“I’m having a bad run of it lately, to be honest.” I scooted my chair back as well.
“Lucy told me you and Joshua have had a temporary crisis.”
“Temporary?” I coughed.“I’m not sure about that.”
He put his hands behind his head. “She also said the two of you had an interesting talk last night.”
“Interesting might be an understatement. I mean, you’re amazing, Manuel. The way you love Alexandra. The way you act like you’re so in love with Lucy.”
“It’s not an act, Savannah. We’re more in love now than we’ve ever been. Difficult seasons often do that.” He removed his hands from behind his head and placed them in his lap.
“But how? How could you love her after all that she did? How could you take her daughter and make her your own?”
“Because there are two options in life, Savannah. You can live with regret and bitterness, or you can forgive. I chose to forgive.”
“But how do you forgive,well, all of that?” I said,waving into the wind.
“I didn’t have an option.” He put his feet down and leaned on the table, letting his deep ebony eyes peer into mine. They looked like Joshua’s.
“But you just said you had two options.”
He ran his hand through his thick black hair.“I said there are two options. I only had one. Forgiveness is the only option for my life. There was no other option for me. I’ve been forgiven of too much myself, Savannah. And forgiveness is the only way for me to continually be forgiven. If I don’t give it, I don’t get it. And I make mistakes every day. When I lose my temper—”
I chuckled. “I can’t imagine you losing your temper.”
“That’s because you saved that gate from my wrath that first day we met.” He smiled. “And I need forgiveness when I’m impatient, and I need forgiveness when forgiving is the last thing I feel like giving.”
“But it’s so hard.” I leaned my forehead on the table.
I felt his hand rub the top of my head, like my father used to do before he started seething at me. Maybe I’d better refrain from excessive criticism of his wife.“Yeah, it’s real hard. And there are times you’d just rather wallow and moan and get angry then forgive. But withholding it only destroys you.”
I lifted my head. “But what did you do, I mean, after you found out? You had to have some sort of reaction.”
“Oh, I reacted all right.” He looked across the street, remembering. “I cried. I screamed. I threw a few dishes. I did all the things men never do, because this is never supposed to happen to a man. Affairs are what men do, not women. And then I looked into the face of the woman that I’ve loved since I can remember, and when she asked me to forgive her—and I could tell she meant it with everything inside of her—then I went away so I could think about it.”
“Ooh, good one.” I laughed.
“Well, I had to know that her repentance was genuine and not just desperation.”
“How were you sure?”
He leaned into me, and his eyes got big as he whispered,“I was brutal.”
I leaned in and whispered back,“What did you do?”
“I made her cut off all ties with the people she’d worked with, leave her job, and commit to weekly meetings with a counselor for the next year.”
“She left her job?”
“Desperate places require desperate measures. Plus, how could I expect her to stay in the same place and us get a different result for our life? There was no way. Then I committed to work on the things in me that needed to change. The things that had aided the entire situation in the first place.”
“How could you have had anything to do with her choice?” I asked incredulously.
“More than you think. Now, at the end of the day, the choice was hers. And I know that I am not responsible for that. But she had spent years being underappreciated, second to my job, and respected more as a mother than a wife. I had abandoned the fact that she was a woman who needed to feel like a woman. She needed to be romanced and loved and treasured and nurtured. And I had reduced her to housekeeper and financier. So I changed all that. Amazing how almost losing one of life’s greatest treasures can cause you to value it in a whole new way.”
“But how could you love a child that your wife made with another man?” Even saying it, I couldn’t imagine it.
“Because I was able to see Alexandra as a child who was completely innocent of her circumstances. And when her father died, I knew that she needed a daddy. Every day my heart swells with more and more love for her.”The tears in his eyes told the truth of his heart.
“I can tell. She’s crazy about you. Like she’s really your daughter.”
“Couldn’t feel like it more than if I had given birth to her myself.” He chuckled.
“Now, that’s a visual.” I laughed. “You’re amazing, Manuel. Dare I say a saint.”
“No, I’m no saint. Sometimes, Savannah, I think that the people who overcome their demons are far more amazing. I never had her temptations to overcome. But every day she fought them, and now she has won. Well, actually we’ve won. And our Alexandra has won.”
“Forgiveness, huh?”
“Haven’t found any substitute for it.”
“Ever have bad days?”
“Every now and then they’ll wash over me like a summer thunderstorm, or sometimes just like a fine mist. I deal with them in whatever form they arrive. And I remind myself that there is nothing in my life that won’t turn out for good. Because I have spent my entire life loving God, and I know that there is a purpose for my life, and everything that Lucy and I have traveled. Plus, she’s a spicy little chick, you have to agree.” He winked.
I winked back.“I’d definitely have to agree with that.” I stood up and wrapped my arms around his neck. He held me there. He really was a perfect father.
“We’ll see you before you leave, I hope?”
“I’ll make sure of it.”
From the street I looked back and watched him walk into the house. A man far beyond my ability to comprehend. A hurt I couldn’t conceive of. A forgiveness far greater than I was capable of. At least it felt that way today.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The sun beat us like we were delinquents.
“I’m sweltering.” Paige wiped the beads of perspiration from her top lip.
“You’re not near as hot as she is.” I motioned to Mother,who was sitting at the base of the East Ruskin Beach Pavilion. She wore a huge hat tied atop her head, and she sat in a fold-up chair, painting the canvas along with six other women and their painting instructor. She was dabbing at her face with a handkerchief, but it was pretty futile, because all of her makeup had slid into one of the creases of her neck.A crease she would assure you did not exist.
“Why is she doing that?” Paige asked.
I pondered the situation myself. “She’s into torture for some odd reason.”
“You two are going to look fifty by the time you’re thirty,” Amber surmised from beneath her umbrella, while eating a Milky Way.
“Who cares?” I mumbled. “We’ll be living together in a retirement village. The only two we’ll have to look at is each other. At least we’ll think we look good.”
“Besides,” Paige interjected,“why come to the beach if you’re not going to lie in the sun?”
> “To see the sights, of course,” Amber responded, looking at Mother across the sand and shaking her head. Now, that was a sight if ever we’d seen one.
I was running and it was dinnertime. That only meant one thing: perilous times. The last two days had been too much. The abandonment of every dream I had ever entertained. Every emotion. Every thought. Every buried feeling that had tried to resurrect itself was officially placed right back in its grave. Today, people mocked me instead of mourned me. At least they did in my head. And a very imaginative head it was, I’d come to discover.
On top of that, I had written and submitted my second article. That led to a horrible phone call and a tongue-lashing and a rewrite by 10:00 p.m. or else. It was five o’clock, and I had nothing.
I passed Adam again. How does something so perfect go so wrong? How can you think you have a love so secure and certain only to watch it disappear as suddenly as it arrived. Love is cruel and mean, and who would want it?
I jogged away to the secret place I had discovered on the outskirts of Water Colors yesterday morning with Joshua. I just wanted to be there. Maybe I could understand a little better there. Wynonna sang to me from my iPod.“Heaven Help Me If I Ever Lose Your Love.”The words reverberated inside of me. Long gone was Barbra Streisand singing songs from Yentl.
As I stood on the edge of the dock and looked out over the glassy water, I watched a turtle’s head bob up for a second, only to disappear before I could catch a closer look.
“Well, aren’t you Mr. Lucky today. You can just bury yourself.”
He didn’t respond.
The thoughts, compounded by the music in my head, must have camouflaged the clip-clopping of high heels that sneaked up on me. When the perfectly manicured hand tapped me on the shoulder, I about threw us both over the railing.
“My word, Mother, would you announce yourself first!” I said, pulling the earphones out of my ears.
“If you would actually listen to the sounds around you instead of having your ears crammed full with hullabaloo all the time,you might have heard me. I’ve called your name the last one hundred feet.”
Savannah by the Sea Page 24