Sandy seemed to have to tear her gaze away from him. She turned to tell the girls, “We’re on our way home. Hunter just had to stop the car to...check something.”
“What?” That was Zoey.
“Something.”
“What?” She was a child who liked answers.
“Um...he was checking how much gas he had left.”
A lame answer, but Zoey bought it. Addie, however, the car aficionado, pointed to the gas meter. “It’s there. Just like on my car.”
The smile of a moment ago gone, Sandy looked so unsettled he tried to tease her back to equanimity. “The moment they hit third grade and multiplication tables, I’ll teach them to do taxes. They don’t miss anything.”
Sandy smiled feebly. “Yeah. Well. We’d better go. Calli’s going to open for me in the morning so I can get some supplies for the cart. But I still have to be there at six. The coast guard cutter is picking up a big order Calli will never be able to fill by herself and take care of the windows, too.”
“Right.” He pulled out of the parking lot and wound his way to Fifteenth Street. In the short distance, the girls fell asleep again. Sandy carried in Addie, and Hunter took Zoey. When they got into the house, he did as he had done when he and Sandy were going out: he tossed blankets back, put Zoey in the top bunk in the girls’ little room, pulled her shoes off, and covered her. Sandy did the same with Addie. She would change them into bedclothes before she went to bed.
Sandy walked him to the front door.
“Anything I can do for you before I go?” he asked from out on the steps.
She stood in the doorway with that wary look. “No, but thanks for helping with Zoey. She’s starting to weigh a ton.”
“She’s grown an inch or two.”
“Two and a half. And Addie’s brain is outdistancing her body growth.”
“Yeah. She’s like a hobbit genius.”
Sandy laughed at that, which made him feel a little better about leaving her. He wasn’t used to her looking so unsettled.
He was surprised by how much it hurt to have to go. He waved.
She waved back and closed the door.
CHAPTER TEN
OKAY, SANDY THOUGHT, so she was a little short this month to pay all her business and personal bills. So the girls had come home with a letter announcing that the cost of daycare had gone up. No need to panic. She’d lost a lot of product when the stand-up fridge had failed, and the fact that it couldn’t be repaired but had to be replaced turned out to be a considerably bigger blow to Crazy for Coffee’s economy than she’d anticipated.
She pulled into the Safeway parking lot at just after five o’clock, daylight inching out the early morning darkness. The large colony of sea lions living on the East Mooring Basin docks barked noisily. She sat for a moment to enjoy the dawn and try to ignore the din. She understood the noisy sea lions drove the neighbors crazy, but Sandy related to their insistence on letting the world know they were there.
Concerns about money again intruded into her moment. Though she told herself not to panic, her body was tired and responded with a will of its own. A dark cloud of depression threatened. Even when the breadwinners in her life had abandoned her, she’d always paid her bills. She’d made that deal with their landlord when her father left, and she had a job when her husband walked away. She’d had to budget to the last penny, but she’d made the money stretch.
The cash from refinancing her house had seemed such a fortune. But once she’d bought the business, including the inventory, paid all her first month’s bills, met her payroll and attended to her personal bills, she’d had an alarmingly small amount left. Then the fridge had failed, costing her several hundred dollars’ worth of product plus the cost of a new one, and that small amount was gone.
And she still hadn’t paid for insurance.
She pushed her car door open and stepped out into the wet but delicious morning air. It smelled salty because the Columbia flowed into the ocean just over the Columbia River Bar not too far from where she stood. The fragrance of flowers and pine mingled with that of fish and diesel and salt to make a perfume that was definitively Astoria.
Dark clouds crowded the slash of light on the horizon. Hard to tell what that would mean for her day. Sometimes rain meant fewer customers, but often hot coffee provided warmth and comfort on a wet day.
Hoping for that scenario, she breathed deeply, shouldered her purse and ran for the market, trying to turn her thoughts around. She had to stop thinking about having too little money, and start planning ways to make enough extra to cover everything.
She caught the handle of a cart from the long lineup in front of the store, pushed inside as the doors parted for her and headed to the cooler in the back. She had a clear path. At this hour, no one seemed to be in the store but her—and the restocking staff.
‘Think, think!’ she told herself. The traditional cost-cutting measures wouldn’t work. She opened the cooler and pulled out a carton of coconut milk for one of her customers who was lactose intolerant, then a carton of almond milk for another who didn’t like coconut milk. She smiled at the realization that she could save a little by not catering to every customer’s needs and preferences, but she was into their stories now and attached to their struggles.
Kate Loughman was keeping her alcohol demons at bay through teaching an exercise class and running. She was in her early thirties and raising a little boy alone because her husband died in Afghanistan two years ago. She always accepted her raspberry latte with coconut milk with a greedy, grateful look in her eyes.
Brody Benson had lost three rental houses and his job in construction when the economic downturn put his boss and most of his friends out of business. He lived in a friend’s basement and delivered two early morning routes for the Oregonian newspaper to earn some income while taking classes in welding at Clatsop Community College. He placed his order with a smile every morning at five forty-five. Sandy could only imagine what that smile cost him and tried to make an absolutely superb double mocha with the almond milk he preferred.
She couldn’t operate without either Terri or Calli, though payroll had so many costs she hadn’t considered when she went into business. She was just grateful she had only two part-time employees.
Daycare was a killer cost, but the girls were well cared for there and loved the friends they’d made.
She picked up a blueberry Greek yogurt, a package of Double Stuf Oreos, and a bag of sweet potato chips. Breakfast and lunch.
Think, she told herself again, wandering along the produce aisle, heading for the large tower of bananas. The girls loved them and they were only thirty-nine cents a pound this morning.
She circled the display, looking for the perfect bunch while mulling over her problem, when she collided with someone.
“I’m so sorry!” she said to the back of a man trying to tear a plastic bag off a roll.
He turned to her with a smile of apology—and the world dropped out from under Sandy’s feet. She gripped the cart, felt her mouth fall open and a small, startled cry escape her throat. Her surroundings swirled and swung, while a loud rattling sound filled her ears. Then there was silence and the world seemed frozen in place.
For one instant, joy rose in her like a geyser and she wanted to reshape her mouth into a smile and shout, “Dad!”
Then the geyser collapsed as quickly as it had sprung and in its place was the emotional cavern her life had been after her father had left, the struggle to regain her self-worth, the dark months her mother had endured trying to find herself again. And the long, long expanse of time without a word from him.
She wanted to hit him. She wanted to hurl angry words at him. She wanted to scream until they heard her in Outer Mongolia. Unwilling to risk a crack in her slipping self-control by doing any of those things, she simply glanced a
t her watch and said quietly, “Huh. Sixteen years, three months, and four days. Wow. Long time. Well. Got to run...” She tried to push the cart around him to escape, but he caught her arm.
“Sandy...” There was tenderness in the sound of her name, in the depths of his eyes. That almost made her feel tenderness toward him, and that made her furious. She suddenly did all the things she’d thought she shouldn’t do.
With an angry, wailing scream she pushed him away with all her strength. He scrambled for balance. And then she let him have it.
“You horrible, horrible man!” she shrieked at him, words tumbling through her brain, firing out of her mouth, propelled by years of thinking them and having to hold them back. “Do you have any idea what Mom went through when you left! Do you have any idea what I...what I...” She swallowed in an effort to hold back the sobs crowding the back of her throat.
“I loved you,” she said, to her horror. That hadn’t been in her brain at all. It had to have come from the heart he’d broken. The sobs erupted. “You just walked away as though we were nothing! As though all those years of you being such a good father, and...and...” She had to gasp for air, clutching at her heart. It wasn’t failing, just thumping like something gone wild.
He glanced around worriedly, probably wondering if the market had defibrillation paddles on hand.
“Sandy...” He caught her arm again and when she tried to yank away, he dropped it. “Sandy, please. Let’s talk...”
“I am talking, can’t you hear me? What are you doing here? Why are you shopping at dawn?”
He looked uncomfortable. She liked that. Otherwise, the part of her brain not occupied with emotional havoc noticed, he seemed to have aged well and with a certain style. His hair was white and nicely groomed, his jeans and blue sweatshirt casually youthful.
“I...ah...” He drew a deep breath, expelled it with an expression of acceptance and dread, and replied, “I’ve been home for about a month. And I didn’t want to run into you, so I came shopping early.”
“You’ve been home for about a month.” Her voice sounded computer-generated.
“Yes.”
“And you’ve been hiding from me.”
He sighed. “Yes.”
“So. Even when you’re in the same town, you don’t care that you have a family.”
“Sandy...”
“Why are you here? If Mom runs into you...She’s been sick and this could kill her.”
He shifted his weight, folded and unfolded his arms. “Actually, she’s been staying with me. I...have a condo on the river.”
“What?” The word was loud and shrill in her head, but came out with quiet threat. Sandy caught a glimpse of a young man in a white apron working nearby on a display of watermelons and looking in their direction.
“Can we go somewhere to talk?” her father asked. “Please.”
“You want to go somewhere with me?” she shouted at him, aware she was being a complete shrew. But long held stuff was surfacing and demanding relief. “Where have you been for the past sixteen years?” She calmed herself and made herself ask in a lower voice, “Why is Mom staying with you. So...she isn’t sick?”
He closed his eyes and nodded, as though to himself, apparently accepting participation in a conversation he didn’t want to have in the produce section of Safeway. “I’ve had some good fortune and returned to see if I could...pull our family back together.”
He looked into her eyes, searching, she imagined, for some sign she was willing to understand. She gave him nothing. He went on intrepidly.
“I wandered around in Astoria for a while, trying to determine what your situations were. I called your mother first and asked if we could talk. I picked her up and...we’ve been talking for days. I helped her pack some things and now she’s staying with me.”
Sandy was feeling that geyser again, but this time it was steamy anger. “Oh, and did both of you forget you had a daughter?”
“I was reluctant to get in touch with you,” he said patiently, “until your mother and I had worked things out. She wanted to talk to you, but I kept finding reasons not to.”
“And how do you work out abandonment?”
He hunched a shoulder, searching for the right words. “It can be done. It was done. I was about to come to you...”
“Really?” She pretended gratitude. “How nice. Mom made me think she was sick so she could work things out with you while I try to keep life going like I always do, like you forced me to do when you left, until the two of you have the time to let me in on...” She walked around in her agitation, flinging her arms out as she shouted, fury seeming to lengthen her stride, widen her reach. Her hand connected with a pyramid of apples and there was a terrible clatter as it collapsed and apples flew to the floor and rolled all over the aisle.
Sandy threw herself at the display, arms protectively outstretched, in an attempt to save the remaining apples. It was too late.
“Sandy,” her father said gently. He moved to push back the apples teetering on the lip of the display. “Let me help you.”
“Help me?” she demanded, abandoning her efforts with the apples, and turning to push her father away. More apples fell and rolled. “Help me! Where were you when I really needed your help?” She pushed him farther back as she shouted into his face. “I...”
She was stunned when a strong hand closed over her arm and pulled her away from her father. She looked up in surprise into the face of a police officer. “Are you all right, sir?” he asked her father solicitously.
Had Sandy simply stood still, it all might have ended there, but hearing the officer ask her father if he was all right after what he’d done to her was hard to take. She tried to yank out of the officer’s grip just to tell him her side of the story. That was when he hauled them both off to the police station.
* * *
HUNTER COULDN’T QUITE believe his ears. It was Sandy’s voice, but first—he couldn’t believe she’d called him, and—second—“You’re where?”
“In jail!” she enunciated, her voice choked and angry. “Well, technically not in jail, but at the police station. Please come and get me.”
His question was instinctive, though irrelevant at that point: “What did you do?”
“I accidentally dumped a display of apples.” She sniffed. “At Safeway. He said I was throwing them at him, but I wasn’t.”
“Who said that?”
“The police officer.”
“Throwing them at who?”
“My father.”
Oh, no.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but Bobbie’s out of town, I’m not speaking to my mother, and your mother has my girls and I don’t want them to remember that they picked up their mother at the police station.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Sandy was a sight to behold. She wore her jeans and her Crazy for Coffee T-shirt, and appeared exhausted. Her face was red and puffy from crying, her eyes were a little crazy—like the figure on her shirt—and her hair looked like a red octopus caught in a rubber band. It reached out in all directions and seemed to move. Rain beaded in it contributed to the underwater beast metaphor.
“Hi.” He spoke quietly. She reminded him of a clutch of dynamite with a quarter inch of fuse.
“Hi.” He put a hand up to smooth her hair and try to pinch off the fuse. Blocking his hand to stop him, she surprised him by catching it and keeping a grip on it in her two.
“Can I go now?” she asked of the tall, fair-haired officer Hunter recognized. Scott Richardson. Hunter did his taxes.
“Sure.” Richardson held his office door open. “Sorry about the trip down here,” he told Sandy, “but the 911 call said a wild woman in the produce aisle was throwing apples.”
She drew a breath, apparently for patience, and s
aid as though she’d said it several times before, “The apples fell. I was angry, made a wide gesture and my hand hit the pyramid of apples. Why do they pile them up that way, anyhow? It’s just begging for disaster.”
“Thanks,” Hunter said to Richardson, his hand still caught in Sandy’s. He led the way to the door. Rain now fell in sheets.
“Where’s your father?” he asked before they went outside. “Does he need a ride?”
She gave Hunter a withering look. “My mother’s coming for him.”
“Sandy...” Feeling as though he should do something to plead her father’s case, he started to explain that he’d met him, but gave up when Loretta appeared around the building, holding up the hood of a dark blue rain jacket. She stopped short when she saw Sandy and him. Loretta opened her mouth to speak, but Sandy dropped his hand and covered her ears.
“Please don’t, Mom. I don’t want to hear it right now.” She ran to his car. He tossed her the keys to unlock it and she got inside.
“Thank you for coming for her.” Loretta, too, looked as though she’d been crying. “Is Harry all right?”
“I didn’t see him, but I think so.” Hunter took Loretta’s elbow and drew her in the doorway under cover. “I’m not even sure what happened, except that it involves apples.”
“Yes. According to Harry, they bumped into each other, and she was furious to discover that he’s been here for a month. And that I’d been staying with him. Well, you can imagine.”
“I can. I thought you were going to tell her right after we spoke.”
“We were, but Harry was scared. And justifiably so, it seems. Will you stay with her today? Bobbie’s gone and she doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of her.”
Giving him a wry smile, Loretta pushed the buzzer that rang at the dispatcher’s desk. “Good luck with that,” she said to Hunter, then added when the dispatcher answered, “Loretta Conway to pick up Harry Connolly.”
“My car’s in the Safeway parking lot,” Sandy said when he got in behind the wheel. “Please take me there. I have to go to work.” She still didn’t seem at all like herself, except for the inclination to issue orders, which was probably etched into her DNA.
Love Me Forever Page 12