Stef Ann Holm

by Lucy gets Her Life Back

  A long span of time stretched between them. He wasn’t sure what to say, how to say what he had to. The tension between them was thicker than the August air.

  “I should have come sooner,” he finally said, then explained, “Your mother brought you to Vero Beach when you were seven.”

  “I know.” Ah know. The Southern vowels were punctuated by her distress.

  “She wasn’t how I remembered. She’d developed into a fine-looking woman, not that girl I’d met so long ago. She’d grown up, gotten rid of some of her shyness. She came right up to me in the locker room and she said, ‘I have your baby daughter sitting in the bleachers and I want you to meet her.’”

  “Why didn’t you come out?”

  “I couldn’t.” Drew’s response was spoken fast. His mind raced, trying to organize thoughts to clarity. “Meeting you would have been more than meeting a seven-year-old little girl. You would have expected me to be your dad. I couldn’t deal with it.”

  “And how do you think that makes me feel?”

  “Mackenzie, I’m so sorry. Back then, I was a full-blown alcoholic. I didn’t know the upside to a bottle from looking at it down the neck. Every night I got trashed, and every day I played baseball better than the day before. It took years before it caught up with me, but at that time in my life, I wasn’t any good to myself, so I sure as hell wouldn’t have been any good to you.”

  Her full lips almost formed an obvious pout, a stubborn streak with a defiant downturn of the corners. “So you never did those drugs like the newspapers said?”

  “No, Mackenzie. Never.”

  She digested that news. “What made you come see me when I was twelve? Were you still drinking?”

  “I’d been sober for two years, but that didn’t mean I thought with a sober conscience. The behavior of an alcoholic is still there even though they’re not drinking. It’s taken me some time to heal. Your mother kept sending me pictures of you throughout the years, and it was when you were twelve that I saw something that scared me. I knew you were mine—the photo of you standing by the rosebush with your hair on your shoulders and that expression on your face, the look in your eyes. But I needed scientific proof, so I asked her for that paternity test.”

  “She told you to go to hell and get off our porch.”

  “So I didn’t come back for two years.”

  When Mackenzie had been fourteen, he’d returned to Kissimmee and he’d waited for her to come home from school. Caroline had been at work, so he’d sat on the porch alone.

  Mackenzie had walked up, seen him and stopped. Gone was that look of wonder and hope that she’d given him when she’d been two years younger. This time he’d been met with resentment and distrust.

  “When I saw you there, I was mad at you,” she said.

  “You had every right.”

  “But when you started talking to me about the trouble I was having in school, I knew Momma must have told you, and I wondered why she was even telling you my business if she was so angry with you.”

  “Caroline kept in touch with me throughout the years, and when she said you’d been struggling, I knew I had to come see you and try to make things up.”

  He blamed himself for hurting her so bad that she might never recover as an adult. To Caroline’s credit, Mackenzie had never had issues with drugs or alcohol. A true testament to Caroline’s well-grounded parenting skills.

  In a lifetime of mistakes, Drew felt worst about how he’d treated Caroline and Mackenzie. It was the one thing after becoming sober that he knew he needed to go back to and correct.

  Mackenzie shifted her weight, put a hand on her hip. “I remember you said sometimes adults make mistakes that fall back on children, but it’s not their fault.”

  “I did.”

  “Do you realize you said I was a mistake?”

  Drew felt the breath knocked out of him. “Mackenzie, I never.”

  “Yes, you did. You said I was a mistake.” Mackenzie’s chin rose, a quiver in her lower lip. “How can I ever forget that?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry! That’s all you’ve ever said!” She balled her hands into fists. “I wrote you letters! After you came to see me the first time, I wrote to you. I wanted you to be my dad.”

  Drew had received her letters, but he hadn’t responded. He didn’t know how to. He’d been dealing with stuff from rehab, but having a brain messed up from alcohol abuse was no excuse. If he could throw a baseball, he was capable of picking up a pen.

  After those first few letters, her enthusiasm changed and she’d wanted to know how come he was so rich while she and her mother lived in a two bedroom house?

  In Drew’s mind, he felt it best not to reply, because ultimately, he would just let her down. But because of Mackenzie’s long letters, he did start to send Caroline money. He had more than made up his financial responsibilities.

  Only once did Caroline ever threaten him—that was when Mackenzie had been entering her senior year and Caroline wrote to ask if he could pay for college. For some reason, he never got that letter. To this day, he didn’t know what had happened to it. So Caroline called him and the first words out of her mouth when he answered was, “I’ll see you in court.”

  After he’d calmed her down and got her to believe he knew nothing about her letter, he’d agreed about the college tuition. Mackenzie needed that education and she had to go.

  Even when Caroline got sick with cancer, any hope he’d had of having a mock family was nixed. He would have gone to see her in the hospital, but she was adamant he stay away. She didn’t want his memory to be of her dying. Up to the end, Caroline never displayed a bitter hatred toward him—and she had every right. She only wanted what was best for their daughter.

  The hot sun beat down on his face and a bead of sweat trickled down his neck. Lucy’s words came back to him, reminding him of the differences between actual remorse and actual forgiveness—even if what he’d done had been entirely wrong.

  Sorry and forgiveness were two different things.

  His eyes burned from the lack of sleep last night. But if he was being honest with himself, he’d admit they burned from the hot sting of unshed tears. He knew there was no hope, could feel it in his heart. “Mackenzie, when I think about all the birthday cards I never sent, the phone calls I never made, no Christmas gifts, no regard for you whatsoever when you were growing up—I don’t deserve any chance you might give me.”

  He couldn’t even beg for one. He didn’t have that right.

  “I do want to ask you something, though.” He swallowed the saliva in his throat, blinked hard once, then twice. “If you can’t, I understand, but it has to be said. Can you forgive me?”

  Mackenzie glanced away, unable to look at him. He knew it, and didn’t blame her. Bees droned in the nearby brush, their sound so loud it was deafening. Someone down the street was mowing a lawn. Life moved on. And here they stood. Stagnant. And he was helpless to fix it.

  “After Bobby left…and then I found out who you were, my reality was no longer real.” Mackenzie’s soft voice carried to him and she met his gaze. He saw years of fear, loneliness, hope and despair, a deep longing, rejection, fondness, and something else. He couldn’t dare to probe deeper in case he was wrong.

  Tears spilled from her eyes, coursing down her cheeks. She cried without noise, the sight going straight to his heart. “All I ever wanted was someone I could call Dad—who knew he was my dad. Bobby knew he wasn’t. You knew you were…but you never—” Her voice cracked. “You never said you wanted me to be your little girl.”

  Drew took a step closer. So close, he smelled her skin. That distinct scent that he’d come to know as Mackenzie. Flowers, shampoo, a certain lotion. It scented her sheets, the bathroom, his house. It was something he’d never forget.

  He wanted desperately to draw her into his arms and hold her tight, but he wasn’t sure.

  “Momma always told me,” she sa
id, wiping at her tears with her fingertips, but they fell faster than she could catch them, “to give you a chance if the day ever came. She wanted me to have you as my father. Not Bobby. Even when she was dying, she said that me and you needed to be together and I really was someone’s little girl.”

  Drew almost couldn’t speak. “Well, I’m the one.” His throat clogged. “I am your dad, Mackenzie, and you’re my little girl.”

  She began to sob, her shoulders shaking from the effort not to lose control, but it was too late. She buried her face in her hands, crying hard and standing there as if she was going to break.

  He made a decision. He brought her close, enveloped her in his arms and held tight. She didn’t try and get away.

  Mackenzie cried and cried. And he realized he was crying, too.

  His nose tucked into her hair, that Mackenzie scent that was unique to her alone. There’d been moments in his life that were priceless to him, but he would trade them all for this one. Seventeen years had been a long time to reach this point.

  Whispering against the strands, he dared to say, “Mackenzie, I love you.”

  For long seconds, she didn’t reply. Then, with her wet cheek sticking to his shirtfront, she said, “I forgive you, Daddy.”

  Twenty-Five

  As the summer wound down and fall approached, the stores on Main Street advertised back-to-school clothes. On Overlook Dam, Labor Day was the final blow-out for docking and good times, the last call on coolers of beer, football, wakeboarding and gossip served up in warm weather.

  Lucy lay out on the bow of Drew’s boat, face and body toward the gloriously warm sun. Eyes closed, she listened to water lapping against the hull, the laughter of children, Lloyd as he went on and on about who was constructing a gigantic house in the Knolls, the purr of outboard motors as they cut through the lake, the wet-rubber squeak of a blowup seal that Lloyd’s fly-swatting grandson was trying to stay afloat on.

  The various sounds were that of life in Red Duck, Idaho. The flotsam chatter of a resort community heading back to normal after a full summer season.

  Lucy was actually looking forward to the population thinning back down, even though that meant she’d lose some customers when they returned home. She’d gained several year-rounders over the last month, and her day planner was full enough that she’d started breathing easier.

  “What are you thinking, sugar?” Drew asked, his voice close to her ear.

  Lucy opened her eyes, shading them against the blinding sun. Drew crouched beside her, his hair damp and his upper body glistening with water. He’d been swimming with Mackenzie, and water dripped off his body, spilling onto the terry cloth of her towel. She was roasting and the cool droplets felt good on her heated skin.

  “Hmm,” she responded, noncommittal. Earlier, she had been thinking about him. Fantasizing. She’d been watching him before lying down, eyes fastened on the way his back muscles bunched up and smoothed as he moved to tighten the cleat ropes, as he pitched a baseball to the boys and when his arm lifted to run a hand through his hair. She’d caught herself staring at his thighs, the strength and sinewy cords of hard definition in them.

  His face had strong features. His thick, dark brown hair was made for a woman to sift her fingers through. His hazel eyes were a combination of golden flecks and olive-green…. Whenever he looked at her, she caught herself going from zero to lust in all of a few seconds.

  Until today, she’d never noticed that he had creases at the corners of his eyes when he smiled. His face was tan, his mouth wide and his smile white.

  “That’s not an answer,” he replied, his voice whiskey soft and filled with a drawl that was to die for.

  When he touched her naked shoulder, she was shocked by the sensations that rocked through her body, the blood that rushed to all sorts of places that had been calm just a second ago.

  She lied and said with a carefree tone, “I’m not thinking about much of anything. But that water dripping off you feels real good on me. It’s hot.”

  “You’re hot.”

  Laughter rose from her throat before she could stop it.

  His hand cupped the curve of her shoulder, slid down her arm, and his flat palm laid on top of hers.

  The atmosphere between them became charged and reckless. Lucy wanted to fill the silence, utter something witty and fun, but the words wouldn’t form.

  She’d never been a flirt, but she found herself taking chances, saying and doing things around Drew she hadn’t done around other men. Through the years since her divorce, no man had ever interested her to the point of distraction.

  Drew distracted her, made her crazy-nuts with carnal thoughts of ripping his clothes off. Resisting temptation had been a increasingly hard to do these past few days.

  Something had been building between them, dangerous and exciting.

  The hard calluses on his fingers were a stark contrast to her own soft hands. With a will of their own, her fingers curled into his and cinched tight.

  His shadow fell over her bikini-clad body, the pungent scent of musk and man filling her senses. She wanted to bury her hands in that hair of his, and would have if nobody had been around. She had to get hold of herself.

  “Want to go swimming?” he asked innocently.

  “Yes, I think I better cool off!” She let go of his fingers.

  Drew held out his hand for her, but she didn’t dare take it. She practically flew off the boat and dived into the chilly water.

  The shock of icy-cold after the blistering heat did her traitorous body good, muting the groan that had gotten stuck in her throat. She needed a bracing swim to clear her thinking.

  She swam around the floating dock to where her boys were.

  Mackenzie and Jason stood at the edge, Mackenzie wearing a string bikini and looking adorable. “Ya’ll want to go wakeboarding?”

  Matt was with them. “Can you do it goofy-foot?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You put your other foot in front—the one that feels funny,” Jason explained.

  “How do ya’ll know what that is?”

  Jason stood in front of Mackenzie, put his arms out without touching her. “Okay—do this. Fall forward like you’re going to go flat on your face. Don’t worry, you won’t. If you do, I’ll catch you.”

  Mackenzie giggled. “I don’t know about this.” She smiled, leaned toward Jason, then her left foot came out in front of her so she wouldn’t fall.

  Matt said, “Your right foot is your goofy foot. So if you wakeboard goofy, you gotta put your right foot in front.”

  The kids went to round up Drew to ask him if he’d take them all out. He got Dave Lawrence to ride along as flagger.

  As Lucy pulled herself out of the water using the stair handles, she watched Drew and Mackenzie. The two seemed to have synchronized moves, a testament to their father-daughter relationship. Jason and Matt sat on the back leather seat, and Matt waved to her as Drew fired up the loud motor.

  Drew had a camera with him. He took a random snap of the kids on his boat, then aimed toward her. She gave him a roll of her eyes, a parade queen wave and shake of her head. He’d been taking a lot of pictures lately. He said seeing Roger Lewis on his mantel wasn’t exactly the way he liked to start his morning. He’d admitted to getting used to all the personal touches, though. He wanted current photos of family who meant something to him. Already, many of him and Mackenzie were placed throughout the house.

  As Drew motored away from the dock, the sight was one that Lucy wouldn’t soon forget. Drew and his daughter. Mackenzie elbowing him when he was sifting through CDs to play and she didn’t like his selection. Lucy’s two boys checking out the high-tech wakeboard. Smiling. Happy. Innocent.

  There was no other way to define it: Contentment in the purest form.

  Mackenzie was leaving on Wednesday morning, and school started that coming Monday for Jason.

  This summer had probably been the best of his life. It hadn’t started out good at all.
Him being hacked off at his mom for making him move up here. But he’d figured out that Red Duck wasn’t all that bad. In fact, he kind of thought it was rad now.

  He missed Brian and the guys, but he’d made a couple of new friends here. Nutter was a dumb-ass, but he was the funniest guy he knew. Ryan and Brownie were fun to hang out with. His boss at Woolly’s wasn’t too bad, but he’d quit that now that he was going to start school. His mom wanted him to focus on getting better grades this year. He was gonna try.

  One thing that he decided not to change was taking food to the Sunrise. Jason hadn’t seen that one coming. He liked it over there. He’d gotten used to the old people, liked a guy named Beansie. He was an old cowboy and he told Jason cattle drive stories.