Olivia (44 page)

The way Carla said it, like they were all family, made Olivia smile. She looked down at the pictures on the bed. “Who are these people?”

Carla picked up the top picture and handed it to Olivia. “This is my baby sister, Gigi.”

The little girl in the picture could have been a little boy with her pageboy haircut and overalls. The photo was black and white but she could tell Gigi was covered head to toe in dirt. She frowned the quintessential, little kid frown at the person taking the picture, and Olivia couldn’t help but smile.

“She’s who I was on the phone with. We’re going to fly out to Oregon in the morning for the funeral. She’s something else. Full of the devil, that one.”

Olivia looked through the pictures and picked up one of a little girl who couldn’t be more opposite of Gigi. Dressed in frills and ribbons and bows, with her hair in pigtails, the little girl in the picture was spotlessly-clean and had a beautiful smile and Carla’s eyes. “Is this you?”

“Naw, that’s Willamina. We don’t talk about her.” Carla pulled the picture out of Olivia’s hand and tossed it onto the floor. She picked another picture up out of the pile. “This is me.”

There was no mistaking Carla. She looked exactly the same back then as she did today, just a hundred years younger. If Gigi looked full of the devil, then Carla was totally possessed. She was also dirty, dressed in an old dress with a sweater and thick tights and black shoes that came to her ankles. She smirked at the camera and had her arm around a little Gigi who was a head shorter than Carla and dressed in overalls again. They stood on a dirt driveway with an ancient Chevy parked behind them. Olivia had a crazy desire to climb into the photo and walk around the yard and play with the girls.

“You were cute.” Olivia smiled and took the next picture that Carla handed her.

“This is my dad and my Uncle Waylon. Look at those turkeys puffing their chests out for the camera.” Carla laughed and held up another picture. “And this here is my Granny Mirabelle showin’ off her brand-new warsher machine. She was the first in a country-mile to get one. My Auntie Dot quit talking to her for a whole year because of it…”

Carla went through the pictures one by one, until Olivia was officially introduced to every single member of Carla’s family. There were a lot of them. Each of her parents had a handful of brothers and sisters so there were hundreds of cousins mixed in amongst Carla’s five brothers and sisters. How she managed to keep them all straight was a mystery to Olivia. She didn’t have any experience with big families. The only one she had to keep track of was Eugene, and if he wandered off he always came home.

“You know what?” Carla asked, and dug through the pictures on the bed. “I think I’ve got a picture here somewhere that you might want. It’s old but… Oh, I hope I still have it…”

Carla gave up on the pictures in front of them and went into her overflowing closet. Boxes of clothes and cards and shoes got pushed aside as she dug her way toward the back wall. Finally, she pulled out an old, dusty and worn, orange Payless Shoe Source shoebox. She dumped the contents into the bed and sifted through pictures and postcards a handful at a time until she found the one she wanted.

“I shoulda gave this to you a long time ago.” She handed it to Olivia, and Olivia gasped.

“Oh my god, Carla…” she managed to say, but then couldn’t speak.

The picture was of her and Eugene when she was maybe three. Her hair was combed away from her face and pinned in little, pink plastic barrettes. Eugene’s hair was darker, his face a little fuller, his glasses quite a bit bigger but not nearly as thick as the ones he wore now.

It was nighttime, and she sat on Eugene’s lap with her back to his chest. Both of their faces pointed to the sky in exactly the same way, and both of them were smiling the exact same smile of amazement. It was Eugene’s fireworks smile, and judging from the vivid colors playing across their faces that was exactly what they were smiling at.

Olivia let out a long breath and clutched the picture to her heart. She finally had back what Mitch had stolen from her.

Tears came to her eyes and she mouthed the words, “Thank you.”

“My pleasure, sugar,” Carla said and pulled her in for a hug. Olivia decided right then and there that she was going to have Carla adopt her. She didn’t care that she was too old.

Olivia wiped her eyes and looked at the picture again, mesmerized by Eugene’s smile. “Who did my hair?”

“Who do you think did your hair? Eugene did,” Carla said as if it were obvious.

“Really?” Olivia asked in surprise.

Carla looked up at Olivia’s hair and said, “Maybe you should go take him a comb and see if he can help you out again.”

“Yeah, probably should.” Olivia laughed and rolled her eyes at herself.

“He was a good dad, Liv,” Carla said. “A real good dad.”

“He still is,” Olivia agreed, and Carla patted her cheek.

As soon as she got home, Olivia framed the photo and placed it on the nightstand right next to her alarm clock so she could say goodnight to her dad every night before she went to sleep, just like she used to.

*  *  *

On a Friday evening in early July, Olivia came home from work and found George sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, deep in thought. A bottle of beer sat beside his elbow. It was fresh from the fridge, sweating from the humidity the air conditioner couldn’t quite cut from the summer heat seeping into the apartment. A handful of empties sat around his half-eaten and forgotten dinner. He didn’t turn when she walked in. Wherever he was, he was far away.

“You’re home early,” she said. She’d kept her voice low to keep from startling him, but she’d startled him just the same. His shoulders jumped as he lifted his head from his hands, and she apologized.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” he said, his tone apologetic as well.

She dropped her purse by the door and crossed the room to him. “Is everything ok?”

“Yeah.” He lifted his beer and took a drink as he motioned her over to him. He pulled her into his lap and offered her the bottle, then lifted a crumbled but smoothed out piece of paper from the table. “I got a letter in the mail today.”

“Who’s it from?” she asked after she swallowed.

“Nick.”

“Oh…” That explained the abuse the paper had sustained. She took another drink, then set the beer down slow and took the letter from his hand. Her eyes scanned the page but she couldn’t focus on the blue-ink printed words. Her attention had instead been drawn to a picture lying on the table. When she picked it up, George let out a sigh and his arms tightened around her.

“Their adoption went through,” he said.

She slipped her free hand around George, rubbing his shoulders and the back of his neck in comfort. She recognized Nick immediately as the man she had talked to at the casino, the same man as the one who had been in the picture she had found in George’s desk drawer a lifetime ago. The other man looked familiar as well, tickling her memory. “He’s the drummer, right?”

His voice came out in a whispered exhale when he said, “Yeah… Michael.”

Nick and Michael were sitting close, posed with a baby of about six months old between them. All three were smiling for the camera. There was no mistaking the joy in the two men’s faces, but Nick’s grin was the biggest of them all.

“He looks happy,” Olivia said.

“He does,” George agreed.

She set the picture down and turned in his arms to place a kiss at his temple, then allowed her lips to linger against his skin. “I’m sorry, George.”

George held her tighter. “Don’t be sorry. I’m happy for him.” 

“I’m sorry he wrote you,” she said to clarify what she had meant. She ran her fingers through the hair above his ear and kissed his temple again.

He closed his eyes and leaned into her kiss. “I’m not.”

“Are you still in love with him?”

“In love?” George picked up the letter, his eyes tracking across the page as he re-read a line or two. “No. Not in love… I think I’ll always love him, though. He was my first love. For that reason alone he’ll always be special. You know?”

“I do,” she whispered.

“But as I read this letter, and re-read it, I think I finally came to realize he doesn’t control my heart anymore.”

“That’s a good thing.”

“A very good thing.” He tossed the letter aside and inhaled a deep breath as he scooted the chair, and them, farther away from the table. He smiled the first real smile she’d seen him wear in too long a time. “Let’s go on vacation.”

Olivia laughed. “We can’t afford to go on vacation. A trip to the zoo, maybe, but not a real vacation.”

“Sure we can. I have some money saved up, and I can’t think of a memory I’d rather spend it on than one made with you.”

A wave of guilt washed over her and tears threatened as she cupped his face in her hands. His jaw was shadowed in prickly stubble, his eyes tired. How long had he looked so tired? He’d been fighting a bit of a summer cold, and it had worn him down, but was that what was showing on his face? Or was his exhaustion new, born from the letter and the beers? Was it from something else entirely? How long it had been since she’d focused her undivided attention on him?

Too long. And he deserved better than that.

“You’re too good to me,” she said on a whisper.

“I know,” he teased with a wink, and that easy way he loved her only made her guilt intensify.

She kissed him in apology. She owed him a million more apologies, delivered in a million different ways, but she started with just one kiss, and then she smiled, the first real smile she had felt like smiling in too long a time. “Well, all right then. Where do you want to go?”

“I was thinking the ocean,” George said. “Maybe do some surfing and snorkeling. Play in the waves and make love in the hot sand.”

Of course he would pick something athletic to do. “
Mmm
… that all sounds good, especially the making love part, but seeing how I don’t know how to swim, you might be doing some of that by yourself.”

“You don’t know how to swim?” he asked in surprise.

She blushed in embarrassment and shrugged. “We live in Nebraska. I never saw the need to learn.”

He laughed. “You never went wading in the river?”

“Where the fish poop?” She shuddered. “As if.”

He laughed harder. “What about the pool at the park?”

“Full of pee.”

“Good point.” He brushed her hair away from her face, tucking a wild chunk of it behind her ear. “See? I don’t know everything about you yet.”

“I guess you don’t.” She smiled.

“Favorite flavor of ice cream?” he asked, rekindling the game they had played once before, but he cut her off before she could answer. “Never mind. I already know—all of them.”

“Every single one.” She laughed as he nibbled on her neck.

“Ok, how about this… How many kids do you want?” he asked.

“Two-point-five,” she answered automatically. “But you knew that, too.”

“A boy and a girl and a baby on the way,” he said, reciting what she had always thought in her mind, but had never said aloud.

“How many do you want?” she asked, surprised to realize she had never thought to ask him before.

“I don’t know. I hadn’t given much thought to the number,” he said, his voice turning serious. He took her hand in his, his thumb playing along her eternity ring. “I guess I always saw myself more as a foster parent than having one or two of my own.”

She threaded their fingers together. “We should look into it.”

“Someday. When the time is right.” He lifted their hands and kissed the back of hers. “The inevitability of all those goodbyes scares the hell out of me.”

“Yeah, but there’s a lot of hellos to be had.”

“True.”

“And think of all the grandkids you dad could teach how to golf.”

His voice came from far away when he said, “He’d be in heaven.”

“I kinda got the impression he’s in heaven whenever he’s around you.” She stroked the hair at the nape of his neck. He’d skipped a haircut, and she’d just now noticed. Where the hell had she been that she’d missed these little things? “He loves you, George. All of you.”

He lifted his eyes to meet hers, and as they sat still in silent communication, she studied the flecks of color in his irises. They were brown on the surface, but if you truly looked, you could see the darker, outer circle surrounding inner golds and hints of green, the squiggle of lines that looked almost black, the pupils that reacted to his emotions as telling as they reacted to the light. He wore a faint scar just below his left eyebrow where he had taken a hockey stick to the face when he was eleven-years old. As she traced it with the edge of her thumb, he closed his eyes to her touch.

“Do you miss having a Nick in your life?” she asked in whisper.

After a long pause, without opening his eyes, he asked, “Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

One heartbeat passed, and then another before he opened his eyes. When he did, she traced his nose, and ran her thumb along his cheekbone, trailed down to his chin, and memorized every freckle, every dip, every bump, every hair, every pore, individual and together, the parts and the whole. By not answering, he had answered, but he hadn’t needed to do even that. She had already known. They didn’t need to play Twenty Questions.

“New Orleans,” she said.

“The birthplace of jazz.” He smiled. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

She traced the crinkles of skin his smile had created around his eyes. They would be permanent lines some day. His hair would go grey. A liver spot would pop up here or there. His ears would grow, or maybe his nose. Maybe both. All those tiny little changes would only make him even more beautiful than he already was. He was truly gorgeous, inside and out, in every single way, and her time with him was slipping away. She needed to slow it down, truly breathe in every moment of it.

As though he sensed it too, he said, “Let’s not fly. Let’s drive and take our time.”

“Take the back roads,” she said. “Stay in seedy motels and eat crap food.”

“Buy ridiculous souvenirs and take thousands and thousands of pictures,” he said.