The Dark Light of Day (30 page)

I wished Jake had been there to see what I’d done.

“Why didn’t you ring the bell?” I asked as he handed me my gun. I checked to make sure the safety was on before placing it back in the pocket of my bag.

He was still gawking at my ink. “You’re just…fuck.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth and goatee, glancing toward the house and turning serious. “Oh, I didn’t want to wake up…”

“Georgia,” I finished for him.

“Georgia,” he repeated. “Like your Nan.” I nodded, happy he
remembered Nan’s name. “She’s cute.” He didn’t look mad or angry when he said it. He just looked tired.

“Yeah, she sure is,” I said proudly. It was thoughtful of him not to ring the bell and wake her up. I was surprised his bike hadn’t
already done that, though I hadn’t heard it, either. “Did you ride here?”

“Nah,” he said. “Bike’s at the apartment. I walked.”

“You walked all that way?”

Jake shrugged his shoulders and took a long drag of his
cigarette.
He shifted from one foot to the other, blowing the smoke out
through his nose.

“Sit.” I patted the empty chair next to me. “You wanna hit?” I
handed him the pipe as he sat down. He hesitated at first, searching my face for something. I had no doubt he was wondering how civil
we could be. The man had just lost his father, after all. It was the
least we could be to each other.

Jake dropped into the chair, lit the bowl, and took a hit. I reached
over to the mini-fridge and pulled out two Coronas, handing him
one.

And just like that, it was back.

The silence.

I can’t say it was as comfortable as it’d always been. But it was as close to comfortable as it could be under the circumstances. His face softened after a few minutes, and I knew he could feel it, too.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” I said, taking the pipe from him and lighting it for my next hit. My hands shook. I was almost as nervous as the first time we were alone. I needed to be much higher to be this close to him.

Jake shook his head. “Seems like I should be saying that to you
about him. Your words gave me a closure I didn’t think I’d be
finding. Ever.”

I guess he’d heard my eulogy.

“Yeah, well... he helped me out when no one else would, and I honestly don’t know where I would be now without him.” I heard myself and hoped he wouldn’t take that as an insult. I certainly
hadn’t meant it that way.

“How long have you been back here?” He gestured to the house.

“Just a few days.”

“And before that, you were...?” His questions were cautious, like he was trying to figure something out.

“The apartment at the shop. Your dad let me stay there when he found out I had been sleeping in the truck.” The words slipped out, and I instantly regretted them.

Jake bent over and put his face to his knees, his hands cupping
the
back of his head. “Why the
fuck
were you in the truck again?” he
asked. When he lifted up his face, he looked enraged.

“I had nowhere else to go,” I said firmly. But, Jake seemed
tortured in a way I didn’t remember him being all those years ago.

“When I...” He halted, as if he were thinking these things for the first time as he said them now. His tone softened. “When I took off, I didn’t mean you had to leave the apartment. You could’ve stayed there forever, for all the fuck I cared.”

“Yeah, well, it was only a few days. And nobody blew anyone
else on the hood this time.” That broke the tension a little, and we
both laughed. “Then, your dad left me a note, in the truck. He called me a hobo, and left me a huge set of janitor’s keys for the apartment and for your truck.”

Jake looked comforted by that. He relaxed and let his head fall
back against the chair. “I saw your postcards.”

For the past couple years, I’d been selling my landscape pictures
as postcards in the gift shops around town. They were selling well,
and recently one of my better-selling cards had been chosen for a state calendar. It wasn’t going to make me rich. But with that in addition to my job at the shop, I could take care of my baby and myself. That was all that mattered.

“Where did you see them?”

“Reggie.” He turned to face me. “He sent me a socket I needed to fix my bike. When I opened the box, there were your cards. He stuck ten or twelve of them in there. I didn’t even need to see the signature in the corner to know they were yours.”

“Oh.”

“They’re fucking beautiful, Bee.”

I didn’t know what to think of that. “Thanks.” I could almost feel my heart beating back to life with each word he spoke. Soon, I would
be back to where I was four years ago, melting in his hands. I
couldn’t
listen to him be nice to me. I wanted him to yell at me, be cruel to
me— scream at me if he had to. It would have been so much easier to let
him go all over again if I’d hated him, if he hated me. Instead, his
kind words caused so much conflict within.

I was so distracted with Jake I didn’t hear the sliding glass door open. When Jake’s gaze widened and focused past my chair, I knew
someone was behind me. I turned to see Georgia, standing on the
patio, rubbing her eyes with her fists. Her night shirt was tucked into her underwear, and her favorite Raggedy Ann doll was being strangled in the crook of her arm.

“Georgia, baby, what are you doing up?”

She came over and crawled onto my lap, almost knocking me over as she did. I was glad I’d already put the pipe back in its hiding place. I may not have been June Cleaver, but I did my best to keep up appearances.

“I couldn’t sleep.” She shifted around in my lap until she was facing away from me. She didn’t even notice our guest until she’d
stopped squirming. “Mama?” She tugged at my shirt and pointed to Jake.

“Georgia, this is an old friend of Mama’s. This is Jake.” To my surprise, Jake held out his hand, and she immediately took it.

“Pleased to meet you, Georgia.” He looked her over cautiously.
Neither of them took their hands away from the other. They were
both smiling, like they were sharing a secret I wasn’t in on.

Knowing about the pretending we’d done with his picture, I was nervous about what would happen next. She left my lap and crawled
right into Jake’s, as if she had done it a hundred times before. He
didn’t seem to mind. He studied her like she was a puzzle he was trying to figure out while she climbed all over him.

Georgia was comfortably snuggled onto Jake’s chest with her
head
nestled in the crook of his arm before I could stop her. “Baby girl,
why don’t you let our guest relax on his chair by himself, and I’ll tuck you back into bed,” I said carefully. “You need to go back to sleep.”

“But, Mama,” she said as her eyes lit up. “I can’t go to sleep now. Daddy’s here!”

Fuck my life.

I TUCKED GEORGIA BACK INTO HER BED
and sang her to
sleep. Lullabies? Not for my kid. The song of the evening, per her request, had been “Bennie and the Jets” by Elton John. That was definitely Frank’s fault. He had given her an iPod for Christmas last year, pre-loaded with her favorite songs from his record collection.

I did my best, but I was no Elton.

Wherever Frank was now, I knew he was laughing at me.

Fuck you, Frank.

Jake was leaning against the counter when I returned to him. He had his legs crossed at the ankles, his arms folded in front of him and a huge, shit-eating grin on his face.

“What?” I asked.

“Nice song,” he teased.

I felt redness creep up my cheeks. “That’s Frank’s fault. Him and his goddamned record collection.” I laughed. “I’ve tried to just play her music at night, but she insists I sing to her.”

“Smart girl.”

“
Spoiled
girl.” I looked around at my bare living room, suddenly embarrassed by my lack of furniture. “I’d offer you a seat, but there aren’t any.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” he said, glancing around the empty space.

“The patio chairs are pretty much it for now, as far as furniture goes,” I said. Jake nodded. I noticed that as he interacted with me, his gaze never shifted from the door of Georgia’s room.

“How old is she?”

“Three,” I answered. I walked past him through the sliding glass doors. He followed me back out to the patio, and we returned to our chairs.

“Three, huh?” Jake eyed me skeptically and took a sip of his beer. His elbows rested on his knees. “And you’re bringing her up without her father?”

I didn’t even hesitate. “She doesn’t have one.” It was the truth. As much as I hated saying it, there would never be a father in my little girl’s life.

“I may not have done well in school,” Jake said, “but I remember
sex-ed quite well, and I do recall that both a man and a woman are required to make one of those.” He gestured to the house with his
beer.

“Making a child doesn’t make someone a father,” I told him. I
wished my beer was scotch. This wasn’t a conversation beer could handle.

He shifted to reach into his pocket to retrieve his lighter, lit a
cigarette and nodded. “Ain’t that the fucking truth?” He blew out the smoke and scratched the bridge of his nose. “You know, I didn’t even know you had a kid until I saw her run up to you during your
eulogy today.” He shook his head. “It was the shock of my fucking
life.” He ran a hand over his goatee again. The gesture was so
familiar. It
brought me a little comfort being in his presence after all these years. It reminded me of the Jake I’d fallen in love with. “I wish I would have known, Bee. I mean, she looks a little like my mom when she was her age. Aside from the red hair. That part is all you. Fucking amazing
really.”

Jake kept talking, but I’d stopped listening. Between what Georgia had said about Daddy being home and my comments about
fathers
being more than a person who makes children, Jake somehow
thought that Georgia was his.

“Oh wow. No, Jake.” I tried not to be shitty about it.

“
No, Jake
what?”

“No, Jake, she’s not yours.”

He sat still for a moment, letting it sink in a little. Then he stood,
like he was preparing for war. Everything about his squared-off shoulders said he was ready for a fight. He roared a stream of
profanity
into the air and launched his beer into the river. Then, he turned around, and with one swipe of his arm flipped over the little metal
table between us, sending it rolling onto the grass.

“Explain to me how she’s not mine, Abby.”

“She’s just not, okay?” I stood up and started to walk away, but
in a few large strides he had closed the distance between us. The
house
stopped me from going any further. I turned and found him
towering over me. He raised his arms and pressed his hands against the wall on each side of my head, his massive form caging me in. He pressed his chest into mine. I was surprised when he leaned into me and buried his face in my hair as he inhaled deeply.

He stood, breathing me in, until he remembered his anger.
“Fuck, Bee!” His gaze met mine. His intoxicating smell filled my nostrils. I
was turned on by it. There was no denying that. I’d never been
attracted to anyone but Jake. Years, decades, even centuries could pass, and he would still be it for me. I would take him angry or sad, and there was definitely something madly hot in angry Jake at the moment. “Explain to me how your kid, who looks just like my mama, who is
three fucking years old
, isn’t my mine.”

“Why do you even care?” I snapped at him. I tried to move out from the cage of him, but he pressed his hips into me to keep me captive. I kept my expression hard, but the contact sent heat racing down my spine.

My face flushed.

“Just answer the fucking question,” he growled into my ear. His mouth was only a breath away. Part of me wanted to run my hands
through his hair and part of me wanted to knee him in the crotch just to show him who I was now, how strong I’d become while he’d been
gone.

I spoke slowly, and kept my voice from shaking. “You have blue
eyes right?” He nodded. “And I have blue eyes right?” Confusion
started to replace the lingering anger written on the lines in his forehead. “Did you see Georgia, Jake? Did you see the color of her eyes?”

“Green,” he whispered. His shoulders fell from their
commanding stance and he backed away from me. He sank back into a chair and his face dropped into his hands. “And we used protection, so why would she fucking be mine.” He sounded defeated.

I realized how painful this was for him now. “I looked it up.
Two people with blue eyes only make blue-eyed children,” I said softly. I
remembered how, even a few months after her birth, I’d still held
out hope that Georgia could have been Jake’s. When I looked online and found a genetics eye color chart that said otherwise, that hope died.

It was a horrible fucking day.

I leaned against the house and continued. “She found a picture of you. When I told her she didn’t have a daddy, she asked if she could pretend it was you. She loves that damn picture so much.” I wrung my hands nervously as I spoke. “I thought I’d never see you again, so I let her pretend. She has the picture hanging above her bed. She says ‘goodnight, Daddy’ to you every night and kisses the picture before she goes to sleep. It breaks my heart every fucking time.” I wiped at the tears I didn’t realize had sprung from my eyes. “I’m so sorry. I never thought…” I slid down the side of the house until my ass reached the concrete. I pulled my knees up to my chest.

When he lifted his face from his hands and looked up at me, the anger was back in full force. “So why hasn’t that cocksucker been a
father to her? Why aren’t you guys together raising her? Where the
fuck
is that pretty-boy motherfucker?” A thick vein throbbed in his neck. His eyes were dark and wide, they shone with each angry word.