With the Father (9 page)

KATE

“Let’s get it all out of the way right now. Take care of all the
business so that we can have a good time and not think about any of it.” Maddox
gave me a serious look before taking a long pull off his bottle of beer.
 

I looked at him
sideways. “What are you talking about?”

“Come on, Kate. You
ran out of the office yesterday like your hair was on fire. You hid all day
today. Something’s wrong. Let’s hear it.”

I sipped my
margarita, attempting to stall. I would feel better after I talked to him,
regardless of what he told me. Still, I was nervous. This was Jonathan’s best
friend that I was talking to.

“Did you know that
Jonathan was having an affair?”
Straight and to the point.
Though his reaction was slight, he stiffened in his chair. “You did.”

He leaned back and
rubbed his hand down his face.
 
“I
suspected.” I’d suspected him suspecting so I wasn’t sure why I was surprised.
Or disappointed.

Maddox had been
Jonathan’s friend since college. But that also meant that he’d known Grace
almost as long. I couldn’t understand how he could sit back and watch it
happen, knowing that she would be devastated if she ever found out. “And you
never said anything?”

“To Grace?” he
asked. “Come on, Kate. Cut me some slack. He was my best friend.”

“And she wasn’t a
friend? How long was it going on?”

“Look, he never
actually admitted it, and I never asked. I didn’t want to know.”

I rolled my eyes at
him, trying to resist the urge to punch him in the face.
 

“Look. It wasn’t my
place to tell her,” he said almost apologetically. “I tried to talk to him about
it once, but he told me to fuck off. I have a general policy of not
interjecting myself into other people’s problems, especially when it involves
their marriage.”

I couldn’t really
blame him there, but I wasn’t so inclined at this point. “Do you know Hope?”

He shook his head.
“No. Who’s that?”

“I found a chat
string between him and some woman named Hope. I searched online for a Hope in
Merriville
but came up with nothing.”

“I don’t know,” he
said, shaking his head, “but Kate, if you want my advice, and you probably
don’t, let it go. It’s just going to eat you up. What’s the point now? What
good are you going to accomplish by dredging up the past?”

He was right. What
went on behind closed doors wasn’t really any one’s business. So why was I now
making it mine? I’d done enough damage already. I smiled and made a vow to
myself to stop obsessing over Jonathan’s sleaziness.

I looked around the
noisy Mexican restaurant and noticed for the first time a grandfather and granddaughter
eating in the far corner. Her head was down as she colored on the paper-covered
table. The grandfather also had a crayon in his hand, and they were both intent
upon their
art work
. When the girl looked up, her eyes
met mine. She smiled and pointed to her drawing with a proud grin across her
face. For a moment, that smile erased all of my anxiety.

“You’re right,” I
said. “No more talk about Jonathan tonight.”

He nodded happily.
“Good. I finally got you to agree to a date, and so far it’s not looking like
you’ll agree to another one any time soon.”

“Just friends,
remember? That was the deal.” I reached out my hand to shake on it.

He groaned and
shook his head. “You’re really going to try and hold me to it, too, aren’t you?
I can’t shake on that.”

I dropped my hand
on the table in defeat. “But we agreed.”

“I don’t remember
any such deal,” he said just as our fajitas arrived. As the waiter placed our
plates in front of us, I stared at the constellation of tiny freckles on
Maddox’s neck. It was something I’d never noticed.

He cocked his head
to the side and looked at me inquisitively. “What are you looking at?”

“You have a happy
face on your neck. Right here,” I said gesturing to the same spot on my own
neck. “I think he’s sticking his tongue out at me.”

He barked out a
laugh. “Are you turning my moles into an ink blot exercise? If you want a
closer look, I bet we can work something out.”

I rolled my eyes
and huffed out an exaggerated sigh. “You have a one-track mind, you know.”

“It’s hard not to
when you show up looking like that,” he said, waving his fork in my direction.

“Whatever,” I said,
dismissing the compliment. “I could have shown up in a muumuu, and you’d act
the exact same way.”

“Muumuus are hot.
Besides that’s just more fabric for me to imagine peeling off of you.”

“
Maaaaddox
.”
 

 
He laid his fork down. His eyes softened
and held mine in a silent plea. “Give me a chance, Kate. I’ll take you anywhere
you want to go. I promise, it won’t be boring.” While he waited for me to
speak, he nodded the yes that he was hoping to hear from me.
 

I had no good
reason for denying him. He was funny and
good looking
.
Charming when he wanted to be. If I could have asked the boyfriend fairy to
find the perfect man for me, she would have delivered Maddox on a silver
platter.

There was also no
denying that I was attracted to him. Once upon a time,
he’d
 
charmed
the pants right off of
me. However, even then, I’d known it wasn’t sustainable. My life had been
halfway across the country, sometimes halfway around the world, and he hadn’t
seemed like the kind of guy who could commit anyway. I’d had no problem walking
away. To me, that said it all.

I drank in the
sincere look on his face and tried to feel it again. I wanted to want him. I
really did. I wanted nothing more than to want him like he wanted me. But
something was holding me back.
Someone
was holding me back.
 
Even with the perfect guy sitting across
from me, someone else was on my mind.

It was stupid and
crazy and ridiculous, and I needed to put an end to the madness. I needed to
get Paul out of my head. “I’ll think about it, okay?”

His blue eyes
blazed victoriously, and he picked up his fork and starting eating again. “I’ll
have you screaming ‘yes’ before you know it.”

“I
said
I
would
think
about it.”

It was an act. I
was playing hard to get even though I’d already made up my mind.

I was not going to
run with Paul tomorrow, and I
was
going to go on another date with
Maddox.

I looked out of the
restaurant window and watched a group of kids break an egg onto the sidewalk
across the street. They gathered around it to see if it would fry.

I reconsidered. I
would
run with Paul tomorrow. But only because it was supposed to be 102 degrees by
mid-afternoon.

But when Maddox
asked again, I was going to go out with him again. I was going to get Paul out
of my head once and for all.

Grace

I
walked through the gate and carefully closed it behind me. Aurora’s stub of a
tail wiggled in anticipation of the face licking ahead. Chubs lapped from the
water faucet in the middle of the park, his owner by his side.

Aurora pulled against me until I let go of the leash
and then she headed toward him as if she knew exactly why we were there. He
barked a gruff hello and then, as expected, greedily licked her drooping jowls.

“You’re here,” Paul said, smiling broadly. “I was
about to give up on you.” His ball cap pulled low on his head again, obscuring
his eyes in the shadow of the brim.

“I made it,” I said while still assessing him. The
first couple of times I’d seen him dressed like this, in a t-shirt and jeans
with flip flops on his feet, it had felt like a disguise, as if he was hiding
behind this look of normalcy. The outfit was so different from what I’d come to
expect of him over the years.
 
However, I was beginning to realize that I was now seeing another
version of the man I already knew. It felt as if he was bestowing a privilege
on me that few in town had been given. “I’m still getting used to seeing you
like this.”

He laughed. “Do you feel you’re meeting a stranger?”

“No,” I said, being completely honest. “ I think I’m
more comfortable with you like this.”

“I thought you might,” he said, indicating that his
new look was for my benefit.

“Aren’t you breaking the rules?”

He looked uncomfortable, and I regretted asking. “You
want to walk?” he said, instead of answering.

“That would be great.” I glanced up at the sky. At
half past eight in the morning, the sun was already blazing.

He pulled an empty, somewhat squashed water bottle out
of his back pocket and unscrewed the cap. He leaned down and held it under the
faucet. “Let’s go then,” he said, stuffing it back in his pocket after it was
halfway full. “Same direction or different?”

I looked in the direction we’d walked last time and
then turned in the opposite direction. It led to the main street of our small
downtown. “I’d like to go the other way. Do you mind?” I had an uncontrollable
urge to do everything different. Today, I wanted everything in my life to be
different.

“We can go whichever way you like.”

“Aren’t you worried that someone will see us?”

“See us walking?” he asked. “There’s nothing wrong
with two people walking their dogs together.”

“People will talk,” I said. “It’s hard to outrun a
rumor in this town.”

“I’m not worried.” He said it definitively, as if he
wasn’t the least bit concerned.

“I guess people will probably just think you’re
helping me anyway. Everyone thinks I’m in need of saving as is.”

“Are you?”

“I think I may be beyond saving. I feel like a living
casualty most of the time.” The statement was so overly dramatic that I almost
laughed at my own instability.

“I don’t believe that. You just need time. You’ve been
through a lot. It’s a lot to digest.”

We fell into quiet step with each other while I
considered his words. “I’m glad you came,” he said, after a few minutes. “I
worry about you a lot, Grace.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“I’m okay.”

I didn’t really believe that. Jonathan’s affair filled
me full of a new kind of rage.
 
It
wasn’t the quiet rage that I felt over losing my family. It was a loud,
clanging rage that beat against the walls of my chest, begging to burst
through. I’d been lied to, cheated on, betrayed, and disregarded. I wanted to
lash out at the man who’d let me down, but I would never get the chance. I
would never be able to yell at him or ask him why he’d done it. I would never get
to hear his petty excuses. I would never be able to ask him why I hadn’t been
enough.

Knowing all of this only made me angrier. However,
even the briefest moment with those thoughts
was
 
immediately
followed by an even
more crippling sense of guilt.

Guilt had become my middle name, an element so
completely a part of my being that I couldn’t remember any more what it felt
like not to have the burden of it resting on my shoulders.

“It’s kind of hard to be angry at the man who died
trying to save my children, isn’t it?”
Especially when I’d done nothing to
save them myself.
My voice didn’t waver, but I kept my eyes trained on the
sidewalk in front of us. I could feel his eyes on me, but I didn’t meet them.
If I looked up, he’d see me.
The real me.
The angry,
wounded woman with a borrowed future she didn’t want.

“Is it? The two acts seem entirely separable in my
mind. You are entitled to feel whatever you’re feeling. Go ahead. Be angry.
Feel it so you can move on.” My head was right there with him. Unfortunately,
my heart was having trouble keeping up.

I was deeply regretting the turn this conversation had
taken. I didn’t want to talk about Jonathan or his affair. Being around Paul
the other day had been so easy. It wasn’t that it was hard now. It wasn’t. Paul
always made conversation easy, but today felt different. He was different.

When we’d gone to dinner with Kate, he’d been relaxed
and funny, and he’d only just met her, leading me to believe that the quiet,
serious Paul that frequented Karen’s Kitchen was more for my benefit than
because it was actually his nature to be so. I wanted to see the other Paul.
The one who’d had dinner with us at the burger
restaurant.
The one who’d almost made me laugh. The one who
had
made Kate
laugh.

I tried to think of something lighthearted to change
the mood, something that didn’t involve any aspect of my life, but I came up
with nothing so I walked on in frustrated silence. As I stepped off the curb, a
horn blared, and I was yanked back just as a car whizzed by, nearly clipping my
left foot.

“Whoa,” Paul said. He continued pulling on my arm
until we were standing hip to hip in the safety zone of the sidewalk. “The
light’s red, Grace.” There was a catch in his voice.

I watched breathlessly as traffic continued by as if nothing
had happened. The car had been so close that I’d felt the air stir around me.
My carelessness could have cost me my life. It could have all been over. If
Paul hadn’t pulled me back, it might have been. Just as suddenly as the
realization dawned on me, I was blindsided again. Something stirred inside of
me, something I’d thought I would never feel again. With Paul’s hand still
gripping my arm tightly and my heart still thumping wildly in my chest, I came
to a decision.

I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live.

Paul thoroughly inspected me while repeatedly asking
if I was okay. I assured him that I was fine. When we stepped off the curb
again, however, I realized that I was better than fine. I felt it.
An energy
. I wanted to walk a little bit faster. I wanted to
go wherever it was that we were going, and I wanted to be
there
just a little bit sooner.

This time, as we walked, I was able to successfully
turn the conversation to easier topics. We didn’t talk about Jonathan. Instead,
I pumped him for information, learning little things that I’d never thought to
ask before today. Simple things, like music and books. And I learned that his
tastes were similar to mine.

Six blocks later, we found ourselves turning onto the
main street. “Would you like to stop?” he asked, pointing to the coffee shop up
ahead.

The small, locally owned coffee shop with its French
style bistro tables had always been one of my favorite places in town. “If you
wouldn’t mind.” Stopping for coffee seemed like something incredibly normal that
normal people would do.

“Not at all. I love this place,” he said, already
clipping a leash to Chubs and tying him to a chair at the first table we’d come
to. He took the crumpled water bottle out of his back pocket and unscrewed the
lid and poured some onto the dog’s muzzle. He did the same for Aurora who was
already sprawled out on the concrete in the shade of the table. Finally, he
turned to me. “Stay here, and I’ll get us some drinks. What would you like?”

“An iced latte, please,” I said, securing Aurora next
to Chubs.

A few minutes later he returned with my drink and a
bottle of water for himself. “No coffee?” I asked.

He pulled the crumpled water bottle out of his back
pocket and sat down. “Nope. I can’t stand the stuff.”

I laughed. “But you said you love this place, and I
know I’ve seen you here before.”

He smiled and ducked his head. “It’s not about the
coffee. I come here to watch people.”

I looked around. Nearly every table was full of people
laughing, reading, talking, eating,
just
being. “If
you sit here for long enough, the entire town will pass by.”

“No doubt. See those ladies there,” he said, pointing
to two older women who were having coffee and playing cards. “They were here
the last time I was. I’m sure of it.”

“Do you like it here?” I asked. “You’ve been here for
what … two years?”

“It’s different. There are some things I love about it
and some things that I could do with out, but honestly there’s no place I’d
rather be right now.” He looked at me with such intensity that I wondered if he
was talking about the town or the smaller piece of real estate that we were
currently occupying.
 

“Like what?”

“Well, the small town drama is different from what I’m
used to. I’m not used to everyone knowing everyone’s business and thinking that
they need to be a part of it. Some of the things that go on between the moms at
the preschool seem crazy to me.” His face fell as he realized what he’d said.
“I’m sorry, Grace. I shouldn’t have brought that up.”

“It’s okay.” I gave him what I hoped was an
encouraging smile. “Really. I’m not a ticking time bomb that could explode at
any minute.
At least, not at this moment.
I actually
feel pretty good right now.”

Paul looked pleased. “So why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know. I feel different. I think that the near
death experience I had a few blocks back did something to Gloomy Grace.” I
wasn’t going to tell him, but I was pretty sure that he had as much to do with
it as the car that had nearly run over me.

“Gloomy Grace is okay in my book, but Giddy,
Gregarious, Goofy Grace is good, too.”

I laughed but looked at him skeptically.

“Well, if Giddy, Gregarious, Goofy Grace is going to
rejoin civilization, she needs to try to act like an active participant, don’t
you think? I don’t want anyone, especially you, feeling like they need to
tiptoe around me. Besides, you’re right about the moms. They are silly, and it
takes some getting used to.”

As if our conversation had willed her to be there,
Arden breezed up to our table. From where she’d come, I wasn’t sure. I’d been
so lost in my conversation with Paul that I hadn’t seen her walk up.

“Hi, y’all,” she said. Her Texas twang exaggerated for
what I suspected was Paul’s sake. Arden thought her Texas accent was cute and
cued it up whenever it suited her. “Look at you, Father Paul. I don’t think
I’ve ever seen you in street clothes.”

“It happens occasionally.”

“Of course it does. In fact, Felicia said she saw you
at the gym a few weeks ago, wearing shorts and running on a treadmill.”

Paul looked at her
strangely,
as if he couldn’t understand why two moms from the school would be discussing
what he’d been wearing. I chuckled thinking about all the times that I’d
listened to Arden talk about Paul’s clothes, shoes, hair, eyes, and so on. “I
can’t exactly run in the collar,” he said.

“Yes. It would be a little uncomfortable and hot, I’d
imagine,” she said, nodding. “Kind of like today, huh?”

“Something
like
that.”

Arden’s eyes awkwardly remained on Paul for a moment
before finally shifting to me. “How are you, Grace? I’m sorry I haven’t
called.”

I nodded. She’d called twice in five months. She’d
been one of my closest friends, but when my life fell apart, so did our
friendship.
 

“How are you holding up?” she continued.

“I’m doing okay,” I said, meeting her gaze and hanging
on to it. “Every day is a new day. Right?”

She arched her eyebrows at me. “Well, today looks like
a pretty good day.”

“It’s not been too bad.” As soon as I said the words,
I wished I could suck them back.
 
Her eyes got wide, and she nodded. By noon today, everyone from the
preschool would know that Paul and I’d had coffee together this morning. School
was out for the summer, but efforts would be coordinated to get the rumor mill
up and running.

“Well, I’ll be going then,”
Arden
said. “But we should get together soon. I saw Kate the other day, and we talked
about getting together for dinner or a movie or something. Have her call me,
and we’ll set it up.”