Cal didn’t look at Mel. “Thank you. Don’t mind if I do.”
Connie was still pushing open the exit door when Mel rounded on Cal. “You’re not coming.”
“You let me have this one evening with your family and I promise I’ll leave you alone.”
The offer was too good to be true. It always was with Cal.
“Bring Daphne,” Cal said.
“I can bring her without you coming, too.”
Cal adjusted his glasses with both hands, an action that made him seem old and vulnerable. Mel experienced a twinge of sympathy at the same time he wondered if he was being conned.
“Give me this, son. It’ll cost you nothing, and then—then we’re done.”
“We were done forty years ago,” Mel said, rising. “I’ll pick you up. That way, you’ll leave when I say you leave.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MEL SLAPPED A mosquito off his arm, spilling Daphne’s lemonade onto his hand. He shook off the drops, all the while watching Cal play croquet with everybody else. Everybody except for Alexi, who was recovering from her daily postsupper morning sickness and was content to sit with him.
“You can join them,” she said. “The lack of standard equipment hasn’t stopped anyone else from playing.” The kids had substituted the mallets with a broom, sticks, a golf club and, courtesy of twelve-year-old Matt, a sledgehammer. Cal and Daphne had been granted the only two proper mallets.
Ben was in the lead by four points, with Daphne only two points behind and Cal three points behind her. Seth was jumping between kids, either to help them make actual contact with the ball or to advise shot angles, while Connie and Ariel bickered companionably as they shared a fence post to take their shots. Mel had appointed himself scorekeeper.
“No,” Mel said. “I’ve moved enough today. Don’t mind watching.” Daphne kept shooting him looks to join her but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He should, though. She was leaving in a matter of days. He should make every moment with her count. He just found Cal’s presence too irksome to enjoy the evening.
“Your dad seems nice,” Alexi said.
“Yep.” Miracle of miracles he’d been stone-cold sober when Mel had picked him up, and other than the two beers at supper, he’d stayed that way. In fact, he was behaving like a real family man. Nothing like the father Mel knew.
He’d forgotten what a great conversationalist his old man was.
Over dinner, Cal had told them he’d spent most of his working life in sales—no surprise there. He claimed he’d worked for more than twenty companies over the years, and again Mel wasn’t surprised. Not wanting to care, Mel found himself caught up in Cal’s tales of selling jerky to ranchers, grooming products for pets, wine at fairs and shows, scrap metal to dealers, health supplements to northern British Columbia outlets and on the list went.
“Has a real feel for kids, too,” Alexi added. “Like you.”
“I suppose.” Mel thought about it. “Not sure if I have a feel for kids or if kids go easy on me.”
“Is there a difference?” Alexi asked. She took a sip of the lemonade Daphne had brought to dinner. “This stuff is incredible.” She frowned. “Daphne refuses to give me the recipe for it, though.”
Not only had she denied Alexi, she’d sent Mel the old squinty eye and said he was sworn to secrecy. He didn’t recall promising anything, but if it was important to Daphne, he’d glue his mouth shut.
Or change the subject. “You managing?” Mel said. “Can’t be easy with four kids and being half-sick all the time.”
“It’s getting better,” she said. “Maybe in another month I’ll be through this stage. On to the next.”
“Don’t worry about anything,” Mel said. “You’ve got lots of people around you here.”
“I’m not worried,” Alexi said.
“Still, when the time comes, you don’t need to depend just on Seth. Me, Connie, Ben, you can call on any one of us and we’ll get you to the hospital.”
“Actually,” Alexi said with a small, conspiratorial smile, “Seth and I are thinking of having a home birth.”
Mel cursed, loud enough for everyone, from age five to seventy-two, to look up from their game. Mel didn’t care. He stood and called to Seth, “I need to talk to you. Now.”
As soon as Seth was close, Mel started in. “You can’t have a home birth. You can’t. I don’t care what all the books and pamphlets say, and I don’t care what all the statistics say, things can so easily go wrong.”
Seth and Alexi exchanged looks, as if he’d gone off his rocker. “Mel. Take it easy.”
“Don’t tell me to take it easy. I may not be the baby’s parent, but I am its uncle, so you listen to me. You don’t know how fast it can all turn. They say childbirth’s natural. Let me tell you, death is natural, too. Why take the risk when you don’t have to?”
“We’re not so much taking risks,” Alexi said, “as we are weighing the risks. Hospitals come with a higher rate of infections. The nearest one is twenty miles away—”
“I told you I could drive you, even if Seth isn’t around. We both have properly running vehicles.”
“Yes, but—”
“Hospitals come with proper equipment, life-saving equipment—”
“Mel, calm down—” Seth began.
“Quit telling me to calm down. You don’t know what it’s like. This is your baby. Consider the consequences.”
Cal strolled over, Daphne with him. Mel wished they’d stayed on the field, like Connie, who was carrying on with the game as if he hadn’t gone half-mad. He didn’t need anyone else ordering him to calm down when there was a life at stake.
Cal brushed grass from his mallet head. “Mel’s right, kids.”
Cal was backing him up? “His mother had a baby boy at home. In the middle of a snowstorm in March. You know what spring snows are like...wet and heavy, impossible to move in.” Shut up, Cal, shut up. “I wasn’t there but Mel was. He delivered the baby. The baby was fine and then his breathing went wrong. They couldn’t get to the hospital on time. Stuck in the snow.”
And there it was. The dark, baby-size hole in his past laid open for all to see.
“It’s all right, Mel,” Daphne said with the same soft sympathy as when she’d let him hold her. Then, her tenderness had strengthened him. Now it sliced through him.
In a few days, there would be no such tenderness in his life. She was a gift soon to be snatched from him, no matter how hard he pumped life into their relationship.
Seth took off his baseball cap, scratched his head and then replaced it. Alexi was quietly crying, swiping away tears with her palms. Daphne produced a tissue for Alexi, who applied it hard to her cheeks.
“You leave baby Isaac out of this,” Mel said to Cal.
“It needs to be said. It proves your point.”
“You don’t have to make an example of him.”
“Why not? If his little life is to mean anything, if what all we went through is to mean anything, is it not to make sure another baby stays safe?”
There it was, Cal pulling off the salesman pitch, making himself into some kind of hero. “You don’t get to say ‘what we all went through.’ You weren’t there, Cal. You know nothing.”
Cal adjusted his glasses. He opened his mouth, closed it and then said in a low, harsh voice, “I know what it is to not be there. I know the pain of not being there for thirty-nine years.” Cal pulled his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. One was bloodshot. “You lost a brother. Your mother lost a son. I lost two sons, and have spent forty years without a family to call my own.”
A fine speech. Seth, Alexi, Daphne all turned to Mel, expecting him to offer forgiveness. Mel breathed in the evening air, now finally starting to cool off.
Mel couldn’t forgive. Cal might’ve lost his sons, but he hadn’t lost the gift of the l
ying tongue. “You got what you deserved.”
“Oh, Mel,” Daphne said, this time with disappointment.
If she’d ever contemplated a life with him in Alberta, his outburst here tonight was proof she was right to leave.
* * *
DEEP IN ONE of his storage units the next morning, Mel checked the time. Less than thirty minutes to finish rustling up stuff for Santa’s workshop and boot it over to Connie at the town hall office.
He was holding a floppy-necked white goose he’d won at some fair when Connie appeared at the doorway.
“Wow. This is all yours?”
No one had ever seen inside his storage units. They were his secret, his business. Mel experienced the same exposed rawness as he had when Cal had told his family about Isaac. “How did you get in?”
“The guy ahead of us let us in.”
“Us? Who did you bring with you?” The last thing he needed was Ben or Seth nosing around in his stuff.
Daphne appeared at Connie’s side, dressed in a sun hat and a light flowery blouse. She was as pretty as ever, not that him telling her so would make a difference. After how they’d parted last night, she wouldn’t be in any mood to hear what he had to say.
In the short drive from Cal’s hotel to the RV, he’d tried to explain to her why he couldn’t forgive Cal, but when he’d parked outside the motor home, she’d said, “I hope one day you can forgive him. For your own sake.”
Meaning it would do him good to get over it. Well, anytime in the past four decades or so, Cal could’ve come and asked for forgiveness. After all, he’d always known where to find him, his lost son. Only, he hadn’t. And, as far as Mel was concerned, it was too late. Besides, he didn’t see how not forgiving Cal had done him any harm.
“I don’t forgive easy.”
“Will you forgive me for leaving you?”
“I don’t blame you. I already said that.”
“Because you don’t expect much of me. Tell me, Mel, if I gave up my job, my apartment, Moshe, everything for you, what would you give me in return?”
“Me. Everything I have. I’d put it in writing, if you like.”
She stayed silent, her hands folded together.
He could practically read her thoughts. “You don’t believe me. You know, settling isn’t my problem. It’s yours. You think you’re not worth noticing. But it’s not you that’s small. It’s your thinking. It’s your world.”
She’d fumbled for the door handle, jumped from his truck and hurried into her motor home without a backward glance. He’d not followed because the way anger had flowed red-hot through him, he didn’t trust himself not to make things worse.
In the space of an hour, he’d taken a delicate, civilized breakup based solely on differing lifestyles and poisoned the sweetness of their memories together with his bitterness and cruelty.
“Hello, Mel,” she said, her gaze flitting about the interior. After the tidiness of his apartment, she was probably shocked at the chaos here. Only he had it ordered, if he could just show her.
Connie plucked the goose from his hands. “Is this for me?” She inspected its seams, squeezed its stuffing. “I can add a red ribbon. It’ll work. What else do you have?”
Mel got his legs moving and redirected the women to his choices, which he’d already laid out on a storage lid by the front door of the locker.
He’d picked out a box of thirty-year-old Lego, still with all of its one hundred pieces, a Cabbage Patch Kids doll, a flowerpot planted with Little Golden Books and a red wagon. Daphne surveyed the display with a careful expression. She knelt in front of the books, her face softening at the one about the ugly duckling. That was one of his favorites, too.
Connie scanned the lot. “Perfect.” She poked her head back into the locker. “What else is in here?”
“What more do you want?”
“Mel. I have a whole workshop to fill. I need everything you can give me.”
“I can part with maybe two, three more things.”
As if she hadn’t heard, she waded right on in.
“I’ve got a system in here,” Mel said from the doorway. “Just tell me what you’re looking for and I can say if I’ve got it.”
“I won’t know until I see it, Mel. This chair only has three legs. Why keep it?”
“The fourth’s on the seat,” Mel said. “I intend to put it on and it’ll be as good as new.”
Connie held up a table lamp. “I recognize this lamp. I threw it out because it didn’t work.”
“All it needs is a new cord.”
“I threw it out when I was a teenager.”
“I’ll fix it and sell it online. I know what I’m doing.”
Daphne came alongside him. Would she see a chair with three legs or note that the fourth was ready to be attached? Would she notice the solid marble at the base of the lamp, or focus on the missing cord?
Connie teetered sideways and fell against a box of Pyrex cookware. He’d picked it up at an estate sale. It was the original kind; they didn’t make it to the same standard anymore. Connie moved on to a transparent container that she’d tripped over a lawn mower to reach.
“Christmas mugs! There must be two dozen here. All different. These will be awesome.” She sang the last word.
“Those are mine. She gave them to me. I’m keeping them.”
“But what’s the point?” Connie argued. “You have never used them.”
“I have one at my place right now. You’ve seen it yourself. When it gets chipped or broken, I’ll come get another one.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Fine, if you want, you can pick out a couple for the workshop.”
“A dozen.”
“Six.”
While Connie painstakingly sorted through the mugs, Mel took the opportunity to explain himself to Daphne.
“Planning for my retirement right here. In a few years, I’ll sell the roofing business, and get a little company going, refurbishing items.”
Daphne nodded slowly, like she would to a mental patient running off at the mouth.
Connie, however, didn’t hold back. “Mel, I love you, but you are a hoarder.”
“I am not,” Mel said. “I’ve seen the shows. I’m not those slobs. You’ve been in my apartment. There’s not a thing out of place.”
“True,” Daphne said quietly, “you keep everything in its place.”
As he’d explained, it was because he’d grown up in uncertainty. She hadn’t blamed him then. “Look,” he said, “I’ve got shelves, hooks, containers. Everything labelled. I’m warehousing, building inventory.”
“Warehousing? Inventory?” Connie said, mugs hanging from her fingers. “This is one ten-by—what?—twenty-foot space. This is not a warehouse.”
He forgot himself in the heat of proving his point, and his gaze strayed behind him to his second and third lockers. The third was a double unit, ten-by-forty feet. Connie noticed. “No. Way.”
Daphne ducked her head.
“I’m not a hoarder,” he said quietly to her. “I just see things and know what can be done with them.”
“I’m not judging,” she said.
Connie was doing it for her. Having set aside the mugs, she crossed to locker number two. “All right. Open it up, Mel. Let’s have a peek at this so-called inventory.”
“Other people do this, too,” Mel said to Daphne, who’d stayed beside him. “They buy up items at an auction sale and resell them at a higher price. Nothing unusual about that.”
“Sure,” Daphne said. “Sure.” She glanced at Connie’s car, as if wanting to make a break for it.
“Look, come, I’ll show you.” Mel took out his keys and met Connie at the locker, where he jerked open the padlock and rolled up the door.
“See?” he said.
Daphne, like
an explorer at the mouth of a bear cave, peeked her head inside. Her carefully set face flickered and trembled like a flame bearing up under a wind gust.
“Mel!” Connie said, “this is more of the same.” She plucked a jar of buttons off the shelf. “What are you going to do with these?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“What’s this? A bag of bags?”
“To keep it all organized.”
Connie began pulling random items off the shelves. “And this? A pail for pails? To keep more buttons? An ice-cream bucket of golf balls. You’ve got another lawn mower here, a deflated basketball—”
“I deflated it so it doesn’t bounce all over the place.”
“A telescope. Does it work?”
“There’s no telescope in the box. The box is for a couple of golf clubs.”
“A couple of golf clubs? What would you do with just two? Do they go with the bucket of balls?”
“Connie,” Daphne said quietly. “To be fair, this is Mel’s. Perhaps we should let it be.”
Let it be. Like he was too far gone, like he wasn’t worth fighting for.
He didn’t want Daphne’s worried pity. He certainly didn’t want Connie’s nosy judgments. What did any of them know?
“I go to auctions, and sometimes they package items together. Then they have piles that are free for the taking, and I take them, too. I see the value in things no one else wants. Not all of us had things handed to us on a silver spoon, Constance Greene. Some of us went hungry and cold and worrying, always worrying.” Mel felt himself slipping off the deep end again. And, once more, in front of Daphne.
His humiliation was complete. For the first time in forever, he wanted to be left alone.
He twisted the set of keys to the storage lockers off his key ring and tossed them to Connie. “Take what you want. You always have.”
He strode off. Like his father, he’d gambled...and lost.
* * *
DAPHNE COUNTED THE storage keys Connie had fanned out. Five. Five storage units.
“You can’t tell me this is normal,” Connie said, looking around at the ten-foot-by-twenty-foot packed shed they’d first entered.
Coming Home to You Page 18
