by Ava Storm
“I’ll just take her,” I said, scooping her up and settling her on my hip. “I’ll meet you at the truck.”
Alex looked relieved as he headed toward the freight elevator and we went the opposite direction toward the one that took us to the lobby. An hour with an awake Madelyn had frazzled his normally relaxed demeanor. It made sense. She was a handful. It wasn’t like he’d spent the last eighteen months watching her grow into a real person. He couldn’t appreciate how cool it was that she had thoughts and opinions now, even if she did express them like a tiny tyrant.
But she hadn’t frazzled Ford.
Stop it, Paige, I ordered myself as I carried Madelyn into the leasing office. While I dealt with the final paperwork, she got her hands on another issue of Sophisticated Living and refused to let it go.
“Mads, it’s not ours,” I said, yanking it from her fingers and putting it back on the pile.
Her face crumpled and her eyes turned to watery slits as she opened her mouth to yell.
“She can just take it,” the woman behind the desk said hastily. “Something to remember us by.”
When we got back to the garage where Alex was leaning against the U-Haul, he said, “What’s with the ripped up magazine?”
“It’s something to remember Chicago by,” I muttered.
Alex had already unhitched his car from the back of the U-Haul, so I opened the door to the backseat and began the process of wrestling Madelyn into the assorted straps. She hadn’t spent much time in car seats. She’d had an infant one when she was born--they wouldn’t let me leave the hospital without it. She’d outgrown it by eight months, and since we never drove anywhere, I’d never gotten her another one.
“My sister says her kid loves it,” Alex said over Madelyn’s screams.
“She’ll be fine.” I got the last buckle snapped, adjusted the chest harness, and handed Madelyn back her magazine. I slammed the door closed and leaned back hard against it, suddenly exhausted. “Thank you, Alex. I don’t know how I would have done this without you.”
“Don’t sweat it. I’m happy to help.” He looked past me with concern. “Do you think she’ll do that the whole three hours?”
“No, her attention span isn’t that long.”
“I hope so,” he said dubiously and tossed me the keys. “You lead the way.”
I was relieved to see the morning traffic had eased by the time we pulled out of the parking garage at ten thirty. I hadn’t driven in ages and doing so with Madelyn in the car was nerve wracking. Fortunately, she stopped screaming when we slid out into the sunlight and she saw the city all around her. She cooed as we passed the familiar buildings, and I wanted to cry. Madelyn was a city girl. What was she going to think of Branville with its fresh air and pin-quiet nights?
What would I think of Branville after all this time?
The answer became clear as soon as we entered the city limits. I was surrounded by wide open space, but claustrophobia clamped down on my throat like the jaws of an animal.
This is not what you want! My brain screamed.
“Hmm,” Madelyn said from the back. She sounded skeptical but interested, like she was trying to reserve judgment.
“This is where Mommy grew up,” I told her, reaching back to ruffle the top of her head.
She looked over her shoulder at me briefly, then went back to staring out the window.
I narrated the town for her as we drove through. “And that’s where mommy went to high school. I knew Uncle Alex back then, but we didn’t start dating until college. Oh, that’s the grocery store where Mommy got her first job.”
Madelyn made noncommittal noises, but she wasn’t crying anymore, so I took that as a good sign.
“And this is where your great Aunt Shirley lives,” I said when we pulled into the drive of the detached single-family home behind the U-Haul. She was sitting on the porch when we pulled in, but she stood when we got out of the car and shaded her eyes.
“That’s a big truck you got there.”
“Don’t worry, Aunt Shirley. It’s not full.” I gritted my teeth in a smile at her. She was the only family I had left, and we weren’t close, but I appreciated her letting Madelyn and I live with her for the next month while I saved up money for an apartment.
Alex had offered to let us stay with him, but even facing Aunt Shirley’s pinched, suspicious face, I was glad I’d declined. I wanted him to fall in love with Madelyn before he had to live with her. And I wanted to maybe fall in love with him. Surely it wasn’t impossible. I’d loved him once before.
Madelyn explored Aunt Shirley’s porch while Alex and I carried my boxes around the house to the basement entrance where we would be staying. It wasn’t hot, not compared to the city, but we were still mopping sweat off our foreheads when we were done. Aunt Shirley reluctantly poured us glasses of lemonade and we sat in the shade of the porch, getting our second wind.
Madelyn held up her sippy cup, but Aunt Shirley shook her head.
“Sugar is bad for babies.”
“Sugar is bad for everyone,” I said, trying not to sound annoyed. “She can have a little.”
Madelyn’s eyebrows were drawing together in concern. Was she not going to get her lemonade?
“It’ll rot her teeth,” Aunt Shirley said, and put the pitcher back in the house.
“They’re baby teeth.” I poured Madelyn some from my cup. Aunt Shirley pinched her lips but didn’t say anything.
Alex helped me get Madelyn’s crib put back together. I looked at it sitting against the wall, two feet from my bed, and felt depressed. I knew it was temporary, but it meant we’d gone backward. There was nowhere else to put it though. The basement made a nice one-bedroom apartment, but it was small. Building the wall to turn this space into a bedroom had only left over a small space off the kitchenette as the living room.
“Come on,” Alex said nicely. “Let’s go get some pizza.”
We collected Madelyn from the porch where she was having a stare off with Aunt Shirley and started the short walk to town. It was surreal walking down the sidewalks I’d grown up on with my own daughter and Alex. I could tell that the people looking at us thought we were a family, but it didn’t make me feel warm inside like it had with Ford. With Ford, I’d leaned into the fantasy. With Alex, I wanted to explain to everyone smiling at us that no, he wasn’t Madelyn’s father or my husband. I wasn’t sure what he was.
In Tony’s Pizzeria, at a round booth in the back, it was clear Alex didn’t know what we were supposed to be either. He’d spent two years trying to get me back, and now here I was. But were we back? That had been my intention when I called him, but now it seemed preposterous.
He held the salt and pepper shakers in his hands, clicking them together in a nervous habit I’d completely forgotten about. “So, how does this work?” He asked finally. “You and me, I mean. Are we...where should we start?”
“I have no idea,” I admitted. “I don’t know if we should start. We ended for a reason.”
“Right.” He looked down, thinking I was talking about Wendy the Waitress. I hadn’t been though, not really. I thought it had been about her until I met Ford, and then I realized that she was just a symptom of a relationship that was pretending to be something it wasn’t.
“Listen,” I reached across the table and put my hand on his. “Let’s just be friends, okay? We’ll forget about the past and start over.”
He nodded, considering this. “That makes sense. We’ll just see what happens, right?”
I could have told him right then that nothing was going to happen, but I decided against it. What the hell did I know anyway? “Right,” I agreed. “And as a friend, you’ve really gone above and beyond. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come to Chicago.”
“You’d have figured it out, Paige. You always do.”
I scoffed. “Right. That’s why I ended up stranded in the city without money, a car, or a job.”
The waitress came by and took ou
r order. Alex and I got a large pepperoni to split, and I got Madelyn a personal sized cheese pizza.
After she left, Alex asked, “What happened anyway? It seems like you were doing pretty well for yourself based on the apartment.”
“It’s such a long story,” I said, feeling the beginnings of a headache just thinking about it. Where would I even start? With Wendy the Waitress? With the first time I saw Ford? When I lost my first job? When I decided to take the executive assistant position? What the hell had happened anyway? I did my best to summarize it for Alex though, because he’d driven three hours in a U-Haul with his car hitched to the back, navigated it through the city streets, and taken us away.
Alex colored on the kid’s menu with Madelyn while I talked, nodding to show he was listening. Occasionally, his eyebrows raised, but he stayed quiet. When I was done, he finished coloring in Tony the Turtle’s apron before finally looking up. I looked closely, but I didn’t see any judgment in his gaze.
“Sounds like you still care about him,” he said finally. “Are you sure this was the right thing?”
“Yes,” I said, looking down. Madelyn was coloring over Tony the Turtle’s apron, displeased with it being blue when everything else on the page was red. My eyes followed the furious scrabble of her crayon as it ground down the waxy point into a nub.
“People make mistakes,” Alex said, and I wasn’t sure if he was talking about me, Ford, or himself. Maybe all three of us.
Before his rescue mission and our friendship reboot, I might have said pointedly, “And you would know.” Now though, I’d made so many mistakes of my own that all I could do was agree with him. I’d made a mistake when I’d gone to Ford, when I lied to him, when I fell in--something--with him.
Now all I could do was try to stop making them before it was too late. Branville would be our fresh start--the first page of a mistake-free life. I’d be responsible and respectable and the mother that Madelyn deserved.
And it shouldn’t make me feel so damn miserable.
34
Ford
I found out that Alexander J. Whitehall was a former college athlete turned insurance agent. In Branville, his family had roots so deep they curled around the core of the earth. Someone in every generation of his family had been mayor for the past 200 years. There was a picture of him looking mayoral in a suit and tie on the Erie Insurance website, next to the slogan: Prices so low it’s Erie!
He looked like a nice guy.
My lip curled anyway.
I took inventory of the cars we own and determined that not a single one would fit in in small-town Branville, so I rented a black four-door sedan and drove down early on Thursday morning. I knew from calling to make an appointment that Alex took off Wednesday. I also knew that Paige moved out of her apartment on Wednesday, and I didn’t think it was a coincidence.
It took me three hours to get to Branville, so I had an hour to look around before my eleven am with Alex. It took me ten minutes. The bulk of the town consisted of one large square around a common green area. The square was lined with small shops, a coffee shop, and a few diners. To my amusement, I saw a neon sign that said “Bar” on a street well off the main area, as though alcohol was a dirty little secret.
Eschewing the pizza place and the breakfast diner, I walked to “Bar” and found the owner just unlocking the door. He looked surprised to see me. He looked me over in one quick glance and said, “Not from around here, are you?”
“Not exactly.”
“We don’t serve lox or whatever it is you people eat,” he warned.
When that didn’t send me running, he reluctantly admitted me into the dimly lit interior. A single waitress was rolling silverware at the bar, her eyes fixed on the TV.
“Wendy, we got an early one,” the man barked. “Get him a menu.”
She jumped. “Carl! We have a customer!”
“Shit, really?” A man poked his head out of the kitchen.
I took a seat at the bar, feeling the stool rock beneath me on uneven legs. None of them sounded particularly pleased to see me. It was like I was a guest who’d shown up to a dinner party two hours early. My lips twitched as they scrambled, harassed, to accommodate me. Wendy brought plunked down a laminated menu that still smelled like lemon cleaning product.
I glanced down at it. “I’ll take the midwestern omelette.”
“All we have is eggs and toast.”
“Great.” I slid it back. “What about coffee?”
“We have it.”
“Even better.”
I watched Wendy while she poured me a cup from the pot and called my order back to Carl. Something was nagging at me. Something about her. About this place. When she brought back my coffee, I asked, “Are you from here?”
She snorted. “Everyone in this town is from here, mister.”
“So you know just about everyone?”
“Know ‘em or know of ‘em.” She was leaning into a midwestern accent now like I was a tourist and she was a character actor.
“What about Paige Stafford?”
Her eyes widened. The accent dropped. “What about her?”
No love lost there, I thought, my eyebrows raising. Finally, someone who wouldn’t defend her and tell me to look into her fucking eyes. “I’m looking for her.”
“Yeah? Is she in trouble?” Her tone made it clear that she hoped so.
“Maybe. Do you know where she is?”
Wendy turned around to put the pot back on the coffee maker. I could tell she was debating whether or not to answer by the way she took a long time arranging it just so on the heater and then taking another minute to clean up the coffee splatters around the base. “She’s probably with Alex Whitehall,” she said finally, turning around. “Word is that he helped her move back here. Though God knows why she’d want to.”
Suddenly, a sliver of memory fell into my lap. It was a slice from that first night with Paige. She was sitting next to me, her bare shoulder nearly brushing mine. Shelly was across from us with Jameson. She was holding her drink up and making a toast. “To Alex the Asshole and Wendy the Waitress, without whom this night could not have been possible.”
How many waitresses named Wendy could there be in one small town? I took a good look at Wendy for the first time. She was attractive. A few years older than Paige, probably closer to my age. Alex must have met her here in this very bar. She was the reason I was here now. If Alex hadn’t slept with her, Paige wouldn’t have slept with me, and Madelyn wouldn’t be doing whatever destructive, Madelyn-like thing she was doing right now.
“Wendy,” I said slowly. “You don’t know it, but you and I actually have a lot in common.”
She snorted and looked me over, disbelieving. “Your haircut looks like it cost more than my house.”
“My barber will appreciate that. While we might not have an income bracket in common, we do have people. And I think you might know them better than I do.” I pulled out my wallet. I always kept cash, though I’d never needed it before. Now I pulled out several one-hundred-dollar bills and put them on the counter.
Her eyes went wide again, and then very narrow. “Who the hell are you?”
“Someone who is just looking for the truth. Can you tell me everything you know about Alex and Paige?”
She grabbed the bills, pocketed them, and then said, “Sure. Alex is a lying asshole who told me he was broken up with his fiancé when he wasn’t, and Paige is a moron who made it out of this dead-end town and then came back for some reason.”
“Did you know if they’re back together?”
She sighed noisily. “Listen, apparently I’m the last person Alex tells the truth to when it comes to whether he’s in a relationship, but last I heard, they’re not.”
“Who’d you hear that from?”
“Alex. He came in last night in a weird mood. Said he’d spent all this time thinking that one day she’d come back and they’d get back together, or vice versa you know? But now she’s back, a
nd they’re still not together, and he isn’t sure he wants them to be. Something about holding on too hard to the past. Not seeing what was in front of him.” Wendy threw her hands up. “I figured he was just trying to get laid.”
You figured, but you hoped otherwise, I thought. Underneath the hard, bitter crust of her words, I heard a mixture of hope, skepticism, and resignation. I had the impression that Wendy had done a lot of listening to Alex wax philosophical.
“How well do you know Paige?” I asked.
“I’ve never said a word to the girl, but I can tell you her favorite color and what she eats for breakfast and a bunch of other shit I don’t care about.”
“Alex?” I guessed.
Wendy nodded.
Alex really was an asshole. I got the feeling he’d been coming into this bar for the last two years, going on about the one who got away to the one who got him off.
“So as far as you know, they broke up two years ago and never got back together?”
Wendy nodded again.
“So why did she move back?”
“He said she’d lost her job; she couldn’t afford to stay.”
She could have afforded to stay. She could have afforded anything she wanted if she’d just asked for child support. Why the hell hadn’t she? Why had she lied to get a job that paid her in a year what I would have paid her in a month? Nothing made any fucking sense.
Wendy slid a plate of eggs and toast under my nose. I stabbed into it with my fork.
“You said we had Paige and Alex in common,” Wendy said, watching me eat. “But you don’t seem to know them very well. Who the hell are they to you?”
I chewed thoughtfully. I didn’t want to feed Wendy a line of bullshit, but I wasn’t sure what the truth was anymore. “I’m not sure,” I said finally. “That’s what I’m here to find out.”
“Uh huh,” Wendy said skeptically. “Listen, you’re not a stalker, are you? My uncle is the chief of police, and I’ll have him all over your ass if you are. I kind of hate Miss Perfect, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you put her in your creepy basement room behind a false wall.”
