by Beth Ehemann
My lungs seized up and I had to remind myself to breathe in and out. “That’s a lot of ‘would’ves,’ Zach.”
“It is. It’s also something we’ll never know the answer to, because the truth is, I was a pussy. I was too scared to face my issues and admit my shortcomings to you. I was also weaker than the bottle. It controlled me for a long time. Hell, it still controls me. I fight it every single day and I always will.”
“Mommy! Look at this leaf!” Lucy ran up to us carrying a bright red leaf the size of her head.
“Wow! Look at that!” I said to her, though I was staring at Zach.
His eyes danced all around her face like he was trying to memorize every feature. He swallowed again and started breathing heavy.
“Who are you?” she asked him innocently.
“Uh. I’m… um…” he stuttered, looking back and forth from Lucy to me, unsure of what to say.
“Lucy, this is mommy’s… friend, Zach.” I smiled.
“Hi.” She grinned at him.
His face visibly relaxed a little after my introduction. “Hi, Lucy. Nice to meet you.”
She flashed another smile at him before running off with her leaf to find Piper.
He looked at me wide-eyed. “Holy shit.”
“What?”
That mega-watt smile I remembered from five years ago flashed at me. “She looks just like me.”
I stared at him for a second and rolled my eyes. “Trust me, I know. I’ve been staring at that face every day for six years. That part hasn’t been easy.”
“She has my smile.”
“And your puppy dog eyes.”
I felt him staring at me, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. Something hung in the air between us. Not quite a spark and not quite nothing. It was history. Good or bad, I shared something with him that I didn’t share with any other person on this planet, not even Brody.
“I have to grab something from my car real quick. Be right back.” I stood up and walked twenty feet to my Jeep, knowing I needed nothing but air.
I opened my car door and fiddled around in the center console for something to bring back to the bench.
My cell phone!
I grabbed it and noticed the blinking light, signaling a text message.
B: MISS YOU, MORE.
Oh God. Why did I look at this?
Brody had been calling me “More” since our night on the pier when he told me I was his more. Normally I loved it, but right now, it stung. The guilt built up in me like a volcano. I technically wasn’t doing anything wrong, but I knew that Brody would lose his mind if he knew where I was right now. Alexa was right. I didn’t want to mess this up. I HAD to tell him, just not right now and definitely not through a text message.
I shoved my phone in my pocket and walked back over to the bench. Now, Lucy and Piper were both standing in front of Zach, showing him the leaves they’d collected.
He smiled and held up a yellow leaf as I sat down. “They gave me this one.”
Lucy shoved a red leaf in my lap. “Hold that one, Mom. It’s for Brody.”
“Come on! Let’s go get more!” Piper yelled as the scurried away.
We sat in silence for a minute, both of us watching Lucy and Piper collecting leaves under the tree, not wanting to address the white elephant that flew innocently out of Lucy’s mouth and stomped right through our playdate.
Zach cleared his throat. “So none of your business’s name is really Brody?”
“Yep,” I said softly.
“How long have you guys been together?”
“A few months.”
“Is he really a professional hockey player?”
“Yes.”
“What team?”
“The Wild. He’s the goalie.”
“Brody Murphy?” he exclaimed, sitting up straight.
I sighed. “Yep.”
“Wow.”
I didn’t bother asking if that was a good wow or a bad wow. Honestly, I didn’t care. It was really awkward sitting on a bench with your children’s estranged father, whom you’ve spent the last five years despising, discussing your new boyfriend, who just happens to be the star goalie of your state’s professional hockey team. I felt like I was living in the Twilight Zone. All other Mondays would be forever easy compared to this one.
“Do you love him?”
Zach’s question bounced around my brain like a pinball for so long, he thought I didn’t hear him and he repeated it.
“Do you love him?”
I lifted my head and looked him straight in the eye. “With everything I have.”
Zach smiled and nodded. “Good, I’m glad. You deserve to be happy, Kacie. Always have. As long as he’s good to the girls, I don’t have a problem with it.”
What?
“What?” I glared at him.
He held his hands up in front of him. “I didn’t mean anything bad by it.”
“You said, ‘As long as he’s good to the girls, I don’t have a problem with it.’”
I jumped up and spun around to face him. “Where the hell do you get off thinking you have any sort of say in what I do with my life? Or the girls’ for that matter?”
He stood up and put his hand on my arm. “Kacie, relax.”
“No!” I snatched my arm away from him. “You disappear for FIVE years. Then, by some insane twist of fate, we end up working in the same place. You tell me your reasons for leaving and I get it. I’ll never fully forget it, but I can forgive it.”
“Kacie—”
“But don’t think for one second you have any right to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do with my life. Nor do you have any say in what I do with the girls. They have been my daughters for all that time and they’re staying my girls.”
“I wasn’t trying to tell you what to do—” He stopped talking and looked past me.
I turned to see Lucy and Piper running toward us with their little arms full of leaves. “Look!” they both squealed.
“Wow. That’s amazing, girls. You can take them with you if you want, but we have to get going. Mommy has to work in awhile.” I tried to make my tone as normal as possible.
They both stuck their bottom lips out and pouted.
“Sorry, guys. Come on.” I held my hand out and took a step toward the parking lot.
“Bye, Zach.” Piper waved as they followed me.
A sad smile crossed his face and he waved one hand at them.
I buckled the girls in their booster seats and climbed into the driver’s seat of my Jeep. The engine roared as I turned the key and started backing out of the parking space. Zach and I made eye contact, the tight smile still plastered to his face. He waved once more as I turned the wheel. I turned right onto the little road that passed the park and couldn’t stop myself from looking over at him one more time. He sat back down on the bench and played with the yellow leaf from the girls. My heart broke just a little.
Zach was standing at the counter, filling out some paperwork when I walked into work several hours later. I walked up and leaned on the counter next to him. He looked over at me but didn’t say anything as I stared straight ahead.
“When I came home and saw the note… I can’t even explain how I felt. Words like crushed, gutted, and destroyed come to mind, but they still don’t describe how I truly felt. I ran to the bathroom and threw up. That was just one of many times over the next few days.”
He sighed but didn’t speak.
“I called my mom, absolutely hysterical. I don’t even remember what I said or what she said, I just remember crying. Then, all of a sudden, she was there. She was calling the landlord and making arrangements for me to leave. She was packing up boxes, she was doing all the things I should’ve been doing but couldn’t, because I was either sobbing or puking.”
“Kacie—”
“Don’t,” I interrupted. “Don’t apologize. I know you’re sorry. You’ve already said that.” I finally turned and looked him in the eye. “What I
need from you now is for you not to act like I owe you something for all the time you’ve missed out on. That was your fault, not mine. What’s done is done and I want the girls to know you and to build a relationship with you slowly, but you have no right to give me your opinion on what you feel I should do with my life.”
“Understood.” He nodded.
“I mean it, Zach,” I continued, not sure my warning had hit home just yet. “I will date who I want, go where I want, and do what I want and it’s none of your business. If you try to make it your business, we’ll put a stop to all this and do it the ugly way. Got it?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Good. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to clock in.” I turned on my heel and walked away, knowing damn well that he was staring at me as I went.
“What are we looking for again?”
Kacie stood up from behind a pile of boxes and a piece of her hair fell in between her eyes. She blew it out of her face. “A can of clear, sparkly spray paint.”
I looked around the garage at the stacks of boxes and odd tools laying around. “You’re sure it’s in here?”
“Yes. At least, I think it is.” She walked in front of me and bent over to make sure it hadn’t rolled under the shelf.
Tilting my head to the side, my eyes traveled Kacie’s entire backside all the way to the floor and back up again. She sighed in frustration and spun around quickly, totally catching me.
“Were you just staring at me?”
“Me? No. Why would I stare at you? You’re hideous with your perfect round ass and pouty, pink lips. I mean, come on. Ew.”
She stomped her foot and punched me in my arm. “Come on. This is serious.”
“What do you need it for again?”
Empty boxes went flying as she started flinging them off the top of the workbench. “For Piper. She lost her first tooth today at school.”
“I can’t believe this shit. I missed her first day of school the other day and now I missed her losing her first tooth.”
“You didn’t really miss much with the tooth thing,” she disagreed. “The real excitement comes in the morning when she wakes up and realizes that the tooth fairy came to her house. There isn’t going to be any excitement, though, if I can’t find the damn spray paint.”
I ducked as a box narrowly missed hitting me in the head. “Obviously I’m an idiot, but what does spray paint have to do with the tooth fairy anyway?”
“You take the dollar you’re going to leave under their pillow and spray it with the glitter spray paint. It’s clear so they can still use it if they want, but it’s covered in sparkles so they think the tooth fairy really touched it.” A tiny smile appeared on her face as she shrugged. “My mom used to do it with me and I wanted to continue the tradition with my girls. I still have all of my glitter dollars. I never spent a single one.”
“Wow. Your mom has some pretty awesome ideas.”
“She does, but none of it’s going to matter if I don’t find that damn can.” She threw her hands up in the air and turned back to the row of metal shelves that lined the side of the garage.
“What time is it?”
She pulled her phone out of her pocket. “Eight forty-five.”
“The hardware store closes at nine, correct?” I grabbed my keys and headed toward the door.
“Yeah, but it’s a fifteen-minute drive to town. You’ll never make it.”
I laughed. “Challenge accepted.”
Forty-five minutes later, I walked back into the garage to see Kacie sitting on the floor with a bunch of boxes scattered all around her, none of which appeared to contain spray paint.
“I can’t believe you made it!” Kacie jumped up and threw her arms around my neck when she saw the plastic bag filled with glitter spray cans in my hand.
“Barely. I called when I was five minutes away and begged the manager to wait for me. He was grumpy about it until I showed up and he saw it was me.” I hugged her back and set the bag on the workbench. “He asked for a picture, but I did him one better and gave him a signed puck. Thank God I always have extras in my truck.”
Her eyes softened as she looked at me and gently squeezed my forearm. “Thank you for going to get these. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Hell yeah, I did. Piper needs glitter dollars.” I looked down at the stuff all over the floor. “What the hell do you got going on here?”
“Oh, I found a couple of my old boxes, so I was going through them.” She sat back down in the middle of the clutter and I followed suit. “Some pictures, some drawings, old toys, stuff like that.”
I reached into a box and pulled out an old crayon drawing of what looked like dogs and cats. “Uh, did you do this?”
“Yeah.” Her cheeks turned an adorable shade of pink.
“Wow. This is amazing. I mean, except for the fact that every one of these animals appears to have a penis.”
“Shut up.” She giggled. “Stop teasing me.”
“No, really. You were drawing anatomically correct animals at a very young age. I’m impressed.” I turned the paper toward her and pointed to a particularly well-endowed dog in the upper right hand corner. “This guy up here, he’s very, uh, gifted in the penis department. His name must be Brody, huh?”
“Gimme that!” She snatched the paper out of my hands and laughed as she put it in another box.
“What’s in this one?”
She tried to peek over the top of the box off to the side of me. “Not sure. Haven’t gotten that far.”
“Let’s take a look, shall we?” I pulled another stack of drawings out and set them off to the side. “Well, we have Barbies. Lots of Barbies. Apparently you don’t like blondes, though, because you cut all their hair off and left the brunettes alone.” I pushed them off to the side and pulled out a very familiar toy. “I remember this!”
“My View-Master!” she squealed and grabbed it out of my hands. She held it up to her eyes and found the light, frantically pulling the lever on the right down to switch the slide. “Smurfs!” Setting it down, she crawled over to the box I was rummaging through. “Are there any other slides in here?”
“Tons.” I grabbed the stack of slides and handed them to her. She shoved them in the View-Master, one after another, clicking through to see what they were.
“Wizard of Oz! Lady and the Tramp! Rugrats!”
She set the giant red binocular-looking things in her lap and looked at me, taking a deep, satisfied breath. “I’m over-the-moon that you found this. I had no idea Mom still had it. I can’t wait to show Lucy and Piper.”
“You really liked your View-Master, huh? On a scale from one to finding a run-down barn, how excited does this make you?”
She stuck her tongue out at me. “I loved this thing, took it everywhere with me. If any one toy represented my childhood, it was this. I loved that I could just pick it up and immediately be transported somewhere else.”
“I had one, but I never played with it. Actually, I think I broke it when I hit it with a hockey stick.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “Help me clean this stuff up real quick and let’s head in. I have a dollar to spray.”
“A dollar?” I asked, surprised. “Just one?”
“Yes, just one. And no, you may not put more under there.”
“You know me so well.” I leaned over and kissed the tip of her cute, crinkled nose.
The next morning, I went downstairs and Kacie and the girls were already in the kitchen.
“Brody! Look!” Piper squealed when she saw me, waving a glitter dollar around in the air.
“What’s that?” I played along.
“My dollar. From the tooth fairy!” She looked down at it like it was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen. “She really came. Can you believe it?”
I took the dollar from her and looked closely at it. “Wow, did you see her?”
Piper shook her head, looking a little disappointed. “No.”
“I did!” Luc
y bragged.
Kacie turned from the fridge to face her. “You did?”
Lucy nodded furiously. “She had yellow hair and white, sparkly wings and a green dress. She was so pretty.”
“That’s Tinkerbell, Lucy!” Piper argued.
“No! It was the tooth fairy, Piper!” Lucy’s little head shook back and forth in anger as she yelled.
Kacie stepped in between them. “Okay, you two, relax. It’s too early in the morning for this and I haven’t had nearly enough coffee yet.”
“Hey.” I walked over to the fridge and pulled out a mason jar of Sophia’s homemade cinnamon applesauce. “Anyone want some of this with me?”
“I do,” Piper said.
“No.” Lucy scowled.
Kacie looked at her skeptically. “Since when do you not like Gigi’s applesauce?”
“I like built apples, Mom, not squished ones,” Lucy snarled.
Kacie and I looked at each other for a brief second and tried to hold our laughs in, but we were unsuccessful. Piper joined in shortly after us and within a minute, Lucy was laughing too. All tension had evaporated from the room and it turned into the perfect morning.
We all sat together at the island, shoving our faces with pancakes and cinnamon applesauce, while the girls told stories about their first week at school.
“Brody, does the tooth fairy come to your house a lot?” Lucy asked.
I frowned at her in confusion. “Not since I was a little kid. Why?”
She shoved her hands onto her tiny hips. “Connor Gerjol said if you’re a hockey player, your teeth fall out a lot.”
Kacie let out a good laugh, trying to cover her mouth with her hands.
“Well, Conno is right, sort of. Hockey players sometimes have missing teeth from getting hit in the face with a puck or a stick, but I’m a goalie. I wear lots of protection when I’m on the ice, so I’ve never lost any teeth.”
