John Riley's Girl

by Cooper, Inglath

  Olivia stopped her car under a tree heavy with green apples. At the sight of her, the children all clamored out of the swings and scrambled into the house, yelling, “Mama, mama, somebody’s here!”

  Olivia got out of the car, feeling as out of place as a piece of contemporary furniture in the middle of a room done in American country. A flagstone sidewalk led to the front-porch steps. The door swung open again, and Sam stepped outside, a smile on his face. “Hey, Olivia.”

  “Hi, Sam. I don’t think I’ve ever seen prettier children.”

  “We’re a little prejudiced, but we’ve decided to keep them.” His smile widened. “Come on in. Lori’s just upstairs putting on the finishing touches. She said to send you up. Second room on the left.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  Like the outside, Lori’s was the kind of house that felt lived in, the walls done in soothing earth tones of gold and cinnamon and taupe. Olivia went upstairs, stopping at a bedroom where Lori sat at a vanity running a brush through her hair, four children under the age of seven anchored to her sides with what looked like a sudden bout of shyness. Emotion capsized inside Olivia. Wistfulness? Envy?

  “Hi,” Lori said, catching sight of Olivia in the mirror and smiling. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  “Me, too.” Olivia tipped a shoulder against the doorframe.

  “Let me introduce you.” Lori pointed, starting with the smallest child. “Christopher, Mark, Rachel and Ashley. Say hello to Miss Ashford.”

  “Hi.” “Hewwo,” came a chorus of curious greetings.

  “Hello,” Olivia said. “It’s very nice to meet all of you.”

  “Would you guys mind letting Mommy have a minute to talk with Olivia? How about if you go on downstairs with Daddy? We’ll be down in a few minutes and make some lunch.”

  They filed out of the bedroom, their footsteps reluctant. At the top of the stairs, they thundered down in a race to see who would get to the bottom first.

  “They’re adorable.”

  Lori smiled. “Thank you. Some days I don’t know what to do with them, and others I don’t know what I’d do without them.”

  “You’re obviously doing something right. They look like very happy children.”

  “That’s the ultimate compliment to me,” she said. “Raising children is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. There’s no manual, no handbook, no four-year degree. So many nights I go to bed wondering if I should have handled something differently.”

  “But you had such a good go-by,” Olivia said. “Your parents probably taught you more than you’ll ever realize about doing the right thing.”

  “Here, sit down.” Lori patted the chair beside her vanity. “I hope I didn’t sound like a total cornball last night when I was talking about what’s important to me these days.”

  “I assure you that’s the last thing I thought.” Olivia looked down, adding, “Actually, I was more than a little jealous.”

  Lori could not have looked more surprised. “With the life you have? How could you be jealous of me?”

  Olivia met her friend’s disbelieving gaze. “I don’t have what you have,” she said, feeling the truth of her own words even as she said them. In this house, her own life felt suddenly thin.

  “But Olivia, your life must be so glamorous and exciting! All those beautiful clothes you wear, getting to look like a million dollars all the time! I can only imagine.”

  “They’re just clothes,” Olivia said. And then, surprising herself, added, “Sometimes I feel like it doesn’t really matter whether it’s me sitting in front of the camera or not. It’s as if that’s just this person I’ve created to do the job, and there’s not much of the real me showing through.”

  Lori looked startled by the confession. “Is it something you want to keep doing?”

  “I always thought so. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I hope I’m not sounding ungrateful. I’ve been given some wonderful opportunities.”

  “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why haven’t you ever gotten married?”

  Olivia shrugged with what she hoped passed as nonchalance. “I think I just ended up not being the marrying kind.”

  “You were once,” Lori said pointedly. And then with a smile, “Back when you were John Riley’s girl.”

  Just the words made Olivia’s chest tighten and ache. There had been a time when that was all she wanted to be. “That was a long time ago.”

  “But you’re still the same person.”

  “In some ways. In most ways, I think I’m very different. And most of the time, I’m pretty happy with the way things are,” Olivia said, but the words did not sound convincing.

  “I always pictured you with children. You and John. It was just one of those things I couldn’t imagine being any other way.”

  “How can you really know what you want at that age?” Olivia managed, and even to her ears, her voice did not sound like her own.

  “Some things, I think you just know.” Lori picked up a pot of foundation and ran her thumb across the top. “John is a proud man. Maybe you didn’t realize what it did to him when you left.”

  The words held no trace of criticism, but all the same, Olivia heard the conviction behind them. “We were teenagers, Lori. He moved on pretty quickly.”

  This time, it was Lori who seemed to have trouble finding words. She put the lid back on her makeup. Picked up a hairbrush. Put it back down. “I don’t really feel comfortable talking about this with everything that’s happened, but there were a lot of rumors floating around when he married Laura. A lot of people thought he married her to get over you.”

  The words hit like hammer strikes against some soft, vulnerable spot deep inside Olivia. She swallowed, then blinked hard. Was it possible that he had not gotten over her so quickly? That all this time she might have been wrong in thinking that his heart had never ached for her even a little?

  “Losing you changed him. He grew up overnight. He got serious about life. It was like he didn’t have the heart to be young and frivolous. He didn’t hang out with the rest of us anymore.”

  Olivia had no idea what to say. All these years, she had pictured something so entirely different. Imagined that John had met Laura, fallen head over heels in love with her and forgotten that he’d ever known Olivia. The possibility that it might not have happened exactly that way lit a flame in her heart, a gentle whoof of hope, unsummoned, maybe even unwelcome, but there, nonetheless. “I saw him earlier over at Dickson’s,” she said, her voice again a rusty replica of itself.

  “And let me guess, he wasn’t wearing his welcome hat?”

  That, at least, got a half smile out of Olivia. “It was actually pretty awful.”

  Lori sighed. “I have no idea whether the two of you will ever be friends, Olivia, but I do know John. He’s a good man. People have different ways of showing hurt.”

  Olivia weighed her old friend’s assertion. Was it possible that John’s anger had begun with hurt? The thought brought with it implications she would never have considered under the chill of his gaze earlier that morning.

  But she wondered on into the afternoon when they went downstairs to have lunch at the round maple table in the center of Lori’s kitchen. Grilled cheese sandwiches for the children, a Caesar salad for the big folks. It was the loudest, messiest lunch she’d ever had as an adult. And it was also the best, one she knew she would remember for a long time to come. Because there at that table, in full, living color was exactly what was missing from her own life.

  UNDER ORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES, John was a ten-minute man. Five to shower, three to shave, one and a half to brush his teeth, a few seconds to comb his hair. Tonight, however, he’d broken all records, standing under the faucet until his skin started to shrivel and the hot water had lost its bravado.

  The goose bumps finally won out, and he reached for a towel, dried off and cracked the bathroom door to check on Flora who was sitting on his bed,
a sketch pad on her lap and an assortment of crayons spread out around her. “You all right in there?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she said without glancing up. John watched her for a moment and then smiled at the intensity on his daughter’s face. She was into her crayons in a major way, and she loved to sit on his bed and draw while he got ready.

  He thought maybe Flora felt closer to her mother in a room Laura had decorated with heavy yellow and rose floral drapes, a thick down comforter with matching duvet and chunky pillows atop a four-poster bed found at an estate auction in Wythe County. After Laura died, John had wanted to move out of the room, but that would have been one more change for Flora to accept along with everything else. He just hadn’t had the heart to do it.

  John finished shaving, swatted a comb across his hair and went into the bedroom for a shirt. He had changed three times and was about to go for another one when Flora said, “Daddy, why do you keep changing clothes?”

  Halfway out of the shirt, John stopped, considered fudging the truth, then reminded himself he couldn’t preach honesty as a virtue to his daughter if he didn’t practice it himself. “It’s called a delaying tactic, sweet pea.”

  “What’s a d’laying tactic?” she asked without lifting her gaze from the pad pinned beneath a red crayon.

  “It’s when you find reasons to put off doing something you don’t want to do.”

  She looked up, her small face scrunched in a frown. “Like when I can’t find my shoes because I don’t want to go to school?”

  “Like that.”

  “Oh. I like that shirt. Blue’s my favorite color, you know.”

  “Then blue it is.” He rebuttoned the shirt he’d been about to take off. Yesterday, her favorite color had been green, but he didn’t bother to contradict her. It was a woman’s prerogative to change her mind. He wasn’t about to discourage it.

  At seven, Flora was a walking encyclopedia of questions. Daddy, why do cows lie down when it rains? Daddy, why are stop signs red? She’d thrown him some stumpers, that was for sure. But it was also one of his favorite parts of being a father, trying to find answers for his daughter, even when he didn’t always have them for himself.

  He glanced at his watch. It was seven-thirty, and he had thought of at least a thousand excuses not to go tonight, some of them pretty good, too. But none of them held water under scrutiny of any duration. And as soon as Cleeve got here, he’d be dragging him out of the house by his blue shirt collar, anyway.

  Through the open bedroom window, John could already hear the music thumping out its bass beat, keeping pretty good rhythm with the headache he’d tossed a couple Advil at that afternoon and still hadn’t managed to shake.

  “Daddy?”

  “What, sweet pea?” Just the tone told him there was a doozy coming.

  “Are you ever going to go out on a date?”

  John stared at his daughter’s reflection in the bathroom mirror, then swung around to face her, the razor he’d been about to put back in the wall cabinet falling from his hand and making a loud, clattering noise in the sink. “What?”

  “Sammy Sullivan said daddies never went this long without dating, and that it wasn’t normal.”

  “And how did seven-year-old Sammy Sullivan claim to know such a thing?”

  “He said his mama was talking about you, and that’s what she said.”

  Red rage went over him in a wave, and he wished he could round up all the busybodies in this town and put them on a bus to somewhere where they could meddle in somebody’s business who didn’t mind. He minded. “Sometimes people talk about things they have no business talking about,” he said, careful not to let his irritation show.

  “But will you?”

  John looked at his daughter then, and saw the confusion on her face. He should have known there was something other than idle curiosity behind her question. He went over to the bed, moved aside a few crayons and pulled her onto his lap. “I don’t know the answer to that. But I do know one thing. Your mama will never be replaced. Other people might come into our lives, but they’ll never replace her. Do you understand?”

  Flora laid her head against his chest and looked down at her lap. “I still miss her, Daddy.”

  “I know you do, baby. So do I. And that’s a good thing because it reminds us how important she was to us. She’d want us to miss her, but she wouldn’t want us to be sad too long.”

  “Are you still sad?”

  Laura’s words from the letter he’d read that afternoon floated up. “A part of me always will be. But it would make your mama sad if we didn’t try to be happy without her.”

  “Aunt Sophia says you’ve gotta deal with your regret before you can ever be happy again.”

  “And how do you know Sophia said that?” he asked, shaking his head.

  “That’s what she told Uncle Hank. What’s regret?”

  “Sadness for things you didn’t do, baby.”

  “Do you have lots of regrets, Daddy?”

  “Not too many,” he said. And then, “A few.”

  “How do you make them go away?”

  “I don’t know.” He pulled his daughter into the curve of his arm and hugged her tight. “I wish I did.”

  A LITTLE WHILE LATER, John made his way out to the front yard of the house where the second night of reunion festivities was now in full swing. There was a DJ tonight, and the music was loud. It would get louder as the night wore on, he was sure. No one was dancing. Too early, he supposed. Not enough cocktails dealt out by the bartender yet to turn inhibition into courage.

  He got himself a Coke and ended up in a corner of the yard next to a potted fig tree that looked about as conspicuous as he felt.

  The moment she arrived, John knew it. His face went warm, and his hands started to tingle. He looked up at the front table just as every head in the crowd swiveled in the same direction.

  People flowed toward her, then clustered around her. She smiled, was more than polite, but she wasn’t comfortable with the attention. He could see that from here, even with fifty yards and fifteen years between them. It was there in the rigid way she held her shoulders, the way her hand kept fluttering to the base of her throat.

  John tried to look elsewhere, but his own gaze betrayed him, and he found himself taking a good long look at her. She’d worn green again tonight. A sleeveless sweater with a rounded neck and skinny black pants. Her hair was loose, just barely glancing her shoulders.

  She disappeared into the crowd, but the sight of her lifted a memory to the surface. Liv with a ponytail. It had been longer then. And sun-lightened. They’d been sitting on the grass beneath the very same oak tree under which she now stood. It was springtime, early May, and they were supposed to be doing calculus homework, but with Liv on his lap, her head on his shoulder, there had been no way he could keep his mind on anything that boring. He remembered her clothes: cut-off Levi’s, a white tank top with skinny straps and yellow flip-flops, the kind you got at the drugstore for ninety-nine cents. Her arms and legs were smooth and tan from Saturday afternoons spent on the dock at the pond behind his house. He remembered pulling the rubber band out of her hair, the way the long strands had fallen across her shoulders, spilling over his hands, the sensation the most sensual he’d ever known.

  And he also remembered now, as clearly as he’d ever remembered anything, the feeling he’d had that afternoon. His sense of absolute completeness, fulfillment, the undeniable rightness of his love for her. He had thought they were forever. Eighteen years old, and he’d been totally certain that if he never achieved another thing in his life, finding Liv would be enough.

  She’d come back to see him all those years ago. She’d come back, and he’d never known.

  The knowledge left him feeling like a sailboat without a rudder, and just the simple act of keeping himself upright took all his concentration.

  He looked around for Cleeve, but didn’t see him.

  Needing a few minutes away from the crowd, he headed down t
o the barn to check on Nadine. She’d thrown a shoe that afternoon and was confined to her stall tonight because the farrier couldn’t come until the morning. The other horses were all out, except for Popcorn, whom he’d left in to keep the filly company.

  He let himself in the barn’s side door, not bothering to flick on the aisle lights. The moon would cast enough shadow through the open Dutch doors for him to see the two horses and throw them some hay if they needed it.

  He heard her before he saw her. That voice was unmistakable. He stood there in the center of the darkened aisle with his feet bolted to the floor, unable to move while something heavy and a little painful settled in his chest.

  This voice was familiar, one he remembered, thought he’d forgotten and realized now that he hadn’t. This wasn’t the one she had cultivated for her TV audience. That voice belonged to a woman he did not know. This belonged to a girl he had once thought he’d known better than he knew himself.

  He followed the sound.

  Naddie’s stall door was slightly open. And there was Liv, standing inside with her forehead tipped against the filly’s mane, smoothing a hand across her neck and speaking to her in that voice women reserve for babies and animals, soft and crooning. The filly was nosing around her pockets, looking for carrots the same way she did with Flora.

  John couldn’t make his voice work.

  Liv looked up, starting at the sight of him. Naddie jumped, saw it was only him and went back to her carrot search.

  “John, I…you scared me,” Liv said, her eyes wide.