“I could supply the down payment,” he said.
The combative fire returned to her eyes. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Do you think you’re going to buy your way into our lives, Michael? Or is it guilt money?”
“Call it child support,” he suggested, deciding then and there that he would insist on helping her out with the house. If she let him do nothing else, she would have to allow him that. Had he known of Jeffrey’s existence, he would have been sending money all along. He wasn’t a deadbeat. He would have paid enough so that Emmie could have stayed home with Jeffrey until he was older, if that was what she’d wanted. He would have paid the hospital bills. He would have done what a father was supposed to do.
She opened her mouth and then closed it. After lifting her glass, she studied him above the rim, then sipped. Evidently she thought his offer was worthy of serious consideration.
“It’s a big chunk of money,” she said.
“Not a problem.”
“If I agreed to let you do this,” she asked, leveling her gaze at him, “what would you expect in return?”
He cursed. He’d been keeping himself reined in, letting her pour out her emotions. But for God’s sake, he had emotions, too. Just that afternoon he’d learned that he was a father, that a woman he’d once loved had given birth on Valentine’s Day four years and some months ago and he’d never known about it. His son had been on this earth, living and growing, and Michael had been left completely in the dark. He deserved to throw a fit as much as she did.
“I’m his father,” he growled, rage surging inside him. “If I want to support him I’ll damned well support him.”
“You don’t even know him,” she pointed out.
That silenced him. She was right, of course. He drummed his fingers on the table and sorted his thoughts. “Okay, tell me this. What would be the ideal situation for you? To own this house and have me out of your life?”
“That sounds nice.” She tempered her words with a grin.
“Why do you want me out of your life? Do you hate me that much, after so many years?”
She shook her head and traced the edge of her glass with her fingertip. “I’ve built something here, Michael,” she said hesitantly, as if speaking the words the instant they took shape in her mind. “I did it all by myself. I had no help from my family or from you. And I’ve done a pretty good job of it, all things considered. But it’s...delicate. I’ve worked awfully hard to get everything balanced just so. You destroy the balance.”
He reminded himself that she had once been an upper-class girl from a cozy, conservative home. She liked stability. Traveling to San Pablo had been the most daring thing she’d ever done-and she’d done it under the auspices of a church. Then she’d gone and done something even more daring: she’d fallen in love with Michael.
And that had turned out badly.
So she didn’t want to take chances. She didn’t want to risk anything on him. She wanted to protect what she had.
He was the opposite, maybe because he’d never had much to begin with. He’d never been afraid of taking chances and forging into new territory. If he had, he’d be working in a warehouse side by side with his father in Bakersfield, instead of consulting with the leaders of industry and the government.
“I’m not going to promise you that your life and will be the same if I’m here. But I’m his father. You can’t just shut me out like that.”
“Do you have any idea what it means to be a father?” she asked.
“I’ll learn.”
“Do you know how to kiss a boo-boo and make it all better? Do you know how to bring down a child’s fever? Do you know how to take the itch out of chicken pox? How to make sure sneakers fit properly? How to make Eeyore’s voice when you read Winnie-the-Pooh out loud? Do you know what to feed an imaginary monster that lives in a tree?”
Michael slumped in his chair, trying not to succumb to defeat. No, he didn’t know how to make Eeyore’s voice and what an imaginary monster might eat. But he knew a few things. “I know my son likes KFC chicken and mashed potatoes. I’ll learn the rest.”
She eyed him speculatively. “It’s not easy.”
“Easy doesn’t interest me.”
Another long stare, and then she blinked. Her eyes glistened with new tears, but they didn’t fall. “I don’t love you, Michael,” she said, her voice as clear and pale as the wine in her glass. “I did once, but I don’t anymore. That’s not going to change.”
“Another thing I know,” he continued, refusing to flinch at the bald challenge in her words, “is that predicting what’s going to happen is a waste of time.” He refused to shift his gaze from her. “I didn’t come here to make you fall in love with me, Emmie. I came here...” He’d come because Maggie Tyrell’s advertisement had promised that lost lovers could be found. He’d come because there had been loose ends hanging between Emmie and him—more loose ends than he’d even known about—and because he didn’t want to live the rest of his life wondering about what had become of her, whether she ever thought about him, whether San Pablo was as special as he’d believed at the time.
He’d come because sex with her had been incredible and he wanted that again. Because talking with her had been just as incredible. Because every time he bit into a peach he thought of her. Because every time he saw a pink rose, every time he dug into one of his grandmother’s native-cuisine feasts, every time he thought about his brother Johnny, he remembered the intense, soul-shaking days he’d spent with Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon five years ago.
Maybe he’d come not to make her fall in love with him but to see if he could fall in love with her again.
LONG AFTER MICHAEL had gone and Jeffrey was in bed, she sat out on the patio, a final glass of chilled wine in her hand. The moon was waxing, a bright silver crescent cut into the sky like a cosmic smile. The crickets chirped, the cicadas buzzed and a few fireflies flickered near the hedges.
The monster in the tree ate shredded carrot peels. She supposed Michael could learn that much.
She wasn’t going to have to move. Jeffrey wasn’t going to lose his monster. She had given Michael permission to help her buy the house.
She couldn’t make herself feel bad about her decision. Michael was right: he was Jeffrey’s father, and if he hadn’t provided for the boy before, now was as good a time as any for him to start.
If accepting money from Michael meant accepting Michael himself, well, maybe she could do that, too—for Jeffrey’s sake. Jeffrey had asked her about his father a few times over the years, and she’d never answered him with lies. She’d told Jeffrey that she’d loved a man very much but that man wasn’t ready to settle down and return her love so he’d gone away. But Emmie was grateful to him because he’d given her Jeffrey.
She was grateful to Michael. If she was still a bit unsettled about what he’d done in San Pablo, she knew her greatest anger was over his having deceived her, presenting himself as a sweet, gentle professor instead of someone bent on revenge. But maybe his revenge was justified, and if the man he’d killed had been about to kill him and his friend, the killing had been justified, too.
She’d hated Michael because he’d left her. She’d hated him because she’d trusted him and loved him and he’d betrayed her. But she’d spoken the truth when she’d told him she didn’t hate him anymore.
Somehow she was going to have to make room for him in her life and Jeffrey’s. She wasn’t going to trust him—it was always possible that he would leave again, the way he had before. And she wasn’t going to tell Jeffrey who Michael was, at least not right away. She couldn’t bear to let Jeffrey grow attached to the man who was his father when she had so little faith that that man would stick around. One betrayed Kenyon in the family was quite enough.
Yet she would accept Michael’s help. She’d accept his money so she could keep her home.
And she would try with all her might not to let him upset her delicately balanced world.<
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHAT A PARADOX: Michael was going to spend the morning looking at apartments for himself and the afternoon helping Emmie to buy her house. He hadn’t seen much of her house beyond the entry, the living room and the kitchen—he’d glimpsed the dining room and a hallway leading off to what he assumed were the bedrooms-but he could gauge the size of the house from the exterior, and by his estimation it had three bedrooms.
More than enough room for him, even if Emmie didn’t want him in her bed.
He didn’t dare to suggest moving in with her, though. It was nothing short of a miracle that he’d gotten her to agree to accept some money from him. But she trusted him about as much as a field mouse might trust a snake.
He was supposed to meet her at her school at three o’clock that afternoon. From there they would drive to a local bank, where she had already processed a mortgage application, and she would reapply for the mortgage with Michael by her side, explaining to the mortgage guy that Michael would contribute the down-payment money. Michael should have been swallowing hard at the understanding that if the application went through, he would be writing a sizable check and handing it over to the bank on Emmie’s behalf. But when he thought of her struggling to keep Jeffrey clothed and fed and supplied with books and toys, not only didn’t he mind the idea of writing that check, but he actually was looking forward to it.
He wasn’t buying Emmie, he told himself. Nor was he buying access to his son. What he was buying was his own peace of mind, a sense that although he’d been less than honest with Emmie five years ago, he was at bottom an honorable man.
The apartments he looked at were uniformly depressing. The first one was large but dark; trees and surrounding buildings seemed to swallow the sunlight before it could reach the windows. The second apartment was so small he reflexively hunched his shoulders as he wandered through the cramped, stagnant rooms, feeling the walls closing in on him. The third apartment overlooked what had to be the busiest street in the eastern half of the state. In less than a minute he counted eleven eighteen-wheelers wheezing and grinding gears through the intersection outside the living-room window.
He wanted to live in Emmie’s house.
With Emmie.
And with Jeffrey, too—although the idea of spending every day with a little boy he didn’t know, but who was his own son, scared the hell out of him.
He returned to his hotel room, edgy but vaguely excited. He’d grown up in an environment bathed in uncertainty—his parents’ rocky marriage, their shaky finances, the friction between their Anglo and Latino cultures, his brother’s bad choices, his own frightening foray into higher education, a world no one in his family knew anything about. A little more uncertainty now shouldn’t bother him. But it did.
He did his best to tune it out and focus on a report he’d been hired to prepare for a client hoping to market snack crackers in Central America. He worked for a couple of hours, then grew restless. Trying not to think about Emmie and Jeffrey was tiring; he could lock them out of his thoughts for only so long before they broke down the door.
Two-thirty. Too early to go to Emmie’s school, but he wasn’t going to sit squinting at the screen of his laptop in his dreary hotel room anymore. He scooped up his keys and headed outside.
Downtown Wilborough contained its share of national chain outlets, but Main Street also boasted a fair number of mom-and-pop shops. He parked by a meter, inserted a coin and strolled up and down the street, wondering what it would be like to live in a pretty New England town. Springtime was balmier here than in Southern California, and infinitely more green. Trees exploded with leaves. Flowers cascaded from planters and window boxes. The previous day’s humidity had left everything fresh and dewy.
A sporting-goods store caught his eye. He wandered in and grinned at the display of hockey sticks and pads beneath a sign that read Hockey Gear For Summer Leagues On Sale. Summer hockey? In California, hockey seemed out of season even in the winter.
He worked his way through the store until he came upon a section filled with baseball equipment. He’d never taken much interest in hockey, but baseball was something he could understand. He and Johnny had played sandlot ball through the summer months ‘of their childhood.
He wondered if Jeffrey owned a glove or a bat. Emmie might read Winnie-the-Pooh in Eeyore’s voice to the boy, but had she ever bought him baseball gear?
It was something every American boy ought to have-American girls, too, Michael allowed, but at the moment he was thinking about just one particular American boy. He was thinking about that boy’s father, too, about how baseball was something a father taught his son.
Maybe Michael could do that.
He searched the store for a clerk, spotted one in the soccer department and waved him over. “What size bat should I get for a four-and-a-half-year-old boy?” he asked.
The clerk eyed the wood and aluminum bats and shook his head. “Hollow plastic, I’d guess. A whiffle-ball bat, maybe—but we don’t sell those. Most kids that young, you don’t want to encourage them to swing a clublike object around.”
“I see your point.” But Michael still wanted to buy something for Jeffrey. “How about a glove?”
“We’ve got some small gloves, sure,” the clerk said, leading Michael to a wall full of pegs with gloves hanging from them. “Is he a rightie or a leftie?”
Michael didn’t know. But he himself was right-handed, and he was pretty sure Emmie. was, too. “Rightie,” he guessed.
“Good thing. I don’t have too much to choose from for lefties.” The man pulled a few small leather baseball gloves from the wall and handed them to Michael.
He examined them. They were too tiny for him to try on, and they seemed stiff and rigid. He would have to teach Jeffrey how to break a glove in. Maybe he ought to buy some glove oil, too.
By the time he’d left the store, he had purchased a glove, a bottle of oil and a can of tennis balls. Jeffrey wasn’t ready for hardballs yet. He wasn’t even ready for softballs. Michael wasn’t sure what he was ready for, but he felt more like a father now than he had a few minutes ago.
He got back into his car and drove to the Oak Hill School. It was a pretty suburban primary school, a one-story redbrick building with broad windows and a flat roof. The circular front driveway was jammed with bright-yellow buses, and children streamed from the building in a formation just this side of chaos.
He drove to the parking lot, parked and got out. Approaching the front door, he saw only an endless torrent of children-children who might stand as tall as his shoulders and children who would have to rise on tiptoe to come up even with his hip. They chattered, shouted, shoved one another and used language he would have gotten slapped for using at their age. Suddenly the new child-size glove sitting in the trunk of his car didn’t make him feel like a father anymore.
Again it hit him that he knew nothing about children. Nothing about their gaudy clothes, their shrill voices, their oversize backpacks, their untied sneakers. Why had he forced the parenthood issue with Emmie last night? Why hadn’t he left things alone?
He wanted to believe it was because he was at heart a moral, responsible man. But maybe it was also because he desired Emmie. The only way he could possibly win her respect at this point was to prove how moral and responsible he was.
He would prove it. He would figure out kids. He’d gotten the fried-chicken part right last night He’d introduce his son to baseball today. In time, with practice, he’d figure out the rest.
Like swimming against the current, he worked his way through the stream of exiting children to the front door of the school and inside. A secretary was posted behind a broad desk in a glass-enclosed office overlooking the lobby, but she was on the phone and didn’t notice him, so he decided not to check in with her. Instead he turned down one of the corridors, searching for Emmie.
The walls were decorated with juvenile artwork and neatly typed poems and essays. The water fountains were navel-high
and the floors durable linoleum. Most of the classroom doors were open. He peeked into each one as he passed. Chairs were perched atop desks; bulletin boards were cluttered with more primitive art and school papers; chalkboards were sponged down. This school wasn’t so different from the school he’d attended as a child, but he felt as if he’d entered an alien universe.
Around a bend in the corridor, he peered into yet another open classroom and spotted Emmie. Dressed in a flowing skirt with a cheerful floral print and a crisp white blouse, she was seated on the edge of her desk, talking to a boy who stood before her.
Not wanting to intrude, Michael remained half hidden outside the doorway. He heard Emmie’s voice, low and soothing, and the boy’s voice, also muted. He couldn’t make out the words, but he sensed from the way they faced each other, the way Emmie patted the boy’s shoulder, the way she tilted her head and smiled, that the conversation was serious but not deadly. Eventually the boy hoisted a bulging backpack off the floor, slung it over his shoulder and jogged out of the room, his huge sneakers clomping against the floor.
Following the boy with her gaze, Emmie noticed Michael. Her eyes widened slightly, and she pushed away from her desk.
Yes, he thought, taking in the sway of her hair, the ethereal beauty of her eyes, the gentleness with which she’d talked to the boy. What he wanted had to do with Jeffrey, but it also had to do with Emmie. It had to do with the fact that Michael felt exactly the same way he’d felt five years ago, when he’d glimpsed her shopping for peaches in the town market in San Pablo. She’d worn a loose, feminine skirt then, too, one that only hinted at the proportions of her hips and legs. Her skin had been a bit darker from exposure to the tropical sun, and her eyes had contained more laughter, but she was just as enchanting today as she’d been five years ago. He had known on that fateful Saturday morning in San Pablo that he wanted the lovely blond woman with the elegant hands and the slender build. He wanted her now, just as much, and it seemed just as fateful.
Found: One Son Page 17
