I laughed and he let me go. Reluctantly.
I sat and pulled my legs up and without needing to say anything, Sean started pushing. I watched him moving like a flipbook, catching a shot of him every time the merry-go-round rotated. The pattern sped up until Sean leaped on and we lay head to head, my legs in one direction and his in the other, staring up at the night.
“Probably not the greatest night to declare my undying love for you, huh?”
I curled my hand up over my shoulder, searching for Sean’s and letting my eyes drop closed when the tips of his fingers laced through mine. Without a word. Without a glance. He just knew.
“What did she tell you this time?”
The fingers in my free hand curled, scraping across the metal tread of the merry-go-round. “Typical mom stuff. My not-real-dad couldn’t stand the sight of me as a baby and the only reason he spent any time with me as a kid was to punish her. So, you know.” I shrugged like I didn’t care what she’d said, but the truth was lodged in my throat as I turned my head away from Sean.
After a long minute, Sean simply said, “Well, okay.”
I looked back. “Okay? That’s all you have to say?”
“Pretty much. I mean I always wondered if your mom was stupid or just evil, and now I know. She’s both.”
Air whooshed out of me. I hadn’t known how much I’d needed someone else to say that. “You think?”
“Oh, yeah.” Sean curled an arm behind his head. “And to be clear, she’s not taking you for any amount of time. I don’t care what we have to do.”
I shouldn’t have felt like smiling at him, but I did. He so clearly meant it. I almost asked him what we would do just to hear how far he’d be willing to go. But, with Sean, I already knew the answer.
“No,” I said. “I’ve got more than sixteen months’ worth of fighting in me, after that I’ll be eighteen and it’ll be no one’s choice but mine.” My almost smile slipped away and the knot in my throat rose infinitesimally higher. “But I don’t think she was lying about my dad when I was little. She was telling the truth about my paternity, and the rest makes sense. It does.”
“Jill...” Sean flipped to my side and wrapped an arm around me. “I love you like Claire loves her treadmill, but I’ve got nothing on your dad.”
Sean was warm where his side pressed against mine and he made things so easy when I tried to make them hard. I squeezed his hand. “I’m really glad you came.”
“I’m glad you let me. Do it more often, will you? Oh, and that,” he added when I shifted closer. “See how well we fit?”
I let my head tip onto his shoulder.
Above us the stars looked like they were glowing water ripples, like stones skipped across the sky.
It was a good fit.
CHAPTER 42
It was late when Sean drove me back to the shop to pick up Dad’s truck. Not curfew-breaking late, but near enough. Just as we passed Pep Boys, I knew something was wrong. The lights were on at the shop even though I’d turned them off.
I went a little pale when we turned into the parking lot and Sean’s headlights illuminated Dad standing in the open garage bay.
“Did you call him?”
I shook my head. I’d turned my phone off when Mom showed up, but when I turned it back on, the screen lit up with missed calls. Lots of missed calls. Most from Dad.
As soon as he parked, Sean reached for his door, but I stopped him. “You sure? ’Cause I don’t mind getting yelled at.” He looked back at Dad standing directly over the spot that had previously held my Spitfire. “And you are about to get yelled at.”
“It’ll be worse if you’re there. And I need to tell him everything.”
Sean touched my hand as I opened my door, squeezing it. “Hey.” He waited for me to look back. “He loves you. I do too.”
I couldn’t dwell on that look and those words, but later I was going to let myself think about Sean and... Yeah. “I’ll call you.”
Sean’s headlights passed over us as he backed out, leaving me to walk the dozen or so feet to the garage in relative darkness. I used every shadowed step to fortify myself for what I had to say.
Everywhere my eyes touched, a memory lay fresh on the surface. And the memories weren’t of me crying over dirty hands or wishing I could take ballet; not one. They were of racing creepers with Dad on slow days; eating calzones with one hand so we wouldn’t have to break for lunch on busy ones; Dad holding me up to stand on a bumper and inspect an engine; the first day I walked into the shop and saw my name on the board by itself, not alongside Dad’s as his helper; realizing no matter how many hours I spent sliding across the floor in my socks, I’d never be able to moonwalk as well as Dad.
And he was my dad. His nose had the same little bump on the ridge that mine did. He used to skate his finger down it and pretend the bump caused his hand to fly off my face, making me laugh until my belly hurt. And they were the same. My bump and his. It didn’t matter that his came from when he used to wrestle in high school and mine came from what amounted to a sperm donor.
“Dad?”
He was holding a piece of paper in his hands. The crease said he had folded and unfolded it at least a dozen times. He folded it again before answering. “You took the Spitfire.”
That ill-fated joyride with Claire felt like a lifetime ago. “I know I shouldn’t have, but—”
He gestured in the direction Sean had driven off and my obviously missing car. “Anybody hurt?”
“No.”
“And the Spitfire?”
“Hurt.” I didn’t wait for him to ask for details. Halfway through describing the leaking coolant, he cut me off.
“We’ll talk about that later.” He took his paper in both hands and stared at it. “This morning, about what your mom told you, I didn’t get to—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
“Not to me.” Claire said it didn’t have to matter unless I let it, and she was right. Me and Dad. Nothing else mattered as long as it was the two of us. I’d always thought that, but I didn’t know it until that year. Mom leaving the way she did, why she did; all of it had torn everything else away. It had poisoned Sean for me, given me a connection to Daniel that ended up hurting us both. Even my relationship with Claire had suffered as I’d withdrawn from her and just about everything else.
But I’d still had Dad. He’d still had me. When Mom had said she was going to take me from him, had tried to tell me he was never mine, I’d fractured head to toe. And I’d existed way too long in that fragile fearful state, knowing a sharp blow, a misplaced step, would shatter me.
But it didn’t matter. Only one thing did.
“Why did you send me away today?” My voice was that of a little girl. I heard it and felt it, the smallness, the vulnerability. “You said she could take me and you couldn’t stop her. Why didn’t we leave? Why didn’t we go to Oregon or anywhere that she couldn’t find me?”
I noticed his hand tightening around the paper he held. The skin between his brows furrowed. “I tried to forgive her. I tried. But when you were born, you looked nothing like me. So I stopped trying.”
I listened to Dad go on about the utter ruination of his marriage and the role he’d played, the one I’d never known about and still couldn’t fully blame him for. Not even after he confirmed some of what Mom had told me.
“I wasn’t a good husband when I had the chance, when it might have mattered. I needed today to think about what taking you from her would mean, because I stopped wanting to punish her a long time ago. How could I, when she gave me you?”
With that one sentence my world straightened. The ground was solid under my feet and I felt whole, loved by the person I needed most. He could have stopped then. I didn’t need another word; even if every o
ther accusation she’d leveled against him was true, she couldn’t break us. Nothing could.
“It was...hard when you were born.” Something twitched in Dad’s eye. “I didn’t want to love you, but I couldn’t help it. I still can’t.”
I couldn’t hold back anymore. I charged across the garage and into Dad, knowing he would catch me. He rocked back a few steps, laughing into my hair and hoisting me into the air. And there was my hug. The one he wouldn’t give me in our kitchen earlier. The one that he’d held back because he didn’t know if he had a right to take me from her again when he blamed himself for so much.
The paper he’d been holding slipped from his hand and fluttered open on the ground. The print was patchy in places since we were always running low on ink, but I could read it plainly. And I started to ugly cry.
Not because I needed more proof; I didn’t. But it felt good, better than good, knowing it was right there in black and white.
A flight confirmation for two one-way tickets to Portland.
Dad pulled back, holding my shoulders. “Jill, it’s okay now.”
I nodded because it was, no matter what happened next. “When the Spitfire broke down, I called her. I wasn’t going to wait for her to show up again. I tried to make her understand that it’s you and me, Dad. Always and forever. But I don’t know what she’s going to do.” I bent down and picked up the paper. “But I want to stay here, to fight here.”
Dad let me go so suddenly that I wobbled. He took the paper from me and tore it into pieces, smiling the whole time. “I came looking for you after I printed this.” He dropped the shredded pieces onto the table. “But when I got here, your mom...she called me. Jill, she’s not going to fight us.”
Something fluttered in my chest, and I remembered that last hug she’d given me. For a moment I forgot everything she’d done to Dad and me and Sean. For one soaring heartbeat, I let her love me. I closed my eyes. “Say it again.”
He touched his forehead to mine. “She’s not taking you away from me. It’s over. You’re stuck with me now, kid. Oil changes and cold pizza and—”
“Everything I could ever want.”
CHAPTER 43
Nothing about Arizona weather was subtle. Five months of summer meant it wasn’t just hot outside; you felt the skin cells on your body die as the sun burned them away. Rain was no kinder, except we didn’t call it anything so mundane as rain. It had its own season—monsoon—and it overlapped with the last two months of summer, bringing with it torrential thunderstorms, flash flooding, dust devils and the more frightening haboob dust walls that could average 30mph.
By the end of July, the air had lost its burning sting in favor of sticky heaviness despite the still-blistering sun. I could almost see steam rise up from the earth each time the rain hit.
It wasn’t unusual for the retention basin down the street to flood high enough that some of our neighbors took kayaks and inner tubes to the makeshift pond.
Driving became something of a combat sport. All the rain brought oil and grime to the road surfaces, making them slick and slippery. Add in near-zero visibility and flooded underpasses, and business at the shop picked up considerably.
It felt wrong to be happy about that, but I was.
And the much-needed influx in business wasn’t just from the monsoon season. Claire and Sean and I passed out flyers until we had more paper cuts than skin on our hands. It wasn’t until that first week of August, however, that I realized we were going to make it. Not just the shop, but me and Dad.
Each day after that last visit with Mom felt surreal. We weren’t going to get a letter from a lawyer or another call from her. I’d wake up in my bed—which I’d begun sleeping in on a trial basis—and I wouldn’t believe that she was truly gone.
And it was hard wanting to smile and cry about that. Because she was my mom. She would always be my mom, so it would never be as simple as hating her and not.
I wanted to talk to Daniel about it like I wanted air. I was panting for it. I missed him. But it bothered me that maybe I didn’t miss him enough.
He’d gotten home two days ago. I saw his Jeep, but not him. The past couple nights I’d thought about going up to my roof to see if he might slip out and join me, but I never got farther than peering out my closed window. It wasn’t a good idea to be that person for him; it wasn’t fair to either of us. And it wasn’t like he was seeking me out either. Maybe it was better that way.
So instead of escaping to my roof at night, I went during the day.
I normally sat on the flat spread of roof that covered the back patio, but this time I sat closer to the edge, letting my bare legs hang free as I leaned back on my palms and watched the sunset.
There was still a sliver of golden sun peeking through in the west. The deep purple sky was shot through with vibrant pinks and oranges. They never looked quite real. Even after nearly seventeen years, there was something sublime about Arizona sunsets. It looked more like a child’s paint set splashed across the sky, only it was too perfectly painted.
Of course I looked at Daniel’s house, but I looked down at mine too.
Only two people lived there. I dragged my hand across the shingles, feeling the rough surface scratch against my palm.
I didn’t startle when Sean poked his head up over the edge. I’d watched his Jetta pull up and knew Dad would have told him where I was.
A month ago, the idea of sharing this space with Sean would have horrified me. Back then, he was one of the main things I was trying to escape. But I didn’t feel the need to hide from him anymore. I wanted him with me. After that night on the merry-go-round, the idea of watching the sunset with Sean—or doing anything with him—was about as far from horrifying as it could get.
He knocked on the eave, making me smile. “I brought you something. It’s part of my get-Jill-to-love-me strategy.”
Then he chucked something at my head.
His phone. Then his keys. Both of which narrowly avoided hitting me in the face.
“This is you trying to get me to love you?”
Sean grinned. “Nah. This is me throwing stuff at you that I don’t want to drop. But it’s cool, I can multitask.” He tossed one more item at me.
When I caught the closed bag, the rich, buttery scent danced up my nose as I opened it. I loved movie popcorn. Sometimes I’d even buy it without going to a movie. Even cold it was delicious.
And Sean had brought me a bag. “What movie did you see?”
“No movie. I figured you’d like this more than flowers.”
It’d be really easy to fall for Sean again. Too easy.
So far, his multitasking was impressive.
“Does the grin on your face mean you’re inviting me up?”
I smiled bigger. Yes, I was.
Sean stopped several feet from the edge where I sat. “Why don’t you come back this way.”
I patted the roof next to me. “It’s nice right here.”
Sean took a step, a small one, then stayed where he was. “Nope. Can’t do it.”
“Sean.” I shifted around on my knees and set the popcorn aside. “Are you afraid of heights?”
“Yes,” he said. “Come over here and comfort me.”
I laughed. “It’s a one-story house.”
“Sometimes it’s the principle of the thing. Now come here. I’m cold and frightened.”
“Why did you come up here, if you don’t like heights?”
“Because I was highly motivated.”
Sean didn’t even blink when he said that, which made me feel decidedly not cold or frightened.
I walked over, and the second I got within arm’s reach, he pulled me to him. He didn’t let go of me even after we sat down, as though he thought one or both of us could plummet to our deaths at any moment. I pu
lled back. “You do know you’ll have to climb down at some point.”
“I do,” he said. “I have a plan. You go down first, then you catch me. Good plan, right?”
“I could always get my dad to catch you.”
“Wouldn’t work.” He shifted to reach across me and place a hand on the roof by my hip. “I’d lose my incentive to jump.”
I laughed and pushed him back while my heart fluttered not unpleasantly.
“Besides, it was the only way I could think of to see you today.”
“I see you practically every day.”
“I know, and I already have to work at that.”
I cocked my head at him. “It’s not really that hard when we do everything together.”
“Shall I enlighten you?” Then he laughed and my toes curled. “Some of this is mildly embarrassing, so try not to mock too much.”
And then he told me.
“Your bike is destroying my backseat, but I keep it covered with a blanket so you’ll let me keep driving you home.”
I tried to lean around him to see if I could make anything out from where he was parked, but Sean mirrored my movement and caught my hand.
“Sometimes I let the air out of my tires so you’ll help me change them.” His thumb started tracing the veins at my wrist causing my pulse to speed up. “See my bumper? I deliberately backed into a tree two days ago. For you. Well, for me really, because I’ll get to be with you when you fix it.”
I made a face.
“I told you it was embarrassing.”
“No, it’s not that.” I squirmed a little in his hands. “But did you have to wreck your car?”
Whatever Sean was expecting me to say, that wasn’t it. His dimples went into overdrive. “That’s what bothers you about what I just said? Wrecking my car? Here.” He lifted my hand and placed it on his chest directly over his heart. “I’d drive it into the canal if that’s what it took.”
If I Fix You Page 22
