by Sylvia Fox
Ayla hadn’t yet made good on her promise to visit, despite the fact that Tara said she and Preston could come and stay for free whenever they wanted to. They kept in touch mostly via social media.
“Ayla! Are you serious?” Tara was practically shouting into the phone.
“What?” Ayla replied, still more asleep than awake, driving to work on autopilot, waiting for her energy drink to kick in.
“The video you sent me! That’s totally the guy!”
Ayla sent a link to the news story about Watterson Gaming to Tara right before she went to bed the previous evening, which was actually less than three hours prior. Tara and Natalie were the only two people who’d seen the mystery man from Scald that night on the parking garage rooftop, and everybody had lost touch with Natalie.
“Thank you! I know I’m not crazy!” Ayla responded. “It’s him, right?”
“I’d bet my life on it,” said Tara. “And how freaking hot is he?”
Ayla pulled back into traffic. “Very. Nice signal, asshole! Sorry, not you, Tara.”
Tara laughed. “Duh, no worries. I have to ask. How wet did you get seeing him again?”
“Stop it. Do you ever think of anything besides sex?”
“Why would I want to?” Tara asked. “What’s better?”
“I barely remember,” Ayla confessed. “Ever since Preston, it’s been work, work, work, baby, baby, baby. Occasionally sleep. Sex hasn’t exactly been a priority.”
“Sucks to be you. Why don’t you grab Watterson Gaming guy and come to Pennsylvania? There’s nothing here but woods to explore, and our dogs love kids. You could have plenty of adult time. Just putting that out there.”
“Yeah, you make it sound so easy,” Ayla replied, pulling into the parking lot at National Parcel Express. “I can’t even figure out where to start with the guy. I can’t just barge into Watterson’s corporate office, Preston in tow, find him, and say ‘Here’s your kid!’”
“Yeah, that might not strike the right tone. But what do they say, ‘knowing is half the battle’? Hypnotize him with your ass, girl.”
“You’re impossible. I’m at work, I gotta go. But you’re sure it’s him, right?”
“Not a doubt in my mind,” Tara confirmed. “Although you, ah, got a bit better look at him than I did.”
“Love you, thanks.”
“Miss you, friend.”
Exhaustion be damned, Ayla bounced into work. She was energized and ignored Jeff’s nasty attitude and with the news that the last truck they were expecting from Fresno had been delayed, she got out of work a bit early.
The weekend was off to a good start.
Lupe had only been there for fifteen minutes when Ayla got home, and Preston greeted his mother at the door. “Buenos dias mami te amo como fue el tr-tr-trajabo?”
“Trabajo,” Lupe corrected Preston’s fledgling Spanish. “Work.”
“Oh yeah, trabajo. How was work?”
Ayla laughed. “Work was work. Yucky. But we got done early, so that’s cool, right? Want me to make pancakes? Lupe, would you like to stay for breakfast?”
Lupe agreed, and Ayla whipped up a batch of pancakes that the three of them ate while Lupe continued Preston’s crash course in Spanish.
Day three of learning Spanish had Preston excited about going to daycare to play with his “friends,” Gilberto and Luis, and Ayla’s morning at the call center was as close to “not terrible” as it ever got.
Her first break rolled around and she checked her phone on the way to the vending machine to grab a Mountain Dew for a caffeine burst.
She opened a text from Desiree, in all caps:
MICK MERRYWEATHER. HIS NAME IS MICK MERRYWEATHER. TEXT ME ASAP!
Ayla stopped in her tracks and stared at the phone. Her palm covered her mouth and her eyes struggled not to bug right out of her head.
Mick Merryweather. Preston Merryweather. Ayla Merryweather? She thought of the three names and then spoke them aloud.
Ayla slumped down against the wall in the hallway outside the breakroom, laughing and crying simultaneously. She replied to her roommate’s text.
“Tell me more!”
Moments later, Desiree replied.
“About time! I asked around and one of the managers here worked at Watterson. The guy is Winston Watterson’s bodyguard. Mick Merryweather. He’s British. That’s all I know, I’ll keep poking around.”
British? Ayla knew he had an accent of some sort, but it was slight. Maybe he’d lived in the United States for a long time?
“THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!”
Ayla sat and stared at the name until several co-workers went rushing by, anxious to avoid the wrath of Teri Palermo.
“Shit!” Ayla exclaimed, and she rushed back to her cubicle, sans caffeine. She didn’t need it. She was high on Mick Merryweather.
Teri glared at Ayla’s smile; nobody was supposed to be that happy on her watch.
11
All Ayla wanted to do was stay put in Las Vegas and scheme up a way to cross paths with Mick, but she’d promised Preston a trip to California and a Dodgers game. Ayla knew that nothing short of Santa Claus could get between a six-year-old and a Dodger Dog, with a mini-batting helmet hot fudge sundae to wash it down.
As tricky as it would be to introduce herself, and the idea of Preston, to Mick, she hadn’t yet even begun to dissect how she’d bring a father into her son’s life.
A father and… grandparents?
Her own parents had made it clear from the moment Ayla knew she was pregnant that they wanted nothing to do with her “bastard child.”
Ayla had never had such a visceral reaction to spoken words in her life. When she’d mustered up the courage to tell her parents that she was expecting, her father gasped and looked like he might faint. Her mother, on the other hand, seethed with rage and told her that there was “no place for a bastard grandchild in our lives.”
It felt like being hit with a sledgehammer, right in the gut. She knew they’d be disappointed, possibly upset, but she figured that the reality of a baby would soften them. But when that awful, horrible word crossed her mother’s lips, Ayla decided then and there that her parents deserved no place in the baby’s life, either.
Preston knew he had a mommy who loved him, and that Auntie Desiree was “family.”
He had his aunt, uncle, and cousins in California, and that was enough. Ayla’s little brother, Allan, had snuck in a few visits to meet Preston when he was a baby, but he’d left for the Air Force after high school, and he hadn’t been back since before his nephew turned three.
Preston had once asked why he didn’t have a grandma and grandpa like the kids he saw on TV, and Ayla explained that just like some kids have brothers, others sisters, some both, or, like him, neither, it was the same with grandmas and grandpas.
And daddies.
As brave as she was when she explained it to Preston’s evident five-year-old satisfaction, she cried and cried that night.
Mick, however, wasn’t just Mick, was he? Would his parents be any more receptive to having a grandson? Did he have brothers or sisters? Did Preston have cousins? Ayla’s mind raced as she cruised south on Interstate 15, bound for California. Preston noticed that Mommy was preoccupied, but he didn’t push the matter. He counted trucks and kept asking her to play something “cool” on the radio, until she relented and put in one of his Kidz Bop CDs.
Friday night traffic was awful both directions on the highway, and it took until nearly midnight to reach Amy’s house. Ayla was ready to collapse, but after putting Preston to bed, she had to read two articles Desiree had sent her.
It was from a decade earlier, in a newspaper called The Sheffield Telegraph. Prominent in the article was a picture that included a young Mick Merryweather, carrying a casket.
Ayla read about a funeral for somebody called Frank Merryweather, Mick’s younger brother. He was a football star from Sheffield, England, and he’d died in some sort of traffic accident.
Mick was mentioned as a “Royal Air Force” veteran, and Frank was survived by Mick and their parents, Beverly and Harry.
Beverly and Harry. Preston’s grandparents.
Ayla clicked on the next link, and a picture in the story stopped her heart. It was Mick, with tears streaming down his scrunched up face, next to his stoic father. They were standing near a statue with hands and three doves; somewhere called Bramall Road.
Mick looked sadder than anybody Ayla had ever seen, and she was overwhelmed with the need to reach out and hug him, hold him, kiss his face, and take away his pain. It tore a hole in her, seeing such raw, terrible emotion on his rugged face. For as little as she truly knew about him, they’d shared something so deep and intense, that she felt his ache through the years and the miles that separated her from the man on her laptop screen.
The sculpture was a memorial to Frank, Mick’s brother, she learned in the story.
Answers only raised questions. How did Mick wind up in Las Vegas? For her, that night on the rooftop was totally out of character; a wonderfully insane aberration in her otherwise mundane existence. A magical moment that spawned the joy of her life, Preston. Did Mick even remember that night? Was she just one drop of water in an ocean of women for dashing military man Mick Merryweather?
She texted Desiree and thanked her for her efforts and drifted off to a much-needed sleep, in-between kicks to the ribs from Preston, with whom she shared a bed when they visited Aunt Amy.
A king-sized bed, but Preston’s nocturnal gymnastics; knees, feet, and elbows, were unforgiving, to say the least.
For breakfast, Amy cut up what seemed like ten pounds of strawberries and several whole cantaloupes. The three children, Preston and his two cousins, inhaled the fresh fruit and asked for popcorn to top it off. Ayla was always amazed at Preston’s appetite; he’d go days surviving on a string cheese here and there, and then in one day eat enough to feed an entire football team. Today, evidently, was a “hungry” day. She cringed at the thought of filling his bottomless pit of a stomach at ballpark prices later that afternoon.
When the kids went outside to play in the backyard, Ayla sat down with her sister on the porch.
“You won’t believe this,” Ayla said. “But I’m pretty sure I found Preston’s dad.”
Amy’s jaw dropped. “Sis! Are you serious? Tell me everything!”
Ayla brought up the news story from two nights ago on her phone and played it for her sister. She paused it when Mick was on the screen.
“Right there. That’s him,” she reported, pointing him out.
“Holy shit,” Amy whispered. She looked out at Preston, running through the yard with a toy spaceship. “They’re practically twins. Now I just wonder who his real mom is!”
Ayla playfully punched her sister.
“I knew he didn’t look like a Murray, but good grief,” Amy said, staring at the image on her sister’s phone. “That man has some strong genes.”
“Mick. His name is Mick Merryweather. The guy in front, Winston Watterson? He’s the president of Watterson Gaming, the big casino company back home.”
Amy nodded.
“Mick is his bodyguard. He’s from England.”
“Have you talked to him yet?”
“No, not yet. I just saw him on TV two nights ago. My roommate, Desiree, works with somebody who used to work at Watterson. She’s been doing my detective work.”
“This is super-exciting, Ayla. What’s your plan?”
“I have absolutely no clue,” Ayla confessed. “You’re my big sister, aren’t you supposed to have some advice for me?”
Amy furrowed her brow in thought.
“Watterson… Watterson… what’s his deal? The guy he guards, I mean. Winston, is it?”
“Yep, that’s him, but I don’t know. Do you think he has a Wiki page? Let me look him up.”
The sisters moved their deck chairs closer together so they could both look at Ayla’s phone.
“Here it is. He went to Stanford, and then Northwestern for grad school,” Ayla narrated his bio. “Before that, he’d gone to a boarding school in Connecticut. But… it looks like he actually graduated from Oasis Academy. That’s that rich kid’s school out in Summerlin. It’s like $30,000 a year to go there.”
“Naturally, that’s where you’ll be sending Preston, right?” Amy asked, sarcastically.
“Oh, absolutely,” Ayla assured her. “I wonder if they’ll give me a break on tuition if I wanted to pay for first grade thru twelfth all at once?”
“I’m sure they’d be willing to work with you. Maybe knock off a thousand,” Amy joked.
“In that case, I’d just pay cash. I can’t figure why everybody doesn’t send their kids there!”
“Well, that’s interesting, actually,” Amy said. “Do you remember my friend Char, from high school? Charmaine Anderson?”
Ayla nodded. She knew the name, even if she couldn’t place a face with it.
“Char dated a guy, for like a year, who went to Oasis. He was a total douchebag, but she got to go to their prom,” Amy explained. “The school rented out a club at the Hard Rock for it. Can you believe that shit?”
“Only in Vegas,” Ayla said,
“Only at Oasis Academy,” Amy countered. “No other school had anything like that. She said it made our prom look like, I don’t know, a middle school dance. She said people were arriving in Hummer limos and that a helicopter even landed in the parking lot to drop off two couples.”
“What?” Ayla asked, in stunned disbelief.
“Yep, true story. I thought I told you about it. Maybe not. Anyway, Char told me that the girls there were fierce. Like hair and makeup and jewelry you’d usually only see on a red carpet. She said she felt completely out of place.
“Anyway, I wonder if Char’s prom date knew Winston Watterson at all. Or, check his Wiki – does it say if he has any siblings who might have been there?”
Ayla scrolled back up to the top of the page. “He has two sisters. One older, one younger. The older one is… Wanda, she’s married to some Russian gazillionaire. The younger one is… well, I guess she works for Watterson, she’s not linked, it just has her name, Wendryn.”
“That family loves W’s,” Amy noted. “Let me run this whole thing through Char. It would be a shot in the dark, I mean she may not even know the guy from Oasis anymore. But maybe he knew one of the Wattersons.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Ayla agreed. “Preston! Stop!”
Ayla stormed across the yard to make her son return a dinosaur he’d snatched from Amy’s crying three-year-old son.
“Crisis averted,” Ayla announced when she returned to the porch.
“Never for long. All they do is fuss and fight. I’d have thought having a boy and a girl would make them get along better than two of the same sex, but no, it’s a constant struggle. I guess being so competitive will serve them well when they get older, but right now it sucks.”
Amy typed on her phone as she complained about her kids.
“Alright, I sent Charmaine a PM. She’s in Phoenix, she usually gets back to me pretty quickly, we’ll see.”
The kids played until it was time for Amy’s to take a nap and for Ayla and Preston to leave for Dodger Stadium.
As they walked out to the car, Amy followed and pulled her sister aside. “Char just got back to me. She said she’s actually friends with the guy on Facebook. He’s a hotshot lawyer in Texas somewhere now. She said she doesn’t really talk to him talk to him, but that she’d message him and ask if he knew any Wattersons.”
“Okay, cool. But yikes, I must look like a crazy stalker going through my sister’s classmates’ prom date from ten years ago to get me closer to meeting this guy.”
“Oh, Ayla, you have no idea. I’m obsessed now. And you know me, I’m like a bulldog. Once I set my mind on something, I can’t stop until it gets resolved. If I have to apply for a job with Watterson Gaming and get an interview in order to get into their offices and maybe bu
mp into Winston or Mick, I’ll do it.”
“I know you will, that’s why I love you, sis. But do me a favor and please don’t do that. Having a nutcase for a potential future sister-in-law might not be the best selling point for me.”
“Mom! We’re going to be late!” Preston called from the end of the driveway, by Ayla’s car.
Ayla rolled her eyes, thanked her sister for the umpteenth time for the tickets, hugged her, and strolled down to join her son and, soon, the world famous Los Angeles freeway traffic.
The game was a success, a 6-1 Dodger victory, and Preston had the time of his life. Between the hot sun, the excitement of the crowd, three Dodger Dogs, and ice cream, he was napping in the backseat before they were halfway back to Amy’s house.
Preston and his cousins settled in for a movie once they were home, giving Ayla and Amy time to chat in the kitchen over a bottle of wine.
Amy hadn’t heard back from Charmaine yet, but Ayla had something else she wanted to ask her sister.
“Do you think, I don’t even know why I ask, but do you think if I manage to meet Mick, and things go well, and in some fantasy world we even get married, do you think mom and dad would ever want to be part of Preston’s life? Or mine?”
“Oh God, Ayla, I can’t even begin to imagine. Honestly, I think given the chance, Dad would. I mean today, right now. Dad is, and I hate to even mention it because the whole thing with you and them totally sucks, but he’s been an awesome grandpa to our kids. As involved as he can be, from three hundred miles away, you know, but yeah. He asks me about you. When it’s just the two of us. About you and Preston.”
Ayla fought back tears, and Amy rubbed her shoulder.
“But mom is a different story. She’s just the same. Maybe worse. It’s like she acts like what she thinks a grandmother is supposed to be like, but it’s all forced, you know? Fake. It’s not sincere. She’s so stuck on image, on what things look like, not how things really are, or should be.
“Whenever I’ve mentioned you, she always shuts me down. It’s like you could have killed somebody and you wouldn’t have done something as bad as having a baby out of wedlock. Or, actually, having sex, gasp, outside the bonds of holy matrimony.”
