Love and Other Mistakes

by Jessica Kate

  “Fine.” Her tone was flat, but her eyes sparked.

  The beginnings of a migraine prodded his brain.

  Nat reached for her cup and found it empty. She indicated her hands, full of baby and dinner. “Could you grab me a drink, Jem?”

  “I’ll get it.” Dad hefted himself from his seat before Jem could respond. He rummaged through the fridge. Jem turned when a glug-glug-glug sounded at the sink.

  Dad held a wine bottle upside down over the drain.

  Jem slammed his cutlery onto the table. Lili jumped.

  Of course Dad would take the overbearing and judgmental route. “Dad, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Don’t cause a scene. I’ll pay you the ten dollars this is worth. I just don’t want alcohol in the home of my grandchildren.”

  Jem thrust his chair back and stood. Dad just couldn’t let him have one night without criticism. Or some attempt to control him. “I knew you’d find something.”

  Dad didn’t respond, just let the liquid chug away.

  “You know it’s cooking wine.”

  “Doesn’t mean people can’t drink it.”

  Jem took a step forward. “You are so unbeliev—”

  “Stop it!”

  A chair crashed against the wall. Every head swiveled to Lili.

  She threw her napkin on the table. “If you’re just going to keep hating each other, then leave. There’s no point pretending we’re a happy family.”

  She flew from the table, past Dad, and into her room. The slam of her door echoed through the apartment.

  Jem glared at his father. “Happy?”

  “Jem, beetroot.” Natalie’s voice carried warning.

  “What?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “We have company.”

  He knew that tone. She wasn’t worried about Chloe. She wanted to cool him down.

  Chloe’s high-pitched giggle cut through their silent interaction. “Don’t worry about me, Nat. I’ve heard all about John.”

  The look Natalie sent Jem almost boiled the flesh from his bones.

  Dad set the now empty bottle next to the trash can. “I’ll take my leave now.” He paused by the door. “If your mother was here, what would she say?” He left.

  The silence stretched.

  A chair squeaked on the floor.

  Chloe stood and took her purse from the kitchen counter. “I’ll talk to you before I go to the airport tomorrow.” She exited quietly.

  Jem’s stress levels hit new heights. What did her thoughtful expression mean? Had his family’s dysfunction just given her ammunition for a custody fight?

  Natalie handed Oliver to Jem and headed to the bathroom.

  Jem looked at his son. The child had hit a growth spurt and slimmed down in the last few weeks. The thinner face made him look older.

  “Is it just me, or is everyone overreacting today?” he said to the baby.

  Movement caught his eye. Natalie.

  * * *

  “Is that what you think I’m doing? Overreacting?” Natalie stepped farther into the dining room, a growl entering her voice. Heat rushed up her neck and poured into her face.

  The man had smashed her heart to smithereens, tempted her again, then thrown her into a spin with his ex-girlfriend. She’d done tonight as a favor, and he’d broken his one promise. And she was overreacting?

  “I didn’t mean it about you.” His unconvincing tone betrayed him.

  Like having ex-lovers around was something that should be easy to deal with. Like she didn’t have better options.

  She folded her arms. “How would you like it if I marched Sam in here and told you I slept with him?”

  Jem’s face went white.

  The time bomb that’d been ticking in Natalie’s brain all week exploded into a hot rush of fury. “Of course I didn’t. But how did that feel? You know what? Just forget it.” She grabbed her handbag and keys. This was too hard. “I can’t do this anymore. Consider this my resignation.”

  He swallowed, plopped Olly down in his playpen. “Just like that? You’re leaving?”

  “As if you can talk about leaving.” She stomped toward the door. “Look, I thought maybe I could forgive you, but—”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “What?” She spun to face him.

  He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “You thought you could forget. Not forgive. There’s a difference.” He strode away from her toward his bedroom.

  Natalie set her jaw. Typical Jem. Walking away from her. She stormed out and slammed the door.

  Beyond the closed portal, Oliver cried again.

  23

  Natalie’s sobs had just hit the ugly-cry stage when her phone rang. Still parked at Jem’s apartment block after that disastrous dinner, she fumbled around the passenger seat, eventually reaching under an inflatable frog—a festival prop—to pull the vibrating cell out.

  “Hey, Nat, do you remember where we left that paper bag full of bolts?” Sam’s cheery voice sounded from the speakers. “Once I find it, I thought I’d go grab a tub of Strawberry Sensation if you’re still up for it.”

  She opened her mouth to reply, but a sob came out instead.

  “Nat?” Sam’s tone changed to concern. “Are you alright?”

  “I’m okay,” she gasped, but couldn’t manage much more.

  “I’ll come get you. Are you still at Jem’s?” He’d given her a lift from there once before when her car was on the fritz, so he knew where it was.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll be there in five.”

  She dropped the phone atop a pile of candy wrappers in her console and rested her forehead against the steering wheel. Slapped the dashboard three times.

  How could she have let this happen? Jem reentered her life and here she was again, crying in her car. Maybe this time she’d learn her lesson.

  Vehicles zoomed past, and she sat up. Sam would be here any minute. She dug through her glove box for a tissue and found only her emergency stash of personal products. Well, this was a different type of emergency, but an emergency nonetheless. She wiped the mascara from her cheeks and blew her nose, then hid the mess back in her glove box.

  Headlights spilled over the dark asphalt ahead, and a rusty Chevy pulled in beside her. She walked around to where Sam wound down his window and surreptitiously swiped her sleeve past her nose.

  Sam had donned his red flannel shirt again. It matched the faded paint on his truck. He leaned out the window and scanned her. “This looks serious. Do we have a Dreamy Dark Chocolate situation on our hands?”

  She leaned on the hood of her car. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called you. You’ve still got so much to do.” And she was crying over her ex. In front of the guy she’d gone out with this week.

  “I called you, remember? And it’ll keep. Get in. It’s cold out.” He reached across and popped the passenger door handle.

  She slid into the warm vehicle and glanced around. “So this is how you roll.”

  Dress-up costumes covered the back seat, a layer of sports equipment sprinkled on top. A crate of snack foods leaned against the left rear window, and a black duffel bag with drumsticks poking out was jammed into the foot well.

  Something crunched beneath her foot, and she tried not to look.

  “You never know when you’ll need a feather boa and a hockey stick.” He backed the Chevy onto the road. “Your dad okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jem? Oliver?”

  “They’re fine . . . physically, anyway.” Well, except for Olly’s flu. She picked a piece of lint from her sweater. “It’s not a very interesting story.”

  Sam tutted and shook his head. “Everything about you seems to be interesting. And you and Jem have a . . . well, a unique situation.” A tactful way to put it, without a hint of malice for her ex. Her esteem for him rose another notch.

  She gave a short, humorless chuckle. “You could say that.” She paused, trying to think of a way to be hone
st without saying, “I’m crying about my ex and the woman he moved on with.” She smoothed a hand over her jeans and tried. “Obviously my relationship with Jem is long in the past.” Because kissing didn’t count as a relationship. “But working for him reminds me of a pretty rough year after our engagement ended.” She twisted her fingers together. Should she say more?

  “And . . .

  “And?”

  He slid her a look. “You’ve worked for him for weeks. There must’ve been a trigger that made tonight harder.”

  She bit her lip. “Oliver’s mother is back in town. And that makes bad memories . . . amplify.”

  “Ouch.” He glanced at her.

  She sighed. “I’m sorry. You don’t want to hear about this.”

  “Hey.” He nudged her with his elbow. “What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t?”

  She came uncorked. “I mean, we were long over when Chloe became pregnant, but that doesn’t mean . . . It’s still not an easy thing if your ex-fiancé has a baby with someone else, right? Especially someone so perfect. I don’t know. Maybe I did overreact.” She sniffed and tucked her cold hands beneath her thighs. “I said I’d tried to forgive him, and Jem got mad. He said all I’d tried to do was forget. I don’t even get what the difference is.”

  Sam flashed his turn signal in the opposite direction of Bloop.

  “Where are you going?”

  “If we’re going to get deep, yogurt won’t cut it. I need real sugar. I need a Macca’s soft serve.” He pulled into a McDonald’s drive-thru line behind a dusty van and faced her. “So you want to understand forgiveness? Nice to see you picked an easy one to test me on.”

  She smiled. No wonder kids found him easy to talk to. “More or less.”

  “Any part specifically you’re struggling with?”

  “I’ve tried it. Every day I tell myself that I forgive him, that I’m past this. It doesn’t work.”

  “What would make it feel better? Besides rewriting the past.”

  “I’d want him to feel the same thing I felt!” The words burst out with more venom than she’d like. Rein it in. She took a calming breath. “But I know it wouldn’t help. I’m not normally this bitter.”

  Sam passed a few coins through his window to the drive-thru operator and accepted two cones. He passed her one and took a generous lick of his own.

  When he’d parked the car in the lot, he gave her his full attention. “You’re right, it wouldn’t help. It would be fair, but it wouldn’t bring back what you’ve lost. It would just make two sad people and wasted years.”

  She took a lick from the top of her soft-serve swirl. “But how do you just let something like this go?”

  “First of all, I think we should establish that no one’s equating forgiveness with necessarily trusting Jem.” Sam waited till she met his eyes before continuing. “When a person hurts you, you don’t have to give them the chance to do that again. Jem’s right. It’s different from forgetting.”

  She licked a drip that threatened to spill from her cone. Sam had finished his in about three bites. “But how do I get past the I-hate-Jeremy-Walters stage?”

  “Have you tried saying it out loud?”

  She blinked. “What?”

  He twisted her cone to show her another imminent drip. “Say it out loud. ‘I forgive Jeremy Walters.’”

  “I—” The words stuck in her throat. She breathed out a shaky laugh. “This is ridiculous.” She’d thought the words a hundred times. Why was it so hard to say them?

  “Harder than it sounds, right? Pray about it. Forgiveness doesn’t come naturally.” He turned the ignition. “No one ever said it was easy. Only possible—with some divine help.”

  He dropped her back at her car and said goodbye with a friendly wave.

  Natalie jumped behind the wheel and cranked the engine. A headache from crying pounded on the back of her eyeballs, and she had a week’s worth of sleep to catch up on before the barbecue tomorrow. She could deal with the Jem problem after a solid eight hours in oblivion.

  She zoomed along the dark streets toward home and cranked the radio. The Fray’s soothing lyrics calmed her nerves.

  Red-and-blue lights flashed in her rearview mirror.

  She bit back a curse and slowed until she found a spot to pull over. Footsteps crunched in the gravel behind her as she rolled down her window. “Sorry, Officer—” Her words halted as she looked up at the man by her window. “John? What are you doing?”

  “I volunteered for a shift and sent an officer back home to his family.” He gave a grimace that was maybe intended to be a smile. “Nothing like a good deed to cheer you up.”

  “He just wanted to impress you, you know.” The words escaped before she could stop them.

  “With what? His former lover, burned food, or the child sick on sugar?”

  “Would it kill you to tell him he’s done a good job? Or at least tried to?” Mad as she was, even she could see that.

  John set his jaw. “When he does a good job, I’ll tell him.”

  “Are you just trying to punish him for leaving you?” Realization slapped her as the final word left her mouth. Hypocrite. She swiveled her gaze to the road ahead. “Forget it. Just write me the ticket.”

  John handed her the fine and crunched his way back to his car.

  Tears streamed down Natalie’s face as she completed the short drive home, then wet the pillow beneath her cheek as she fell asleep.

  The fabric was still damp when her ringtone jerked her awake. The alarm clock beside her bed glowed 1:53 a.m.

  She snatched up the phone. “Hello?”

  “Natalie.” The shudder in Lili’s voice catapulted her out of bed and halfway into her jeans before the teenager finished her sentence. “We’re on our way to the hospital. Olly’s really sick.”

  24

  Dad was missing.

  Lili’s footsteps echoed against the tiles in her empty house. It was almost 2:00 a.m. Jem had dropped her here on his way to the hospital, assuming—as she had—that Dad was home. She twisted the hem of her purple polka-dot pajamas between her fingers, worrying her lip as she surveyed the living room.

  She’d checked the whole house. Her parents’ bedspread lay undisturbed, Dad’s keys weren’t on the hook by the door, and his favorite shoes were missing.

  “Dad?”

  No reply.

  Something creaked, and Lili started. Phone in hand, she double-checked the locks as she called her father’s cell. The call rang out and dropped to voice mail. “Dad, Oliver’s sick so Jem dropped me home. Where are you? I’m getting worried.” She tried the church phone next as she felt her way down the dark hall. Same result.

  She reached Dad’s office, felt through the doorway, and hit the light switch. Yellow light flooded the room, illuminating his massive cherrywood desk and leather chair. The desk matched his bookcase, both new pieces Mom purchased during last year’s redecoration. But the chair, with worn patches rubbed on both armrests and the seat, matched nothing. Lili jumped into it and curled up, the leather cool against her bare legs.

  Her eyes wandered the room as her mind traveled to all the places Dad could be. He might have fallen asleep at work—he was prone to stretching out on the carpeted floor to “rest his eyes.” Or maybe he was with a church family at the hospital. Maybe . . .

  A familiar plaster finger caught her eye, resting in the ajar bottom drawer of Dad’s desk. She nudged the drawer open.

  A hundred webbed cracks ran through the painted plaster cast that sat atop a pile of old Bible-study workbooks. She picked it up and held it inches from her face. It was an enlarged impression of her father’s handprint at double size, painted shades of red. Inside his palm was Mom’s handprint, dotted with a pattern of light-blue shades, at one and a half times its real dimensions. Mom’s hand contained Lili’s real-sized handprint in a swirl of purple.

  She’d seen this artwork not just crack, but shatter, the day she’d busted Dad with Miss Kent.

>   Something red caught her eye in the drawer beneath. She peered down. The lid of a super-glue tube.

  “Dad, you fixed it?” She ran her fingers over the artwork.

  She placed the art back in the drawer and eased it shut, then returned to Dad’s chair and rested her forehead on his desk.

  She could have been wrong, that day in the church when she smoked. Maybe Miss Kent really had been in the bathroom. Maybe Dad had told the truth about his cigarettes.

  The super glue, and hours he must have spent using it, didn’t lie. She’d thought Dad’s fling with Miss Kent meant he didn’t care about their family—Lili included—but this . . . Maybe she had been wrong.

  Her intestines twisted like a well-wrung cloth. Where was Dad? What if he’d crashed his car or something? She had to tell him she was sorry.

  An idea sparked, and she grabbed for Dad’s keyboard. Her fingers flew across the keys until the login screen for Dad’s Find My Phone service came up on the screen. She typed Lilianna into the password box and hit Enter.

  The computer searched for his location, and Lili chewed her fingernails and prayed.

  An unfamiliar address popped up. The hair on the back of her neck raised. She copied the address, dumped it in the Google search bar, and brought up the Street View image of a house. A rosebush peeked over its fence and white wicker furniture rested on the porch.

  Miss Kent’s house.

  Lili punched the desk and screamed.

  Then she dialed Mom’s number.

  * * *

  Natalie gunned her Bug to its limits on the way to the hospital. Who cared if John prowled the streets? He could kiss her taillights.

  She screeched to a halt in the hospital parking lot and scanned for Jem’s Camry. There. She sprinted across the asphalt.

  Jem held Olly, bundled in a blanket, in his right arm as he locked the car with his left.

  Natalie screeched to a halt beside them. “Is he alright?” She reached for Olly, and Jem shifted him so they held him together.

  The little boy opened his eyes, and a small smile lit his face. He lifted a hand in her direction, but it fell back against the blanket.