Love on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel)

by Anna DeStefano

  “The Dixons care.”

  Yeah. They do. They gave me a real chance the way no other family has. Mr. Beaumont gave me a chance, too, and Ms. Hemmings and Chloe.

  “It sounds like the Beaumonts have been good friends. You’ve spent a lot of that time with them. You and Chloe weren’t happy about it to begin with, but look how well that’s turned out.”

  Yeah, things are just great. So great I feel like I’m going to puke up the toast Mrs. Dixon made me eat before coming over. I’m going to lose everyone.

  I shrug.

  Mrs. Sewel pushes her glasses higher on her nose and looks at her notes, which means she’s thinking up another question that I don’t want to answer.

  “So, Chloe and her mean-girl friends laughed at you the morning Mr. Beaumont came to school. Is that why you wouldn’t let Chloe use the water fountain?”

  “No, all right! What difference does it make? Chloe never laughed at me. She’s always been cool with me, sort of, even the next day at lunch when I ran away from school.”

  “Even after you and your friends were mean to her, she was cool?”

  She’d understood what it felt like not to have anybody she could trust, just like me. That’s what made her cool. Of course, I’m not going to say that to Mrs. Sewel. That would be talking about Chloe to somebody else—that would be talking about the things she’d told me, and I’d promised I’d never tell anyone.

  But I’d known we were the same, almost from the beginning. And then her mom went and did all the stupid things she’s done since November. It had almost felt good, having another kid in Chandlerville who felt as crappy about having a family as I did.

  “You didn’t know Mr. Beaumont before that day, right?” Mrs. Sewel writes something else, grading me or whatever.

  I shake my head.

  More notes go into the notebook. “Not until he coached you, because Ms. Hemmings asked him to?”

  I rub my eyes, but they keep filling up again. My nose, too.

  “Fin?” Mrs. Sewel asks.

  I’m not looking at her anymore. She’s probably writing something about me not talking. Mostly because I don’t know how to say it right—how much meeting Mr. Beaumont and Chloe changed things.

  That morning at school turned out to be my best day ever. Even when I have to leave town because of what Chloe and me did last night, wherever I go next, I get to keep the good days that happened after Mr. Beaumont said yes to coaching me.

  “What are you remembering?” Mrs. Sewel asks. She hands me a girly box of tissues that I don’t take. There are flowers all over it. The tissues are pink. “It’s okay to be upset, Fin. You can tell me what you’re feeling. I need you to. Tell me all the things about you that I don’t have in my notes. That’s why I had the Dixons bring you in on a Sunday, instead of waiting until next week or having your foster parents talk with me by themselves. It’s time for you to talk about what’s really important to you. You can tell me that, can’t you?”

  I want to tell her to shut up. I want to tell her to take me away from the Dixons already—and Chloe and Mr. Beaumont and the awesome soccer team he’s made for us—so I can stop feeling like this and start not caring again, the way I used to not care about anything.

  But kids don’t tell grown-ups to shut up. And I want another good home like the Dixons’, and Mrs. Sewel gets to decide if that happens. But how do I tell her what happened that day at school, without saying that even though I’d been living with the Dixons for a month, I’d hated being there, and I’d hated going to school at Chandler, and I was already thinking about how to get away from all of them? That wasn’t okay to tell.

  “Are you remembering what Mr. Beaumont told you at recess that day?” Mrs. Sewel asks.

  “He didn’t tell me nothin’.”

  “Anything,” she corrects me, the same way Mrs. Dixon always does when I mess up words.

  “He asked me.” Mr. Beaumont had been cool from the start. “I’d been mean to Chloe for weeks. He’d seen me be mean to her at the water fountain. She could have made him stop wanting to coach me. He could have said I couldn’t be part of his team. But she didn’t. He didn’t. He asked me…”

  No one had ever cared about me like that before, especially not my loser mom. And I hadn’t wanted anyone else to even try, not before Chandlerville. Not since my mom decided getting her high on was what she loved most, not me. But the Beaumonts had cared, I’d realized. And the Dixons had cared, too. Even Ms. Hemmings.

  “I know it’s hard to talk about it,” Mrs. Sewel says.

  I stare at her, wishing I could make her stop, because I can feel the words coming, and more stupid tears coming, and I’m not going to be able to hold them back. And what’s the point of feeling this way? It’s not going to change things.

  “Why is it so hard?” she asks.

  “It’s not hard,” I lie.

  She sighs. She writes something else.

  “It was no big deal!” I say. “None of it.”

  Mrs. Sewel puts her pen down. She closes her notebook. I wipe at my nose. She folds her hands on top of her desk and watches me.

  “Talk to me, Fin. This is too important for you not to.”

  Too important? That day had been more than important. It was the reason for everything else. It was why I did what I did at the party last night, even though I knew helping Chloe would get me into trouble.

  “Mr. Beaumont asked me if I liked to play soccer,” I say. “Did I like playing soccer as much as I liked being a badass who had no real friends at all. He asked me if I wanted…more.”

  “More, like being on his team?” When I nod, Mrs. Sewel keeps talking. “And you said yes.”

  Sort of.

  I wipe my nose again. “So?”

  “So, you’d already told the Dixons no when they wanted to sign you up for the league. What made Mr. Beaumont’s asking so different?”

  I don’t answer. I don’t know what to say this time. I really don’t.

  “Fin, why did you trust Chloe’s father to coach you? You didn’t know him. Your records say you’ve refused to play soccer every place you’ve lived since your mother died, even though it used to be your favorite thing. Tell me why it was different with Mr. Beaumont.”

  I want to say that she doesn’t know that it was different. She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t know how I feel. She never will. No one ever will, and I don’t care anyway. I didn’t care when I lost my mom. I shouldn’t care now that I’m losing Chloe and Mr. Beaumont and the Dixons.

  Only I do. A lot. And maybe I do want someone to understand, even if I can’t stay in Chandlerville, no matter what I say.

  “Mr. Beaumont was like me,” I say to Mrs. Sewel, crying while I do. “He was standing there on the playground, acting angry and weird after talking with Ms. Hemmings. And he didn’t feel like he belonged there any more than me. I can tell when someone feels that way. He didn’t like me yet. I could tell that, too. But he was just like me.” He was just like Chloe, the way she’d felt to me since my first day at Chandler. “He said he wanted to coach me…sort of. And somehow I knew he meant it. And just hearing Mr. Beaumont say that, even though Chloe and me weren’t friends yet…it made me want to, you know?”

  “Want to play soccer again?”

  I nod my head.

  Then I’m shaking it, because that’s not it. I bury my hands in the pockets of my jeans, trying to hold the words back. Mrs. Sewel won’t understand. I don’t even understand. And I don’t want to talk about it anymore. But the feelings from that day and every day after are coming up and out, and there’s no stopping them.

  “He made me think about staying. He…I don’t know why. But that day, it was the first time I thought about staying with the Dixons and in Chandlerville and at school. Everything changed after that, just like he said it would, if I let myself start to care ab
out things.”

  Only now I’ve gone and ruined it all.

  Before

  Kristen watched Law cross the playground toward Fin. She made herself breathe. She’d opened a giant can of crazy for herself, inviting Law to school. But it had been worth it. And besides, this wasn’t about her. She could handle any fallout she might have invited into her life.

  All that mattered was for Law to come to some understanding with Fin. And then for him to get Chloe on board. So what if the man Kristen had practically been drooling over a minute ago thought she was nuts for asking him to mentor a kid he’d never met?

  You’re kidding me, he’d said.

  Yet there he was, talking to Fin. A little. Hardly at all, actually. But it was a start of something hopeful and positive for the painfully detached boy. She couldn’t, she absolutely wouldn’t, lose another student to thinking that silently enduring the life he’d been trapped in was the only choice he’d ever have.

  Law and Fin had their hands shoved in their pockets. What was it about boys and men that would forever make them the same creatures? Especially when they were uncomfortable or embarrassed, or you challenged them to feel something that they didn’t want to.

  She could have backed off when Law first balked at her idea. But too much was at stake for Fin and Chloe. Law simply had to coach at least one more season.

  He had all but sprinted away from her explanation of Fin’s precarious situation at the Dixons’ group foster home. He’d become so quietly agitated, she’d expected him to head toward the school parking lot and the beat-up truck he drove. But instead, he’d stalked toward an angry little boy who didn’t know how to belong to anyplace or anyone, not even himself. Law and Fin were standing with their feet braced shoulder-width apart, thirty-something confronting nine years old as if they’d squared off in a grudge match to see who could pull off I don’t care the smoothest.

  Not that Fin’s body language was much different than any other day of the three weeks he’d spent at Chandler. Each time some disruption he’d been involved in had landed him in her office, he’d silently stared at her the way he was looking at Law, daring her to do her worst because nothing could touch him. Watching the two of them together tugged at her heart. It was as if neither of them fit on a happy playground on the outskirts of an affluent, sleepy suburb. And neither of them particularly cared.

  “Is everything okay?” asked Daphne Glover, Chloe and Fin’s teacher. She had her eye on Chloe. The girl was glaring at her dad’s back. She was standing on the other side of the playground from where Law and Fin were talking by the water fountain.

  “Of course.” Kristen let out a trapped breath, remembering how Marsha Dixon, Fin’s foster mother, had sounded at her wits’ end yesterday afternoon. No one at the group home she and her husband, Joe, ran had been able to break through Fin’s distrust and refusal to settle in.

  Kristen pressed her fingers to her mouth and nibbled at the inside of her lip. It was a nervous habit her father had abhorred. But it kept Kristen quiet and still when she needed to be. At the moment, it was helping her keep her distance from what Law was doing.

  This was his show now, as Fin stared down at his shoes, back up at the man, and then beyond him to Chloe. The boy said something that Law leaned closer to hear. But even across the playground, Kristen had no problem reading her student’s lips.

  “Oh, my.” Happiness shot through her, filling her up, making her feel light as air, as if she could float out of her skin and hug the perfect moment closer.

  How many chances did the universe give you to see trust, or at least hope, take root in someone so determined to face the world alone?

  “Did he just…” Mallory Phillips started to say. Chandler’s more-pregnant-every-day school nurse had joined Kristen and Daphne, stepping to Kristen’s other side. Her question fizzled into shocked silence as Law reached out his arm, and Fin squared his shoulders.

  And then the small boy and the towering man, both of them mysteries to most everyone in Chandlerville, shook hands.

  “Well, I’ll be.” Kristen exhaled, falling even harder for Law, though he’d probably never let her near him again after today. The man hadn’t taken kindly to being roped into this.

  “What are they talking about?” Mallory asked. She was wearing puppies on her scrubs today—basset hounds, holding daisies in their mouths.

  “Who cares?” This could all fall apart in the next five minutes. But Kristen had learned to savor every victory, especially the small ones. “When have you seen Fin engaging with any adult, except when he’s in so much trouble he doesn’t have a choice?”

  The rest of the boys Fin hung out with, a roving band of mischief he’d immediately gravitated toward his first day at school, gave up on reclaiming his attention. They struck off toward the slides. Chloe and her besties were already there, chattering away, while Chloe kept her dad on radar with an occasional long-suffering glance. The other girls seemed to be ignoring what was happening at the water fountain, but Kristen knew better.

  Brooke Harper and Summer Traver ruled the most popular clique in Daphne’s class. They reigned supreme over the entire third grade. Their mothers were friends with Libby Beaumont. No way were those girls not tracking every move Chloe’s dad made. No way was this not going to make trouble for Chloe—collateral damage that Kristen hadn’t counted on.

  “Really,” Mallory said. “What are they talking about?”

  “They’re talking about…” I’m sorry, Fin had said to Law just now, when the boy had refused to acknowledge anyone else’s attempts to connect with him. “…belonging.”

  “I didn’t think ‘sorry’ was part of his vocabulary.” Mallory gave Kristen a one-armed hug of celebration.

  Over the last year, Kristen’s once-standoffish clinic nurse had become one of the few people in town Kristen felt she could confide in. She was the only one who’d caught on to Kristen’s infatuation with Law.

  “If I’m not missing my guess,” Kristen said, “Fin’s sorry for just about everything he does. Not that he’d let any of us see how much.”

  Daphne shook her head. “So, what’s changed?”

  “Simple.” Kristen smiled as Fin kicked at the dirt between himself and Law. He cast a glance toward the slides, where his buddies had joined up with the girls.

  “What’s simple?” Chloe’s teacher asked.

  Kristen hesitated.

  When it came to relationships between people, nothing was ever as simple as you expected it to be. Her family never had been. Neither were the Beaumonts or the Dixons or most of the other families in their “ideal” suburb—not once you took the time to peek under the surface. Love was never simple. But even couched in something as everyday as playing soccer and meeting a new coach, the right offer to belong could change who a kid like Fin might become—if Law helped Fin learn to like who he already was.

  “Sports.” She smoothed her hand into the pocket of her favorite, eggshell-blue pantsuit. She crossed her fingers for luck. “I’ve never run across a better incentive to straighten up, especially with overactive boys. And ladies, we’re looking at two hypercompetitive, gifted athletes, if the stories the Dixons have heard about Fin from Family Services can be believed. We may have finally found someone who speaks Fin’s language.”

  “Libby Beaumont’s husband?” Daphne sounded horrified.

  “Why not?” Mallory raised a long-suffering eyebrow Kristen’s way. “Don’t tell me you’re buying into what people have been saying about the guy, Daphne. So what if he works in a bar and his bitter ex-wife blames him for everything she’s never had in her life? That doesn’t automatically make him a bad influence.”

  Daphne blinked at Kristen, ignoring Mallory. “Doesn’t Mr. Beaumont have a prison record? Do you really think he’s the right role model for a boy with impulse control and anger issues?”

  Kristen inhaled,
telling herself to ignore the gossip she knew Daphne and other teachers had helped spread—fed by Libby’s never-ending need to be seen as a victim.

  “I think Law’s a fine man,” she said instead.

  She bit her lip again. Knowing Daphne, the news of Kristen weighing in on Law’s behalf would be all over town by the end of the school day. But staying silent would have felt like a betrayal. Law was talking to Fin because Kristen had asked him to—or at least because Law had wanted to get away from her asking him to.

  “I think he works almost every afternoon and half into the night,” Kristen added. If she’d dug a hole for herself, she might as well make her swan dive in worth the flak she was about to get. “He works almost every night to support his ex-wife and the child she tried to take from him in their divorce. He’s putting up with Libby’s antics. He’s not retaliating. He’s focused on making the most of the time he still has with Chloe. I think that’s exactly the kind of parent and coach Fin would be lucky to have taking a special interest in him.”

  Law had mostly kept to himself since moving to Chandlerville. His brother, Dan, lived over on Mimosa Lane. But as far as anyone could tell, they avoided each other, except when they got their kids together to play. No one in town knew Law well, and he hadn’t made much of an effort to change that since he’d gotten his own place almost a year ago. So at first, it had been easiest for everyone to believe the things Libby said about him.

  But none of her outlandish claims had been substantiated by her lawyers. Otherwise the judge’s custody decision wouldn’t have awarded Law two nights and three days a week with Chloe. Meanwhile, there had been something cold about Libby when she’d let her guard down in the few private moments Kristen had witnessed the woman spending with Chloe. There was something too lonely about Law’s daughter that reminded Kristen of her experience with her own mother. A mother who’d cared more about having a good time on Kristen’s father’s dime than she had about her only child.