Days Like This

by Laurie Breton

  “I suppose we should be heading back soon,” she said. “He’ll be looking for me.”

  “He who?” Luke said. “Your dad?”

  “He’s not my dad. He’s nothing more than a sperm donor.”

  “I don’t get it. Uncle Rob is the coolest guy I know. Why do you hate him?”

  “He deserted us. Why wouldn’t I hate him?”

  “He didn’t desert you. He never even knew about you.”

  “Hah! Says him.”

  “I’m telling you, you’re way off target. I was home the night before last when he and my mom got into it because he’d just found out about you, and Mom and Aunt Meg and Grandma all knew, and nobody bothered to tell him. It wasn’t pretty.”

  “You were eavesdropping on their conversation?” She liked the idea of her cousin snooping around, hiding in corners, practicing clandestine surveillance on his elders.

  “Trust me, when two MacKenzies get into an argument, eavesdropping is totally unnecessary. The neighbors can hear for a mile around.”

  “Yeah, well, he probably just wanted to make himself look good. Because there’s no way my mom would have lied to me. She told me he left because he didn’t want the responsibility of being a father. He didn’t want me. And I can never forgive him for that.”

  “You can go on believing whatever you want, but you’re dead wrong. And you’re not the only one with parent problems. My dad’s a real jerk. He treated my mom like crap, then he went out and got a new wife. One who’s not much older than my sister. And Mikey’s mom left when he was just a kid. So don’t think you’re special just because you grew up without a dad.”

  Her head swiveled around, and she studied Mikey, who thus far hadn’t uttered a word. Outraged, she said, “Your mom left you?”

  Lying beside her on the blanket, Mikey folded his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” he said. “Mom got pregnant at seventeen and married my dad, and I think she didn’t have any idea what she really wanted. She was too young. When they split up, Dad was the stable one, so they agreed that I’d stay with him. It’s not as though I never see her.”

  “Wow,” she said. “That must have sucked, all those years without your mom.” She’d gone just two weeks without hers, and the pain was almost unbearable.

  “I had Aunt Trish, and Grandma Millie, and Aunt Casey. And now, I have Luke’s mom. My dad’s amazing. I wasn’t raised by wolves, if that’s what you’re implying.”

  “Wait a minute. I’m confused. Why do you call her Aunt Casey?”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her like she was an idiot. “Um…because she’s my aunt?”

  She scrunched up her nose and studied him while she tried to work it out in her head, but finally gave up. “How is that possible?”

  “My mom is her sister.”

  “Holy batshit. Are you people all inbred, or what?”

  “It just seems that way,” Luke said. “Once you get all the relationships worked out in your head, it makes more sense.”

  Still trying to puzzle it out, she said to Mikey, “Let me make sure I understand this. Your father’s sister is married to your mother’s brother. Do I have it so far?”

  Those dark eyes were indecipherable. “Correct,” Mikey said.

  “So that means…you and the Bradley kids are double cousins.”

  “Also correct.”

  “Jesus.” She sat up and screwed the cap back on the bottle of Jim Beam. Handed it back to Luke. And said, “I think I have a headache.”

  Rob

  When he got home from his morning run, Casey had breakfast going: sizzling bacon, fresh-sliced cantaloupe, scrambled eggs, and pancakes loaded with lush, ripe blackberries she’d picked just after sunrise. The way she cooked, it was a wonder they weren’t both morbidly obese. He snagged a strip of crisp bacon from the paper towel where it was drying and went to the refrigerator to take out the milk. He was stirring it into his coffee when Paige came out of her bedroom, shuffled past him without speaking, and slammed the bathroom door behind her.

  He met Casey’s eyes. “Little Miss Sunshine,” she said.

  Grimacing, he returned the milk carton to the fridge and reached for another strip of bacon. “Hey, you!” his wife said, playfully slapping his hand away. “Leave some for breakfast.”

  “I’m a growing boy. And you’re just scared that I’ll take your share.”

  “Make yourself useful while I finish this. Set the table.”

  He popped the pilfered strip of bacon into his mouth and gathered up plates and flatware, glasses and napkins. In the bathroom, Paige was running water in the sink. He arranged the table, found the salt and pepper and a dish of softened butter and set them in a splash of honey-colored sunlight next to the vase of flowers she’d cut from the garden while she was out picking berries at the crack of dawn. He had no idea what the tiny blue and purple blossoms were, but fresh flowers on the breakfast table were classic Casey.

  The bathroom door opened, and Paige came out, dressed in jeans, a white tee shirt, and red suspenders. She’d made an attempt to tame her hair, but he knew from firsthand experience that it was pretty much a hopeless task. She yawned, sniffed bacon-scented air, and said, “I usually just eat cereal and toast.”

  “That’s because you haven’t tasted my wife’s pancakes.”

  The kid shrugged, pulled out her chair, and collapsed into it as though every bone in her body had dissolved, leaving her spineless and limp. Casey brought the food to the table, and they sat down to eat. Paige eyed the scrambled eggs with disdain, took a single slice of cantaloupe, and studied the stack of pancakes. “What are those purple things?”

  “Blackberries,” Casey said. “Just picked this morning. They’re out of this world.”

  “I don’t think I like blackberries.”

  Casey raised an eyebrow. “You don’t like blackberries?”

  Paige squared her jaw. “I’ve never had them.”

  Rob wondered briefly just what kind of mother Sandy had been, until he remembered the price of supermarket blackberries and realized she’d probably been a frugal one. “Well, then,” he said, “you’re in for a treat.”

  Paige didn’t look convinced, but she helped herself to a single pancake and smothered it with syrup. “Butter?” Casey offered.

  Paige shook her head. “That stuff will kill you before you’re fifty.”

  He and Casey exchanged glances before he shrugged and smeared his pancakes with artery-clogging saturated fat.

  Paige sliced her pancake with her fork, pulled out a blackberry, and nibbled at it warily. Eyes focused on her plate, she ate in silence. The tension around the table lay heavy and thick, in stark contrast to their usual relaxed meals. He glanced at his wife. She raised her eyebrows and gave him a brief smile. “So,” she said to his daughter, “what do you think of the blackberries?”

  Paige shrugged. “They’re okay.”

  “If you want to make me a list of the foods you like, I’ll be happy to stock the pantry with your favorites.”

  “Whatever.”

  Casey cleared her throat. “Where’d you go last night with the boys?”

  Paige raised her head, coolly met her stepmother’s eyes, then went back to eating. “Nowhere special.”

  “I’ve been thinking. School starts in just a few weeks. I thought maybe we could go school shopping at the mall. All three of us. We could make a day of it.”

  Paige threw down her fork and scraped back her chair. “Why don’t you just back off? You’re not my frigging mother! You will never be my frigging mother! So why don’t you just stop pretending, and leave me the hell alone!” She staggered to her feet and slammed out of the house.

  In the silence, the clock ticked. For an instant, his wife’s face looked as though she’d been slapped. “Goddamn it,” he said.

  “It’s all right. She’s hurting.”

  “It’s not all right, and hurting is not a valid excuse to lash out at you for
no reason.”

  “I’m fine. Let it go.”

  He squared his jaw, studied her face, considered his options. “No,” he said, and shoved back his chair.

  She set down her napkin. “Rob, don’t—”

  But her protest came too late. He was already out the door and circling the old farmhouse through the lush beauty of a late-summer morning. He found his daughter on the back porch, huddled on the swing, looking as miserable as he felt. When he rounded the corner, she glanced at him briefly, then went back to staring off into space.

  He climbed the steps to the porch slowly, sat down on the swing, leaving a good distance between them. Leaned back, propped his feet on the porch railing, and began lazily rocking.

  “Look,” he said. “This is an awkward situation we’ve been thrown into. I know how you must feel about losing your mother—”

  “You don’t know a goddamn thing about how I feel.”

  He hesitated, considered her words, realized she was right. “Fine,” he said. “I probably don’t. Both of my parents are still alive. But I’ve lost people I cared for. I’ve felt the pain of loss, so maybe I do know a little bit. And because of that, I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt. But there are lines we don’t cross, and you just crossed one.”

  She glanced at him from the corner of her eye, but said nothing.

  “You will not speak to my wife like that again. Ever. I don’t care how much you wallow in self-pity, it’s not an excuse to be rude to her. That woman has been nothing but kind and gracious to you, and you owe her an apology. I may not know what you’re going through, but let me tell you, little girl, she does. She lost her mother at fifteen, her daughter at twenty-nine, and her husband at thirty-one. If there’s anybody in this godforsaken place that you might ever want in your corner, it’s her, because she’s been there, done that. And survived it all.”

  He was met by a stony silence.

  “Look at it from her point of view,” he said. “She’s trying to rebuild her life after absolute devastation. Then she finds out that the yahoo she just married sowed a few more wild oats than she’d ever guessed, and now, surprise! It’s a bouncing baby girl. Only the kid’s fifteen years old. Talk about shaking things up. And you know what? A lot of women would’ve said, ‘You’re on your own, buddy.’ A lot of women would have booted me out on my ass. But she didn’t. Even when I was questioning the wisdom of taking you in, she was already sizing up bedrooms and mentally redecorating. You know why? Because that’s the way she rolls. She’s a good person, the best person I’ve ever known, and it never even occurred to her to question taking in somebody else’s kid to raise. Even this morning, after you were unforgivably snotty to her, she told me to let it go. Because she knows how bad you’re hurting inside, and it’s breaking her heart. That’s the kind of woman she is.

  “So if you have anything to say to her, you will act like a mature, civilized human being. If she offers you something you don’t want, you’ll just say, ‘No, thank you’ and leave it at that. Is that understood?”

  “Fine. Are we done now?”

  He leaned back on his tailbone and clasped his hands behind his head. “You know,” he said, “I’m going to tell you something about me, something you could use against me if you ever wanted to. But I’m telling you anyway, because I trust that you have enough integrity to not do that.”

  “Don’t trust me. You’ll be disappointed.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You act tough, but I have this feeling that underneath that hard shell, there’s a soft, marshmallow center.”

  She snorted.

  “Everybody has a weakness, right? Something they can’t control? Something that controls them? For some people, it’s drugs, or booze, or greed. For some of us, it’s something a lot simpler. You know what my weakness is?” He closed his eyes, felt the warmth of the sun on his face. “It’s that woman in there. If you want to hurt me, the quickest and easiest way is through her. You stick a knife in her, I’m the one who bleeds.”

  They were both silent, the only sounds the buzzing of insects and the twittering of birds. “There are three billion women on this planet, give or take,” he said, “but there’s only one of her. And for me, that woman is it. There are no others. There’ve been two things that defined my life. One is my music. The other is the way I feel about her. And for the most part, they’ve been tangled together from the beginning.” He opened his eyes, crossed his ankles on the railing. “That woman is what keeps me upright and breathing. She always has been. So if you want to know who your old man really is, kiddo, I’m just a washed-up old guitar player who’d gladly lay down his life for the woman he’s loved since he was twenty years old.”

  “I suppose there’s some kind of lesson buried in there somewhere.”

  He smiled, leaned his head back and studied the porch ceiling. “You ever go running?”

  “Running?” she echoed, as if he’d said something foul.

  “Like it or not, kiddo, you’re built just like me. Long and lean. That’s what they call a runner’s body.”

  “And your point is?”

  He turned his head. “I go running every morning. Rain or shine. I think you’d make an outstanding running partner.”

  Various emotions flickered across her face: disbelief, uncertainty, disdain. And back to disbelief. “You’re serious.”

  “You just put on loose clothes, your most comfortable pair of sneakers, and you put one foot in front of the other, and you sweat and grunt and gasp for breath until the endorphins kick in. Then it gets good.”

  “Endorphins.”

  “Way better for the psyche than happy pills. Runner’s high. Makes you feel good. Legally.”

  “Is this supposed to be some kind of father/daughter bonding ritual?”

  “Do I look like a manipulative guy? I just thought you might take to running.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Why are you being nice to me?”

  “Because, like it or not, you’re my kid. I’m stuck with you, and you’re stuck with me. That’s what they call family. And I think everybody deserves a second chance. Which is why we’re going back into the house, and you’re going to apologize to Casey, and we’re going to move on from there. If we’re lucky, maybe we can still salvage breakfast. If she hasn’t already tossed it in the trash.”

  “Fine.”

  They found Casey in the kitchen, scrubbing industriously at the stove top. Their uneaten breakfast still sat on the table. He cleared his throat. “I believe Paige has something to say to you.”

  Casey paused in her scrubbing, turned slowly, waited. Stiffly, Paige said, “I’m sorry I was rude to you. And if you still want to, I’d like to go shopping with you.”

  “Apology accepted,” Casey said. “Now, let’s eat breakfast, before it’s inedible.”

  Paige nodded, sat, and began eating. He met his wife’s eyes. One corner of her mouth turned up, ever so slightly, and she gave him an almost imperceptible nod of approval.

  And over his daughter’s head, he shot her a wink.

  ***

  He hadn’t expected much to come of their little chat, so when he came downstairs the next morning, he was surprised to see Paige waiting for him in the kitchen, dressed for running.

  “Don’t think this means we’re friends or anything,” his daughter said as she tightened the lace to her sneaker. “Because it’s nothing like that.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Running’s good for your health.” She finished with the first foot, and swapped it for the other.

  “Absolutely.”

  “And if you don’t have your health,” she said, tugging at her laces, “what do you have?”

  He nodded gravely. “I used to smoke. A pack a day.”

  She looked up, surprised. “You did?”

  “I did. Then, about five years ago, Casey badgered me into running with her. It was torture at first. I could barely make it to the end of the block. But she was a true friend,
the best kind, the kind that doesn’t accept any bullshit excuses. She applied the toe of her running shoe to the crack of my ass and bullied me into losing the cigarettes. Smartest thing I ever did.”

  They went out together into a glorious summer morning, pale pink tinting the eastern sky as the birds awoke for the day and began their good-morning songs. “You need to stretch first,” he said. “Like this.” They did a few stretching exercises together, until he decided they were both sufficiently limber. Then they started down the road, Paige deliberately positioned on the shoulder, away from traffic. He slowed his pace considerably to accommodate her. “You want to run facing traffic,” he said, “so you can always see what’s coming. Especially here in the sticks, where there aren’t any sidewalks.”

  For a time, they ran together in silence. She moved with a lengthy stride, strong and even, in spite of her lack of experience. Youth, he thought. It made all the difference. He studied her from the corner of his eye, marveling at her lean strength, blown away by the fact that he’d fathered this amazing creature.

  “Why are you staring at me?” she demanded.

  “I guess I’m just wondering how a guy with an ugly mug like mine managed to create a kid as good-looking as you.”

  “You’re not ugly. Besides, you had help.”

  He tried to picture Sandy’s face, but it had been too many years, and his memories were vague and indistinct. Guilt gnawed at his gut. He and Sandy had dated off and on for nearly two years. Shouldn’t he be able to remember her more clearly? In his own defense, it hadn’t been any great love match. She’d been his sister’s best friend, and their relationship had been based more on proximity than passion. For the most part, it had been—and he hated to use this word, but it was the only word that fit—casual. At least from his point of view. They’d had fun together, but the relationship had been so unremarkable that he barely remembered its final death knell. Their parting had been so low-key, he wasn’t sure they’d even said good-bye. It had simply been understood that he was leaving for New York and moving on with his life, and Sandy was staying behind in Boston. Not once had he considered asking her to come with him. It hadn’t been that serious a relationship.