The Good Father

by Diane Chamberlain

  “You love that purse, don’t you, Bella?” I said.

  She lifted the purse in the air to give me a better look. “Pink is good with my eyes,” she said, repeating what I’d told her a few days earlier.

  “It really is,” I said. “What do you carry in it? Can you show me?”

  She nodded and began trying to pry open the clasp.

  “Would you like some help?” I asked. Carolyn had hated it when I’d try to help her with small tasks like that, and I wasn’t surprised when Bella shook her head.

  “I can do it.” She frowned as she struggled, her lips tight in concentration. Oh, my God. She was beyond precious. She finally looked up at me in defeat. “I can’t do it,” she admitted.

  “But you almost did,” I said. “It’s really hard, huh?”

  She stood up and took a step toward me, handing me the purse. She rested one hand on my knee. I felt the warmth of her small, fleshy palm through my pants. Or at least, I imagined I could feel it, and I hoped she’d keep her hand there forever. My own hands shook a little as I took the purse from her. “Wow,” I said, prying the two sides of the clasp apart. “This is even tough for me to do. No wonder you had a hard time.”

  “That’s so nothing falls out,” she said.

  I could smell her. Soap. Toothpaste. Musty hair. I took in a deep, deep breath, then handed the open purse back to her. “Do you want to show me what’s inside?” I asked.

  She nodded and slipped her hand into the pink satin lining. With a flourish, she pulled out a miniature Barbie-type doll with very long, blond hair and a red-and-white-striped bathing suit painted on her body.

  “Look at that amazing hair!” I said.

  Bella leaned on the arm of my chair and peered at the doll. “Yellow hair is called blond,” she informed me.

  “Like mine,” I said.

  She studied my hair, then shook her head. “Yours isn’t yellow,” she said with the candor no adult would dare to express.

  I smiled. I supposed that, between my dark roots and fading highlights, my hair wasn’t very yellow anymore. “Does she have a name?” I asked.

  “Uh-uh.” She shook her head, then suddenly gave a little jump. “Oh, yes! Yes, she does. I forgot. It’s Princess!”

  I laughed at her sudden enthusiasm. “Well, she’s beautiful,” I said.

  Travis sat down on the sofa, resting his coffee on the table. “Here, Bella,” he said. “Here’s your half of the muffin.”

  I realized that they’d split a muffin every day I’d seen them. At first, I’d guessed they’d eaten breakfast at home and the muffin was just a snack. Now that I was convinced they had no home, though, I figured this probably was breakfast. Half a muffin.

  Bella pointed at the doll. “I’m showing her what—”

  “Miss Erin,” he corrected her.

  “I’m showing Miss Erin what I have in my purse,” she said.

  “Well, put it away for now and eat your muffin,” he said. “Then we can have a story.”

  “Just two more things,” Bella said. From inside the purse, she pulled a rectangular photograph and handed it to me. Nearly leaning on my lap, she pointed to the three people in the picture. “That’s me and Daddy and Nana,” she said.

  They were sitting on a beach wearing bathing suits and broad smiles, the ocean behind them.

  “What a beautiful sand castle!” I said, pointing to the castle in the picture. It was big and elaborate, nearly covered with shells. I knew Travis was trying to get Bella to climb back onto the couch and that I was undercutting his parenting, but I didn’t want her to move away from me.

  “We builded it,” she said.

  “Where does your Nana live?” I asked.

  “She lived with me but she moved to heaven.”

  Oh, no. I glanced at Travis. Mouthed, “I’m sorry.” He gave me a sad nod.

  “I bet you miss her,” I said to Bella.

  “She can’t come back,” she said, but she was already reaching into her purse again. This time she pulled out a small photograph of a pretty teenage girl. It looked like the uninspired sort of picture kids had taken at school.

  “And who’s this?” I asked. My best guess was Travis’s sister.

  “My mommy,” she said.

  I didn’t dare ask where her mommy lived and Travis seemed to pick up on my trepidation. “She lives in Beaufort,” he said. He was holding his cup to his lips but not drinking.

  “Ah,” I said, thinking I’d better not ask any more questions. “Let’s put these things back in your purse and then you can have your muffin,” I said. I watched as Bella carefully placed the items, one by one, into the purse. As she slipped the picture of her mother inside, I saw the name Robin written on the back.

  “See? It’s got two ’partments,” Bella said, showing me how the inside of the purse was divided in two. “The pictures go on this side and the dolly on the other, so the pictures don’t get scrunched.”

  “Good job,” I said, when she managed to press the two sides of the clasp together. I watched her climb onto the sofa next to Travis.

  “This is my paper,” I said to Travis, gesturing to the News and Observer on the coffee table. “You’re welcome to check the ads.”

  “Thanks.” He looked really tired today, even more than usual. I’d been so focused on Bella that I hadn’t noticed, but he seemed beaten down. The shadows around his eyes were darker and his whole face seemed drawn and gaunt. Maybe seeing the pictures in Bella’s purse had made him sad. Or maybe he was just fed up with the job hunt.

  “Do you know about Craigslist?” I asked. “I hired some yard guys through it once. They have free job listings.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, actually, we went to the library day before yesterday and I used the computer there to check. There was one job that was a good fit, but by the time I called, the guy said it’d been filled. Twenty or thirty applicants, he said. Something like that.” He brushed a crumb from his jeans. “We’ll go the library to check again today.”

  “Use my iPad,” I suggested, lifting the iPad from the table. “I’ll find Craigslist for you and you can check right now. You can probably find someone to do child care, too, but be sure to check references.”

  He gave me what I hoped was a mock insulted look. “I’ve been her dad for four years,” he said. “I know what to look for.”

  “Of course,” I said. I found Craigslist on the internet and handed the iPad to him, holding back from giving him instructions on how to use it. I didn’t want to insult him again, and he didn’t seem to have any problem at all surfing through the ads. He pulled a pen and pad from the canvas bag and jotted a couple of things down. “I’m going to call on this one,” he said, reaching for his phone.

  Bella held the book in front of him with an expression on her face that asked, Did you forget about the story?

  “I’ll read to you after I make this call, Bell,” he said, getting to his feet.

  “Would you like me to read to you while your dad talks on the phone, Bella?” I asked.

  She jumped off the couch, handed me the book and climbed into my lap, and for the first time in six months, I was holding a child. She leaned against me as if she’d known me all her life. As if she were my own daughter. I breathed in the musty smell of her hair again. I couldn’t pull the scent of her deeply enough into my lungs. Beneath my hands, I felt her ribs and the little knobs of her spine. She was tiny for four. Tiny and way too thin. Carolyn at three had been bigger than Bella at four. I rested my chin on the top of her head and opened the only book she seemed to own, and while I read to her, I thought of all the books and toys in Carolyn’s room. I could go to the house and get some of them for her. If I could make myself go into Carolyn’s room. The thought was so unsettling that I lost my place in the book.

  “No,” Bella said. “The fish says that part!”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I said. “My mistake.”

  I read on, thinking about my house. Michael’s house, fo
r now anyway. Was there any work Travis could do there? Since Carolyn’s death, Michael had taken care of nearly every handyman task we’d had, so I doubted there was much left to do. Besides, without my income, we couldn’t afford to hire anyone.

  I glanced at Travis, who stood in the corner of the coffee shop talking on the phone, and I could tell from his expression it wasn’t going well. Reaching into my own purse, I pulled a twenty from my wallet, never missing a beat as I read to Bella. Carefully, I slipped the bill into the pocket of her pants. I knew Travis wouldn’t take it if I offered it to him outright. I only hoped he wouldn’t be offended when he found it.

  19

  Travis

  Bella and I ate at Mickey D’s again that afternoon. My mother would have thrown a fit if she’d known how Bella and I practically lived there. Mom had been a true Southern cook—lots of butter and gravies and pork—but she looked down her nose at fast food, and before this trip from hell, I’d only taken Bella to a McDonald’s maybe twice. Now it felt like home. Those cheap Happy Meals. Protein, right? Plus apple slices. Plus the little toys. Bella loved them. She loved everything about Mickey D’s, from the sweet, harried teenagers who worked there to the play area. Especially the play area. I loved it, too, frankly. I could sit at a table calling on jobs while Bella climbed through the tubes and hopped around in the germy plastic balls and chattered with other kids and acted like she didn’t have a care in the world. That’s what I wanted for her. That freedom. And if the price was some artery-clogging food, well, it was worth it.

  We’d hung out at the coffee shop as long as we could that morning. Until Erin left, actually. Erin was returning to her job in a few days and I was going to miss her. She was the only person I knew in Raleigh—not that I actually knew her—but she was a smile in the morning and she gave us her time and I liked that. She was good with Bella and I liked that even more. Bella needed some women around her.

  I’d written down some of the Craigslist ads from Erin’s iPad that morning. Building a fence, hauling stuff, handyman jobs. I’d written down anything I thought I might be able to do, and while Bella played, I started calling around. I was going to need to buy more minutes for my phone today. I also needed to buy some fruit and vegetables. A bag of carrots. Something cheap. Something to keep Bella from getting scurvy. Did kids still get scurvy? I’d picked up a bottle of that saline stuff Erin told me about and it seemed to be helping.

  The Craigslist ads were a pain in the butt, though. People wanted you to start work now. Like ten minutes ago. And I couldn’t work until I had somebody to watch Bella, but I couldn’t find someone to watch Bella until I had a job that would let me pay them. I thought of Erin. I should’ve asked her for her number. Maybe she’d be willing to watch Bella for a few hours so I could work and get the money to pay someone for the next day—if the job lasted that long. My brain hurt from trying to figure it all out.

  That was the other thing about the Craigslist jobs. Most of them were short, one-day sort of things. Move some old couple into an apartment. Fix a toilet or paint a room. I finally called one of the numbers for a woman who said she could babysit. Turned out she was sixteen and she sounded totally stoned on the phone. While I was talking to her, I watched Bella slide into the sea of plastic balls, her arms high in the air. She looked happy and I smiled and hung up on the girl. Forget turning Bella over to someone I didn’t know. Wasn’t going to happen.

  I was so angry at Savannah. I used some of my precious phone minutes trying to call her. I wanted to chew her out, but I got her voice mail as I had each time I’d tried to call her since I’d talked to Roy. I pictured her checking her caller ID, seeing it was me, laughing at her big joke and not bothering to answer. I didn’t know why she’d jerked me around like this, but if she ever answered her phone, I was going to let her have it. It was one thing to mess with me, another thing to mess with the welfare of my daughter.

  I finally ran out of numbers to call. Then I tried my old boss in Carolina Beach just in case something had opened up, but when he answered he was in Washington, D.C. He’d moved back in with his brother and was looking for work up there. That scared me more than anything. He had skills up the wazoo. If he hadn’t been able to find anything at the beach, I didn’t stand a chance. Sticking it out in Raleigh was the best choice. At least, it was the best of a bunch of really shitty choices.

  “Daddy!” Bella ran from the play area over to me as I was hanging up the phone. “I finded money!” She held a wadded-up bill in her little fist and I held out my hand for it. She dropped it onto my palm, and I unfolded it. Twenty bucks.

  I looked toward the play area, thinking finders keepers, but what kid would be carrying around a twenty-dollar bill? “Where did you find this, Bella?” I asked. I looked toward the balls. Anything could be buried in there.

  “It comed out of my pocket,” she said.

  “Your pocket? Which pocket?”

  She pointed to the left front pocket of her pants.

  “Are you sure about that, Bella? Are you sure you didn’t just find it in the play area?” But even as I spoke, I knew what had happened. Erin. I remembered Erin reading to her, Bella cuddled against her as she listened, and my cheeks burned. Damn. I wished she hadn’t done that. I needed my pride more than I needed her money—or worse, her pity. I wished she’d let me have that pride. We couldn’t go back to the coffee shop now. She’d ruined it.

  Yet I looked at that twenty-dollar bill and it looked like a bag of carrots and a couple of apples and maybe some of the grapes that Bella loved, as well as a couple of gallons of gas for the van. I let out a sigh.

  “Can I keep that in my wallet?” I said.

  “In my purse,” she said. Her purse and her lamb rested on the table next to my phone.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll go over to the Wal-Mart in a little bit and use it to get some food, and then we’ll keep the change in your purse. How’s that?”

  “What kind of food?”

  “Grapes?”

  Her eyes widened. “Yes!” she said, her face so filled with a simple joy that I had to laugh. I cupped her head in my hands and leaned forward to kiss her forehead. I caught a whiff of little-girl sweat and wondered how ripe I was smelling myself. We needed a motel room. A real shower. A laundromat.

  “Can I go back and play some more?” Bella asked as I put the twenty-dollar bill in her purse.

  “Sure,” I said.

  I sat back in the chair and watched her climb around the play area with another little girl about the same age. I was trapped in McDonald’s. Trapped in this gigantic parking lot with stores I’d never be able to shop in except for some careful trips to the Target. The beach was a million miles away and just the thought of walking barefoot on the sand, watching the waves that now held my mother’s ashes, and picking up shells that were free and more beautiful than anything I could find in one of the nearby stores got to me, and I had to blink my eyes to clear the image away.

  Five hundred dollars. Five hundred dollars for a few hours’ work. Roy did it all the time. Five hundred dollars sounded like a million to me right then. A motel room for few nights. A tub and a shower and a phone and TV. A few healthy meals for Bella, and a chance to catch my breath.

  I just had to drive the van. It was no big deal, Roy had said. I wouldn’t be the one doing the actual stealing. Plus, I’d be helping poor parents, right? Poor parents like me. What if Bella was still young enough to need formula instead of cheap Happy Meals? I’d be helping those parents feed their kids. I didn’t let myself go too deep with that thought. Not deep enough to see the wrong in it.

  What if Roy had found someone else to do it by now? A panicky feeling suddenly hit me. This was my only chance. Five hundred bucks. Why was I being such a tightass? I’d be an idiot to pass it up.

  I’d do it. What would I do with Bella while I was driving the van, though? I thought of what it would be like to do this job with her buckled into her car seat behind me. No way. The thought of Roy an
d his buddy—two total assholes, I was sure—being around Bella made me feel sick.

  And then I remembered Erin.

  20

  Robin

  2007

  I had a short, spotty period a couple of months after Travis and I made love that last time, but my periods had always been irregular because of my heart medication, and with the heart attack, hospitalization and missing Travis, my cycle was the last thing on my mind. So by the time my doctor shocked me with the news that I was pregnant, I was already sixteen weeks along. Both he and my father said I had to have an abortion. The medication I was on could cause birth defects and there was no way I could handle a full-term pregnancy. You could die tomorrow, I reminded myself, and the baby was my only link to Travis. I’d recovered okay from the heart attack and felt nearly as well as I had before it, so I refused to have an abortion. My father tried to get a court to declare me a danger to myself and give him guardianship rights so he could force me to abort the baby, but the judge was a pro-lifer who was on my side all the way.

  I wanted to tell Travis. I didn’t know how he felt about me now, since he’d never answered my email. Had he moved on? Was he with someone else? I told my father we needed to tell him, that it was only right. Even if Travis wanted nothing to do with me, I argued, he should know he was going to be a father. I knew I was secretly hoping maybe the baby could bring us together again. But Daddy said there was no way he’d let Travis back in my life. I’d fought my father in court and won, though, and that gave me courage, so I emailed Travis and asked him to get in touch. That I had something really important I needed to talk to him about. Months had passed since the whole mess with my father in the E.R., and I guess I believed Travis loved me enough that he’d write back, but he didn’t. The pain of that—of not hearing back from him when I really, really needed him—was so bad. I remembered what my father had said about puppy love so long ago. Maybe he’d been right. Maybe that’s all it was for Travis.