“Would you want to tell your kid you didn’t know who her father was? Or worse, you did know, but didn’t want your child to have anything to do with him? Wouldn’t you want to hope for that point-one-percent chance the condom was defective?”
“She always made the identity of the father a big secret.”
Ben quietly said the ugly truth. “It could’ve been, even to her.”
Connie flinched. “We can’t be sure of that.”
Also true.
But there was one final piece to his story Connie didn’t yet know. Maybe the most important part. “She came to me again. One night, a couple of years later. Drunk this time. Came on to me. Tried to drag me down the hall to bed. I refused to go, told her to sleep it off on the couch or go home to her kid. She wouldn’t let up and I lost it. I lifted her up and tried to throw her out. She started crying then and begged me to let her live with me. Her and Ariel. She said she would be good. And Ariel, too. I would see. Just give her a chance.
“I didn’t believe her. If she hadn’t already turned herself around for her daughter’s sake, why would she now? I refused.”
Ben didn’t look at Connie.
“From that point on, she hated me. You remember what she was like. I couldn’t do any good in her eyes, and after a while, I didn’t care if I did.”
“She hated you more than she loved me,” Connie said. “Otherwise she would’ve stayed. Hated, too, that you picked me instead of her.” Sadness dulled her voice, sharpened his guilt.
He fumbled on. “Now, thinking back...with everything that has happened, I wonder if, maybe if I’d let her stay, if things would’ve been different. If we could’ve found a way for all of us to be together.”
“I dunno,” Connie said. “You hated her, too. I always thought it was because you figured Miranda was a bad influence on me.”
“She was. And I did. But if I’d known that she had genuine feelings for me...I might’ve treated her better. We might not have seen each other as the enemy. She might not have forced you to choose between us.”
He expected her to cut him down. Wanted it, even. Instead, she sighed. “I have my own list, remember?”
He finally understood how Connie felt. The need to come clean. How could he with a dead person? Connie had picked Ariel as her way to make it right with Miranda.
He’d do the same. Even as her father.
CHAPTER TWELVE
BEN CALLED FOR a DNA testing appointment the next morning and—whaddaya know?—there’d been a cancellation, and would he be able to come at two? He snapped up the time, not knowing if Ariel was free. She was probably at school and he didn’t have her number to text. He could go through Connie, but given last night’s conversation, the less he had to inflict himself on her, the better for them both.
On a hope and a prayer, he stopped at Connie’s house during the school lunch hour.
“Hello?” he called out, entering.
A kitchen chair scraped against the tiles and Ariel came to the top of the stairs, a pepperoni stick in one hand and her phone in the other. “Auntie Connie’s not here. She’s at the farm.”
Weird to have this hard-bitten teenager give Connie a childlike tag. “It’s you I want to see,” he said. “I have an appointment at the DNA clinic for two in Red Deer. Can you come?”
She didn’t move. “You serious?” When he nodded, she said, “I’ve got a science test this afternoon. I don’t know if I can get out of it.”
“Can you get Connie to say you’re sick or something?” That way, Ariel could be the one to tell her about the appointment.
“I’ll try,” Ariel said, and for the next while, she and Connie fired texts back and forth, while he leaned against the door and waited. At last, Ariel slipped her phone into her pocket. “She said she’d do it.”
“And in return?”
Ariel halved the length of her pepperoni stick in one big bite. “I have to clean her bathroom if I fail the test.” She began chewing contentedly. “Which I won’t, because I’ve got an eighty-five average in science right now.”
Ben experienced a shot of pride. No, it couldn’t be that. Relief, then. Relief that Ariel’s academics were not yet one more problem for Connie. “A high mark like that only proves I couldn’t be your old man.”
He’d meant it as a compliment, but the smile fell from her face. “I guess we’ll see.”
“Guess so,” he said, and checked the time on his phone. Too early to go, not long enough to leave and come back. How to kill time? “You need to bring ID.”
“What kind?”
How was it that everything he said triggered a new complication? “I dunno, birth certificate, learner’s permit, social insurance number, whatever you got that proves you are you, I guess.”
She thumped in her combat boots down the stairs, skimming past him as she rounded the staircase to her basement. “This’ll take a while.”
“Perfect,” he said, because it was.
“Oh, and I’m the sarcastic one,” she said over her shoulder.
He leaned against the door and kept the peace.
* * *
ARIEL DIDN’T SAY a word during the entire twenty-minute ride to Red Deer, which suited Ben. She sat straight and tilted a little forward, looking all around like a kid on a field trip. Maybe for her, it was. She’d moved to Spirit Lake two months ago, and how often had she gone into Red Deer since then? How often had she gone anywhere? Even in an old beater like his. It didn’t sound as if Miranda had had a car, given her lifestyle, and from what Ariel had said, none of the gang kids she hung with were well-traveled.
Twice he felt her gaze on him and braced for whatever she might fire his way. But then her attention slipped away to a hawk in flight or a moving tractor in a field, and he relaxed again.
Once, she winced and cupped her hand over her jaw. He remembered her first night here when he’d taken her for a sub. “Your tooth still hurt?”
“A little.”
A tooth didn’t hurt a little for two months. By now, it probably hurt a whole lot. “Tell Connie about it. She’ll take you to the dentist.”
“It’s fine.” Ariel pulled her hand away but not a minute later her hand crept back. Fine, he’d say something to Connie himself.
In the waiting room of the clinic, the probabilities from late-night internet searches spun in his mind. He tried to look calm, indifferent. He glanced at Ariel, who seemed to be pulling off what he was aiming for. Either she’d achieved it, or they were both faking it.
In the end, the whole procedure from entering the private room to the mouth swab and out again took them under fifteen minutes. In two or three business days, they’d know if they were family or not.
Getting back in the truck, Ben got a text from Connie. Seth’s cow is in labor! Get out here! And in a second text, Please.
Ben groaned. What did he know about calving? The closest he’d come to a cow that wasn’t in his burger was these last couple of days checking Seth’s cattle, and each time he’d checked on the pregnant cow, he’d hoped she’d stay that way until Seth returned. No such luck.
Once again, he felt Ariel looking at him. This time, she spoke. “What’s the problem?”
“Seth’s cow is calving.”
“So?”
“So I don’t know anything about calving. He said to call the vet if the cow was in trouble but I’m not sure I’d be able to tell.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
* * *
HE STILL HAD no clue as he observed the cow in the barn pen. The animal was lying down on the straw, her back end bulged and lifting as her muscles and the calf worked together. She looked fine.
A whole lot better than Connie, in fact. She had lifted Callie into her arms, her face paler than he’d ever seen it. “Will she be okay? Should I call Seth?”
“No. He’ll just worry and I don’t know yet if there’s anything to worry about.”
“You don’t need me here? I can go?”
The cow bawled, long and low and almost in surprise. Connie squeaked in terror and burrowed her head against Callie’s shoulder, covering the little girl’s own head with her hand, as if the barn roof was caving in.
“You can go,” Ben said. Connie was off like a bullet, still holding Callie, back to the house, where she’d ordered the other kids to stay put.
He leaned on the gate. The cow had shifted around so that her back end was now on full display. He wanted to run after Connie. “Now what?” he said aloud to himself.
“I think we wait.”
Ariel. He’d forgotten she was there. He’d brought her straight out to the farm with him, and had barely registered that she’d followed them to the barn. She turned her phone screen to him. It was a video of a black-and-white cow lying in straw, calving. “The front feet are the first to come out.”
“Does it say how long that’ll take?”
Ariel unmuted the video, and the soft voice of the narrator—the cow owner apparently—drifted into the barn. Not a minute passed before Ariel said, “She keeps cutting the video, so I can’t tell.”
Ben rested his arms on the top railing of the gate and his foot on the bottom one, and settled in to wait. Ariel came up beside him, leaned her arms on the second railing from the top and rested her chin on the top one.
“You don’t have to stay.”
“I know.” She didn’t move.
Okay, then. They watched the cow’s back end bulge and retract, bulge and retract. Once she got halfway up on her hind legs, then folded down again and returned to the bulge-and-retract pattern. If this was farming, Seth could have it.
“Do you have a family?” Ariel asked.
The question had come out in a rush, a quick birthing of what she’d probably wanted to say on their drive to Red Deer.
“I’m an only kid,” he said. “My mom left my dad and me when I was eight, and my dad eventually moved to Fort McMurray. Haven’t seen him in nearly five years.”
“You and him don’t get along?”
Ben rubbed his thumb along the railing, worn smooth from sixty-plus years of hands and arms doing much what he was now. No amount of sanding could replicate the slow wear of time and touch. “We don’t not get along. We’re just not interested in each other. He signed over the house to me, all paid for, before he left for Fort Mac and that was that.”
His father had also given Ben fifty-seven thousand and six hundred dollars, an odd number, as if he’d drained the account to the nearest dollar. His father had written him the check on the truck hood warm and vibrating from the engine chugging underneath. He handed it over and said, “That enough?”
Ben had understood what he was really asking. Is this enough for me to leave you in good conscience? Ben told him it would do, folded the check once and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he’d shook his dad’s hand and wished him a safe drive, his usual sendoff since he was ten. His dad had reversed out of the driveway; they’d waved to each other as they always did, shine or snow. His father had driven off and Ben had headed around the corner of the house to his workshop. And that had been that.
“Why did your mom leave? Was your dad beating her?”
What? Her expression was deliberately neutral, as if by assuming a horror she’d given him permission to lay on whatever the truth was. “No, he wasn’t. Far as I can gather, she was bored. Of marriage, of being a mother.”
“Wow. Cold.”
Exactly what Connie had said of him. Was apathy inherited? From both sides?
Ariel seemed to believe so. “That explains your lack of interest when it comes to me. You didn’t have any real parents so you think I don’t need them, either.”
“You get top marks in psychology, too?”
Ariel fixed her attention back on the cow.
“I had parents enough,” Ben said. “Mrs. Greene and, until he died, Mr. Greene. Shirley and Jim.” Even now, saying their names comforted him.
“I had parents in a way, too. Mom and Auntie Connie.”
Ben knew where she was going with this one. “Until I came along and ruined it, right?”
“They weren’t like how Alexi is with her kids,” Ariel said. “Both of them burned the food all the time. I remember Mrs. Greene actually. She taught me how to use the toaster and cook an egg in the microwave. I made my own breakfasts because a lot of mornings they were too hungover.”
It couldn’t have been easy for Ariel. “I think,” he conceded, “I came out ahead when it came to parents.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve made it this far,” she murmured.
She had. By the skin of her teeth, but she had. This time, he didn’t deny feeling proud.
The cow stood and began to turn in the small space, moaning.
Ben straightened. “What’s happening?”
Ariel lifted her chin off the railing and tilted her head to inspect the cow’s rear end. “I see the feet!”
Sure enough, two hoofs protruded out, but then disappeared back inside the cow. Ben jutted his chin at Ariel’s phone. “Is that normal?”
Ariel played more of the video and Ben watched it with her. It was. So was wrapping chains around the front legs and pulling the calf out.
“Should we do that?” Ben said.
“Might make it easier on the cow,” Ariel said.
But not on him. “Let’s wait.”
The cow seemed to think Ben was talking to her and laid back down.
“What’s going on with Trevor and the bag?”
By now, Ben was used to Ariel speaking out of the blue. How much to tell her? “I gave it to a guy who knows Trevor. He will talk to Trevor.”
Ariel looked at him as if he’d gone insane. “Who is this guy? Does he understand who he’s dealing with?”
Ben recalled how expertly and indifferently McCready had applied the tire iron to his windshield. “Believe me, he understands. I don’t know how these gangs or dealers work, I’ll be the first to admit that, but he does, okay?”
“If he doesn’t get it right, and they get ahold of me—” She stopped, her teeth scraping her lip ring.
He said it for her, softly. “They’ll kill you.”
Her lip paled where her teeth had bit down so hard on it. “Or worse,” she whispered.
That had never occurred to him. All kinds of ways to get even.
The cow rolled up on her heavy udder and began to pant. Out came the hooved feet again. Ariel stiffened. “Okay, I think she’s close.”
The hoofs disappeared again, leaving behind a red membrane-y balloon. Ugh. Connie would’ve puked if she’d seen it. He was having to swallow hard himself. The cow was panting now, her muscles flexing and straining. Minutes passed. The hooves didn’t appear again.
Ariel strode over to a hook by the barn door and lifted off a long chain with a padded noose. “The kids said this is what Seth uses on the cows.”
“That can’t be right.”
She began to unhitch the gate.
No way was she going to do his job. “I’ll do it,” he said. To cut off her arguments, he added, “I’m stronger and you need to tell me what to do.”
That seemed to suit her fine—had she counted on him to react that way?—and he found himself kneeling on the straw, groping with his bare hands inside the cow for the feet.
“I got ’em,” he said.
“Okay, so pull them out—gently—and then slip the rope around them quick before they get back in. Then you have to pull on the chain so the feet don’t disappear inside again.”
He did it and, while holding the tension on the rope, said, “Now what?”
She instructed him to pull in time with the contractions. Whe
n the calf squelched out onto the straw minutes later, she walked him through how to check the calf’s breathing passages and how to wait for the cow to lick her calf dry and then to nudge the calf to the cow’s engorged udder.
Good. Done. “When you get the results, will you tell Auntie Connie?”
He should’ve known he wouldn’t be clearing the pen without at least one more question. “I’ll give you my number now. I’ll text you and Connie at the same time.”
“How long will it take?”
“Two to three business days.” He’d opted for the rush service.
“How long after you get them will you forward it to us?”
“Within twenty minutes. You can text me after three days if you haven’t heard.”
Ben was closing the gate when Ariel lobbed her last question.
“If it turns out not to be you, do you know who else it could be?”
What a thing for a kid to have to ask. Ben rolled off a strip of paper towel from a dispenser on the wall and wiped his hands as best he could.
“No,” he said, giving her the most honest answer he could. “I don’t.”
“I guess you’re my one chance, then,” Ariel said.
At family. At what every lost and lonely kid, in combat boots or riding a bicycle, secretly wanted.
The calf’s mouth latched onto his mother’s teat and the tail became a wagging blur of bliss. The cow, her lashes long, blinked at Ben in clear dismissal.
Job done. He opened the gate and closed it behind him.
“Thanks,” Ben said, “for helping out.” He paused and then said, even though it sounded way too heavy, “I don’t know if I could’ve done it without you.”
Ariel pushed off the railing. “We didn’t have a choice. Auntie Connie was as useless as teats on a bull.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AT SUPPERTIME, SETH and Alexi arrived back home from their short honeymoon. The kids instantly mobbed them, and Connie stood aside and let the family become a big cluster of hugs and kisses. Besides, she could never get enough of Seth going soft with his ready-made family.
He sat on the front porch, strung with the kitschy Welcome Home banner, two kids on his lap, two more pressed to his shoulders and a cat circling his legs. He was handing out gifts like Santa Claus. Even Ariel, off to the side as always, brightened when he tossed her a small present. A pack of cards. It twisted Connie’s heart to see Ariel’s quick blush and casual thanks. Who, except maybe her mother, would’ve bought her anything out of the blue? Connie still had to buy her a birthday gift.
Building a Family Page 17
