If something real developed between me and Addie, how would having her in my son’s life be bad? I was so accustomed to pushing away anything that seemed like a distraction for me, anything that pulled my attention in another direction. But with Addie, I was beginning to see things a different way. Of course, Daniel had no real idea what was going on. All he knew was that we had a house together thanks to a very odd legal arrangement.
“So the raccoon is going to leap off the mantle when the door opens?” Addie was asking Dan now, her eyebrows adorably wrinkled.
“Or maybe when people walk by,” he suggested.
We spent an enjoyable evening, drawing up plans and figuring out each aspect of our haunted house, and I said goodnight to my son, knowing the next day would be bittersweet—he’d go back to Shelly for the rest of the week. But I’d have time alone with Addison. And after sleeping in separate bedrooms for the week, I was ready to hold her in my arms again.
Just before bed, Dan insisted on going out to look around the yard in order to finalize some plans. I was trying to finish up installing some shelving in the master bedroom for Addie, so I told him to use his phone flashlight and be careful. As Addie and I worked together to put up the shelves, I had a strong sense of serenity—everything was working out.
Daniel came in after about twenty minutes, and at first I didn’t notice the limp.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” I asked him.
“Nothing. I’m good.” He shrugged and walked away, but the limp was definitely not a good thing.
“Hey,” I called after him. “Why are you limping?”
“Dad,” he insisted. “I’m fine.”
I should have been more insistent, but hindsight is twenty-twenty.
The following morning, I took Dan to school and went into the store, to find Virgil and Emmett grumpy and muttering with their heads together.
“What?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.
“That gnome showed up here last night,” Virgil said, his face dark as he crossed his arms over his chest.
I laughed. “Oh, the new feud gnome? Thaddius?”
“Laugh all you want,” Emmett growled. “This means war.”
I shook my head, dropping a hand on the counter loudly enough to startle a customer wandering past. “Sorry,” I told her, waving toward the garden pots she was examining. Then I turned to my cousins. “This doesn’t mean war, actually. This means that both sides of this stupid feud have agreed to take the whole thing down a notch. We’re moving this ridiculous feud to level where it can’t hurt anyone’s business or prized possessions, to a place where we can continue pranking each other but know that it’s all in good fun.”
They just stared at me, their faces remaining dark.
“Where was the gnome?” I asked.
“He was sitting out front on one of your Adirondack chairs this morning when I opened,” Virgil said.
“That’s perfectly harmless,” I said.
They exchanged a look.
“Was he holding a sign that said ‘Tuckers are Fuckers?’”
“No,” Virgil said.
“Was he holding a sign that said, ‘Store clearance, everything must go’?”
“No,” Emmett said.
“Was he doing anything besides just sitting innocently in the chair?” I asked.
“No,” they admitted.
“Good, then if you can handle yourselves appropriately, you have permission to take on the responsibility of placing the gnome next. Harmlessly. Without any kind of vandalism or criminal activity.”
Virgil sighed. “Fine.”
“Good,” I said.
The rest of the day progressed calmly, with Thaddius standing next to the register, adding a bit of spooky charm to the place to honor the approach of Halloween.
That night, Addison was waiting for me at the house with lasagna, garlic bread, red wine, and the most beautiful smile I could imagine.
“This is nice,” I said, accepting the glass of wine she handed me once I’d dropped my messenger bag.
“It’s our first night alone in a while,” she said, and it felt so good to know she’d been anticipating it just as much as I had.
I sipped the wine, feeling all the tension wash through me and away as the lush flavor coated my tongue.
This.
Addison waiting, warm and smiling, this beautiful house, the smell of home cooked food in the air. This was everything I wanted. This feeling of happiness welling inside from a place I hadn’t heard from in years, maybe ever. This idea that my life could still take a turn, that there could still be something in it for me beyond the day to day focus I’d found in trying to be a good father to my son. This.
We sat down to dinner, an air of calm anticipation around us in the knowledge that we had the whole night together, the whole weekend. There was no rush.
“Thanks for making dinner,” I said.
Addison smiled. “I’m practicing. It isn’t something I’ve done a lot, but my mom said lasagna is pretty much foolproof.”
“You’re pretty far from a fool anyway.”
“That was close to a dad joke.”
“Do I tell too many dad jokes?”
“It’s part of your charm,” she said, and I believed she meant it.
Dinner was a leisurely affair, each of us relaxed and smiling. Our meal was punctuated with light touches as we talked, and with exchanged looks that said we both knew what was to come. It was like extended foreplay, and by the time we were taking the dishes to the kitchen, I couldn’t wait any longer.
I put my plate on the counter and then let my hands find the sweet curve of Addie’s hips as she faced the sink. I pulled her into my hips and was rewarded with her sharp intake of breath. As my hands explored beneath the hem, finding their way to the smooth skin of her stomach, sliding across soft warmth and pulling her tighter into me, she dropped her head back onto my shoulder. I leaned my head in, burying my nose in the floral sweetness of her hair and then finding the long column of her beautiful throat.
Addie moaned as my lips brushed her skin, and gasped again when I began kissing and licking my way along the side of her neck, moving into the curve of her shoulder to be rewarded with another breathy moan.
My hands had found their way to her breasts, and I cupped the perfect swells in my hands, my balls tightening in anticipation as I pressed myself harder against her. I let out a throaty groan of my own, blinded and deafened to everything but her. But this.
Until.
“Dad?”
I looked up to find Daniel standing just inside the back door, his mouth open slightly and his brow furrowed.
“Dan,” I said, but my brain was too muddled with Addie to respond quickly enough. To respond correctly. I should have stepped away, should have sat him down and explained things, but in the next second, his mother was standing behind him. And she did not look confused at all.
“So you lied to me before,” she said. “This,” she waved between me and Addie, “is exactly what I thought it was. And that doesn’t even matter,” she went on. “You let my son get injured in this disaster of a house.”
“No,” I said, feeling like my words were blocks of concrete, heavy and impossible to arrange correctly. “Wait, hurt? Dan?” I looked to Dan. The limp?
“He stepped on a nail out in the yard,” she said. “And we just came from the doctor where he had a tetanus shot and had the wound treated in case of infection. The fact you didn’t even know about it only makes it worse. And now, this.” She waved back and forth between Addison and me. “No wonder you were too distracted to keep your son safe.”
Daniel looked as upset and confused as I felt. “Are you okay, Dan?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, but stared at Addie, looking hurt. This wasn’t the way I wanted to tell him about the relationship I was building with Addie. And I couldn’t help but feel like Shelly’s presence just behind him was poisoning my ability to defend myself, like there was no way I cou
ld really explain anything with her there. And there was really no defending myself if what she said about Dan getting hurt was true.
“I think we all know exactly what’s going on,” Shelly snapped.
“Just a second,” Addison tried, stepping forward, but Daniel’s face had shifted, his cheeks reddening.
He interrupted whatever Addie had been about to say, “Why didn’t you tell me?” His voice cracked, and I felt my heart crack at the same time. “Why didn’t you just tell me? I’m not a kid.” His words were directly at odds with the emotion on his face, the trembling lip as he struggled with emotion. He was shaking his head now, refusing to meet my eyes.
“Just go upstairs and get your backpack,” Shelly said, and when Daniel had trudged off to retrieve his forgotten item, she pinned me with a glare. “You let your son get hurt and lied to him. And you lied to me. You said you’d keep him safe here, and now he’s got a hole in his foot that needed medical attention. What if it had been something worse? I might have made an empty threat before, but you’ll be hearing from my lawyer now.”
“Shell, don’t do this,” I said, my voice carrying every ounce of the exhaustion I felt.
“I’m doing it. For Daniel,” she said.
I knew two things for certain when she spoke those words.
One, Shelly was serious this time. I’d given her ammunition by not looking out for Daniel. My stomach was shredded with the knowledge that he’d gotten hurt under my care, and that Shelly was right, it could have been much worse.
I also knew that whatever bliss I’d shared with Addison had just come to an end. I’d been deceiving us both, pretending I was free to start something, to enjoy something, to share something with her. But in truth, I was not free. I’d let down my guard and my son had paid for it, and now Shelly had the upper hand. I might lose him.
“Daniel, we’ll talk about this,” I promised as my son walked past me, refusing to meet my eyes.
“Fine.” He pushed through the kitchen door, his backpack slung over his shoulder, and I felt my heart go with him, crushed and crumpled like his pack.
“I’ll talk to you Monday,” Shelly said, and her voice held a threat I clearly identified.
I watched them both walk away, and then turned to face Addison.
“Michael, I’m so sorry.”
“For what? You did nothing wrong.” My words came out harsher than I meant for them to.
“I just—“ Addie began.
But I couldn’t hear her. Not now, not when everything I’d imagined was crumbling like sand walls as the inevitable tide washed in to reclaim its territory. I’d failed Dan. I’d failed to keep him safe, to be the dad he needed. I’d failed at the one thing I’d vowed to focus on. “I’m just going to go to bed,” I said, turning toward the stairs.
“Michael—“
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Good night.” My heart felt like it was sinking through my chest, falling like a rock to the bottom of the deepest ocean trench. I didn’t think I’d ever retrieve it from there, and tonight I didn’t have the energy to even try.
30
Mom Love
Addison
I saw the exact moment Michael gave up on us. Daniel walked right past him as Shelly’s eyes lasered into Michael’s downcast face, and I watched his shoulders fall, his expression dim.
And I knew that whatever this was, whatever this had been, it was done.
I felt awful that Dan had gotten hurt—but then again, he’d come back inside the night before and hadn’t said a thing about stepping on a nail. Was Shelly maybe blowing it a little out of proportion? I couldn’t doubt her really, she was his mother. But why didn’t Dan tell us?
It didn’t matter now. Not where I was concerned. That night, as I lay alone in the king bed in the master bedroom staring at the ceiling, I realized what a fool I’d been.
This house had made it easy to pretend. I’d allowed myself to build an alternate reality, one in which I wasn’t a financial analyst who lived in New York City. One in which I wasn’t a spinster, recently dumped by the man I thought I’d be building a life with. One in which I had everything I ever really wanted.
But I could see now that it was a mirage. One I’d wanted so desperately to believe could be real.
Even Michael was just a flickering falsehood—a version of the man I’d wanted to believe in. One he could never be. Because Michael wasn’t free.
He’d told me himself that he lived in a prison of his own making. He didn’t use those words, of course, but he existed in a cage he built for himself out of regret and guilt over the failure of his relationship with Shelly. Over the mistakes he’d made as a kid and over the opportunities he’d lost as a result.
And now? He was going to choose to step back inside those bars and pull the door shut again, because he thought that was what he deserved.
No amount of convincing from me—that he was a worthy man, that he deserved to be happy, that he was by far one of the most successful people I’d ever met—would change his mind.
So when I woke the next morning with the sun streaming optimistically through the curtains I’d hung, I knew what I needed to do.
Michael was not in the house when I went downstairs. I’d heard his truck start early, and imagined he’d headed off to the store to punish himself some more.
I had coffee and then headed down the hill to the Muffin Tin.
“Addie!” Mom called as I walked through the door. “Oh no. Oh dear. Here, have a pumpkin creme muffin and sit.”
I guessed my distress was clear on my face. Or maybe it was just clear to mothers.
I sat at the end of the counter, watching my mother bustle around and wishing I had the energy she always seemed to have. She put a latte and a muffin in front of me and then stood, her perfectly manicured plump little hands on the counter in front of my plate. For some reason, I found myself staring at her hands.
They’d done so much in her lifetime. They’d done so much for me. Those hands had held me when I was a baby, had carried my sisters and me as children. They’d made countless treats and wiped innumerable tears from our cheeks. They’d hugged and loved, and helped for as long as I had known this woman, and for some reason staring at my mother’s hands now brought tears to my eyes.
“Oh, Addie, what is it?”
I put one of my hands atop my mother’s and looked at the difference. I’d done nothing in my life. I’d thought I was building some kind of empire of independence, modeling the new self-made woman, showing my small-town family what I could do. But my hands were smooth and unlined, and they revealed the folly in my thinking. My hands hadn’t smoothed away tears or held babies. They hadn’t made cookies for school bake sales or tied shoes on the ends of pudgy little legs. They’d typed and processed spreadsheets and dialed for takeout.
“Mom,” I whispered, and it was a broken sob that came from my lips as I realized the extent of my own failures, gazed behind me at the ignored opportunities, the scattered dreams I’d ignored. “I’ve done everything wrong.”
Mom covered my hand with her other one, shaking her head with tears standing in her own eyes. “Oh, my Addie, no. No, you haven’t.” She stepped around the counter and pulled me into her arms, and I buried my face in her familiar smell. The Aqua Net of her bob, the gardenia perfume she sprayed into the air and then shimmied through, the flour and sugar and cinnamon that made up her days. My heart broke wide open and I cried.
For what felt like hours, I sobbed into my mother’s apron like a child, Muffin Tin patrons no doubt avoiding the scene and hoping it might be over soon. But Mom didn’t say a word, she just held me close and let me cry.
And when I’d simmered down to sniffles, wiping at my face and recovering myself as best I could, Mom looked at me and said, “Let’s figure out what’s next.”
For the rest of the day, I stayed at the Tin. Mom and I worked side by side, and we didn’t actively talk about what it was I was going to do next. Instead, we cobbled t
ogether ideas percolated alongside pots of hot coffee and pieced together in the quiet moments between oven timers dinging and customers paying for muffins. And when I helped Mom close down the shop at the end of the day, somehow I had something that felt like a plan.
“So you’ll stay through Halloween, and then go back to the city,” she said. “Not because you owe anything to anyone, but because you have unfinished business there.”
I nodded, testing her words in my soul and finding that they felt right. I would have left earlier, but I felt like I owed it to Daniel to see the haunted house through, and maybe I owed it to Michael to let him know my plans.
He might not care where I went or what I did, but since we were still looped into the house together, he needed to know the plan.
I texted Michael that I was staying with Mom, and I didn’t go back to the house that night, or again until Wednesday evening, the following week. I arrived to find Michael hanging the porch swing in the fading light.
“Hi,” I said, feeling like an intruder as I stood on the front walk of what was technically my house.
He stopped what he was doing and turned to face me, and in the shadowed eaves, I could see emotions cross his face one by one. Surprise. Happiness. Regret. Distance. “Hi,” he said. He stepped toward me and then seemed to think better of it, remaining on the porch at the top of the steps.
“How are you?” I asked, then nodded at the swing without waiting for an answer. “That looks great. You made that?”
He glanced at it as if seeing it for the first time. “I did, yeah.” He didn’t add what I knew was true: for you.
“So, listen,” I began, but Michael spread his hands in front of him as if to stop my words.
“No, no, Addie. I owe you an apology.”
Oh God, no. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to stand here and listen to him tell me why we couldn’t be together, how things would never work. “No, it’s fine. I just needed to tell you that I’m leaving.”
“You’re—oh. You’re leaving.” When he said the words, they sounded flat. Empty.
Falling Into Forever Page 21
