Authors: Mary Wallace
His eyes flared, “No, I don’t.
I’ve never been a part of her school
life.”
His words bit.
“Okay, calm down.
Why don’t you take her tomorrow and see what they need at
the school office?”
“I’ve got to meet the commercial property
landlord. Can you do it?”
Celeste looked at him, baffled.
“But Eddie, you finally have her with you.
Don’t you want to do the important
things with her?”
His lips tightened.
“I’m no good at that stuff.”
“Who says?”
“Everyone.
You don’t understand.”
“Well, she’s your daughter, you should do it.
If I’d had a father, I’d want him to
help me out.”
“Your father took off, didn’t he?
You never met him?”
Filled with inexplicable shame, Celeste
nodded.
“So you’re going to
abandon her because my father abandoned me?”
“I’m not going to abandon her.
I brought her here.
But I know when I’m not good at
something and I don’t know how to stand up in public to explain where I’ve been
for the past 9 years.”
“No one’s going to ask you where you’ve
been.
How would they know anything
about her past?”
“I don’t know.
Can you please do this for me?”
“You’re asking me to go in and pretend I’m
related to her.”
“They probably won’t ask anything personal.”
Celeste raised her eyebrows at him, wondering
why he didn’t do it if they wouldn’t ask personal questions.
“I’m not good with kids.”
She bit her lip.
She’d only vaguely sketched out the
scene of her firing when she came home that day, leaving out the toddler who
had simply tried to show off her little car.
“Look,”
his voice got serious, “First, I dumped her mother, not knowing she was
pregnant.
I didn’t find out about
Rosalinda until she was 7 and her mom died.
The authorities shipped her off to my mom when I was
deployed overseas.”
“Seven years you missed?”
“Yep.
And I don’t think they were good years for her.
Her mom ended up an addict.
She OD’d.”
“How tragic.”
He looked at her with a bit of embarrassment.
“Well, she had too hard a time raising
Rosalinda, so she numbed herself so she wouldn’t feel so alone.”
Celeste frowned.
“You should be really happy that you had your
mother.”
“Why are you bringing up my mom?”
“Because she worked so hard to feed you and
give you a roof over your head.
You have no idea how hard that is, actually.
And she slept near you every night.”
“She did.”
Celeste remembered waking up with her little arm flung over
her mother’s neck, her mother kissing it in her half sleep.
“When you told me about your mom, it gave me
the courage to face up to Rosalinda,” he admitted, “to try to take care of
her.”
“That’s very sweet,” Celeste said, her heart
warm with the thought.
“But it’s not so easy for me.
Kind of like it wasn’t so easy for
Rosalinda’s mother.”
“Didn’t anyone stop her mom from doing
drugs?
How could she do that
knowing how much it would screw up Rosalinda’s life?”
“You can’t stop someone,” he scoffed.
“Drugs change your brain chemistry,
they lay down tracks like a horse drawn carriage in the mud.
Your neurons change, they can’t
make themselves happy anymore without continuous highs, more drugs.
It’s hell, being addicted.”
She remembered Frank’s insistence at lunch
that Eddie was addicted.
“How do
you know?”
“I saw lots of guys broken by war.
Drugs helped them suit up each new day
when they didn’t know if they’d be playing chess or scraping guts off their
faces before lunchtime.”
“I know you had a hard time in Iraq.”
Celeste leaned in.
“Did something happen that hurt you
that deep?”
For a moment, Eddie’s face contorted and then
softened and she felt in a flash that she could again see vestiges of his little
boy face.
“No,” he said.
“When you come home you put all those memories into a coffin
and you bury them.
Right now I’m
fighting to get the business going and be the least damaging dad I can be to
Rosalinda.”
“What about me?”
Celeste minded that she wasn’t on his priority list.
“Celeste, I love you,” he said softly,
spooning scrambled eggs onto two plates.
“As well as I can.
You have
no idea what it means to me that the big-hearted girl who wrote ‘hope’ all over
places in Detroit is you.
I’m
happy that we took this leap together.
That we’re in Hawaii together,” he spread his arms wide, pointing to the
lush hillside out the window.
“I
can’t believe I’ve lived long enough to get here.
And if I can make up even one day to Rosalinda for not
taking care of her until now, I’ll be a success as a man.
I need you to help me with that, if you
can.”
“I can try,” she said, “but I’m really not
good with kids.”
“You haven’t tried yet in your life.
You and Frank had great lives but you
weren’t really mature.”
“Hey!
I was mature!
I worked
every day, got myself through college and worked years in that job and I saved
money from every paycheck.
I was
responsible.”
Her pride was hurt.
“But you never cared for anyone, took care of
them, like a kid.”
“I never wanted a kid.”
“This fight again?”
Eddie rubbed his temples, running his fingers around the
dent in his forehead.
“We’re a
package deal, Celeste.”
“No, not this fight again.
But if I wasn’t mature by raising a
kid, neither were you.”
He winced.
“You’re right.
I
let a couple of years go by, trusting my mom to raise her.
But I was in Afghanistan.
I haven’t been out drinking with my
work buddy.”
“Oh my god, I can’t believe you brought that
up.”
She seethed.
“Well, I haven’t been there for her.
You’re right.
But I’m here now.
And I’m telling the truth, I know I can’t do all the parenting she needs,
I’m fucked up.
I love you,” he
leaned in to kiss her neck.
“Maybe
together we can raise her right.”
Never, not once in all the days she’d been with
Eddie or the nights when they’d made love did she ever imagine them having a
baby together.
Maybe she was
deficient, she thought.
She’d been
decorating a million homes in her head and never included a nursery or a
child’s bedroom.
She wanted to be with
him and Rosalinda was all right as kids go, but signing on to raise her was
more than she wanted.
Balancing
out between her life in this lovely house, the bed she shared with Eddie, she
shook her head at the thought that her path actually did include Rosalinda for
years into the future.
His warm lips pressed in to her ear, his
tongue gently played and she moaned, distracted by his passion.
She turned her face to kiss him.
After a long kiss and his roving hands on her
body, he whispered, “so, you’ll take her to the school tomorrow?”
She pulled away and looked into his eyes.
They were intense and sincere.
“I’ll do my best for you, Celeste, if you can
help me with Rosalinda.”
He kissed
the top of her nose, pulling her close.
“Please.”
Her mind torn between the fear of walking into
a classroom of screaming children and her desire for Eddie’s body, she pursed
her lips and said, “I’ll try.”
He smiled gratefully and nibbled part of her
lip, then moved his tongue deeper into her mouth.
Chapter
Thirty-Four
The little school was quiet, not the
pandemonium she expected.
Class
was in session.
Celeste walked gingerly down an empty, bleached
wainscotted hallway, hearing muffled sounds of childish laughter and lilting
adult voices.
Rosalinda pointed to a metal engraved sign on
a wall that steered them to the school office.
Rosalinda’s hair was long and wavy, Celeste noticed.
Very much like her own, except dark
black.
The little girl looked
clean in her sweatshirt and jeans.
The school secretary was on the phone, taking
down absentee student information from a parent.
She adeptly motioned to Celeste and Rosalinda to sit down
and completed her call.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
She was Hawaiian, about 5 foot 2 inches
tall, solid like a fire hydrant, with short curly hair.
She wore an ankle-length casual dress
and flip-flops, which amused Celeste.
No one wore flip-flops to work back home.
Well, maybe they did at schools these days.
She had zero experience at schools back
home, hadn’t walked into one since she walked out years ago after her college
graduation.
“We are here to sign Rosalinda up for school,”
Celeste said.
“My landlady, Malia
Konani, told me that she’d phoned ahead?
You said you have room for a transfer student?”
“Hello, Rosalinda,” the lady rolled the letter
R as she repeated Rosalinda’s name, ‘I’m Mrs. Lokelani.
My name means ‘rose’ too, how
funny!”
She leaned over the desk
to shake hands with Rosalinda and Celeste.
“Yes, Malia made quite a phone call about you, little lady,”
she patted Rosalinda on the shoulders.
“She says you are a very good gardener.
We have a vegetable garden here, we cook a lot of our school
lunches with food we grow ourselves.”
Rosalinda smiled thoughtfully.
“Where are you from?”
“Michigan,” Rosalinda answered.
“But we live here now.”
“Welcome, then.
What grade are you in?”
“Fourth.”
Celeste was relieved that Rosalinda was so
competent, she had been afraid of being found out as a fraud.
She hoped this meeting would stay
lighthearted and welcoming.
“You and your mommy moved here?”
Mrs. Lokelani motioned to Celeste with
a warm smile.
Rosalinda froze.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to embarrass you.
It’s okay if it’s just the two of you
as your family.
We’ve got all
kinds of families here.
We’ve got
kids raised by one parent, both parents, grandparents, two dads, two moms.
It’s okay if it’s just the two of you.”
Celeste smiled nervously at Mrs. Lokelani’s
mistaken assumption and she reached quickly for Rosalinda’s hand.
“Her father is here with us, we just
moved in over the ridge.”
Technically truthful, she didn’t need to redraw the mother-girlfriend
distinction for her.
“Malia said
her grandson went to school here.”
“Her daughter went to school here too, poor
thing.”
Celeste cocked her head, confused.
Rosalinda looked down in her lap.
“So I’m sure there’s some paperwork?”
Celeste spoke methodically to calm
herself.
“Yes, siree!
Just a few papers.
And we need a copy of an official mailing with your new address showing
your local residency.
A phone bill
or an electric bill with your name on it.”
“I have a copy of our lease, but it’s just in
my name, not her father’s.”
“That’s just fine, honey,” Mrs. Lokelani
said.
She took the lease and looked
at it cursorily.
“Do you have a certified copy of her birth
certificate?
Or her passport?”