Chapter 9 Brooks
NINE
brOOKS
Somehow, Lindsey and I have managed to fall into a comfortable friendship, and it only took a week of living together to get past the thick tension that filled the room whenever we were alone together.
Of course, Holly has been waking up a lot at night, and Lindsey’s boys have been running to her bedroom in the middle of the night to sleep with her because they’re scared, so our alone time has been drastically limited.
Those few moments when I’m not at the ballpark, and Lindsey’s not at the table taking her online classes, have been filled with unpacking boxes and figuring out the many quirks of this place.
Like after dinner last night, when we tag-teamed locating which light switch kept causing a full-house power outage every time we touched it.
It’s the downstairs bathroom light. Roddy and his son, Jake, are coming over later to take a look at it with me.
It’s all been a lot—finishing the legal process for Holly, getting established with a pediatrician, moving, house repairs, parenting, and stressing out over this new blended-family situation I chose.
Oh, and baseball. Yeah, the thing I need to be great at if I want to give my daughter the best life I can.
I need to get the rest of my shit in order so I can focus again.
Despite my scattered brain and chaos-ridden life, I’m somehow getting it done on the field.
I made some highlight reels after my game last night—first with my diving stop that I turned for a double play to get out of bases loaded, then almost hitting for the cycle.
I was one triple away. I swear they’re harder to hit than homers.
I need to really bear down on my speed work.
I can be faster on the bases. Every skill I dominate gives me an edge.
Play hard this season, get to Texas next year. That’s the plan.
But first, I need to get this paperwork approved, make my custody official, and order a certified copy of Holly’s updated birth certificate.
Until I have every single dot dotted and T crossed, I simply don’t feel settled.
Even if I hadn’t grown up the way I did, I would still feel scared about losing her.
But the stakes seem escalated when I try to calm my worries and chase sleep at night.
It has been elusive and rare. It’s going to catch up with me, for sure. But not today.
“Lindsey?” I have tried to knot this tie around my neck a dozen times. I give up.
I saunter out of my bathroom and head downstairs, where she is camped out at the table with a dozen books open around her laptop.
She’s trying to knock out three college courses online so she can enroll in the university’s advertising school and finish her degree.
I wish I could help her, but she needs to complete three of my worst subjects—biology, algebra, and some course that surveys the world’s religions.
I only hope she’s better with a tie than I am with parts of the cell.
She pushes her reading glasses up on top of her head, and they get buried in the hair she’s tied into these crazy-looking buns on either side of her crown.
She’s cute in her glasses—and with the hair knots, to be honest—something I have kept to myself because things are going well.
We’ve found a groove, the kind that throwing out words like “cute” can mess up.
“Come here,” she says, twisting in the kitchen chair and uncrossing her legs. I don’t know how she sits like that on a wooden chair. I can barely sit cross legged on the floor.
I step in front of her as she stands on her toes to reach the tie I’ve butchered around my neck. She unfurls my attempt at a Windsor knot, and her mouth is bunched with her concentration. That’s another cute thing I keep to myself.
“So first, you need to make this side twice as long,” she explains, tugging one end of my tie lower along my chest. I drop my chin to watch her work, and her fingers thread through the gray silk, wrapping one strip of fabric around the other until suddenly she’s pushing a perfect knot toward my throat.
“Now you try,” she says, reaching to undo her work.
I flatten my hands over hers and stare directly into her eyes.
“If you untie this thing, I’ll scream like Riggs and Deacon do when you force feed them broccoli.”
Our stare-off lasts about three seconds before she relaxes her hands under mine and we both let go.
“Fine,” she says, blowing up at the loose hairs in her face, then dropping her reading glasses back down the bridge of her nose. “But if you don’t practice, you’re never going to learn.”
She sort of sings that last part, and it makes me chuckle. I bet her mom talked to her and her sister a lot like that, at least when she was around. I’d take a part-time mom like hers over the addict I was stuck with.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you? I can help with Holly,” she says while I grab a protein drink from the fridge and shake it. I’m too nervous to eat anything, but I have a game tonight. I’m going to need to pack away some energy.
“I can handle it. Plus, if she gets fussy, I want to show off that I know what to do.” I shrug and gulp down the rest of my shake before tossing the empty bottle in the trash.
“Unless, of course, she has one of those epic meltdowns that leaves you utterly helpless.” She laughs for a second, then snaps her mouth shut and draws a line across her lips when she realizes the effect of her words probably missed the humorous target.
“You’re going to be fine. You have everything ready. And this part is basically the formality. You’re her dad. You have the DNA to show it. And you’ve been doing great. I mean, look at the nanny you went out and found for her?”
She breathes on her nails, then rubs them on the center of her T-shirt before heading back to her seat. I roll my eyes, but her confidence does calm my nerves some. I wish I could help with her anxiety in return.
Her ex picked up the boys for the day, for some behind-the-scenes thing for the monster truck rally out at the fairgrounds.
Lindsey said things like that are completely out of character for the guy, which I can tell, even from only meeting him once.
He doesn’t strike me as the type who’s into motors, or sports, or outdooring.
Academic is the word Lindsey uses to describe him, but from where I come from, the guy’s basically a snob.
She threw herself into her studies the moment the boys left this morning.
She does this thing when she begins to daydream, though, where she hooks a strand of hair around her index finger, then wraps it around her first knuckle until it nearly cuts off her circulation.
I’m pretty sure she does that when she’s stressing over her boys being gone. Gone with her ex.
“I think we might get the castle done this weekend,” I say, to pull her out of her own head.
She lifts her gaze to take in the scattered Legos on the other end of the table, the drawbridge nearly complete. That was last night’s big moment. Deacon figured it out on his own after dinner. A faint smile plays at her lips before her eyes shift to me.
“They really like their birthday gift, don’t they?”
I nod.
“So do I,” I tease. I’ve put my fair share of blocks in place. And maybe have a little envy that Deacon got to do the drawbridge.
Our shared gaze drifts into that too long territory, so when I feel the shift in the air and inside my chest, I drop my chin and feel my tie against my button down, then drop my hands to my pockets to make sure I have everything.
“What am I missing?” I ask.
“Uh . . .”
I look up and follow the direction of Lindsey’s finger, which is pointing to my sleeping daughter nestled in her carrier.
“Right,” I breathe out.
“Don’t worry. That’s just a sign you’re legit. We parents lose our minds sometimes.”
I take her pep talk to heart, then stride across the room and grab the handle. Just as I make my way to the door, though, there’s a harried knock that startles me and wakes my napping baby.
“Shit,” I mutter.
“I’ll get it,” Lindsey says, leaping from the chair while I raise the carrier to my chest so I can soothe Holly back to sleep before she really gets going.
My face close to hers, I make the popping sound with my lips that seems to be her favorite thing lately.
I’m so into this tiny world that I’m not paying close attention to Lindsey’s interaction at the door until I hear a strange male voice say my name.
“Son,” he says when I meet his stare.
The man standing in the doorway is a ghost. A shell of the man from my memories and in the photos in that box.
The Jared Callahan I knew was a smoker who swore a lot, with muscles and a tattoo of a naked woman on his forearm.
His hair was shaggy, always a bit dirty, and his mustache grown too long.
This man’s cheeks sink in and his face is clean shaven, his hair buzzed and balding at his widow’s peak.
The tattoo is there, though. It’s been covered some with other things, but if I tilt my head and look just right, it’s a perfect match.
It’s an answer key barely disguised under time served.
“What are you doing here?” I shift the carrier in my hand, moving the baby seat to my side, away from the doorway.
I glance at Lindsey, hoping she’ll see the seriousness in my eyes as my jaw tightens.
“I’ve been looking for you for a year. I got out last spring, served the last year on parole. They just approved my move last month, and I’ve been trying to get the courage to come see you.”
I swallow hard, then bite, “Why?”
My father flinches, his eyes blinking rapidly. His nervous system was misfiring before his last run-in with the law, when I was in junior high. You push too much poison into your body, and it reacts. It’s inevitable.
“Well, I was hoping—”
“I’m busy. You shouldn’t have hoped,” I say, cutting him off.
Lindsey has slowly made her way toward me, and when she reaches my side, she takes over holding Holly’s carrier. My father’s gaze darts to his grandchild, and his eyes widen as his mouth forms an O.
“Is that—”
“She’s mine,” Lindsey says, as if on instinct. My pulse races, my veins teeming with energy. If I need to throw him out of this house, I will. I’ll carry him to the street and leave him for the dogs, or the teenage drag racers that I hear run their engines around here sometimes.
“Is this your wife?” he asks.
My mouth remains a hard line. I won’t give him anything. Lindsey, however, chuckles politely.
“No, nothing like that. We’re roommates.
I’m living here with my kids. Brooks was just helping me to the car.
” Lindsey waves her hand as if this unwanted, unexpected visit isn’t hitting me like an ax in the center of my chest. She’s intent on building a story for him.
What she doesn’t know is that this man doesn’t deserve a story. Or another minute of our time.
My dad’s gaze drops to Lindsey’s bare feet. She follows his sightline and curls her toes under.
“I was about to put on my shoes. I’m always running late,” she says, laughing in a self-deprecating way.
“We have to go. I have . . . work,” I say, catching myself. I’m sure he’s figured out I got a contract to play ball. He’s not here to see his son, the accountant.
I grasp the door and lean toward the man, who, though we are the same height, is half my weight.
“I’m sorry I bothered you. Maybe if you have time later this week, or—”
“Probably not.” I shut the door before he can utter another word, then rest my fist on the wood before letting my forehead fall against my hand.
My entire body is vibrating. I tried to visit him when he got locked up, and he had zero interest. I played baseball as a kid, hoping maybe I’d get his attention, that he’d come home and get straight.
Other kids had dads in the dugout coaching them.
Their moms were in the stands, waiting with orange slices and cold-water bottles.
They wore shirts with their sons’ numbers. Nobody wore my number to anything.
I rode home with friends. I was invited to stay at their homes after games because their parents knew I didn’t have anyone to go home to.
I didn’t get it when I was a kid, but looking back now as an adult, I see how they all took pity on me.
I don’t resent them for it, either. I love every family that was kinder to me than my own.
Hell, Hunter damn near saved me when we were in high school.
“Come on. You don’t want to be late,” Lindsey says as her palm lands on the center of my back.
“I need a minute. I don’t think I should drive right now,” I say, my eyes closed and my forehead still pressed against the door.
“I know. I’m driving,” she says.
I open my eyes and twist just enough to glance down at her feet. She put on shoes. She skipped the socks, but the sneakers are tied. My lip tugs up on one side, and I lift my gaze to her.
“So, that’s my dad.”
“Yeah, I pieced that together. Sorry I lied about Holly. I had a feeling you didn’t want him to know.”
I bring my palm to her shoulder and cup the curve of her arm.
“You read the room perfectly. I don’t ever want him to know he has a grandchild. He would just ruin that relationship. It’s better for Holly if she never knows he exists.”
Lindsey’s eyes hold on to mine for a moment, and the way they grow heavy, along with the downturn of her mouth, sends a wave of shame and guilt into my chest. I know how my words sound. But when you’ve lived through hell the way I have, you lose faith in second chances. Redemption is a fairytale.
“You should ride in the back seat, so you can watch her sleep.” Lindsey pats the center of my chest, covering the wild thump of my angry heart. “You want to have a cool head in the courtroom, even if this is just a formality.”
I drop my gaze a tick and nod. She’s right.
I take Holly and her carrier from her and follow her out the door to her van.
She presses the automatic door button on her key fob so I can load Holly in while she starts the van and cranks the air.
The summer heat is beginning its brutal reign.
Once Holly’s seat is locked in place, I slide into the one next to her.
My gaze lands on Lindsey’s in the rearview mirror.
“Hey, Linds?”
She arches a brow in the reflection.
“You’re a great fuckin’ nanny.”
Her lips pull into a tight smile, and she drops her sunglasses down over her eyes before nodding.
“Damn right I am.”
She backs out of our driveway, and I give my focus over to the one thing that matters most in this world—Holly. But I save one percent for someone else, sparing a few glances back to the mirror every few miles. I shouldn’t have called her a nanny. She’s a friend. Probably my best one at this point.