Chapter 8
Jake
My mother doesn’t ask. She announces.
“Barbecue. Diamond Head. Tomorrow at noon.” Her voice comes through the phone like the matter is already settled. “That little girl needs noise and cousins and badly supervised sugar.”
I shift the phone against my shoulder. Down the hall, Poppy is narrating something to her sea turtle in a voice that suggests the turtle has done something genuinely wrong.
“We don’t have cousins, Mom.”
“Lucas counts as several, emotionally.”
She’s not wrong. I rub a hand down my face. Four hours of sleep in two days. Custody paperwork stacked on my kitchen island thick enough to stop a door. Somewhere under it are Poppy’s pediatric records, which I keep meaning to file.
Under the pediatric records is a folder Emilia put together.
Agency printouts, three candidates, her notes in the margins.
She found a nanny by the end of the week, the way she finds everything: fast, thorough, no wasted motion.
Lani starts Monday. Weekdays, eight to four, covering the foundation hours and the preschool gap so I’m not rebuilding my calendar around a four-year-old’s nap.
Good hire. Emilia vetted her harder than I vet board appointments.
She also did it to get herself out. I know that’s the play. Get someone qualified into the daily logistics and step back to the job she keeps reminding me she’s actually paid for.
It won’t work, and I knew it the second she handed me the folder.
Poppy doesn’t want the qualified person. When she wakes up scared she’s not going to ask for Lani. And when something goes sideways at nine at night, I’m not calling an agency hire.
I’m calling Emilia. I’ve been calling Emilia for weeks.
“She’s still settling in. I don’t want to overwhelm her.”
“Jacob.” Just my name. That’s all it takes. Twenty-nine years, and she can still make me feel like I got caught misbehaving. “You’ve had that child locked in a glass tower for five days with nobody but you and Emilia. She needs to see what family looks like. So do you, frankly.”
I open my mouth.
“Noon,” she says. “Bring Emilia.”
The line goes dead before I can explain that Emilia isn’t mine to bring.
Hell.
The flower sundress becomes an international incident.
“It has flowers.” Poppy stands in the middle of her bedroom with her arms crossed, glaring at the dress. “I want my shark shirt.”
“The shark shirt has ketchup on it.”
“I like the ketchup.”
I crouch down to her level because that’s what the parenting articles say to do, and discover that eye contact with a furious four-year-old is its own brand of hell. She has my eyes. I keep forgetting that until moments like this, when those eyes are aimed at me like weapons.
“It’s a barbecue. With our family. Don’t you want to look nice?”
“No.”
Fair. Honestly, completely fair.
I call Emilia.
She picks up on the second ring. “What’s wrong?”
“Clothing situation.”
A pause. “Define situation.”
“Poppy’s rejected the dress. We’re at an impasse, and I’m losing badly.”
“Put me on speaker.”
I do. Emilia’s voice fills the bedroom and Poppy’s whole face changes, softens and opens, the way it does every single damn time. That thing happens in my chest again.
“Poppy. The flower dress is the special barbecue dress. Do you know why?”
Poppy eyes the phone. “Why?”
“Because barbecue dresses have to be soft enough to run in. Can you run in your shark shirt?”
“...Yes.”
“Can you do a cartwheel in it?”
I watch the negotiation happen on Poppy’s face in real time and think, not for the first time, that Emilia Hart should be running a country.
“I can wear my boots,” Poppy announces. Not a question. A treaty term.
I start to say something about rain boots with a sundress, but then I remember Emilia over Poppy’s head the other day, mouthing we never argue with a toddler.
“Boots are perfect,” I say.
“Boots are perfect,” Emilia agrees. “I’ll be over shortly.”
Poppy puts on the damn dress.
The call comes in while she’s admiring the boots in the hallway mirror.
Diane’s name lights up the screen. We’ve done this twice already since Poppy got here, once the first night, once a few days later and both times went the same way. I prop the phone against the fruit bowl so Poppy can see it and brace for round three.
“Hi, baby,” Diane says. Her face is too close to the camera, the way older people hold phones, and behind her I can see Robert’s shoulder and the kitchen they raised Rachel in.
“Hi.” Poppy becomes quiet and subdued.
I’ve clocked the pattern by now, because it’s been like this for every call. Two minutes ago she was negotiating footwear like a hostage situation. Now she’s sitting dead straight on the stool with the sea turtle crushed against her chest, answering in one word at a time.
“Are you having fun in Hawaii?” Diane asks.
“Yes.”
“Did you see the ocean?”
“Yes.”
Robert leans into frame. “Any sharks?”
“No.” A pause. “Sharks live deep.”
That’s the whole answer. The kid who grilled me about shark bedtimes for forty minutes yesterday has nothing for the man who’s known her since the day she was born.
It looks like these calls remind her of what is now missing.
It’s not them. Diane and Robert are the only home she had since Rachel died, and they’re sitting in the kitchen she used to live in, in front of the life she lost. Every time those two faces show up on the screen, the whole thing comes back with them.
So she goes quiet and careful and far away, and I sit here filling the silence with preschool updates and beach stories because I don’t know how the hell else to help her through it.
Diane’s eyes stay locked on Poppy the entire time, hungry for any piece of her. Robert nods at everything I say.
Poppy holds the turtle and gives them almost nothing.
When Diane says I love you, sweetheart at the end, Poppy says it back, quiet and dutiful, and slides off the stool before the call fully disconnects.
I look at the dark screen for a second. Fuck.
I’d trade a lot to know how to follow her into wherever she goes on those calls. I haven’t figured it out yet.
“You ready for the barbecue?” I ask.
“Yes,” Poppy says, both boots on.
“Yeah.” I pocket the phone. “Me too.”
She talks the entire drive to Diamond Head.
Forty solid minutes of sea turtles, whether sharks have bones, why the sky is “doing that,” and a deeply personal grievance against a kid named Tyler she hasn’t seen in five days and may never see again.
I don’t follow most of it. I don’t need to.
The sound of her voice filling the backseat does something to the inside of my car I don’t have words for yet.
Emilia sits beside me, trying very hard not to laugh.
She’s failing. Every time Poppy says something genuinely unhinged, ”Tyler eats the paste, Jake.” Emilia presses her lips together and looks out the window, and her shoulders shake.
The coast road curves. Ocean opens up on the right, stupid and bright, and I glance over. Sundress on the four-year-old in the back. Emilia laughing in the front seat. Me driving us to a barbecue together.
We look like a family.
The thought lands wrong and right at the same time. I put my eyes back on the road before I do something stupid.
Mom is already on the lanai steps waiting when we pull up.
I get Poppy out of the backseat and she immediately tucks herself against my leg, suddenly shy with all the new space and noise around her.
“Poppy.” I crouch down beside her. “This is your Grandma Maggie.”
Mom doesn’t swoop in. Doesn’t push. She just lowers herself slowly to Poppy’s level and waits.
Poppy studies her for a long moment.
“You have nice eyes.”
Maggie smiles. “So do you. You got them from your dad.”
Poppy looks at me like she’s verifying this information. I nod.
She seems satisfied.
Mom straightens up and squeezes my arm once as she passes. “She looks happy, Jake.”
Four words. That’s all.
But my throat tightens anyway, because coming from my mother, happy means I’m doing something right.
The barbecue is chaos inside of ninety seconds.
Lucas reaches us first, because Lucas always reaches everything first, and drops into a crouch in front of Poppy with the focused intensity of a man meeting a head of state.
“You must be Poppy.”
Poppy looks at his shirt. “That’s a flower.”
“Hibiscus,” Lucas says. “You like flowers?”
“On dresses.” She’s already losing interest. “Not on shirts.”
“Noted.” He stands, claps his hands once.
“Okay. Here’s the plan. I have a surfboard that’s too small for me, which makes it exactly your size.
We’re gonna paint flowers on it, eat shaved ice until an adult tries to stop us, and I’m going to need you to ignore basically everything your dad says for the next four hours. ”
Poppy looks at me. Looks back at Lucas.
“Okay,” she says, and takes his hand.
Just like that she’s gone, towed off across the lawn by my brother, and I have to look away.
Isla appears at my shoulder. “He’s been planning that for two days. Bought the surfboard yesterday.”
“He bought a surfboard for a kid he hadn’t met?”
“He bought a surfboard for his niece.” She says it gently, but it lands like a fist. Niece. Like it was always going to be true. Like nobody needed a vote.
I watch Lucas crouch on the grass, painting tiny crooked hibiscus flowers along the rail while Poppy supervises with the seriousness of a building inspector, and something in my chest pulls so hard it hurts.
My brothers are already treating her like family.
She’s been here ten minutes.
Noah’s approach is something else entirely.
He waits until Poppy is settled with her shaved ice before he sits down across from her at the lanai table, folds his hands, and says, “Hello. I’m your Uncle Noah. I understand you like marine life,” with the energy of a man negotiating a hostage situation.
Poppy stares at him for a long, evaluating moment. “Why do your eyebrows look mad all the time?”
Leah, two seats down, makes a sound like a kettle and has to put her drink down fast.