14. Callum
14
CALLUM
I glanced around the kitchen as I rinsed off my hands under the tap water. Spending my days in Nadia’s house without her here, spending time with her dog and cats, was like getting to spy on her life. I sort of felt like a peeping Tom—a peeping Tom who fixed things. Being surrounded by her belongings, her array of plants, the photos in frames of her friends and from her school, and the novelty mugs that ranged from silly to raunchy, which was basically Nadia in a nutshell, that were on her drying rack beside her farmhouse sink all combined to give me an insight into who she was as an adult. It made me feel closer to her, yet somehow even more distant at the same time.
Even though we’d been together during our college years, we’d spent a lot of those years apart. We never went to the same college, not that it would have mattered because after my freshman year, I quit to pursue my MMA career. Since I was an amateur, my schedule was crazy. I had six to eight bouts per year and spent all the time in between recovering or training. Nadia stayed on the East Coast to go to college, and I was on the West Coast with my trainer.
Technically, we were together, but long-distance definitely didn’t do anything to help us with our off-and-on status. We broke up more often, and it took us longer to get back together. Still, we made it all the way to her senior year.
A week before my dad passed, we’d broken up, but I was sure that, like all the other times, we’d get back together. But that didn’t happen. My dad died, and my entire life fell apart.
I stared out the window at the back deck that I’d repaired and resealed. A flash of what our lives would have looked like if we had gotten back together and stayed together played in my mind’s eye. In vivid detail, I saw our friends laughing and talking with two or three of our own kids running around with their friends kicking balls and jumping over sprinklers. I smelled the delicious aroma of meat cooking on the barbeque. I heard our song playing as we continued our tradition of slow dancing at sunset on the deck just like we used to talk about doing when we had our own backyard as teens, slow dancing at sunset on the deck at Slice of Heaven.
No. I couldn’t think like that. If we’d gotten back together then I wouldn’t have Matty, and he was my entire world. Things worked out exactly how they should have.
My phone alarm went off, snapping me out of my stroll up what-could-have-been way, which was the opposite of a walk down memory lane. I pulled my phone from my pocket and saw it was a timer I set to remind me to pick Matty and Chloe up from the after-school art program they’d both gotten into. My mom had been doing the drop-off and pick-up all week, but she had a hair appointment tonight. Chloe’s school counselor emailed me about the program the weekend I got to town, saying it would be a really good fit for her because it used art as therapy.
I agreed because I could use all the help I could get in that department. Thankfully, they had classes for all ages, so she nominated Matty for a slot too, since he transferred mid-year. So both kids were there.
“See you tomorrow, Peanut.” I leaned down and gave him good scritches under his chin.
His entire backend wiggled, and his tongue hung out of one side of his mouth. He’d spent the entire week following me around like a shadow. After I had Matty, I wanted to get a dog, but Felicity claimed she was allergic. I was starting to suspect she lied, considering she’d done several collabs with people who had dogs, cats, rabbits, and horses. She spent weekends at their houses, went on trips with them, even been on shoots and done promotions in ads with a variety of animals and never seemed to have any issues.
Over the years, I’d begun to think her problem with dogs and cats had more to do with her aversion to their shedding and drooling because she hated having hair on her clothes and thought that slobber was disgusting.
On my way to pick up the kids, I thought about all the little things I’d overlooked with Felicity and wondered why I had. The most obvious answer was I wanted Matty to have a family with parents who were together, but the truth was, we weren’t together. Maybe for the first year after Matty was born, we were, but after that, Felicity had been gone as much or more than she’d been home. I justified her absence by saying it was for work or because she was overwhelmed and needed to take care of herself, but there came a point when I had to face the fact that she wasn’t interested in being a mom or partner.
Now that I’d seen Nadia again, the reason I’d stayed in my relationship with Felicity for so long, why I never cared why she was gone, and why I’d overlooked so much had become clear to me. I overlooked things about her because I didn’t love her. It never bothered me that she wasn’t around because my life was easier when she wasn’t home; I preferred it. She was not an easy person to cohabitate with. Her mood swings caused me emotional whiplash. If she didn’t get enough engagement on a post, it would ruin her entire day. If she read comments from trolls, she would obsess over them and go down a very dark rabbit hole. If she saw other influencers collaborating together without her, she felt left out and would have a meltdown. From one moment to the next, I never knew if she was going to have a good day or a bad day. One comment, one poor-performing post, one envy-inducing collab, and her world imploded.
But none of that mattered to me because I didn’t care. It didn’t matter to me what she felt. I knew she would never hurt me; she could never hurt me. Being with Felicity, raising a family with Felicity, was safe because no matter what, she couldn’t destroy or devastate me. She didn’t have that power.
I pulled up to Artistic Horizons, and through the window, I saw Chloe and Nadia .
“What the hell?” I muttered aloud to myself.
It was a small town, but this was getting crazy. I went to drop Matty off at school; Nadia was his teacher. I went out on my first job with Comfort Construction, and Nadia opened the door; she is the homeowner. And now I come to pick up the kids from their after-school program, and who is working at the front desk? Nadia.
If I believed in signs, I would say these were all flashing neon arrows pointing in Nadia’s direction.
I got out of my truck and headed up the stairs. When I opened the door, Chloe and Nadia both turned their heads to look at me.
“Hi.” Nadia smiled.
The second I looked into her eyes, all the anxiety I’d been feeling just melted away. “Hi.”
I looked over at Chloe and did a double take in disbelief. She was smiling. At me.
“Matty’s in the back.” She clapped her hands together. “I’ll go get him.”
Chloe practically skipped down the hall, leaving Nadia and me alone.
I wasn’t sure what was more shocking, the fact that Chloe smiled at me or that Nadia was here, just like at school and on my first job. “What are you doing here?”
I winced, hoping that hadn’t come out sounding rude.
Her chin dipped as she ducked her head, and she tucked her hair behind her ear, revealing the slope of her neck, the area of her neck that I knew she loved when I kissed. “I work here. I’m the program director.”
“Oh, that’s great.”
“My friend Ashley runs it; this is all—” She waved her hand like a model on The Price is Right . “—her baby. I mean, it was her baby. Her real baby is, you know, in her belly, but, you know, she’s amazing.”
“So are you.” I hadn’t meant for that admission to come out of my mouth. It had just sort of happened. I loved it when Nadia rambled; it meant she was nervous. That emotion rarely happened. Most of the time she projected a confident, sassy persona. The truth was that beneath that facade there was a very tender, sensitive person that few people ever saw.
Actually, when I thought of it that way, she reminded me of the way everyone described Chloe.
Her baby blue eyes looked up at me beneath a row of thick, dark lashes. I could see the vulnerability and confusion swimming in them. I wasn’t sure why my comment would have caused her to be confused. It’s not like I had ever stopped loving her. She was the one whose feelings changed. She was the one who’d ended things. She was the one who’d immediately moved on with Jerry Fucking Clemons, of all people.
I heard Matty before I saw him coming around the corner. “Dad, I’m starving. Can we get pizza?”
“Uh, yeah, sure. We can get pizza.”
“Do you want to come with us?” Chloe asked Nadia.
“Oh, um…” Nadia looked at me and then back at Chloe. “I don’t think?—”
“Yeah, come get pizza with us!” Matty jumped up and down.
“Oh, no.” Nadia shook her head back and forth. “I don’t want to…you guys should just?—.”
“Please?!” Chloe pleaded. “Please, please, please!”
“Don’t you like pizza?” Matty asked over Chloe’s pleas.
Nadia looked at both kids and then up to me. I smiled. I didn’t want her to feel pressured into coming to dinner with us, but I would really appreciate it if she did. Chloe and I still weren’t in the best place. I’d been trying to give her space but also let her know that I was there for her. My approach was crashing and burning because I didn’t feel any closer to her now than when I arrived two weeks earlier. I knew it wasn’t going to happen overnight, but having Nadia as a buffer for pizza would be nice.
Chloe clearly had a connection with Nadia. Seeing the two of them talking and laughing through the window the same way I’d seen her behave with my mom and Buzz made me feel like even more of a failure. I really didn’t have any idea how to connect with her. The first smile she’d ever given me was when I’d shown up just now.
“We’d love you to come,” I told her. “But if you have other plans, like a hot date...”
“No, I don’t.” She shook her head. “You know I’m not…okay, yes. I will come.”
“Can I ride with you?” Chloe asked her.
Once again, Nadia’s eyes met mine, searching for my approval before giving her response. I dipped my chin in a quick nod.
“Sure. I just have to let Ash know I’m leaving.” She smiled and then turned to me. “We’ll meet you guys there.”
Okay, I guess that was my cue to leave.
Nadia grabbed a bag so comically large it looked like it would tip her over as she picked it up from beneath the desk and Matty and I headed out.
“Did you have fun?” I asked as we walked to the truck.
“Yeah, we did two paintings.”
“Two? Wow.”
“One was of our families, and one we did when we looked in the mirror; it was a self poor tate.”
“Self-portrait,” I corrected him.
“That’s what I said.”
After I opened the door, he tossed his backpack into the backseat and climbed up into the truck. As he got situated into his booster seat, I noticed the hem of his jeans were a half an inch higher than his shoes. He’d gone through another growth spurt. Which meant I needed to do some shopping.
I was weighing the pros and cons of online vs. in-person shopping as I made my way around the truck and into the driver’s seat. The biggest pro of online was not having to drag a six-year-old who hated shopping almost as much as I did into a store to try on clothes. But the online column had a big con; without trying on the clothes, I had no way of knowing if they would fit, which meant I’d have to do returns, and that was a pain in the ass.
“Look!” Matty enthused behind me as I pressed the ignition button.
I turned and looked over my shoulder. Matty was holding up one of the pictures he’d painted. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of his self-portrait. Whatever they were teaching, it worked. This wasn’t your typical child’s drawing of a generic round face, round eyes, hook nose, exaggerated smile, and one-dimensional brown hair. This portrait had layers; it had dimension.
“Wow.” I was genuinely impressed. “That is really good!”
“And I made a family one!” Matty pulled out the other paper.
Once again, I was surprised. This time it wasn’t just the quality of work that had me taken aback; it was also who was included, or should I say who wasn’t. There were five people in the picture and eight animals. Myself, Matty, Chloe, my mom, Buzz, Bandit, Betty, Shadow, and all five chickens.
“Why didn’t you draw your mom?”
“She’s not real family,” he explained the same way he would if he was saying Bandit was a dog and Shadow was a horse; it was just what they were.
Hearing him say that caused my heart to drop into my stomach. I looked at his face, searching to see any hint of what he was feeling. His expression matched his tone, matter-of-fact.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, she’s not real family like Gammy and Buzz and Chloe; she’s just sometimes family.”
My heart broke hearing him say that. We’d only been staying with Buzz, my mom, and Chloe for two weeks, yet he considered them ‘real’ family and didn’t put his mom in that same category. I don’t know why I thought that Felicity dipping in and out of Matty’s life hadn’t affected him. I guess it was because he never asked for her. He just accepted that was how it was because it was how it had always been.
Being back home, with my family, on the farm, opened my eyes to the fact that I’d been checked out of my life, operating my life on autopilot for the past ten years. But I was checked back in now, and I needed to make some changes.