13. Imogen
Imogen
Chocolate cake taught me everything I need to know about this kitchen, so this morning I keep both hands on the bowl and my eyes off the man pouring coffee like the floor’s on fire under him.
Ashton’s dressed and shaved already. Twelve hours ago his fist was wound through my hair and his mouth on mine, and now he’s reading his phone over the rim of a cup like I’m a vendor who showed up early.
“Morning,” he says.
“Morning.” I keep it short enough to hand back as change.
“You sleep?”
“Like a log. A spiteful log. Out cold.”
His jaw tightens at the corner, the muscle there jumping once. He lifts the cup and drinks instead of answering me.
“Luke’s up,” he says, like that’s what either of us was talking about.
“I know. I heard him. I’m making pancakes.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t.” I drop the flour bag on the counter. “I’m doing it anyway.”
“What’s for breakfast?” Luke asks when he comes into the kitchen.
“Pancakes,” I tell him, dropping the flour bag down between us. “You’ve got the dangerous jobs.”
“The eggs?” He’s already dragging a stool across the floor, the legs shrieking, and I watch his father’s eyes close like the sound costs him money.
“The eggs. You crack, I rescue any shell that jumps ship. Teamwork.”
He climbs up, sleeves pushed past his elbows, and cracks the first one. Half the shell goes in and I pick it out. He tracks my fingers the whole time, waiting to see if I’ll turn it into a lecture, but it doesn’t and I just whisk.
“You’re going really hard at that,” he says.
“It needs to know who’s in charge.”
He breaks into the wet helpless giggle that doubled him over the first day I knew him, and across the counter his father goes still over the coffee.
I keep my face in the bowl, because I made a rule overnight about not looking at this man in daylight, and I’d like to make it past breakfast before I break it.
“Dad. You want a crunchy one?”
“Sure, I’ll take a crunchy one.”
“That’s the shell one,” Luke tells him, very seriously.
“I know what it is.”
I suppress a smile. “Brave. Eating the ugly one to spare the child’s feelings. Real frontline parenting.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“You contain a binder. With tabs.” I flip the first pancake. “Stay humble.”
The corner of his mouth lifts, and I watch him strangle it in the crib. Back to the pan I go, because the second I start enjoying him on purpose I’m done for, and by my own accounting I was done for the moment I climbed into his lap last night.
Six pancakes hit the plate, half of them shaped like no creature God made.
Luke eats his with his hands. His father stands the whole time, drinks his coffee, and answers a question about whether octopuses eat pancakes with a no so final it puts the kid sideways on the stool.
Two grown adults orbiting one six-year-old so we never have to set down anywhere near each other.
Then his phone buzzes, Lola’s voice threading out of it, and he steps into the hall.
“They’ll be here in an hour,” he tells me when he comes back. “One photographer. One writer. You don’t have to do a thing but be in the room.”
“In good light. Looking dependable. The wholesome live-in, model B.”
“Imogen.”
“I know the deal, I made the deal. I’m only saying it out loud so neither of us forgets I’m the one with a conscience about it.”
“You’ve made that clear.”
“Have I? I’ll keep going till it sticks.” I scrape the pan harder than it needs. “I’m thorough. I learned from the best.”
He opens his mouth.
“Don’t,” I say.
He closes it.
The crew turns the deck into a set quicker than I’d have bet, two umbrellas up on stands, a woman crouched with a light meter, a man in a linen shirt who keeps calling the house organic when there is nothing organic about glass and money.
The writer’s the one to watch. Older, sharp, a recorder cupped in her palm and a notebook she’s not going to need.
She came up the coast for a single story about a single dad who’s rebuilding his life.
Today, my job is standing at the edge of the frame in a clean sweater, being a woman who makes a man’s life calm.
Luke gets parked on the low wall with the whole ocean behind him.
I crouch under the lens and pull faces until his shoulders climb down off his ears and the camera catches a real grin instead of the stiff little one he issues adults on request.
“Beautiful,” linen man calls. “Mom, can we float you in closer?”
“She’s the tutor,” Ashton says, before my mouth’s even open.
The air goes thin and the writer’s pen stops moving across the page.
She swings her chair toward him and opens soft, asking about the coast, the view, the build.
He talks about the topics I pried out of him in his own dining room, why this water, what he saw out here that everybody else drove straight past. Her pen moves fast because it’s a better story than the tax return she came braced for.
I hate that my coaching took, but I hate it even more that there’s a thing in my chest puffing up like a proud parent at a recital.
Then she takes the turn she drove all this way to take.
“And Luke,” she says, tipping in, warm as a hand held over a stove. “Hard age for a separation. How’s he holding up? Our readers love a father who’s there for the worst of it.”
It’s a soft toss, floated right over the middle. The board wants the swing. One line about the nightmares, the closet at the school with the crest on the blazer, and they’ve got their photo in words, the broken boy mended by his father, two points on the number before the coffee’s cold.
Ashton sets his cup on the rail. His son’s twenty feet off, deep in a tide pool, nowhere near earshot, and his father checks the distance with one glance before he opens his mouth.
“He’s six,” he says. “He likes the ocean. The rest of him isn’t for the article.”
She waits, pen lifted, sure there’s a second half. He holds her eyes until she understands that there’s none, then asks about her drive up, turning into an easy and gracious host again, shutting the door on his kid so quietly that she half misses the latch catching.
I turn toward the water so the crew doesn’t catch my face going soft against my own orders.
He kept the one term I asked for in place of money, the single thing I wanted. He chose the boy over the number with a recorder humming a foot from his hand and a board breathing down a phone line.
It shouldn’t change anything. I’m still furious.
Last night’s still lodged behind my sternum like a stone I swallowed and can’t bring back up.
But there’s the warm line dropping down my spine regardless, because a man refusing to sell his kid’s worst nights for two points on a stock price turns out to be a thing I can’t stand to watch, and my resolve goes cheaper than I’d ever admit at the price.
They break it down by two. Linen man calls the light a gift, the writer swears she’ll send the piece before it prints, and then the deck’s only a deck again, two umbrellas standing dead and a kid who’s been a small saint about strangers pointing equipment at him for three hours.
“Can we go to the rocks?” Luke asks the second they’re gone.
“We can absolutely go to the rocks.”
The tide’s half out and the pools are crowded with the small stranded world he loves best. I take a warm flat stone with his math workbook open across my knee while he conducts a full census of everything with legs.
We knock out three pages between crab sightings.
He runs the multiplication in his head faster than I can copy the problem down, then loses ten clean minutes to a sea anemone, and I let him have them, because the workbook was never once the actual work.
“Lori moved,” he reports. Lori is the starfish and Lori has not so much as twitched.
“Lori’s an adrenaline junkie. You can’t keep a girl like that in one place.”
“Starfish are basically the slowest, though.”
“So am I, and here I sit, top of the food chain, queen of the rock.”
“You’re sitting on a rock.”
“Exactly. Queen behavior.”
He considers this, then nods like I’ve made a fair point.
The water runs us back up the sand by six, his pockets clinking, his nose gone pink across the bridge. I get him fed, scrubbed, the rabbit set in its exact spot on the nightstand, and the door cracked to the one width he can stand. He’s gone under before I finish the second page of the dragon book.
I stay in his doorway a minute longer than the work requires, watching him sleep.
Back in my own room, the anger walks back in the second there’s no kid in front of it to hold it down.
Keeping his word about Luke doesn’t square the hallway.
It doesn’t erase the fist in my hair, the mouth that took mine apart, then the hands that set me back on the mattress like I’d embarrassed us both in front of a crowd.
A man can do one brave thing and one cowardly thing inside the same daylight.
I’ve known enough of them to recognize the pairing on sight.
I pull on the soft-necked shirt that I’m calling pajamas, get into the too-soft bed, and drag the dark up over me. I’m not thinking about the six feet across the hall and the man behind the door.
But of course I’m thinking about every bit of it. I roll over and put my spine to the door like that’s ever stopped anything.
My phone lights the ceiling.
For half a second I’m sure it’s my father, the name I let tip into voicemail this morning without listening, and my stomach drops the way it has since I was seventeen. But it isn’t him.
It’s Ashton’s name on the screen. The message waits there, short, and nothing like the orders he usually hands me.
I don’t want to invade your space again, but I would like to talk to you. Please come.
Across the hall, under the crack of his door, the light is on.