Chapter 36
ADAM
Andi rolled toward me on the couch, turning away from the big screen playing Zootopia, and blinked her watery, red-rimmed eyes up at me. “Did you like school when you were a kid?”
We’d been hanging on the couch all morning and afternoon, just the two of us.
The smell of chicken soup hung faintly in the air, already cooled in her bowl on the coffee table.
The rain outside fell in erratic bursts.
I tucked the blanket tighter around her.
“School was fine. Not my favorite, but I liked it.”
She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her shirt. “Did you have any mean teachers?”
“Mrs. Wychowski,” I replied, instantly. “She was the meanest. She always gave me detention for talking in class.”
Her nose scrunched in the most adorable way. “Did you talk in class?”
I sighed. “Yeah.”
She smiled weakly.
“You’re right, I deserved the detention, but she was still mean. She used to make me clean her erasers while I stayed after school.”
“Did you go to school with Billie?”
“She was a couple years younger than me, but yeah, I did.”
“Did she like school?”
“I think so. She was good at school. She got way better grades than me, but she was always busy with her sisters and helping her grandma with the bridal shop.”
“Was Billie your best friend when you were in school?”
“Yes, she was.”
I wasn’t sure where all these Billie questions were coming from, or questions at all, for that matter.
Andi wasn’t really a talker, she left that to Joey.
But since she was sick and home from school, it was just her and me.
The doctor said she had a viral infection and needed to rest for at least the next few days.
She was quiet for a minute, pulling air through her lips in slow, raspy breaths. “Is Billie your best friend now?”
I nodded. “Yes.” I wasn’t sure she ever stopped.
Andi studied me. “Do you love Billie?”
There was no point lying to a kid who could see straight through you. “Yes.”
She considered that, picking at a loose thread on her blanket. “Why doesn’t Billie have kids?”
Shit.
I turned my attention back to the TV. I didn’t know how to explain all that, with its baggage and messy history, to a five-year-old who clung to Billie. I tried anyway. “Remember how Billie took care of her sisters when she grew up? Well, I think that she was sort of already kind of a mom.”
Andi mulled this over with the philosophical air of a sick child who’d spent too many hours bored on the couch. “Yesterday when she was talking to Mrs. McDonald, she called me her little girl.”
“She cares a lot about you, and I know she’ll always be there for you.”
Seeing how attached she was, seeing the way this conversation was headed only cemented the fact that Billie’s time here needed to end.
The girls were clearly getting too attached.
And I wasn’t doing any better. After the weekend we spent crossing every line imaginable, I couldn’t have her here.
Every time she walked by, I wanted to reach out and grab her, to touch her, to kiss her.
Keeping my hands to myself was difficult enough before we’d spent the entire night and morning behaving like a real married couple, now it was damn near impossible.
And then the way she’d taken care of Andi, made the doctor’s appointment and we all went to it together, got ice cream on the way home, it was so wholesome and felt like a real family.
I didn’t want the girls getting the wrong idea.
She nodded and looked at the TV. It was quiet for several minutes, and I had just taken a sip of my coffee when she asked, “What’s cuntvenience?”
I almost choked. “What?”
“Billie was talking to Mrs. McDonald and said—”
Fucking Billie.
“Oh, I think she was trying to say convenience.”
“Yeah, that’s what she said she meant, but she said cuntvenience first, then she said, I mean convenience.”
“It’s a bad word. You shouldn’t say that.
Billie should not have said that in front of you.
” I sighed, then addressed something that I’d been wanting to talk to Andi about.
“I’m sorry she spoke to Mrs. McDonald in front of you.
I hope it didn’t make you feel uncomfortable.
Sometimes Billie doesn’t think before she speaks, especially when she’s sticking up for people she cares about. ”
When I heard what Billie did, I was worried it embarrassed Andi even more than she’d already been. I would have handled it differently. I would have made an appointment to speak to her teacher in private.
A grin lifted on Andi’s face, and I realized I got it all wrong.
“I didn’t feel uncomfortable. I wasn’t the one getting in trouble, Mrs. McDonald was.
And, don’t worry, Billie wasn’t mean, she was funny.
When Mrs. McDonald said that I was fine at lunch, so that’s why she didn’t let me go see the nurse when I said I didn’t feel good, Billie pretended like she was a doctor and knew something no other doctors knew. ”
I chuckled, yeah that sounded like Billie.
“Mrs. McDonald is mean, and Billie just told her she can’t be mean anymore.
And Billie told her I wouldn’t lie about having to use the bathroom and said I know my colors, numbers, alphabet, can write, read, and do double digit addition and subtraction, so Mrs. McDonald isn’t teaching me anything.
” Andi shrugged her tiny shoulders. “And she isn’t teaching me anything, so Billie wasn’t lying when she said that. ”
I grinned, at first thinking it was a joke, but then looked at Andi. “Wait, do you actually know all those things?”
Andi nodded.
“Who taught you?”
“Grammy used to have me do Brainthelete thirty minutes a day.”
“Brainthelete?”
She nodded.
“What’s Brainthelete?”
“It’s an online brain training app for kids with an IQ of a hundred and forty or more.”
I stared at my daughter. I knew she was smart, that nothing got past her, and thought she might be a genius, but I didn’t realize that she actually was. “Your Grammy didn’t tell me about the app, I’m sorry. Do you want to do it still?”
She sniffed and wiped her nose with the tissue. “Yeah, I do. I miss it.”
“Okay.” Shit. I wished I would have known. I wondered why Maureen didn’t tell me. Was it a test to see if I could figure it out? If it was, I clearly failed.
Or, maybe she just wanted you to get to know your daughters so you could form your own opinions of who they were as people before you had preconceived ideas about them and put them into boxes. A voice that sounded very much like Billie sounded in my head.
Billie voice might be right. If I’d known that about her this whole time, everything she’d done would have been viewed through the lens of being a genius, instead of the lens of being Andi, the shy, sweet, introspective, generous, loving, compassionate girl she is.
“What was your mom like?” Andi asked, catching me totally by surprise.
“Um, she was funny and she liked to sing.”
“She liked to sing?”
“Yeah, she sang a lot.”
“Did she sing to you?”
“I don’t remember if she did, I don’t think so.
I remember she would put music on and sing and dance around and plant flowers.
” I hadn’t thought about that in so long.
No one asked me about my mom. The last person I’d spoken to about my mom was probably Billie, and that’s when we were kids.
“Oh, and she made her own Halloween costumes.”
A wrinkle appeared on Andi’s forehead. “You don’t remember if she liked to sing to you?”
Out of everything I’d said, that’s what she followed up on? Not the plants or the Halloween costumes?
“No, I don’t remember.”
“Why not?”
“She left when I was your age.”
Her nose scrunched in the most adorable way. “She left?”
“Yep.”
Andi sat up and tucked her knees to her chest, thinking hard. “Why did she leave?”
That was the million dollar question, wasn’t it? I’d spent years speculating: maybe she was overwhelmed, maybe she never wanted a kid, or maybe she just… couldn’t do it. But the reasons got thinner the older I got.
I wanted to give her a better answer than the one I’d lived with. “I just think maybe she wasn’t happy,” I guessed.
She looked suspicious. “Do you think she misses you?”
I thought about that for a long time. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
If she did, she hadn’t done anything about it. It’s not like it would have been difficult to track me down.
Andi looked back at the TV and was quiet again. We both were. I could practically hear the wheels in her head turning.
After about five minutes she looked up at me. “Do you miss her?”
The truth was I hadn’t thought about her for years, probably a decade. But after coming back home and having the girls, I had been thinking about her more. I wasn’t sure if I missed her, but I had been thinking about her and I had questions, questions I wished I had answers to.
“For a long time, I didn’t think about her, but lately I have been,” I answered honestly.
She blinked up at me with a wisdom in her eyes far beyond her years. “Do you have a picture of her?”
I hesitated, then pulled out my phone. There was only one photo—grainy, scanned in from an old Polaroid: my mother in the backyard chasing me around the backyard at the age of four, both of us laughing. I held it out to her.
She studied the photo for a long time. “She looks like you.”
“You think so?” I hadn’t looked at the photo in a long time, but now that she said it, I could see the resemblance.
“Where is she now?” Andi asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. After she left, she never came back.”
She frowned. “Why?”
I shrugged and felt my chest getting tight. This was not my favorite subject but my daughter deserved to know her family history. “I don’t know.”
Without warning Andi threw her arms around my neck and hugged me tightly. I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close to me. Her fever was coming back up. She was due another dose of Tylenol. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
I hugged her back, kissed the top of her head, and breathed in the scent of children’s shampoo and the ghost of the baby she used to be that I’d missed. “Thank you, baby girl,” I whispered, grateful the words held steady.
When she settled back down, she curled up beside me, and I could feel her body relaxing, her breathing evening out as she started to doze off.
Then, half-awake, she murmured, “Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t go anywhere, okay?”
My heart shattered hearing her say that.
I squeezed her shoulder. “I’m not going anywhere, I promise.”
I knew from the first time I saw the girls that I would do anything for them, protect them, sacrifice for them, and I knew I loved them, but this feeling now, now they were mine on an entirely different level.
I would kill for my girls, die for my girls, Andi and Joey were all that mattered.
And Billie, too, even if she didn’t know it.