Chapter Sixteen #2
“That’s very generous. Thank you.” She executes a theatrical pivot and disappears into a bedroom, swinging the door shut behind her.
Mila looks up at me. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly.
“Don’t apologize. You did nothing wrong.” I offer her a hand, helping her to her feet. “And I won’t accept it, so you can just take it back.”
The smile she gives me makes my heart feel like putty. “Thanks for doing this. I won’t keep you any longer—I’m sure you have things to do.”
I do, but I can’t leave her like this. It feels like leaving a bunny alone with a hawk. “I have some time. Want to get out of the house for a minute? Take a walk or something?”
She glances over her shoulder at her mother’s closed door. “I don’t know if I should. I have to get dinner going soon. We have to be at the hospital really early tomorrow morning.”
“Come on,” I coax. She needs some distance between herself and her mom. “Fifteen minutes—a walk around the block. It’s gorgeous outside.”
Her bottom lip disappears between her teeth while she considers it. “Okay. Let me just put some shoes on.”
While she’s upstairs, I take the drill out to my truck. When I come back inside, I spot a black cat at the bottom of the steps. “Hey, there. You must be Beatrix.” I crouch down and hold out my hand, pleased when she moves closer to sniff me. Her ears twitch forward.
“Wow.” Mila pauses at the top of the stairs. “She likes you. It usually takes her a while to warm up to people.”
“I’m good with kids, old ladies, and animals.”
“Clearly.” She comes down the stairs, unlaced sneakers on her feet. Sitting on one of the lower steps, she ties her shoes while I pet Beatrix. When the shoes are tied, Mila stands. “Okay, Bea, go back upstairs. You know the rules.”
The cat scampers upstairs, and I rise to my feet. Since Mila is still on the step, we’re chest to chest, her face level with mine.
It would be so easy to kiss her.
Her eyes drop to my mouth, making me wonder if she’s thinking the same thing, especially when she runs her tongue over her lips. One step forward, and it’s done.
Remembering this morning’s vow to respect her space, I back up and hold the door open for her instead.
“Just a minute,” she says, rounding the corner into the living room. “I should leave a note for my mom so I don’t get a bunch of texts accusing me of ghosting her.”
In my opinion, her mother deserves to be ghosted, but I keep my mouth shut. A moment later, she reappears and we head outside.
We wander slowly down her street. It’s warm and sunny, with just a few wispy, white clouds in a sky the color of her eyes. At the corner, two neighborhood girls have a lemonade stand set up.
“How much?” I ask.
“Fifty cents,” says the shorter one, who wears a unicorn headband.
“We’ll take two.” I put a five-dollar bill in the red solo cup serving as their bank. “Keep the change.”
She and her business partner exchange a thrilled look. “Thanks!”
Carefully, they pour two lemonades for us, one holding the cup steady on the stand, the other grasping the pitcher with both hands.
“So how has business been today?” I inquire.
“Pretty good,” replies the taller one, who wears glasses.
“Lots of customers?”
“Not lots, just some,” says the unicorn.
“We’ll send anyone we see your way,” I tell them. “Are you guys friends or sisters?”
“Sisters,” they answer at the same time.
“I’m older,” adds the one with glasses. “I’m seven, and she’s six.”
“But the lemonade stand was my idea.” Six wears a serious expression, eyeballing her sister like she expects her to argue.
“That’s true,” Seven concedes. “But we both made the lemonade. We used real lemons.”
Six beams, revealing a gap in her front teeth. “I added the sugar.”
I nod. “Teamwork. I like it.”
When the cups are full, the sisters hand them over. As I give the first one to Mila, a woman comes out of the house with a toddler on her hip.
“Excuse me! Mayor McKean?”
I look up, surprised. “Yes.”
The woman smiles and holds up her phone. “Could I take your picture with the girls?”
“Sure.”
“Would you mind holding the baby so she can be in the picture too?”
“Not at all.” I reach for the little tyke, another girl with a ponytail sprouting from the top of her head and the chubbiest cheeks I’ve ever seen.
I wonder if she’ll protest being held by a stranger, but she gives me a gummy smile and kicks her feet when I lift her up to the sky.
Setting her on one arm, I move around to the older kids’ side of the stand and position myself between their chairs.
Mila observes it all with an amused expression as their mother snaps a few photos. “Thanks,” the woman says. “My name is Sydney Carr, and I do social media for the Hart’s Landing Parents’ Club. Would it be okay to put the picture online?”
“Fine with me.”
“And I wanted to thank you for approving funds for the new splash pad at Riverfront Park. It was so wonderful all summer!”
“I’m glad.” I hand the baby back to her.
“We’d been asking the council for years,” Sydney says, bouncing the toddler on her hip. “They always claimed they couldn’t find the money.”
“Well, sometimes it’s just a matter of looking in new places.” I pick up the second lemonade and give the family a wave. “Good luck, girls.”
“Thank you,” they call back.
Mila and I resume our walk. “Well, that was adorable,” she murmurs. “You are good with kids.”
“Oh, I staged that whole thing to impress you. Did it work?”
She laughs. “Yes.”
“Good, because those child actors are expensive.” We reach the corner, and I look both ways. “Which way would you like to go? Toward Main Street? Or toward the park?”
“Park,” she says, taking a left. I fall into step beside her.
A couple of minutes later, we enter the park and follow the jogging trail around the perimeter. When we come to a bench next to the pond, I turn to her. “Want to sit for a minute?”
“Sure.” We take our seats, and for a little while, we just watch the ducks on the pond and sip lemonade, the sun warm on our faces. Every time the breeze kicks up, it carries the scent of orange blossoms in my direction.
“I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but I was proud of you for defending your art career to your mom,” I tell her. “You weren’t lying when you said she’s hard on you. I can’t believe she said you were a disappointment.”
“She doesn’t mean it like it sounds.” Unbelievably, it seems like Mila is actually defending her mother. “She just really wanted me to go to Juilliard.”
I say nothing. Toss back the rest of my lemonade.
“She sacrificed a lot for dance. She didn’t have a regular childhood.
She left home at twelve to go study at a ballet school in New York.
She lived with a family and was homeschooled with other dancers like her.
No social life, no school events, no normal high school experiences.
Dance was all she ever knew, all she’d ever worked for.
” Mila stares into her cup. “And then she had to give it all up for me.”
“Do you feel guilty about that?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
I shrug. “It wasn’t your fault she got pregnant.”
“Somehow, that’s not the part that got stuck on a loop in my brain.” She’s silent for a moment. “When I was a kid, I used to try to make up for it.”
“How?”
“By being perfect. Especially in dance.”
“That’s a lot of pressure on a kid.”
“Didn’t your parents put pressure on you?”
I think for a moment, squinting into the sun. “It was different. We just had to avoid setting my dad off. He had some predictable triggers, but sometimes you had no idea what would do it. So I learned to be hypervigilant, more to protect my mom and sister than anything else.”
She turns her face toward me. In the afternoon light, her blue eyes glimmer with flecks of gold. “You like protecting people.”
“It’s the right thing to do when people can’t protect themselves.” Those eyes are killing me. And that mouth. If I kiss her right now, she’ll taste like lemons and sugar and sunshine.
I lower my head. She lifts her chin. Our lips are barely an inch apart.
Then I slide to the far end of the bench, making her laugh.
“What’s the matter?” she asks.
“Nothing. I’m just being a good friend.”
“Ah.”
“You’re being a bad friend, by the way.”
“I am?”
“Yes. If we’re going to hang out, you shouldn’t dress so cute.”
She looks down. “Everett, I’m wearing ripped jeans and dirty sneakers. I slept in this shirt.”
“Hmm, maybe it’s not your clothes. Maybe it’s your hair and makeup.”
“I’m not wearing any makeup. And I haven’t even showered yet today, let alone washed my hair. My mother kept me too busy.”
I frown. “Then it’s your perfume. I’m going to have to request that you don’t put it on before you see me.”
She shakes her head. “I’m not wearing any perfume, either.”
“You mean to tell me that all this—” I make a circular gesture with my hand, framing her in. “All this is just…the real you?”
“Yes.” Her cheeks grow pink.
“Jesus, that’s even worse.” I get up, walk down to the next bench, and drop onto it. “I better sit over here,” I call out.
She laughs so hard her feet come off the ground. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Oh, and could you stop laughing so much, too?” Getting to my feet again, I walk slowly back to her. “Because I really like the way it sounds.”
Her laughter fades as she looked up at me. Making a visor with one hand, she shields her eyes from the sun. “Everett?”
“Yes?”
“I need you to tell me some bad things about you. The worst things you can think of. Disgusting habits, horrible personality flaws, giant red flags.”
“Hmm.” I toy with the plastic cup in my hands and prop a boot on the bench. “I’m bossy. I’m competitive as fuck. And I always think I can solve other people’s problems better than they can.”
She ponders that and shakes her head. “Do better.”
“I don’t make my bed. I don’t own wineglasses. When I do laundry, I don’t separate colors, I just shove everything that’s dirty in the washing machine together.”
That makes her wince. “Keep going.”
“I listen to yacht rock. I constantly scavenge for food at my mom’s house because I can’t cook a thing, and I hate grocery shopping. And here’s one that will really get you—I don’t own a single piece of artwork or have any framed photographs in my house.”
She blinks at me. “What’s on your walls?”
“Paint.”
She nods slowly. “This is good.”
“Have I sufficiently turned you off?”
“No,” she says, rising to her feet. “But it’s a start.”