9. Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine
Trent
T he roads are still closed, and the walkway and driveway need to be blown clear again when we wake up.
I send a text to Earl, my boss, to let him know I’m still stuck in Little Falls.
Luckily, I keep a spare set of clothes in my car for nights when I get so into fixing something at the shop that I stay over.
Downstairs, I’ve just pushed down the toaster when Emily appears. I hand her a coffee, and when the toaster pops, I put two waffles on a plate, give them a liberal douse of maple syrup, and pass her the plate.
“Used all the good stuff in the casserole yesterday,” I say. “I guess I need a lesson in rationing.”
She smiles and takes the plate. “Breakfast and coffee two days in a row?” She slides into one of the kitchen chairs and lets out a satisfied sigh. “Seriously, I’m kidnapping you. I’m going to tie a chain to your leg. Give you enough room to move around the house but not out the door.”
“That doesn’t sound psychotic at all.”
“Blame the aliens. They warped my brain that one time you didn’t show up when I called.”
“That’s slanderous chatter,” I say, sliding into the seat beside her. “I’ve never not shown up when you told me the aliens were upon you.”
“You realize from now on, all my texts are going to lead with one word: Aliens.”
“And I will drop everything to appear at your side, like a good boy.”
“I do love a good boy,” she says.
“Good boy in the streets, naughty boy in the sheets.” I waggle my eyebrows at her.
“Do not ever teach my son that rhyme,” she says with a laugh. “Like, ever.”
“Someone is going to have to teach him how to pick up women,” I say, taking a sip of my coffee. “You want me or his friends?”
“That is many years from now,” she says, “so that’ll be a game day decision.”
“Put me in, Coach.”
“By then, we’ll be old, and he’ll have no desire to learn anything from either of us.”
“More slander. I’ll always be the cool uncle.”
“You’ll be someone’s cool dad someday, I’m sure,” she says, avoiding my eyes as she takes a drink of her coffee.
“Doubtful,” I say as I cut a piece of the toaster waffle. “These aren’t as terrible as I thought they’d be.”
“Amir and I have tested many, many brands in our bid to find the best toaster waffle.”
“I think it’s a success.”
“If I was a better mom, I’d be making them from scratch.”
I catch her gaze and hold it. “You gotta let go of other people’s expectations or stupid standards—you’re enough for him, I promise.”
“You’ve been making a lot of promises lately,” she says, her tone light, but I think the meaning might be heavy.
“I was thinking about what you said last night when I carried you to bed.”
“Was I talking in my sleep?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I eye her. “You said the idea of a donor didn’t appeal to you as much because you’d have another kid without a dad.”
She flushes, and I wonder whether she really doesn’t remember saying that to me. She had been half-asleep.
“And I think, if that’s how you really feel deep down, that maybe you should keep dating. You’ve still got quite a few years before you need to worry about being too old, right?”
“Too old is relative,” she says. “I could freeze my eggs, get a surrogate. But I also don’t want to be starting over again in ten years when Amir is fifteen. Already, if I got pregnant today, they’d be about six years apart.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admit.
“Trust me when I say that’s all I’ve been doing lately is thinking about it.
From every angle. Every scenario.” She points to her computer and her stack of papers.
“Pros and cons. The whole thing. I don’t want to use a donor.
That’s not my first choice, but I don’t want a relationship either.
The idea of having a relationship with a man doesn’t appeal to me.
Not yet. There wasn’t a single spark on any of those dates.
Maybe that phase of my life has passed, I don’t know.
Maybe the donor is the lesser of two evils. ”
“I just want you to be happy,” I say.
“I want to be happy too,” she says, “and I’m trying really hard to figure out what that looks like.”
The roads remain closed, but the snowfall starts to let up. I spend most of the day outside, digging Emily’s car out, digging my truck out, clearing the sidewalks, and helping her elderly neighbors to get their properties clear of snow too.
When Leann Picallo comes out of her house with a shovel in hand across the street, I steer the snowblower over.
“I can get this for you,” I say, even though I’ve heard through the town grapevine that she absolutely despises me.
She squints through the drifting snow at me, clearly not sure who’s talking. “That Trent Castillo?” she calls out.
“It is,” I say.
“Don’t need no help from you,” she says, coming down her porch stairs into almost waist deep snow with her shovel.
“I can at least have a path cleared for you in ten minutes. It’s no problem with this,” I say, giving the snowblower a good pat on the side.
“You know who my son is, Trent? He was one of your clients back in the day. Got hooked on meth. Still hooked on meth, as far as I know. But I don’t know much since he left home when I wouldn’t support his habit, when I tried to get him help.
You might see what you did as harmless, but it wasn’t harmless to me.
Wasn’t harmless to a lot of people in this town. ”
“I made a lot of mistakes when I was nineteen,” I say, struggling to find the words. “I’m sorry your son got mixed up in those.”
She ignores me and starts shoveling, but it’s so ineffective that I’d laugh if I wasn’t so fucking ashamed of myself. Rather than leaving her to it, I start at the end of her driveway, blowing the snow out of the way.
There’s nothing I can do about what happened to her son, my part in it, but if I never start making amends, never try to help those people I hurt in some way, then I might as well have stayed in jail.
We don’t speak the whole time I clean up her property, even when I’m almost on her feet as she shovels, and when I turn to leave, she goes into the house, shovel in hand.
When I come in from clearing snow from what feels like every property on the block, Emily’s making dinner.
“All I had was stuff to make spaghetti. With Amir gone and so much on my mind, I think I lost track of groceries.”
“Who doesn’t love spaghetti?” I stomp my boots and take off my snowy jacket. “Any word on the roads?”
“Maggie has heard they might be open late tonight as long as the wind doesn’t pick up.”
“You okay if I stay here until then? Grady texted and said I could go over to Maggie’s with them if you were tired of me.”
“Is it possible for someone to get tired of you?” she asks with a hint of teasing.
“I know it seems impossible, but it’s bound to happen to someone at some point.”
“Not me. Not yet.” She drains the spaghetti and gives me a heaping portion before dishing up her own.
We both take our plates to the table, and there’s a surprising heaviness in the air. I don’t know if I carried it in from my conversation with Leann or if it’s been in here with Emily most of the day and I wasn’t here to feel it.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Emily says with a sigh. “I’ve just been doing a lot of thinking.” She gestures to the pile of papers. “I think I just need something to take my mind off it.”
“The Fast and Furious movie wasn’t enough to keep you awake last night,” I say.
“I only like the ones that have Vin Diesel in them,” she says.
“Ah, that was the problem.”
“And I’m a boring mom who goes to sleep early so I can get up early most days.”
“You’re not boring, Em. Far from it. Another movie while we wait for the roads to open or some games?”
“A movie,” she says. “My brain can’t brain any more than it already has.”
“We can watch my favorite Christmas movie,” I say as we finish our meal.
“What’s that?”
Emily takes her dishes to the sink and comes back to grab mine. I lean back in my chair and take a long pull from the glass of water she gave me. “Die Hard.”
“Controversial choice.”
“Only for people with no taste,” I say.
“I’ve never actually seen it,” Emily admits, slotting the dishes into the dishwasher.
“Criminal,” I say, rising to start the water for the dishes too big for her small dishwasher. “We’ll rectify that tonight.” I bump her shoulder, and she smiles at me.
“Looking forward to being schooled.”
Emily’s head is back in my lap, and I’ve got my fingers in her hair, idly playing with strands while we watch the film.
Maybe it’s a bit too intimate, but she doesn’t protest, and I like when I can touch her without it becoming loaded with sexual tension.
For whatever reason, her head in my lap and my hands in her hair is more comforting than hard-on inducing.
We’re half-way through the movie when Emily takes the remote and lowers the volume.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about something, and I’m really nervous to talk to you about it,” she says without turning to look at me.
“Okay,” I say, my heart kicking. I can’t imagine what she’d want to talk to me about that would make her nervous, given everything we’ve covered in the last year of friendship. “You can talk to me about anything. I’m not gonna judge, Em.”
“Right, well, it’s less about the judging and more about the freaking out,” she says with a little laugh, but she’s still staring at the TV rather than turning to look at me. She takes a deep breath. “I want to buy Bruce’s shop and we can do a rent-to-own type of situation.”
“Em—”
“Let me finish. Yesterday, one of the reasons you didn’t want to do it was because you said I wouldn’t get anything out of it. But what if...What if I did?”
“Like interest payments?”
“More like a deal,” she says, her voice quiet. “I want a baby, and you want that shop.”
I sit in stunned silence for a minute, trying to figure out whether I’m interpreting what she’s saying correctly. “You want me to father your child? Is that...Is that what you’re saying?”
She sits up and scoots back from me so she’s sitting cross-legged on the couch facing me, but she still won’t make eye contact.
“I know it’s a wild idea, but I think it could work.
We’d both get what we want. And neither of us wants a relationship, but we get along really well. You’re already so important to Amir.”
I run my hands down my face, not quite sure what to say. “This isn’t a small thing, Em.”
“I know. I know.” She sneaks a glance at me. “And you hate it. Oh, god. Please tell me I haven’t ruined our friendship.”
I take a beat to gather my thoughts before I respond. “I don’t have any intention of having kids at all, if I’m honest. I would never want to bring a kid into the world attached to my reputation.” My mind strays to Leann’s reaction to me today. “It’s just not in the cards for me.”
“You don’t have to pay for the mistakes you made at nineteen forever.”
“Maybe not, but I’m nowhere near making up for what happened back then.
Not even close. I’ve barely pounded out one dent in my reputation, you know?
I can’t do that to a kid.” I run my hands along the top of my head and scan Em, trying to figure out whether I say more.
“And even if there wasn’t that, I don’t want to fuck up our friendship.
I already did that with Lila by being too careless, not understanding the weight of my actions, and there’s no doubt about the weight here. ”
“I think we’d be okay,” Em says.
“Maybe we would. But if we weren’t, it’s not just you and me. I love your kid. The other day when we were on the phone with him, I realized that I want him in my life forever. If you and I fuck up our relationship, that’s not fair to him, either. He’s already lost so much.”
Em finally looks at me and there are tears in her eyes. “It just seemed like the perfect solution for both of us.”
“But at what cost?” I ask. “I don’t jump in anymore without checking the depth. I learned my lesson there.”
“I could still—I’d still do the loan, you know that, right?”
“I know, but mixing money and friendship is a bad idea too.” I shake my head.
“I hope I haven’t ruined anything in our friendship by asking, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I just...I had to ask.”
“You didn’t ruin anything,” I say. “It would take a hell of a lot more than you offering me the honor of fathering your kid to break our friendship. Truly, Em. Whoever gets to be that person for you is going to be a lucky fucker.”
Her expression is sad as she stares back at me, and I get the sense she’d like to press me, see if she could use her debating skills to win me over. But I’m not going to be won—not about this.
Her phone and mine chime at the same time, and rather than dwelling on the growing awkwardness between us, I snatch my phone off the coffee table.
“Roads are open,” I say. “I’ll get my stuff together.”
“We’re okay?’ Em asks, rising with me.
I drag her into a hug, and I squeeze her tight. “I’m honored you asked, Em, and I’m sorry I can’t do it.”
She presses her cheek against my chest, and I let myself feel it in a way that I shouldn’t, let myself wish for a brief second that I could say “yes.” But if I let myself sink into those thoughts, I’ll be consumed with the idea of Emily being pregnant with my kid, and I can’t let that notion take hold. That’s a fucking dangerous path.
For me, wanting leads to foolish choices, and I’m done making those.