Chapter Fifteen #3
“How old was I?”
“Four or five.”
Her mother asked for some photos of Emily and they chatted for a few more minutes.
Vanessa felt better after she hung up. She felt lighter of spirit, less weighed down by life’s disappointments.
Emily’s tantrums didn’t make her a bad parent.
Leaving Bennett was the right choice, even though the divorce had been hard.
She could move on with a clear conscience.
She’d made a mistake in marrying him, but she’d done nothing to drive him away.
Her father, in contrast, wasn’t the villain she’d made him out to be.
He also wasn’t the hero she’d looked up to as a child.
He was just a man, like any other, full of flaws and weaknesses.
After mini-camp, Vanessa took Emily shopping. Along with basic groceries, she bought an inflatable pink flamingo for floating on the lake, lemons for fresh-squeezed juice, and yellow paint for Emily’s sign.
Jackson called while they were in the checkout line. He offered to bring hamburgers and french fries for lunch. As she pulled up to the cabin, she spotted Paul with a cordless drill. He appeared to be screwing pieces of boards together on the front lawn.
“Mr. Paul is making the lemonade stand,” Emily exclaimed. “Look!”
“Did you ask him to?”
“Yes.”
Vanessa shook her head, but didn’t say anything.
It was too late to tell Paul not to bother, or to lecture Emily about manners.
She carried in groceries and put them away while Emily begged for the paint to finish her sign.
Vanessa gathered the items they needed and walked outside.
Emily raced ahead to admire Paul’s work.
He’d attached three boards together to make a basic table with a flat surface and two sides.
“What do you say?” Vanessa prompted.
“Thank you!” Emily said. “Can we paint the sign now?”
Vanessa drew an outline of a lemon on the sign for Emily to fill in. Then she stood back to let the little girl do the rest. Paul put away his drill and supervised the process, as if he had nothing better to do.
“You didn’t have to build a stand,” Vanessa said quietly.
“It took five minutes.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Oh? Did you set a timer?”
He threw his head back and laughed. She admired the strong, suntanned line of his throat, and the way his faded blue T-shirt clung to his sweaty torso. He was drop-dead gorgeous, and she was in serious danger of falling for him.
Stop it, she told herself. Stop it right now.
Emily made a yellow blob of a lemon, and got more paint on her shirt than the sign, but it didn’t matter. Paul found a black marker to write the lettering. He gave the marker to Emily, which was not a good idea.
“Hold on,” Vanessa said. “Let’s use pencil first.”
Paul removed a pencil from his pocket.
“What kind of pencil is that?” Emily asked.
“It’s a construction pencil,” he said, showing her the flat sides. “It doesn’t roll away.”
Emily insisted on writing LEMONADE herself, with Paul’s help. She made a few of the letters backwards. Vanessa didn’t correct her, because the mistakes were cute and added to the sign’s authenticity. Emily traced the letters with marker, her little face screwed up in concentration.
Vanessa thought about asking Paul if he wanted kids of his own. She discarded the idea as quickly as it popped into her head. She couldn’t afford to give him the impression that she was shopping for a new daddy for Emily.
“Why don’t you have a girlfriend?” she asked instead.
He shrugged, noncommittal.
“When was your last one?”
“Before I left Houston.”
“What happened?”
He squinted into the distance before returning his gaze to her. It was clear that he didn’t want to answer. A quick scan of her body seemed to remind him that he was interested in having sex with her again, and therefore needed to participate in basic communication. “We had a falling-out.”
“Over what?”
“She didn’t come to the hospital to see me.”
Vanessa drew in a surprised breath. “How long were you there?”
“Four days.”
She tried to imagine a scenario in which a man she was dating took a bullet to the chest and she couldn’t drum up the concern to visit. The idea was foreign to her, though she’d met more than her share of lost souls in the ER. Some people had no emergency contacts, no human connections.
“We weren’t serious,” he said. “I was in stable condition. I didn’t expect her to weep at my bedside.”
“But you expected her to care, right? It’s a low bar.”
“It’s a low bar,” he agreed.
“Did she have a reason?”
“Not one that made a difference to me.”
“I’d come,” she said, after a moment.
His eyes cut into her, gray-blue and rock-steady. “I know.”
Vanessa didn’t ask any more questions. She was satisfied with the little hints he gave her of himself, and reluctant to engage with him on a deeper level. They were keeping things casual. Not cold or unfeeling, but casual.
While Emily put the finishing touches on her sign, Paul went back to work, and Vanessa didn’t stare after him wistfully.
Not at all.