14. Scarlett
— ? —
Scarlett
The truck is wrong.
I’m standing at Lucy’s front window with Josie on my hip, watching a beat-up Chevy pull into the driveway, and my first thought is that someone has the wrong address.
That truck has a rust spot on the fender and a dent in the tailgate and looks like it belongs to someone who actually works for a living.
Then Beck Cooper climbs out of it, and my heart jumps in my chest.
“Da!” Josie points at the window, her whole body going rigid with excitement. “Da! Da!”
“I see him, baby.”
He’s wearing jeans and a flannel shirt I’ve never seen before, and he’s carrying a plastic bag from the grocery store.
No sign of his entourage tailing him. Just Beck, walking up my sister’s driveway like a normal person, like he hasn’t spent the last two years being chauffeured everywhere outside the ranch.
He stops at the bottom of the porch steps and looks up at the window.
I don’t move.
“Da!” Josie slaps her palm against the glass. “Da in! Da in!”
“No, baby. Daddy’s staying outside.”
Beck’s eyes meet mine through the window. I watch him process that. The glass between us, me not moving toward the door, our daughter pressing her hand flat against the pane like she’s trying to reach him through it.
He nods once like he expected this. Like he knew before he drove three hours that I might not let him in.
Then he sits down on the top step, sets the grocery bag beside him, and takes off his hat.
“What’s he doing?” Lucy’s voice comes from the kitchen doorway behind me.
“I don’t know.”
Beck turns halfway around so he’s facing the window. He’s maybe ten feet away, close enough that I can see the lines around his eyes, the gray coming in at his temples. When did that happen? When did my husband start going gray?
“Hey, Josie-girl.” His voice is muffled through the glass, but I can hear him. “Daddy came to see you.”
“DA!” Josie throws herself toward the window so hard I almost drop her. “Da in!”
“I can’t come in right now, baby. But I’m right here. See?” He holds up his hand, palm out. “I’m right here.”
Josie presses her hand against the glass again. Her little fingers spread wide, trying to match his.
Beck puts his hand up on the other side of the pane. His palm is so much bigger than hers. His fingers dwarf her tiny ones. But he lines them up carefully, like this is the most important thing he’s ever done.
“There you go,” he says softly. “There’s my girl.”
Something cracks open in my chest and I immediately shove it back down.
“I brought you something.” Beck reaches into the grocery bag and pulls out a container of yogurt bites. The strawberry kind, Josie’s favorite. “You want some?”
“Bite! Bite!” Josie bounces in my arms, reaching for the window like she can grab the container through it.
Beck looks at me. Asking permission.
I don’t want to give him anything. I don’t want to open the door or take the yogurt or let him be here at all. I want to tell him to leave, to go back to his helicopter and his ranch and his other woman and leave me alone.
But Josie is saying “bite bite bite” in that desperate toddler way. He may suck one hundred percent in the husband department but Josie still needs her dad.
I go to the door and open it just wide enough to take the container from his outstretched hand.
Our fingers don’t touch. I make sure of that.
“Thank you,” he says.
I close the door without answering.
Back at the window, I open the container and give Josie a yogurt bite. She shoves it in her mouth and immediately reaches for another, her eyes still fixed on Beck through the glass.
He’s watching us. Watching everything with this look on his face that I don’t know how to read. It’s not the smooth Beck Cooper confidence I’m used to. It’s something rawer, something that looks almost like desperation.
“So what’s the plan here?” Lucy asks quietly from behind me. “You’re just going to stand at the window?”
“I don’t know.”
“You could let him in.”
“No.”
“Don’t be-”
“I said no!” My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to. Josie looks up at me, startled, and I force myself to soften. “Sorry, baby. Mama’s okay.”
On the porch, Beck shifts his weight. He’s still facing the window, still watching, but now he starts to talk.
“I went to Salt Fork yesterday,” he says. His voice carries through the glass, muffled but audible. “Told Camille she needs to find somewhere else to be. That I can’t see her anymore.”
I don’t respond. I don’t know if he expects me to.
“I know that doesn’t fix anything.” He looks down at his hands. “I know saying it to her face doesn’t undo everything I said on the radio. But I wanted you to know I did it. That she’s not… that I’m not going there anymore.”
Josie holds up her hand for another yogurt bite. I give her one automatically, my eyes still on Beck.
“Tripp gave me a number,” he continues. “A therapist in Fort Worth. I called yesterday. My first appointment is next Thursday.” He pauses.
“I don’t know if that matters to you. I don’t know if anything I do matters to you anymore.
But I’m telling you because… because I should have been telling you things all along. Instead of keeping you out.”
Out.
The word sits somewhere under my ribs and won’t settle. He’s not cheating, at least not in the way I would have expected, not in the way I could have named and pointed at and thrown across a room. It’s something quieter than that, somewhere I couldn’t see him, and someone who wasn’t me.
I don’t have a word for what that is yet.
I just know it’s heavy, and it isn’t moving.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” Beck says. “I’m not asking for anything. You can continue hating me but I just want to see her. Once a week. If you’ll let me.”
Josie presses her yogurt-sticky hand against the window again. “Da,” she says, softer now. “Da hand.”
Beck puts his hand up to match hers. They stay like that, palm to palm through the glass.
“Same time next week,” he says. “If that’s all right.”
He doesn’t wait for me to answer. He stands up, puts his hat back on, and walks down the steps to the truck. He doesn’t look back. He gets in and drives away, and I stand at the window watching until the truck disappears around the corner.
“Well,” Lucy says. “That was something.”
I don’t answer. I’m too busy trying to figure out why my hands are shaking.
Josie twists in my arms, looking for the truck that isn’t there anymore. “Da?” she asks. “Da gone?”
“Yeah, baby. Daddy’s gone.”
“Da back?”
I think about the way he sat on that step and talked to her through the glass like it was enough, like he’d take whatever I gave him even if what I gave him was a pane of glass and nothing else.
“I don’t know,” I say. “We’ll see.”
But the next Saturday, I’m at the window ten minutes early. And when his truck pulls into the driveway, I realize I’ve been counting the minutes all week.