Chapter 9 #3
Maverick heard the entire conversation. He had paused around the corner when he’d heard Nina talk about her mother, and not because he didn’t want to interrupt, but because he wanted to know more about her.
Only, he hadn’t expected the conversation to turn back on him quite so quickly.
He heard the long silence after Poppy’s declaration that she didn’t like her mom, followed by Nina’s sweet reply.
Her words humbled him. He wasn’t the best dad, not by far.
He tried his best, and maybe that counted for something.
And he would have taken a bullet for his kid, but most of the time he felt like a fish out of water.
There was so much he didn’t know, so many things he did terribly, and as much as Sierra was playing when she declared herself Best Aunty in the World, Mav wasn’t entirely sure how he would have survived without her and Benji in those first few years.
And Marisol, José’s mother, who had come and helped him at nights.
And Jenna, Poppy’s nanny of almost four years … It truly took a village.
Despite the beautiful life he had been given, Maverick had seen plenty of hardship. But nothing came close to the difficulty of being a single parent. The highs were incredible. The lows … the lows could drag a person into the deepest despair.
Still, he plastered a smile onto his face and walked into the kitchen. He stopped just inside, as surprised by their tight circle as he was by the warmth that spread through him as he took them in.
Nina stood at the stove in a Hunt Ranch shirt, stirring the pasta sauce. Sierra sat in a chair nearby with Poppy on her lap. The three made a pretty picture, he thought. They might have been related.
Until a person looked closely.
Sierra and Poppy were darker, like him, compliments of his and Sierra’s Chumash great-grandmother. Nina Keller, with her pale skin and pin-straight ebony hair, was all Black Irish.
‘I could eat a horse,’ he said, knowing it would get a reaction out of Poppy.
‘No, Daddy!’ She giggled. She climbed off Sierra’s lap to run to him. ‘We made pasta,’ she said again.
‘We still need to cook the pasta,’ Sierra interrupted. ‘Mav, why don’t you show Nina to her room, and then get cleaned up.’ She turned to Nina. ‘No offence, but you both smell like the barn.’
Nina only laughed and held out her arms as she looked down on her dirty clothes. ‘I don’t even smell it on me anymore.’
‘Come on.’ Mav shucked his head in the direction of the stairs.
‘Poppy, you stay here,’ Sierra said as Poppy started to follow Nina. ‘I need your help, little chef.’
‘’Kay,’ Poppy said. But she turned to Nina and very seriously added, ‘I’m making dinner, but I’ll be here once you’ve had a shower.’
‘Okay,’ Nina replied, matching Poppy’s tone.
Maverick was intensely aware of Nina behind him.
At her last birthday, Mav had shown Poppy static by rubbing a balloon against her hair until it had stood up on end and they’d both laughed hysterically.
That’s what it felt like to have Nina so close.
As if there was a constant hum of energy between them, pulling the hair at the nape of his neck to attention.
‘I’m sorry about that. Kids don’t really filter the way we do.’
‘Don’t apologize,’ Nina said from behind him. ‘I should be the one apologizing. I almost made her cry.’
‘She’s five. If you’re here for three weeks, I guarantee you’ll see tears eventually.’
Maverick opened the door to the spare room.
It was a large, airy bedroom with big windows that looked out over the tree-lined driveway and an en-suite bathroom.
Though they rarely had guests, their cleaning staff deep-cleaned the ranch house once a month, including the guest room.
‘It should be stocked with everything you need but just shout if something’s missing. ’
‘Thank you, this is great. I would be more embarrassed if I didn’t feel so much better already.’
Maverick liked that she felt safer, so all he said was, ‘It’s our pleasure.’
He started to go but stopped on the threshold when she said, ‘Poppy’s incredible. You should be proud, Maverick.’
Mav turned to face her again.
‘I don’t need to have had kids to know you’re doing a great job.’
He leaned against the doorframe, hooked his thumbs in his belt loops.
He took her in, the tiny woman sitting on the large bed, her hands twisted anxiously together in her lap, her black hair falling down to her hips.
He had a need to go to her, to wrap her in his arms again, but he fought it, knowing that nothing good could come of it.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Most of the time I don’t know what I’m doing, so that means a lot.’
‘Trust me when I say this, you’re off the charts on the parenting scale.’ She looked away from him, shook her head. ‘I never really thought about how much I still resented my mother. But Poppy … She saw straight through me.’
‘Kids have a way of doing that,’ Mav said. ‘They’re intuitive, even if they can’t always understand the information they’re processing.’
Nina raised her hand to her face, her fingers unconsciously tracing the faint bruising. ‘It’s strange for me, to see how natural you and Sierra are with her. Comparing you both to my own mother has me wondering if some people just don’t have it in them.’
‘You’re not close – to your mom?’
‘No. I walked out when I turned eighteen. Never saw her again. The last time I heard from her, she called to ask me for money, and when I said no, she sold my childhood pictures to the tabloids with some sob story about how I’d abandoned her.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Mav knew the words weren’t quite right, but he didn’t know what else to say.
‘It was a long time ago.’ She walked to the window and looked out at the ranch. ‘The craziest thing is that even knowing she was a terrible mother and a horrible person, sometimes I still want to call her, you know? See how she’s doing.’ She laughed quietly. ‘Pathetic.’
‘I think that says a lot more about you than it does her.’
Maverick thought about Shannon, remembered how astounded he had been when she’d insisted he could have full custody of Poppy as long as she could keep her visitation rights. He’d been preparing to go to court, to fight it out, and instead, Shannon had just walked away.
He blamed himself. He shouldn’t have pushed marriage just because she’d fallen pregnant.
He should have worked less and tried to make her feel more at home on the ranch.
He should have given her more attention because if she’d been happy, maybe she would have stayed.
‘I don’t know. I think life’s just so hard for some people already, and the more it takes out of them, the less energy they have to expend on everything else. ’
‘And, still, some people never even try.’
‘True,’ he replied cautiously, and again he thought about Shannon. Irrespective of how much it had hurt, he could have forgiven her for leaving him because he had known she had been miserable. But leaving Poppy … In his mind, there was no excuse for that.
‘I could forgive my mother for the life we’d led if I had seen her get up and go to work. Try. Pick up double shifts. But she never did. All she did was complain about how hard her life was, how unfair.
‘I still remember getting my first job.’ Nina smiled even though her eyes were distant.
‘It was as a waitress in an Italian restaurant: Luigi’s.
I was terrified. I had grown up listening to my mother talk about having to work like it was this terrifying ordeal to be endured.
I remember listening as my boss had described what I’d have to do, and thinking, that’s it?
Just show up, do the work, and get paid?
It was so easy, so simple. And, yet my mother always made it seem so impossible. ’
Maverick didn’t interrupt. He listened intently.
‘I worked so hard. I’d work doubles, and Luigi would let me even though he had enough staff to cover the shift and probably would have preferred not to pay me overtime, and the day I got my first paycheque …’ She laughed lightly.
‘Did you buy something ridiculous?’ he asked, and he hoped that she had, that she had bought something just for herself.
‘I did. It was so silly, but I had always wanted a fancy makeup box. You know, one of those ones with all the neat compartments and cubbies for your brushes.’ She frowned.
‘I don’t even know why I wanted it. I didn’t own any makeup, wouldn’t have known how to put it on if I had.
But that was the first thing I ever bought just for me. ’
‘Did you fill it with makeup?’
‘No.’ She laughed softly. ‘My mom … She, ah, found it before I had a chance …’
She didn’t have to say more. Mav exhaled a tight breath. ‘Well. Fuck.’
Nina sighed. ‘She stopped working completely, started taking my paycheques. But it didn’t matter.
Because every time she did, I’d watch her, and I’d promise myself that on the day I turned eighteen I’d leave and never look back.
And I did. And my mother sobbed hysterically.
And I didn’t feel a single thing. No guilt.
No regret. No love. Because I knew in my heart that she wasn’t crying for me, only for herself. ’
‘How did you go from waitressing to acting?’
She shook her head on a laugh. ‘Luigi had a love for old films. He’d play them on this tiny box television in the restaurant kitchen.
Meet me in St Louis, The Maltese Falcon, His Girl Friday …
And one day – I was about sixteen – I happened to be coming off a shift as Casablanca was starting.
And the next thing I know, it’s an hour and forty minutes later and I’m still there, watching the credits, tears streaming down my face. ’
‘And that was it?’
‘No. Acting didn’t even cross my mind. But Luigi was there, standing beside me. And he looked down at me, and he asked, “You ever thought about acting?”’
Maverick laughed at her Italian-American accent.
‘And when I said no, he shrugged, said, “You got a face on you. And I’ve seen you sell a two-day old cannolo to a lady from Beverly Hills. Don’t figure it takes much more than that.”’
‘I started thinking about it. Soon, I couldn’t get it out of my head.’
‘That’s pretty incredible,’ he said. It was a huge understatement.
He didn’t know why it mattered so much, but Maverick appreciated that she had worked like a dog for what she wanted.
Maybe it was because he had done the same?
He might have been born with more, but when you lived on the land you owned it was only as valuable as the work you put into it.
Not very many people understood that. They didn’t see the sweat and blood and uncertainty.
All they saw was the value of the square footage to a developer.
Maybe it was because her story affirmed everything he already thought about her?
Nina Keller wasn’t someone who was afraid to get her hands dirty.
She was a beautiful woman who was down to earth because she knew what it was to come from nothing, to work for what she wanted every day, and to make sacrifices to realize her dreams.
‘It’s certainly worked out for me so far,’ she said. But her eyes changed, becoming so sad again. ‘And I always have waitressing to fall back on.’ She cleared her throat, turned to look around the room. ‘I better get cleaned up.’
Maverick hesitated. He wanted to ask her what she’d meant by that. He wanted to tell her she could trust him. But then Nina stood and started unzipping her suitcase, and Mav lost his courage. ‘See you down there,’ he said, and with one last tap to the doorframe, walked away.