53. ABRAHAM
AbrAHAM
IHUNG AROUND IN FULTON COUNTY for a couple more weeks, helping my father make repairs he’d yet to get to and visiting with my brothers and their families.
It’d been a long time since I’d been home for an extended period of time and even I had to admit, there was something about the country that quieted the mind.
I’d taken Matthias’s offer into consideration, and had even accepted, ultimately deciding that running to Seattle wasn’t the answer.
For one thing, I hated everything about the Pacific Northwest from their weather to their food.
But mostly, I knew that so long as I was running from corner to corner to avoid one woman, she was always going to follow me.
Sometimes the only way around was through.
If that meant I had to spend every day of the next decade-and-a-half until I actually retired, watching my ex-wife’s life unfold right in front of me, at the very least I’d grow some semblance of a tolerance.
I finished hoisting the tent I’d been setting up in my parents’ backyard and started unfolding the tables where the food would eventually go.
My mother’s Sunday barbecues had been somewhat of a tradition when I was a kid, but decades later, she was practically famous for them.
Within the hour, nearly all of the neighborhood began to fill the backyard.
I checked the supplies, occasionally looking in on a turkey I’d started smoking that morning, and greeted family as I saw them, but when it came to parties, not much had changed.
After I’d married, I’d apparently extended an open invitation for anyone who’d ever known me to share an unsolicited opinion or ask an inappropriate question.
Not wanting to find out what the divorced version of that kind of ambush looked like, I grabbed a few beers from one of the beverage coolers, slunk across the yard to my father’s garage, and slipped inside.
The old tin shed could hardly be called a garage, but it housed a nearly fully restored 1969 Mustang Fastback.
I didn’t dare raise the tarp for a look—my father loved that car only second to my mother and would beat my ass if I left a fingerprint on her—but standing next to it while I watched half of my hometown and their kids fill up my parents’ backyard made me feel purposeful for the evening.
Twisting the top off my beer, I drank half the ice cold liquid. It was uncharacteristically hot for late spring. So much so, I wasn’t surprised when I saw people stripping off layers and tossing their jackets aside. Somewhere in the distance, music began to play from a speaker.
I sat on the workstation bench and thumbed through the stack of decaying paperbacks. I wasn’t much of a science fiction reader, but I picked up the novel that appeared to be in the best condition and opened to the first page.
A few chapters later, I heard footsteps approach the garage before the door opened. Probably someone who needed something lifted or carried.
“Yes?”
The person cussed under their breath. “This is not where the extra to-go plates are kept, is it?”
Turning to face the intruder in the doorway, I saw my ex-wife leaned against the frame. She winced. “I’m sorry. When your mother invited me last month, she said you weren’t even going to be here.”
Because I wasn’t supposed to be. I hadn’t told my mother I’d be visiting. Damn.
“I wasn’t,” I admitted.
“Abraham, we can leave. I’m sorry—”
I nearly rolled my eyes. “Of course I’m not going to make you leave.” Even if I wanted to, I didn’t have the energy for the argument it’d cause with my parents. Nonetheless, I’d never expected my family to cut their ties. They’d formed their own relationships and I’d never take family from her.
She let out an exhale. “Oh, thank God.”
I raised a brow.
“We’re currently working on regulating our big feelings,” she explained. “And I’m learning that when it comes time to leave anywhere she’s enjoying herself, or to put a project aside for later, Miracle’s feelings are more… stratospheric.”
I’d caught her daughter’s name from my mother and sister’s conversations, but hearing it from her mouth suddenly made the girl real. I didn’t know why that put me on the defense.
“Like mother, like daughter.”
Nineah laughed. “According to her children’s psychiatrist, that’s so accurate it’s terrifying.”
She glanced over her shoulder back toward the yard with such pure adoration, it was transmissible.
How many times had I looked upon her with a similar feeling?
Proud. Awed. Entranced. However, now unburdened with the weight of doubt and deep-seated insecurity, I appreciated something else in her I wasn’t sure I’d ever had—contentment.
Nineah had always been happy exactly where she was, never obsessing over what she couldn’t control, or anxious to move onto the next ambition. I’d always ignorantly mislabeled the trait as indulgent or unfocused, but in this moment, it was humbling.
“Motherhood agrees with you,” I told her.
“Love agrees with me,” she corrected. She turned away from her child to face me. “What agrees with you these days?”
I considered that. “Water.”
Nineah had ultimately refused the Ma Maison, claiming that she couldn’t stop me from selling it but she wouldn’t accept rights or cash for the boat.
In the end, I’d decided to keep it, choosing to spend much of the last year learning how to sail the damn thing.
Still, even the best distractions had a shelf life.
It was good to be back on land. Even if the land had history.
“I knew it was something,” she teased. “Though if I had to guess, it’d have been like, bench pressing trucks.
” Her gaze swept over my body before skirting away and I stole the moment to look at her, myself.
Her skin glimmered with an oil that had golden sparkly shit in it and she looked like she’d be more at home in an expensive vineyard than a family barbecue in a tiny pale, white halter dress with blue polka dots, that hugged her braless tits.
I knew many men over the years who’d grown bored of their women, seeking newer, younger, more impressionable whenever the opportunity presented, but I never could relate.
It was one thing to have a beautiful woman, but it was another thing entirely to be truly wanted by someone who saw you.
In the early morning quiet, when it was dark, and the sea air was as still as the water, I’d reminisced about that the most.
Yearning eyes. Flushed cheeks. That glazed distracted expression that made my shit hard…
Then somewhere between the Chesapeake and the Atlantic, I’d come upon a depressing realization—when the self-righteousness and resentment faded, all that remained was just a profound lack.
It was hard to return to contentment when you knew joy, scarcity after a lifetime of overindulgence. I missed her.
“I’m sorry,” Nineah said, clearing her throat. “I promised myself I’d be a good girl when or if we saw each other again.”
Her oiled body, sugar-candy scent, and tight as fuck dress said otherwise, but rather than point that out, I shook my head. “And yet…”
“And yet, you keep placing more strain on your poor, undoubtedly over-worked heart by adding mass to your frame,” she murmured. “I’m just saying, from a medical standpoint, there might be healthier uses of your time.”
“Like good girls in gold body oil?”
“You said it, not me.”
“Can I ask you something?”
Nineah who’d had both eyes and one ear on someone else this entire conversation finally faced me, affording me her full attention. “Uh oh.”
I nodded in the direction she’d just been looking. “Why does the girl hunch over like that?”
She immediately glanced over at her daughter, as if she might have disappeared in the half-a-second she’d taken her eyes off of her.
I wanted to assure her nothing was going to happen to Miracle under my parents’ watch, but I knew that’d be futile.
Nineah nervously clutched a necklace I’d noticed was an exact replica of the one the child wore.
“Her birthmark,” she answered, finally. “She spent so much time hiding herself, she has to relearn how to stand upright. I’ve been wondering if ballet might help.”
I frowned. “Bullying?”
“At a former school,” she confirmed. “Evil bitches.”
I smiled. “Karate.”
“Hm?”
“Ballet is fine, but it’s still an aesthetically critical culture which may do more harm than good at this point. Martial arts will accomplish the same result, but she will learn to take responsibility for herself. Be her own advocate.”
“Karate,” she murmured, weighing the idea.
“I know a good instructor. I can pass along the information.”
“I will consider that. Thank you.”
Crossing my arms over my chest, I was viciously aware of the brown eyes that watched me from their periphery. “I’m thinking of making an adjustment to my own training regimen,” I said.
“Hm. Let me guess, less bodybuilding. More cardio?”
“For my heart’s sake.”
The corner of her mouth twitched. “Just looking out for you.”
Finally losing the fight with myself, I let my palm fall to her hip, and to my surprise, my ridiculously beautiful ex-wife leaned into my side, resting her head against my chest.
I didn’t know if my mother was right. If it was the outcome I needed control over or simply an infallible trust in my own instincts, but the more I sat on her disturbing if not wholly accurate insights, the more I’d begun to accept that time spent calculating odds was time lost. In the same year that Nineah had worked to rebuild her life, her home, and brought a child into it, I’d just missed her.
That was more apparent now as she clung to me, comfortable in the silence as she watched her daughter play.
Closing my eyes, I tried it. Just existing.
And I decided, it wasn’t the worst.