Chapter Twenty-Two
“Gingersnap? You here?”
Autumn heard Pom’s voice coming from the front door of her condo and sighed. Again?
“GINGE?!” he yelled, his voice breaking from the effort.
“I’m here.” She pushed up from her desk chair and crossed to her open home-office door.
Her father was gliding toward her kitchen, his arms full of bags.
She had been home from Missouri for nearly a week, and one or both of her fathers had cooked up some reason or other to come to her house every day. They’d even spent time here together two evenings earlier, and had shared a meal with her. Together.
They were on high alert, but they didn’t need to be. Okay, yes, she’d spent the first day or two wrapped in a comforter on her sofa watching Carousel, Les Miz, Rent, Marley and Me, every version of A Star Is Born, and all the saddest episodes of Buffy and Angel, but since then she’d been more or less okay. She was back at work, at least remotely, and hadn’t cried over Cox in hours.
Every day was a little bit easier. She was okay. She was going to be just fine.
As she should be! Yes, her ten days in Signal Bend had been ... eventful. She had experienced the full range of human emotions and been kicked straight in the heart at the end, but it had been only ten days of her life—a life she’d planned with careful precision, and ten days in which she’d been making ridiculous, fantastical decisions that might have yanked her whole existence off track.
That probably would have, if Cox had continued to treat her like someone who mattered.
The thought brought a fresh wave of ache to her bruised heart, but her mind shouted down at it that they’d dodged a bullet. Very briefly, she’d thought she could fall in love with a dour, angry, hick biker from a nowhere town in the middle of Missouri. Momentarily, she’d thought she was falling in love. She’d even thought she was falling in love with Signal Bend, making friends, beginning to imagine what a life there would be. Sometimes, holding Cox while he slept, she’d even imagined buying that It’s a Wonderful Life house and reclaiming it from ruin to make it everything she wanted it to be, everything it should be.
Obviously, she’d experienced a form of derangement. Maybe crystal meth just floated in the air out there, giving unsuspecting visitors contact highs and turning them into love-addled zombies. No, not love. It couldn’t have been that.
But for a few days there, she’d been all in with Cox, and it had been about more than handling his mother’s arrangements and taking care of him in his furious grief. She’d felt them moving toward each other before his mother’s suicide, and felt that bond tightening speedily after it, like a cord being laced together and pulled taut.
In the midst of working with the Horde family to arrange Elaine Cox’s funeral and burial, Autumn had also begun to form ideas for her own plans, considering how to stay in Signal Bend much longer, as long as Cox needed her, as long as he wanted her. She’d even been sketching out a script for a conversation she might have with Chase, trying to establish a case that MWGP needed someone on site through the whole build.
But then Cox had announced that he didn’t need or want her, and he’d ridden off and left her standing outside his mother’s funeral alone. She’d waited for him at his house for the rest of that day, hoping he’d take back those crushing words, but he’d never come back.
Lilli Lunden had driven her to the St. Louis airport the next morning.
After Miles, she’d promised herself she would never, ever again look past even a single red flag. Yet Cox was covered in them, and she’d barely slowed down. And now here she was.
Autumn put her mental shoulder to those thoughts and shoved them into the dark. She would not allow ten days of her life to tear the rest of it apart.
“Hi, Pom. Why are you here again? What is all that?”
He set his armload of bags on her glass dining table, then spun and took two smaller bags, these plain white paper, to her marble countertop. “Remember? Today was the sample sale at Saks!”
“Oh. Right.” Autumn walked past the table and opened one of the bags on the counter: take-out cartons from Jasmine Thai, a favorite restaurant. It looked like a lot more food than she and Pops could consume in a single meal; obviously, he meant her to have lots of leftovers.
Pulling one of the cartons out of the bag, she opened it and discovered Pad Se Ew, one of her personal favorites. She closed the carton and pushed it away.
“The deals were so hot today, I might get arrested! Grand theft fashion!” Pom said, rifling through the bags on the table.
“If you keep feeding me like this, I’m going to get fat. It’s been almost a week, Pom. You don’t have to take care of me. I’m okay. I’m fine.”
Her father spun with a dramatic flourish and crossed his arms. Then he decided it wasn’t a sufficient gesture and instead threw one arm out to Vanna White the bags on the table.
“I just told you I brought you prezzies from the Saks spring and summer sample sale, and you, my own daughter, who has celebrated sample sales like national holidays with me since she was in fourth grade, walked right past the haul here. You are not okay. You are not fine.”
“I am,” she insisted. Being told she was hurting did not make her hurt less. Denying it, on the other hand, made some room for her to climb over it. Autumn had long ago become a master at ignoring the things in her way; for the past week or so, she’d deployed all her skills to clear Daniel Cox from her path.
Pom came to her and cupped her face between his hands. “You are my beautiful, sweet, good girl. I love you better than tiramisu. I am not about to allow you to lie to me or yourself. You are not okay, and I am not leaving you alone with your not-okayness. Babydoll, you are wearing sweatpants!”
He said it like someone else might say, You are standing in diarrhea up to your waist! Autumn looked down at herself. She had on an ancient Alpha Phi t-shirt and a pair of sea-green shorts.
“They’re sweat shorts,” she corrected. “And really they’re pajamas. I wear this to bed, I don’t wear it out of the house.”
Pom crossed his arms again and popped a hip. “It is six-thirty on a weekday afternoon, Autumn Renee. Telling me you—You! You!—are still in your PJs does not ease my mind.”
Energy drained from Autumn as if a cap on the bottom of her foot had been opened. All at once, she couldn’t hold it back, could barely hold her body upright. Her knees shook, and she grabbed the counter. Pom leapt to her side and flung his arms around her, bending to her level and pushing her head to rest on his shoulder.
It was keenly reminiscent of the way Cox had rested on her for comfort, so very often during those days between his mother’s death and her funeral, and Autumn simply could not hold her heart together another second. It was stupid, to be so broken over such a small slice of her life, but right now, in Pom’s arms, she shattered.
“Okay, okay,” Pom cooed, stroking her hair as he squeezed her close. “Okay, little love. Pom-Pom is right here, and I am not going anywhere. Ever, ever, ever.”
Autumn clung to him and sobbed.
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~oOo~
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“Oh! Is this ... you got Tom Yum?”
“Sure. There’s red curry, too. We’ll probably need to heat all this up now, but—Oh! Almost forgot—there’s those curry puffs, too. They’re in the other bag.”
“Since when do you like red curry?”
“I don’t. I’m a Massaman curry girlie, just like always.”
Pops stared at Pom for a few seconds, then looked across Autumn’s condo, peering through her hanging pots to send her a curious look. “Do you like red curry now?”
Sitting cross-legged on her sofa, wrapped in the throw Pops had tucked around her after her meltdown almost an hour ago, Autumn set her laptop, on which she’d been comfort-streaming Derry Girls (also prescribed by Pom), aside. She was picking up on the same clue Pops had clocked.
“I like green curry,” she told him, and they held eye contact, letting understanding settle in.
Pom had declared Autumn’s emotional upheaval an ‘all hands on deck’ situation and called Pops over, too. Pops had dropped everything and come over. Because that was who her fathers were—they both dropped everything when the people they love had need.
Even so, to have them here together, for the second time in a week, was fairly remarkable. Though her fathers had, superficially, a stereotypically gay divorce, where they ‘remained friends,’ the real truth was Pom clung to a grudge like a buoy in the open sea. As far as Autumn knew, neither had cheated or anything like that, but it was Pops who’d wanted the split. Well, they’d both been visibly straining against their bond, but it was Pops who’d first mentioned divorce, and Pom would never forgive being forevermore The One Who Was Left.
Thus, their ‘remaining friendship’ was decidedly icy, mostly on dramatic Pom’s part, unless people were watching. They occasionally spoke on the phone, generally about Autumn, but unless she had an event like a graduation or an award, or some other reason they couldn’t celebrate the same thing with her at different times, they did not spend time in the same space.
But here they were, standing side by side in her kitchen, plating takeout Thai together, and Pops and Autumn had both realized that Pom had bought food for Pops. Not enough for Autumn to have leftovers; he’d ordered dishes only Pops liked. And he’d done so before he’d shown up here and been witness to her meltdown.
Before he’d known there might be an ‘all hands on deck’ situation, Pom had bought dinner for the three of them—all their favorites, just like the old days.
That was a freaking earthquake, and vastly more interesting than her ridiculous heartbreak over a man with whom she’d shared a single good weekend and one horrific week.
“Ginge,” Pom said, apparently unaware of the seism he’d created, “there’s no rosé in here, and no pinot grigio, either.” He closed the door to her wine cooler. “Why do you have so many bottles of chardonnay?”
With a shared blink as their gazes unlocked, Pops and Autumn tacitly agreed not to point out what they’d noticed. She unwrapped herself from the sofa and stood. “Ida loves chardonnay—and we found a really light one at a winery around Carmel. I like it, too. But there’s still a Tuscan rosé left, at the bottom, I think. Here, let me look.”
Pom and Ida both loved wine. Though she preferred harder drinks, Autumn enjoyed wine, too, and she adored wine-tasting trips with her friend and/or her dads. Thus, she kept a nice collection. Hardly a cellar, but several good bottles.
“Why isn’t Ida B. Badass in our little mix?” Pom asked, hovering over Autumn as she pulled the rosé from the cooler. “Has she been to see you since you’ve been back?”
“She’s in South America, with her students, right?” Pops answered. Pom’s head spun toward Pops, and Autumn could see him spinning up to be mad that Pops had knowledge he didn’t, but she had told him, so she jumped in before he could open his mouth.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “Until August.” Turning to Pom, she added, staring him straight in the eyes, “Remember, when we had a spa day last month, I told you I was going out with her that night for her farewell.”
Pom’s burgeoning dramatic scene fizzled out. “Oh, of course! She’s in ... Peru, right?”
Smiling to himself, Pops picked up his plate and went to sit at the table.
“They started in Peru, but they’re in Colombia now.” Autumn collected her own plate, pulled three wine glasses from the rack, and joined Pops at the table. “They’re visiting almost every country, I think.”
“She does admirable work,” Pops said as Pom joined them and set the open wine bottle in the center of the table. “There is no more important job than teacher. Everything comes from education.”
“Yeah,” Autumn agreed, swallowing down the melancholy sigh that wanted to join the word.
There was absolutely no chance her father meant to compare Ida’s career as a high school Spanish teacher favorably against Autumn’s own corporate career, but just now, while she was feeling especially tender, when the steel armor she’d made of her skin had developed a few gaps and cracks, Autumn felt the comparison anyway. Ida changed children’s lives. Every day, she made impressions on children who would carry those impressions into their own lives and the world they lived in.
And Autumn built shopping centers.
She didn’t even build them. She didn’t even design them. She bought and sold the idea of them and the property they were on. Big freaking whoop.
Sighing again, she grabbed the wine and filled her glass. Then she drank the whole glass dry. When she set the empty on the table, both her dads were watching her.
“What?”
In tandem so perfect it might have been rehearsed, her fathers turned to each other and shared a look.
Pom made a small offering flourish with his hand. “You can go first.”
Pops thanked him with a nod and shifted his attention to Autumn.
“Wait,” she said, putting up a hand. “Did you two plan this? Are you in cahoots?” The real implication landed on her with a thud. “Is this an intervention?”
Her fathers shared another glance. Then, with studied innocence, Pom focused on his food while Pops turned back to Autumn. “No, lass. It’s not an intervention, and we’re not in cahoots. But we both love you, and these past couple of weeks, we’ve been worried.”
“Longer than that,” muttered Pom.
Pops shot him a quick look before telling Autumn, “True, we’ve been worried longer. But this feels like things are coming to a head, and—”
“I’m going to stop you right there,” Pom interrupted, “before you make some kind of infection metaphor we’ll all regret. We’re eating here.”
Pops chuckled. “Yes, fair.”
Pom picked up from there. “You’ve been heading full-speed toward a wall, babydoll. Of course we’ve been worried.”
Autumn considered the men before her. They’d been divorced for more than a decade and only reluctantly civil for most of that time. She’d needed an elaborate schedule to make sure she saw them both an equal number of times, doing equivalent types of things—if one got a lunch, the other couldn’t have a dinner. If one got a dinner and the other wasn’t available for dinner that week, a short shopping trip or museum visit would work as a substitute, but not a ballet or concert. If once got a ballet or concert, the other got a round of golf or a winery or spa day.
All of that because they couldn’t enjoy each other’s company, so they couldn’t enjoy her company together. Every Christmas, Thanksgiving, her birthday, she’d celebrated twice—or, really, once, but in two insufficient halves.
Maybe Pops hadn’t been surprised that Pom had bought the Thai food he liked. Maybe this had all been part of some complicated Autumn-focused scheme.
“How long have you two been talking again?” she asked.
They shared another glance, and this one had the stink of guilt.
“Oh my god! You have been! For how long?”
“Not long,” Pops answered, reaching his big, hairy hand to squeeze hers.
Not to be outdone, Pom grabbed her other hand. “Just since the spring, really.” He gave her hand an extra squeeze and huffed dramatically. “Remember that day I picked you up and we had lunch at Harry the Night Horde MC had already collected his balls. She didn’t know exactly what leverage they had over him, and she did not care. She could probably construct a decent guess once she took the time to sort through what she knew, but she wasn’t sure she’d bother. She didn’t care how they’d ‘handled’ him, only that they had.
A promise Cox had delivered on.
That thought caused a quiet echo of memory, of their wager at the pool table: one small favor. Chase had interrupted the game before she could win, but the lay of the table said she would have.
There was not one single reason she could conjure for why she might nullify the power of a favor like this.
Instead, when she opened her mouth, Autumn told Chase what she wanted.