Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Tyler drove to Lindsey’s on Tuesday night with nothing in the passenger seat.
He usually brought something. Wine from the place on Glenneyre.
Lemons from the farm stand past the bridge.
Once, a rotisserie chicken. Tonight he had left the bungalow with his jacket half-zipped and gotten two blocks before he’d realized his hands were empty and by then he was almost there, and he’d kept going.
She was on the porch when he pulled up, barefoot in the cold, holding a wooden spoon. She looked at him and tilted her head toward the door.
“Come inside. I made a chicken.”
“You made a whole chicken?”
“I had the afternoon off and I was in a chicken mood. Come on.”
The apartment smelled like garlic and lemon and something herby, and a cast iron pan was resting on her stove with a roasted chicken in it, lemon halves and onions gone to jam around the edges.
Lindsey set the wooden spoon on the counter and squeezed his arm on her way past—quick, warm. She’d already read his face.
Tyler sat at her small table with mismatched chairs. The one she’d refinished last month, which he’d watched her sand down in her backyard for an entire Saturday. He ran his hand along the arm of it.
“You’re being quiet,” she said.
She sat down across from him, pulled a leg off the bird, put it on his plate and started serving the salad—not waiting, not circling, just making him a plate—and something about the ease of it made him say it.
“I have to call Sam.”
Lindsey looked up. She knew about Sam. He’d told her the broad strokes months ago—the mother who left, the postcards from wherever, the family that had stopped expecting her to show up.
“The girls are going to Sedona in two weeks,” he said. “Somebody has to call Sam with the travel details. If it were just Bea, Anna could make that call. But Stella’s going too.”
“And Sam doesn’t know about Stella.”
“Nobody ever told her. It wasn’t a thing I decided—we just don’t talk to Sam.
None of us do. She sends a postcard occasionally.
We read it, nobody picks up the phone.” He turned his wine glass on the table without drinking.
“And now Stella’s about to walk into her house, and Sam needs to know before she opens the door and there are two girls standing there instead of one. ”
Lindsey pulled the chicken toward her and started pulling meat off the breast, putting pieces on his plate. Not looking at him. Just feeding him.
“Go ahead and eat,” she said. “So, you have to call your mother, who you haven’t spoken to in years, and tell her she has a granddaughter she’s never met?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“What are you going to say?”
“Something like—Bea’s coming, and she’s bringing my daughter. Her name is Stella. She’s seventeen.” He ate a piece. “I don’t know what else there is to say.”
“Is she going to ask why you didn’t tell her?”
“Probably. And the answer is that I didn’t think about it, because I don’t think about calling her. It’s been years.”
She ate quietly, hands busy, no pacing or talking in circles.
“That’s a hard phone call,” she said. “But it’s a phone call. Not a crisis. Not a confession. Just—hello, here’s what’s happening, here’s who’s coming.”
He almost smiled. “Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it. And it should be.” He went back to his plate. “Stella asked me if Sam knew about her. And it wasn’t like I did it on purpose. Not tell Sam. I just didn’t think about it until this came up, but I didn’t want to tell Stella that.”
“What did you say?”
“I said no. And her face—” He stopped. “She didn’t say anything. She just said okay. But her face, Lindsey.”
Lindsey put her fork down and looked at him. “What are you actually afraid of?”
He didn’t answer right away. He ate. Drank his wine.
“That Sam does to Stella what she did to me,” he said. “That Stella walks into that house and Sam is wonderful for a day and a half and then just—stops seeing her. And Stella doesn’t have the calluses for it. She’ll walk in there wide open.”
Lindsey reached across the table and put her hand on his wrist. “Stella is the least wide-open person I have ever met. She’ll be fine.”
“You keep saying that about things.”
“Because they keep being fine. And because your daughter is tougher than you think.” She squeezed his wrist and let go. “Make the call. Give Sam the information. And then let Stella be Stella.”
He looked at her across the table—this woman who had walked into his life five months ago with an almond croissant and a lanyard and had somehow become the person he drove to when his hands were empty.
Tyler reached for his glass. “You set a pretty high bar,” he said. “For a weeknight.”
“You have no idea how low my bar is,” she said. “You’ve seen my apartment.”
“I like your apartment.”
“You like that I feed you.”
“I like a lot of things.” He took a drink and went back to his plate. “The chicken is incredible, by the way.”
Lindsey tucked a foot under herself. “You said that about my beef stew.”
“I meant it about the beef stew too. I mean it about this. You’re going to have to accept that I think you’re a good cook.”
“I’ll work on it.” She smiled at him, and the room felt smaller in a way he didn’t mind, and she went back to her plate.
They were most of the way through when Lindsey said, “I saw Stella at school today.”
“How was that?”
“She ran into me coming out of the darkroom. Literally. She was blinking against the hall lights and walked straight into me.”
“That’s Stella.”
“She told me about the Sydney trip. Oliver and the toaster. The twins.” Lindsey tore a piece of bread in half. “She made pavlova with Fiona.”
“She didn’t tell me about the pavlova.”
“She doesn’t tell you everything.” Lindsey set what was left of the bread on her plate. “And she brought back a shell—one her nana picked up on Bondi Beach the day she found out Fiona was pregnant with Stella. She kept it for sixteen years. Fiona sent it home with Stella after Christmas.”
Tyler’s hand stopped on the stem of his glass.
“Say that again.”
“Her nana kept the shell for sixteen years.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute. Lindsey let the silence sit.
“I’ll talk to Anna and Meg tomorrow. And I’ll call,” he said.
“Good.”
They finished eating and neither of them said anything else about it, but his hand stayed near hers on the table, and neither of them moved.
After dinner she washed and he dried. She handed him plates and he put them in the rack, the warm water running and the clink of dishes filling the small kitchen, and their arms touched and neither of them mentioned it.
She handed him the last plate.
“Your ears are red,” she said.
He laughed. “Apparently they do that. At totally random times. And it’s all your fault.”
She laughed and kissed him on the cheek, and said, “Go home. Stella’s eating cereal for dinner and you know it. Take her some chicken.”
“She’s definitely eating cereal for dinner.”
“Go.”
Stella’s light was on. He could see it from the driveway. He sat in the truck for a minute with the engine off and the windshield going dark.
He went inside. Stella was at the kitchen counter with a bowl of cereal at nine-forty-five, which was not a dinner, and she looked up at him when he came in and saw his face and didn’t say anything.
“Good dinner?” she asked.
“Good dinner.”
“You don’t smell like wine.”
“I didn’t have much. But I did bring you some chicken, from Lindsey.”
He dropped his keys on the counter and sat on the stool next to hers.
“Nice. I’ll trade, no problem.”
She opened the container and reached for a fork. She pushed the cereal box over. He took a handful and ate it dry.
“Dad. You okay?”
He thought about it for a while before answering.
“I will be,” he said.
Stella nodded. She didn’t ask anything else.
They sat at the counter in the quiet kitchen and she ate and he ate his dry handful, and the fridge hummed and the pipes ticked in the wall.
After a while Stella got up, rinsed her bowl, put it in the drying rack, kissed the top of his head on her way past, and went down the hall to her room.
He got his phone out of his jacket pocket and set it on the counter in front of him.
Tomorrow, he thought.