Chapter Seventeen
· Brooks ·
Under different circumstances, I would have paid someone to do this for me. The handiest thing I’d done in my life was put together Ikea furniture when I moved into my own first apartment. Installing a new mailbox was definitely above my usual punching weight.
The guy in the hardware store had told me it was foolproof as long as the post of the old mailbox was undamaged.
He’d definitely upsold me on the huge toolbox, but I figured I’d need tools in this town anyway.
It wasn’t like back home where I could pay extra to have a plumber, a locksmith, and an electrician to be on my doorstep within thirty minutes if need be.
As welcoming as everyone had been to me and Skye, I also didn’t necessarily trust the people in this town to handle Addie’s new mailbox. They’d made her life harder by spray-painting the first one already. I wasn’t calling anyone to fix this.
Adriana’s car turned into her driveway and stopped a few feet away from me just as I tightened the last nut. Perfect timing. She hadn’t had to witness me struggle with the drill bits for fifteen minutes before turning to YouTube tutorials.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?
” she asked and banged her car door shut.
The skirt of her work uniform swished around her, and her hair glowed in the low evening sun.
She wasn’t wearing much makeup, so her freckles were out, a perfect sprinkle across her nose and cheeks.
Even yelling at me across a gravelly road, she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
“Your mailbox was in pretty bad shape,” I said and gestured at the old metal box at my feet. It wasn’t too bad, but you could see the scratches in the varnish where Addie had scrubbed the “B” off the “Bitch.”
“I didn’t ask you to fix it.” She sounded snippy and crossed her arms in front of her chest. I’d hit a sore spot with this thing. I knew she wasn’t actually angry at me. She just needed somewhere to direct her insecurity, so she wouldn’t have to feel small or weak.
“You don’t have to ask for my help,” I said. “I did this out of my own free will.”
“I can pay you back. That thing looks pretty nice quality.”
“Addie love, I did this because I wanted to, not because I wanted anything from you. I want you to have nice things. You deserve a mailbox that doesn’t have insults sprayed on it. You deserve nice things.”
“That’s stupid. Nobody deserves nice things just because.” She bit her bottom lip, wrapping her arms tighter around her chest.
“Do you like it?” I set the wrench back in the box and patted the top of the mailbox.
“Yes,” she grumbled. “It’s cherry red.”
“Well, your old one was, too. I figured that kind of fire truck color wasn’t an accident.”
“I wanted a cherry red one,” she mumbled, brows still drawn deep as she stared at the shiny new insult-less varnish.
I stepped closer, arms wide to indicate that I wanted to hug her.
Her eyes swept over me. She didn’t move to reciprocate the hug, but she shuffled her feet a few inches in my direction and that was all the invitation I needed.
I closed my arms around her, and Addie softened against me a little.
Not fully, not unwrapping her arms or tearing her gaze away from my project, but just enough to fit her head right under my chin.
“It’s just a mailbox,” I whispered against the crown of her hair, inhaling a whiff of warm vanilla.
“I don’t…I don’t know what to say. I’m not used to people doing nice things for me.”
“You can say thank you.”
“I can cook dinner to say thank you.”
“Just say thank you,” I replied.
“I make great pesto.”
“Say thank you, Adriana.”
“Thank you, Adriana,” she mumbled.
“That’s it.” I pressed my lips to her forehead. “Now come on, I’ve got lasagna waiting for you.”
Her head snapped around. “You cooked? At my house?”
“Your mom helped me not burn the place down, but her and Skye have formed an alliance against me. Apparently, dessert before dinner is acceptable now.”
She glanced back at the mailbox and when her eyes returned to me, they were glassy with tears. “Thank you.”
“Anything. Anytime.”
Skye and Maureen had set the table at Addie’s cottage, and Duncan carried a foldout chair over from their house to join us for dinner.
I kept an eye on my daughter, watching for traces of discomfort or overwhelm, but she was the life of the party.
Not just Addie, but her whole family entertained Skye’s choices of dinner conversation.
Nobody made her talk about school or reprimanded her for her deep dive into the differences between twentieth- and twenty-first-century underwear, which included literal toilet talk.
Maureen only interjected when Skye wanted to show off a video on her iPad, insisting on a “no screens at the dinner table” rule because she wanted to actually talk to her family, but immediately encouraged Skye to tell her about the video in great detail and then show it to her after dinner.
My chest ached for my daughter, because this was what she deserved. Not grandparents who were so concerned with propriety, they got upset by Skye bouncing in the roller-coaster line.
“Do you mind questions about your father?” I asked a few hours after dinner, when Addie and I sat on her front porch. Faint light spilled out from the windows and crickets chirped in the dark around us.
“Not at all,” Addie said, plucking a few lazy strings on her new guitar, “but I might not have very many answers.”
“You aren’t in touch?”
“No,” she laughed and glanced up. “My mom spent the summer after high school graduation on a road trip with her friends and came home pregnant. It’s a bit of a Mamma Mia situation. Three men, but no one serious.”
“Did you ever try to find your biological dad?”
It didn’t take a genius to see the parallel between her and Skye. Candace and I hadn’t been serious, and from how Skye talked about her, she’d been great at the single mom thing. If it hadn’t been for that car accident, who knew if I would have ever learned of Skye’s existence?
“No, I didn’t,” Addie replied.
“Was it hard? Growing up without him?”
Addie weighed her head from side to side.
“In some ways. I didn’t really need a second parent.
I wasn’t actually missing out on anything.
Living in a family holiday destination, however, I was constantly aware of how different my family was.
You don’t really slap a picture of a single teen mom in a brochure, you know?
It made me really hate Bravetown for a while because it had all these picture-perfect families visiting.
And then I started to hate Wild Fields because everything is all Bravetown all the time.
People stay here, work in the park, get married, have kids, and then take the kids to the park.
” She ran her hand over the curve of her instrument.
“But I’m grateful, too. I never had that picket-fence life, so it was easier for me to look at what else the world had to offer. I developed my own ambitions.”
“Do you still hate it here?” I asked, not sure whether I asked for Skye’s sake or my own.
“No.” Addie smiled and plucked the high E string, looking directly at me. One note and the memory of “Für Elise” flashed through my mind. “I have a new appreciation for it.”