Chapter 32
Thirty-Two
“You’ll keep your mouth shut,” Cap snaps, gruffer than usual as I step out of the guest room.
“Are you kidding me?” Nash strains to keep his voice low, and I freeze in the middle of the hall. “Everything going on with her mom and the money—she’ll be blindsided.”
What?
Cap hacks. “No.”
For the second time today, I can’t stop myself from listening to words not made for my ears.
Nash says, “You need to tell her.”
My back tenses against the wall.
“And what’ll she do if she knows?”
Nash doesn’t answer.
“Exactly!” Cap barks through a wheeze. “Nothing anyone can do.”
Frank finds me in the hall, and I put a finger to my lips, begging him to stay quiet. Being the asshole he is, he barks.
I step into the living room with a painted-on smile. Cap is in a chair with his cane leaning on one side, his oxygen propped on the other, and Penny in his hand.
“Everything okay?” I look between them. “Sounded like you two were having a lover’s quarrel.”
“Your husband dragged my ass off the boat in this weather,” Cap gripes.
“Storm might last for a couple days,” Nash fills in, eyeing my dad. “Thought he might like to crash here.” To me: “In the guesthouse I didn’t know I had.”
“You should open an inn.” I give him a sweet smile. To my dad: “Your boat sink?”
“Hardly.” He hacks out a cough that leads to him gripping his side with a wince.
“You okay?”
“Bah.” He pokes me with his cane. “You sound like him.” He tilts his head to Nash, and they exchange a look of contempt.
“Okay . . .” I look between them. “Is this about Mom?”
There’s a tense pause as they have an entire conversation of eye narrowing and aggressive head tilts.
“I knew about you,” Cap finally says.
My chin jerks back. “In the shed?”
“The shed?” He frowns, adjusting his hat. “No. Your mom told me she was pregnant before she left.”
In unison, Nash and I say, “What?”
I drop to the couch, reeling.
“I loved Iris, but it didn’t matter,” he says. “I wanted the gold.”
My mother lied to me about lying to him. He’s not lying, I can tell. And my mother—this is something she would do.
I look at Nash. He shrugs.
“Thought I would find it then we could be together,” Cap continues. “By the time I wised up, your mom was married. You were older. Too old to want a dad, I figured. Nobody wants to be the deadbeat.” He chuckles, self-deprecating. “I was too proud to grovel, and too much time had passed.”
I open and close my mouth—twice. Completely thrown.
“Nash figured it out.” He glares at Nash.
“Bastard didn’t want me lying to you. Something about things being better out in the open.
Clean slates and people making mistakes and all.
” The way Cap directs his gaze at me feels like an attack.
“Sorry about that, kiddo. Don’t blame your mom though, she just wanted what was best. I didn’t know how to do that.
” He takes a hit off Penny, almost daring Nash or me to tell him not to vape in the house.
“Then I didn’t know how to let everything else go. ”
I start to ask him what that means, but once again, the reality of who my dad is or isn’t breaks apart before coming back together. He knew, he didn’t care, and my mother is a plague on my life.
My eyes meet Nash’s. He’s somehow just as shocked as I am even though he already knew.
My mother lied to me.
About my father.
Then lied to get me here.
Again.
I’m shaking and hot and mad enough to smash Nash’s fabulous Poulsen and Wortz coffee table to smithereens.
Afraid I might do just that, I calmly say, “Excuse me,” and walk to the back door. I slide it open, step onto the patio only to be instantly pelted by rain, then close the door.
Somewhere between numb and enraged, I let myself get soaked, seething with my fists clenched at my sides. My mother lied to me. Again. I can’t even blame the tumor, she’s pathological at this point. A menace.
The door opens and closes, and both men appear on either side of me.
“She deserves to have a goddamn brain tumor,” I say to nobody and without an ounce of guilt.
She has upended my life and I’m here chasing my tail trying to help hers.
I glare at Cap through the downpour. “And you. You make me call you Dad and play along.” My entire gene pool is made of assholes.
“You didn’t even care to know me for forty-two years! ”
Cap grunts. “Want to scream?”
“Yes.” Because yes, I really do. I want to scream. At him. At her. At a Frenchman.
So, I do. I scream.
And to my surprise, I hear one deep voice then another. Cap and Nash scream right along with me. In the rain, until Nash starts laughing, Cap starts coughing, and I feel less stabby, we scream.
When I look at Nash, he wipes the rain off his face and gives me a little smile that makes me laugh. Only he could make this feel better.
He slides the glass door open, and we step inside, dripping.
“You drag me over here,” Cap barks. Like he didn’t just drop a bomb on my life, then scream in the rain. “You gonna feed us or what, asshole?”
Despite every line crossed and secret spilled in the last twenty-four hours, Nash makes us blueberry pancakes.
The rain falls all day.
All day we watch Antiques Roadshow, and I listen to them tell stories as they alternate between playing chess and pool. My dad wins every time, but the way Nash says “Got me again” and gives me a wink leads me to believe it’s all by design.
It’s one of those days that looks like nothing but feels like everything. A gift of ordinary to make up for all the days of it we’ve missed. What things might have been like if life were different and we had all been made less flawed and messy.
When the day ends much sooner than I want, Cap hobbles out to the shed—Nash alongside him with proper blankets and pillows—and I call Bennie.
I don’t have much excitement to report, but she rattles on and on about the fun they’re having, not missing me anywhere near as much as I’m missing her.
She’s elated her cousins are there and reports Gypsy’s only had a couple of headaches—I secretly wish her head would explode.
In a whisper, she adds, “Aunt Remy’s been calling Uncle Darren and asking him to change his mind about something.
” She shouldn’t be listening, but I’m too distracted with the implication to tell her that.
Something must be going on with them. Maybe a new house, he’s in real estate.
When I hear the sliding glass door open and close, I say, “Bee, I have to go. I’ll call tomorrow.”
“Aunt Reese says we’re coming to visit you and going to the beach. And I’ll meet Grandpa and everyone else.”
“Everyone else?”
“There’s always other people in the treasure hunt movies,” she says with a duh tone of voice. “Someone who knows one thing the other person doesn’t.”
“Right.” I smile into the phone at the irony but feel a wave of nausea. I have to tell Nash about Bennie before they get here. “The beach sounds fun.” And slightly terrifying. “Love you, Bee.”
“Love you back.”
I end the call, change into a sleepshirt, and pad to the bathroom to brush my teeth. Mid-scrub, my phone rings, Nash’s name on the screen. I pull the toothbrush out of my mouth and answer, pinching the phone between my ear and shoulder.
“You fall in the pool?”
I hear his chuckle through the phone and floating down the hall. “Just wanted to see how you feel about today.”
“How the lies of my family never stop, and you found me homeless in your shed?” I ask around my toothbrush.
He fills the doorway, eyes meeting mine in the mirror. “I found you naked in my shower, actually.”
I roll my eyes and finish brushing. “You have something to say?”
“Lots.”
One word, a million meanings.
I rinse my mouth and look at him, phones at both of our ears, stupid smiles on our faces. I want to lean into him and feel his warmth. I want to inhale his scent while his voice vibrates my cheek.
“Talk fast,” I say. “Because I’m dying to sleep on a bed that doesn’t include the word futon.”
He steps aside, letting me pass then following me as I make the short walk to the guest room, phone not budging from his ear.
“I’m dying for you to do that too,” he says.
I laugh at the absurdity of hearing his voice in two places.
At the doorway of the bedroom, I face him. “Good night, Nash.”
He grins. “Night.”
When I close the door, it’s quiet on the phone, but I don’t hang up as I crawl into bed.
“You there?”
“Maybe.”
I smile into my pillow. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
He’s smiling too.
There’s a silence, but it’s comfortable.
“What are you doing now?” I ask.
“Sitting in the hall outside of your bedroom.” His double voice confirms this.
I want him to come in here and lie in this bed with me, then I want to fall asleep in his arms. I want it so badly I can taste it.
“Why?”
“Because I’m hoping you’ll tell me you called off your engagement so I can break down this door.”
“I did not,” I say. “Tell me a story.”
“About?”
“Anything. Your favorite.”
“Well, you were there for my favorite story,” he says easily. I can picture him in the hall, just a few feet and a thin wall between us, with his knees bent and forearms resting on them. Can picture the slant of his lips and the disarray of his hair. “That was only eight years ago, though.”
He blasts a tune on the harmonica, and my brain rewires itself.
“Something about Ben Franklin then.” Though there’s nothing he can tell me about the man that he hasn’t before, I want to remember. The stories. Him. Us.
“Ah,” he says, smile in his voice. “Our best president.”
I laugh. “He wasn’t a president.”
“But he should have been.”
Then he talks about his historical hero.
He tells me how Franklin was an avid swimmer and invented handheld swimming fins then an instrument called a glass armonica. The armonica—made from thirty-seven glass bowls—never caught on because claims were made that the sound drove people mad.
He explains how Franklin took air baths where he’d essentially sit naked in front of a window for an hour or longer, often reading and writing, in the name of wellness.
Ben Franklin might have been insane, I consider, but the way Nash talks about him makes me wish I knew him.
“Why do you like him so much?” I ask, when he runs out of steam.
“Right now?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Because he knew absence sharpens love.” I swoon just a little. “Night, Rue Conway.”
I don’t want the call to end.
“Night, Nash.”
As much as I need the gold and to get back to my life, when we wake up to a forecast of rain for the entire next day, I’m relieved. Maybe even happy.
My dad makes us laugh with his stories and Nash looks at me like I’m the thing he’s spent the last eight years searching for.
When he calls me at bedtime from his spot in the hall, he tells me his favorite story, the one about the time he fell in love in a small antique store in Fontain, North Carolina. “I bought an old harmonica, and all it cost me was my heart.”
It takes all my strength to keep myself in my bed.
And once again, Jonathan doesn’t answer when I call.