Chapter 44
Chapter Forty-Four
Decker
“Okay, today is just to make sure you remember it.” I sit on the porch steps of Pen’s backyard. She’s one step up, and my fingers graze along her smooth legs as Hazel gets set up. “Ready?”
She nods, and I play the music on my phone.
Hazel runs through the routine from the top.
Waist, chest, then the neck roll hits, and the hoop wobbles and drops.
She groans. One thing I’ve discovered is that Hazel isn’t a crier.
I waited for the tears many times during all these practices, but she’ll just grunt and groan and make frustrated noises that make me laugh.
I climb off the stairs and crouch down to her level. “Relax. It’s okay, we have all night.”
She nods, her determination similar to her mom’s, and picks up the hoop.
I feel Penelope’s eyes on me from the steps behind me.
She’s been staying out of it, which I appreciate.
I started this as someone else in Hazel’s life, and now I want to be a helluva lot more to her.
I’ll never get there without Penelope giving us space, which I’m sure is difficult for her.
But I’ll never let her regret trusting me with the most precious person in her life.
Hazel tries again. Gets the hoop to her neck and does two full rotations before it drops.
“Better,” I tell her. “But you’re fighting it. When it gets to your neck, you tense up, expecting it to drop. Let’s close our eyes.”
She tips her chin down and glares.
“Come on, humor me.”
Penelope laughs lightly behind us.
Hazel reluctantly closes her eyes.
“Visualize the routine all the way through to the very end. Do you see it? All the moves you’ve mastered, how well you’re doing. Do you see how great you finish? The neck roll four times and then everyone claps.”
She nods, and her small chest rises and falls. “I do.”
“Okay, then let’s do it again.”
I step back, not going back to the stairs since the temptation is too much with Penelope there.
Hazel runs through the routine again, but it’s her worst yet.
“Okay, here.” I pick up the other hula hoop.
“I feel like I should take a video of you doing it.” Penelope stands and takes out her phone.
“No video evidence, thank you.”
“Hazel, would it help later to watch the video of Decker?” Penelope ignores me, her smile so wide and teasing that I know she’s going to use this against me someday.
“Yes, Mommy.”
Penelope sits down in the grass, and Hazel sits next to her. The two of them watch me with rapt attention, Penelope’s phone raised.
Now it’s me grunting. This is the part I’ve been dreading.
I start the hoop at my waist, which goes fine, and work it up to my chest, which goes less fine, and by the time I get it to my neck, I’m sure I look like a grown man having a medical emergency.
But I do what I told Hazel. I stop fighting it, and it holds.
Hazel and Penelope both clap.
“You’re better than me,” Hazel says.
“I’ve had a lot of years practicing things I’m not naturally good at.” I put the hoop down before I embarrass myself further. Then I sit across from her. “Can I tell you something?”
She nods.
“This season I had a problem. With baseball. The thing I’m supposed to be the best at. I started thinking too hard about every play. Worrying about whether I was going to mess up. And you know what happened?”
She shakes her head. “What?”
“I messed up every time. Because I was fighting my natural instincts instead of trusting myself. Does that make sense?”
Hazel picks at the grass. “I think you’re a real good baseball player.”
I catch Penelope smiling at me. “I do too, just like you’re a really good hula hooper.”
“So, what did you do?”
I glance to her side at Penelope. “I found something that was more important, and it stopped my mind from fixating on making a mistake. Is there anything you care about more than this hula hoop talent show?”
Hazel processes this the way she processes most things, which is quietly. Then she gets up and grabs the hoop.
She starts the routine. Waist to chest to neck, and this time she looks as if she feels different doing it—the release, the trust—and it spins around her neck for four full rotations before she rolls it back down and catches it at her hip.
She stares at the hoop as though she can’t believe she actually did it. “I got it!”
“You got it.” I’m not surprised, instead more relieved and proud that she saw it through.
Penelope’s eyes widen. “Haze, honey.”
Hazel drops the hoop and throws herself at me. She hits me like a small freight train, and I hold her, swinging her up and around. She shrieks, and I hold her for a few seconds before setting her down.
She grabs the hoop immediately. “Again, Decker.”
She runs through the routine. Waist, chest, neck roll, catch.
“It worked.” She still looks amazed by herself.
“What did you think about? Actually, you don’t have to tell me. Just think about it at the talent show, okay?”
She nods and turns to Penelope and back to me, picking up the hula hoop. After the fourth time she does it all perfectly, she stops and holds it at her waist. “Decker?”
“Yes?”
“Are you going to sit with Mommy at the talent show?”
A soft noise falls out of Penelope.
Hazel looks at me with big serious eyes that don’t miss anything and probably never have. This doesn’t feel like a casual question. She wants to make sure I’ll be there because I’m someone important to her. And she’s important to me too.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll sit with Mommy.”
She nods once, seemingly satisfied.
“And after, right?” She circles the hula hoop around her waist.
Man, she’s come so far.
“After?”
“Cookies and juice.” She says it as if I should know this.
“In the gym. All the families stay. Leighton’s bringing the black-and-white cookies from Steingold’s.
Mommy is bringing ones from Levain.” Leave it to a seven-year-old to name the best cookie places in Chicago. “You have to come to that too.”
Some emotion moves through my chest that I can’t describe.
I crouch back down to her level. “Like I would miss cookies and juice.”
She studies me for a moment the way she does, as if she’s trying to figure out if I mean it. Then she nods and lifts her hoop.
“Okay,” she says. “I’m going to do it ten more times.”
“Ten more times?”
“Yes, you said no reward comes without hard work.”
She starts the routine, and I sit down next to Penelope to watch. Her shoulder is warm against mine. Neither of us says anything. We just watch Hazel run the routine over and over until she’s satisfied.
On the sixth pass, she adds a bow at the end that I did not teach her.
“She made up a bow.” Penelope’s voice is almost wistful.
My throat is doing something I’m not going to look too hard into right now.
I lay my hand over Penelope’s on the step between us. She doesn’t move it. Then I turn my attention back to the backyard.
Hazel runs it again. The bow gets more dramatic, like a curtsy. By the tenth pass, she’s holding it for a full count before she drops the hoop on the grass.
“Can we get Portillo’s now?” Hazel asks.
“Sure.” Penelope smiles at her daughter.
Hazel looks at me. “You’re coming, right?”
“Where else would I be?”
“Go get your shoes.” Penelope watches her go inside for her shoes.
Then we turn to each other, and we’re just sitting on the back steps with two hula hoops on the grass and an empty backyard.
“I think she might know,” Penelope says.
I nod. “Yeah, I think so too.”
“You know she’s going to tell Monroe.”
“Monroe probably already knows. They might be in cahoots with each other, who knows?”
Penelope laughs. Actually laughs. The real one she doesn’t always let out, and I think about the letter I wrote when I was seventeen and how I said she had the best laugh of anyone I’d ever met. All these years later, it’s still the truth.
I stand and hold out my hand.
She takes it, and I pull her up off the step.
I want to hold her and kiss her and tell her how much I love her and her daughter. Every morning since we got together, I’ve wanted to pinch myself to make sure I’m living in the here and now.
The back door swings open.
“Let’s go.” Hazel scurries down the stairs and jumps off the last two. She takes Penelope’s hand, and they walk along the side of the house to the sidewalk.
I follow, but once we’re on the sidewalk, Hazel’s small hand slips into mine. I look over her head at Penelope, and we both smile.
Yeah, I think Hazel knows.