Accidental Happiness (9 page)

“My birthday’s next week,” Angel announced after we’d ordered our drinks. “Can we come back here that day if we’re still around?” She glanced at her mother, and some kind of code passed between them, it seemed.

“We’ll see.” Reese remained noncommittal.

“How old will you be?” I asked. I tried to make the question sound casual, but it came out an octave too high.

“Eight,” she said.

It would have been close, the timing, but possible. I needed to force that issue next with Reese. She clearly wasn’t going to offer much in the way of unprompted information.

“Congratulations!” I said with too much enthusiasm. Lane shot me a look that I was sure meant
calm down.
Reese’s scattershot energy was rubbing off on me.

Plates rattled as waitresses brought food to the table next to us and voices rose and fell among the rowdy summer crowd. But there was no mistaking the odd silence at our table. All of us, with the exception of Angel, knew what lay implicit in the child’s age.

“Remember the clown we went to see last year for your birthday?” Reese said to Angel, filling the awkward pause.

The two of them launched into descriptions of some friend of Reese’s who worked as a professional clown. As they talked, I looked at Angel, her expressions, her skin color. Nothing gave any hint of her place in Benjamin’s genetic line. The more I stared at her, the less she even looked like Reese’s daughter to me, a changeling substituted for the child I watched earlier standing on my boat.
You’re losing your mind, Gina.

“Lane said we could have a picnic,” Angel said, “on a deserted island like Gilligan! Maybe we could do
that
for my birthday—if we’re still here, that is.” Again, the necessary disclaimer laid against all plans. She was a smart kid. A bit of a brat for my taste, but I had to admire her bold approach to her new situation.

“There’s an island just across the way,” Lane explained. “You can only get to it by boat. If you’re here for your birthday, that’s great, but we can do it any day, really. We’ll anchor, take my boat to the beach, and have the place to ourselves.” Lane had an old Boston Whaler tied up at her dock. The flat bottom could go right up on the sand.

Angel grinned, then looked at Reese. She was searching for something . . . instruction, maybe?

Reese gave a slight shake of her head, barely any movement at all, but Angel seemed to understand.

“Maybe your dog can come with us,” Angel said, addressing me.

What was it with those two? The looks. The signals.

“Georgie would like that,” I told her.

It was true. She and Georgie had taken a liking to each other. Georgie rarely made a misstep when it came to character. Her instincts ran sharper than mine. I hoped for my sake that the dog’s batting average held when it came to the girl. If she
was
Benjamin’s only child, I at least wanted to like her, whether I got on well with her mother or not.

“Why didn’t Georgie come to dinner with us?” she asked.

“Restaurants aren’t crazy about dogs,” I said.

I wondered if the AC guy had made it to the boat. I had high hopes of sleeping cool again, and the last thing I needed was a houseguest or two on a stifling hot boat.

“Do you know how to make a doll cake?” Angel turned to Lane, the subject of the dog replaced in an instant. “I saw one once where the doll’s skirt was the cake. Do you know how to do that?”

The words held a reverence. She sounded hopeful, but frightened of the hope itself. It was the first time she’d looked like a complete kid to me, and I wondered what her life had been like, with Reese. The two were devoted to each other, that was clear, but something about their interaction seemed to mix up the roles of parent and child. Lane’s presence offered no ambiguity, and Angel allowed her kid persona to shine when she talked with the older woman.

“I’ve made a cake or two in my time,” Lane said. “I bet I could figure it out. Chocolate or vanilla icing?” she asked.

“Pink.” Angel’s smile changed her face.

“Pink’s not a flavor,” Lane said, smiling. “Strawberry maybe?”

Angel smiled, nodded.

I had an odd feeling. I wanted to warn Lane, to tell her not to get so attached, but the concern seemed unfounded when weighed against rational thought. Maybe I simply didn’t want Lane’s loyalties divided. My gut sensed a competition in the works and I had already fallen behind.

“Lane said she can teach me to sail too,” Angel added, looking at her mother. “She’s got a little boat, called a . . .” She glanced over at Lane.

“A Sunfish,” Lane filled in.

“Well that’s a lot of plans. We’ll have to see,” Reese said. “Sounds like fun, though.”

It is fun. Lots of fucking fun.
I suddenly felt like the last one picked for kickball. Seemed the party would continue whether I showed up or not.

“I could lend a hand in the sailing department,” I said. Angel turned to look at me; her face showed no response at all. Reese made a small noise, something between a cough and a grunt.

“Thank you,” Angel said, after the prompt from her mother. “That would be fun too.”

The waiter brought hush puppies, fresh from the vat, hot grease staining the paper that lined the basket.

“Where’re we sleeping tonight?” Angel asked her mother.

“Let’s talk about that,” Reese said as she took a hush puppy, then bounced it from hand to hand to cool. She turned to Angel. “Careful with these, honey. Wait a minute to pick one up.” She turned back to me, said in an offhand tone, “I know you said we could stay at your place for the night, but that’s going to be pretty tight.”

“There’s plenty of room,” I said, the lie heavy in my throat. “The biggest headache will be the one bathroom.” The tension between us remained. She’d barely acknowledged me since she sat down.

“Well,” Reese told me, “we could find a room somewhere. Something that doesn’t cost too much.” It was a fairly transparent protest, designed to give me an out if I really wanted to be an asshole.

Angel looked out the window. A salt creek ran behind the restaurant, and she stared at two seagulls vying to land on the same post. I got the feeling she’d heard this routine with her mother before, felt vaguely embarrassed by it. But maybe I was projecting too much. Maybe she just wanted to look at birds.

“I’ve got an idea,” Lane said. “Why don’t you two stay with me? Or at least one of you. I’ve got an extra room, plus a pull-out in the den. That might give you some time to figure out what you plan to do.”

“That’s nice of you,” Reese said. “Maybe if Angel stayed with you, Gina and I could have a chance to talk.”

“That’s what we’ll do then,” Lane said, looking delighted with the outcome.

I helped myself to a hush puppy, suddenly registering a biting hunger that I’d been too preoccupied to notice before.

“So, did you two travel far to get here, you and Angel?” Lane asked, trying to make her question light and conversational.

Reese had dodged the where-did-you-come-from question several times already. They’d lived “outside of Baltimore,” visited friends in Georgia, stayed a season on the Outer Banks . . . The list went on and on. Relentless, Lane had continued to ask, rephrasing it each time just enough to make it new.

“Lately, we’ve been traveling in the western part of North Carolina,” Reese said. “We haven’t stayed in any one place for too long. We were living near Boone, in the mountains, just before we came here. I’ve got a friend who runs a restaurant there, and I was able to pick up some work.”

Closer to an answer, but still vague. Reese’s life didn’t make any sense. I knew she and Ben had married during college. She’d graduated from State the year before he finished. Worked as a sales rep for a local radio station from that time until she left him. But the bits and pieces she’d offered about her life over the course of the afternoon didn’t offer any consistency, no big picture of what her life with Angel had been like.

“Mom?” Angel sat beside Lane near the window, had to speak across the table to get her mother’s attention. “Can I have a gumball? There’s a big gumball machine by the front door.” The request seemed perfunctory, her face suggesting that she’d given up before she even spoke.

Reese put her elbows on the table, leaned in toward Angel, then sat up again and began fishing in the bottom of her purse for a quarter. Angel’s face changed as her mother began to look for coins. “You may go
get
it now,” she said, her hand rooting inside the macramé bag, “but I don’t want you to chew it yet. Our food is coming any minute.”

Reese’s hand was still feeling around in her bag.

“Here, I’ve got one,” Lane said, handing Angel a coin.

Reese nodded at her daughter. “What do you say?”

“Thank you.” She beamed at Lane, then went off, momentarily delighted.

We all watched her go, marveled at the happiness of unanticipated permission.

“Wouldn’t you like to be seven again?” Lane asked, her eyes following the girl. “Even for a few minutes?”

The sound of a blender rose and fell in arcing spurts from behind the bar.

“Not me.” Reese’s words came out solid, the edges sharp and dangerous. “I wouldn’t go through childhood again for love or money.”

It was a dead-end remark. No response could naturally follow, so we let it go, looked around for the waiter who could bring us our salads, maybe another round of beers. I watched Angel struggle to work the gumball machine with her left hand. A bit awkward, but she was managing. Still, guilt fell over me again.

“Excuse me for a second,” Reese said, suddenly standing up. I figured she was going to literally give Angel a hand, but she headed toward the back of the restaurant instead.

Lane watched her go, shrugged her shoulders as if to say,
Who knows?

After a short time, Angel came back with the gum tight in her fist. When she put it on the table in front of her, the inside of her hand was blue. Lane stuck the corner of her napkin in ice water and rubbed the child’s sticky palm.

“Where’s Mom?” Angel asked.

I took a stab at answering. “She went to the bathroom, I think.” Better to go with something concrete. The bathroom. Angel nodded, but continued to look around. Sometime after that the salads arrived, but still no Reese.

“I guess we should go ahead and start,” Lane said, gesturing toward the plates in front of us.

Angel picked up her fork, tried to look blasé, but a current of something—concern, maybe even fear—flashed in her eyes, then was gone.

“You think I should go check on her?” Lane asked me, keeping her voice light.

“I’m sure she’ll be back any second,” I said. “Let’s finish our salads. She wouldn’t want us to hold up the entrées.”

With Angel at the table, questions passed between Lane and me with only glances, no words to alarm the little girl. But we both wondered what Reese was up to. With a child present in the equation, the stakes became high, much more than the curiosity the situation would normally have warranted. After what seemed to be hours, but had in fact been about twenty minutes, Angel’s face changed entirely.

“Mom!” she called out, her eyes fixed across the room. The waiter was clearing salad plates, but Reese’s sat untouched at her place.

Lane and I turned to see, and sure enough, there was Reese. Late sun through a side window caught her jewelry. Carrying a tray in her hands, she passed a group of men who sat drinking at the bar, and her skirt brushed the bare legs exposed below their shorts. The men followed her with their eyes as she moved across the room.

“Where’d you go?” Angel stood up as her mother came closer to the table. The tray held tall glasses that overflowed slightly around the edges with something—a concoction, dark pink and frozen. Strawberry daiquiris was my guess. Four of them sat cold and sweating on the tray.

“My treat,” Reese said, still standing over us, as if in triumph. She smelled of cigarettes, and I guessed that while waiting for the drinks, she’d bummed a cigarette from one of the guys at the bar.

“Reese, “ Lane said, “you shouldn’t have done that. Those are expensive—”

“It’s okay,” Reese interrupted her. “I get the employees’ discount—in advance. I just got a job.”

“A job?” I replayed the sentence in my head. “Here?” I asked. For an instant everything stopped. “You’re going to work here?” The day had been a rush of Reese and Angel, but when she spoke, the moment froze into a photograph.

“Yeah. I start next week,” she announced.

She had a job? Planned to stay? What kind of person was she? What kind of mother drags a child hundreds of miles and makes a life decision on a whim? Still, after less than a day with Reese, nothing about her seemed out of bounds. Lane looked over at me, mouth slightly open, eyes wide. I was sure my expression mirrored hers.

“So?” Reese stood with the tray, waiting, clearly expecting a more enthusiastic response. I forced myself to sit up straight, to smile.

“That’s great,” I said, unable to animate my tone beyond the phonetics of the sentiment. Could I possibly deal with having Reese in town indefinitely? It was too late, in any case.

“Congratulations,” Lane managed, with a little more expression.

“So we’ll be here on my birthday?” Angel asked.

“You bet,” Reese answered, smiling, putting a glass down in front of each of us, even her young daughter. “The green straw means it’s virgin,” she said when Lane’s eyebrows went up.

She put the last one at her own place and sat down, then lifted hers toward the middle of the table. Angel held hers out, followed by Lane, then me. The glasses clinked together, held high, pink as party balloons. Whipped cream topped the festive drinks, and in the center of each mound of white sat a different colored gumball.

“Cheers,” Reese said.

“Cheers,” we answered with varying degrees of enthusiasm; but Angel remained unconflicted, her voice calling loudest of all.

7

Reese

R
eese noted the cold sensation that ran down her arm. She thought about what she’d done, hoped to God it was the right thing. She rode in the backseat with Angel on the short drive back to the marina. Lane sat in the front with Gina. Angel stretched out with her head in Reese’s lap, her bandaged shoulder the only sign of what had gone so wrong the night before. Reese pulled her fingers through Angel’s hair, the soft curls yielding at her touch. Angel snuggled as if settling down for a journey, rather than the short ride home. Then again, everything was part journey to a child. Only adults began to see life in terms of destinations.

“Mom?” Angel asked. “Are we going to live on a boat here too, like Gina?”

“I don’t think so, baby. I have to find us a place to stay, though.”

Reese had dreaded arriving in Charleston. Even as she sorted through the details of how she might work things out with Ben, she understood how torn she would feel when it was done, when she was actually sharing her daughter with him. Months before, when she brought Angel to meet Ben, she’d had hopes of another outcome, one that would give Angel the family she deserved. But Ben had made it clear what the terms would be.

She’d been stupid to take Angel away, to panic like that. Ben wouldn’t have turned against her. He wouldn’t have tried to keep Angel from her, no matter what her problems were; no matter how intent he was on staying with Gina. Gina’s feelings about children had left her with the slightest thread of hope; hope that Ben would have to choose between the girl and his wife.

But that was before. With him gone, everything had changed, and she now had to rely on the woman she’d wanted to replace. Her options had become slim. And as Angel asked about the future, Reese realized how muddled everything had become. How hard it would be to find a solution without him.

“Well, we don’t have to worry about where you’re sleeping tonight,” Lane said. “We’ll have a great time at my place, Angel, and your mom and Gina can spread out and have a slumber party of their own.”

“Right.” Angel smiled, but glanced up at Reese for final confirmation.

“That sounds like a great idea,” Reese said. A night with Gina didn’t have the makings of a party, not with the conversations they had in store, but she could feel her daughter relax—the muscles in her neck, in her good shoulder, eased against Reese’s thigh—and that put a better light on everything else. She saw how much Angel liked Lane, trusted her. Reese trusted her too, and she hoped it was mutual. She needed all the goodwill she could muster.

“We’re here,” Gina said as she turned into the lot of the marina. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m exhausted. Where’s your car, Reese?” she asked. “Don’t you need to get stuff out of it?”

“The Plymouth there.” She pointed to the maroon car. Her South Carolina license plate read
DOG-MAA
. In a lot full of fancy sport vehicles, even Gina’s Volvo looked out of place. Reese’s old boxy sedan looked prehistoric.

“South Carolina plates,” Gina said. “That was fast.”

Reese smiled. Gina was fishing. But nothing would be biting today.

“Like I said, we’ve moved so much. I haven’t gotten around to changing them. Good thing, huh?”

“Pretty lucky,” Gina said. “Okay, I’ll let these two off at Lane’s, then I’ll meet you at the boat.”

“Go ahead and park,” Lane said. “Angel and I can walk to the house. We might even stop and get an ice cream at the Ship’s Store.”

Lane had a natural way with Angel. But what about Gina? Could she be trusted? Benjamin had loved her, relied on her. Hell, he married her, which had surprised Reese from the beginning. That was almost enough. But not quite. Reese sensed something off-center about her. She had all that baggage from her childhood, but hell, who didn’t? The real problem came from the notion that she didn’t seem to care much for Angel.

A breeze stirred the air. Halyards on the sailboats responded, clinked against the aluminum masts like wind chimes, dozens of them at once.

“I could use a shower,” Reese said, feeling the salt air thick on her skin. “Should I bathe on the boat or go up to the marina showers?”

“Either way,” Gina told her. “The water pressure’s a little better up at the guest showers. It just depends how lazy I am on any given day.”

“I’ll go to the marina, then. I need to throw in a load of clothes at the laundry up there anyway.” After the catharsis of their luncheon, Reese had felt things go cold with Gina. She wanted to minimize girlfriend time as much as possible.

“I’ve got quarters on the boat if you need some,” Gina offered.

“I’ve got plenty.”

Marina living reminded Reese of apartment life. Temporary. Angel would need more soon. Maybe she needed more already. Reese watched her little girl walking away with Lane. They were making plans for Angel’s birthday picnic.

“I’ll check on you in a few minutes,” Reese called out. Angel gave her a slight wave, unconcerned about her mother’s plans.

“What am I going to do?” Reese mumbled to herself, watching the two of them walk away.

As she leaned into the trunk to find what she needed for the night, she saw Gina glance over. Reese realized she’d spoken out loud. Gina continued locking up the car, didn’t say anything. Reese tried to read the other woman’s expression, but came up blank.

“The security code on my dock is 1282,” Gina offered after a moment. “It’s easier to walk to the boat from here than swim.” Gina was smiling. It took Reese a second to get the joke. She wondered how much bite lay behind it.

“Don’t worry about me. Just keep your pistols in the drawer, cowgirl,” Reese volleyed. She felt a smile settling in at the corners of her mouth. Maybe, just maybe, she and Benjamin’s widow would find some middle ground.

“See you at the boat,” Gina called out as she headed toward the docks. The marina lights exposed her, made her look vulnerable, lovely somehow, amid the surrounding shadows that hung over the marsh and the water. Reese felt secondhand next to Ben’s widow.

She did a last survey of the trunk of her car, examined the contents of her life to date. She’d taken out only what she and Angel needed. She saw the manila folder tucked in at the side of the trunk. The two things inside would get her through this nightmare. She wouldn’t need them just yet, but knowing they were there gave her piece of mind.

She picked out a change of clothes for both of them, toothbrushes and shampoo. No need to clutter the small living space on the boat with any more than that. Besides, the more she took out, the more she would risk revealing herself. Lane had been through her things earlier, when she brought clothes to the hospital, but it wasn’t likely that she’d gone rifling through the folder with all her papers.

Lane came the closest to Reese’s idea of a confidante, but there wasn’t enough trust there yet. Not enough history. She’d have to wait before she let anyone else into the complicated world she shared with her daughter. The time wasn’t right. Not yet. She put the few items she’d gathered inside the smallest of her duffels, locked up the car, and headed toward the docks.