SIX MONTHS EARLIER
Dana held the car door open while I got Shayla out of the backseat. She smelled of soap and sun and felt impossibly small in her oversize jacket and matching pink boots. I felt like Peter Pan introducing Wendy to his world—an emotionally weary Peter Pan with a serious is-this-for-real? buzz going on. Things had moved fast since I’d made my decision. One minute I’d been sitting in Dana’s office trying to pick the right words to change the course of my life, and the next I’d been signing papers in Steve’s office, rushing off to Dream Acres, and then driving extremely carefully back to Trey’s bakery. I wasn’t used to having a pseudo-daughter strapped into the backseat. As it turns out, the words I had used to change my life were “I’ll take her,” which, as life-altering statements go, wasn’t exactly poetic, but it beat “I’m terrified but I can’t help myself” for clarity of purpose.
Everything had gone so fast that Trey didn’t know he was an uncle yet. A pseudo-uncle-half-brother, I supposed. So Dana and I had decided that I should make L’Envie the first stop on my way home. And Dana had come along, I suspected just to get another look at my brother, but her presence in the car had been comforting, especially when Shayla had asked, “Are you taking me to Daddy?” from the backseat. I knew she knew that her daddy
was gone, but I guess we all need to ask the tough questions again every so often. Just in case.
Given the difficulty I was still having realizing that this pint-size human being now belonged to me, I didn’t know quite how to introduce her to Trey.
Belonged
, of course, was an overstatement.
Depended
was more accurate. This agreement between my dead father and me was a nebulous thing, a tenuous connection I both wanted and despised. The
wanted
part was Shayla, who had crayoned her way into my future on our very first encounter, all sunshine-yellow and cloud-blue. The
despised
part was her father, who was mine, too, but only by birth. This man who had punctuated my childhood with emotional whiplash and affective dissension, the sound of which could still be heard in the squeaky hinges of my relational impairments, was now intimately linked to me—and in a permanent, irreversible way. I had tried to distance myself from him all my life, and in recent years successfully. Yet Shayla had brought him back inside my fortified walls with such intimate finality that a part of me—the fragile, damaged part—instinctively braced itself for rejection, aspersion, and pain.
I gazed into Shayla’s eyes after I pulled her from her car seat, and she gazed right back, unwavering and just a little numb. If this new beginning was overflowing my adult capacity for comprehension, I couldn’t imagine the havoc it was wreaking in her uncomplicated world where, until recently, home had simply been Daddy. I asked Dana to watch her while I went inside and prepared Trey for the news.
Trey was handing change back to a classy-looking lady when I entered the bakery. He sent me a wait-a-minute look and finished his business with her, turning his attention to me only as she exited in a fog of Chanel No. 5.
“Shell! What are you doing here?”
“Nice to see you too.”
He checked his watch. “Shouldn’t you be teaching?”
“I’m playing hooky.”
“Nice. Add to that ripping off a 7-Eleven and spending your allowance in the arcade, and we’ll have to start calling you Trey.”
“Um . . . I have some news.” I sat down at one of his pretty French tables and, as there were no other customers in the shop, he joined me.
“News?”
“Kinda big news.”
He had a suspicious look about him all of a sudden. “And the big news is . . . ?”
I had trouble believing that I was about to tell my brother that I’d just become the legal guardian of our father’s child. He must have misread my incredulity for hesitance, because he sighed a little and said, “Do we have to play twenty questions every time something big happens with you?”
He was referring to the day I’d gone shuffling into his bedroom many years ago, my head low and my gaze averted. He’d tried to coax my problem out of me, but my mortification had prevented it. So he’d resorted to twenty questions.
“Are you in trouble?”
“No.”
“Are you sick?”
“No.”
“Is someone we know in trouble or sick?”
“No.”
“Are you covered in hideous warts from the frog you had in your pocket last week?”
I rolled my eyes. “No.”
He looked at me more closely and I blushed. My body language
said,
I’m so embarrassed I’d be happy if the ground opened up and swallowed me,
and it didn’t take long for Trey to figure it out.
“Are you . . . ?” He blushed a little. I had to love him for it. “Are you . . . a woman?”
I hit the floor and pulled the blanket off his bed to cover my head.
“You are?” He wasn’t supposed to sound so perky about it. He was supposed to get all awkward and kick me out of his room, then act weird around me for months and years.
I couldn’t breathe very well under the blanket and I had a bit of a claustrophobia problem too, so I didn’t dillydally any longer. “I don’t know how to buy the . . . stuff,” I said, hoping he could hear me through the knit fabric draped over my bruised pride.
“Go ask Mom.”
“She’s in the den with a box of Kleenex.” Which was code for “She’s curled up in a fetal position on the couch, sobbing into a cushion like we can’t hear her, and jumping out of her skin every time she thinks she hears Dad coming home.” Mom in that state was like a car without tires—it could still kinda move, if it had to, but you knew it really shouldn’t.
Trey had suspended every smidgen of male pride on that day and had walked with me to the Jewel-Osco on Cross and Willow. He’d shielded me with his body so nobody could see me reading the labels on the boxes of girl stuff I’d studiously ignored all my life, and then, seeing my nearly apoplectic shame, had boldly walked to the checkout and paid for my icky things himself.
I realized at that moment that the only way I would ever be able to pay Trey back for being my brother would be to buy an island in the Pacific, build him a palace on it, hire professional soccer players to populate it, and equip it with state-of-the-art Dad repellents. Since I couldn’t quite afford any of that yet, I just kept quiet on the
walk home. I knew he appreciated that, too—though not as much as an island. What I really wanted to do was hold his hand and say thank you over and over again until I turned blue.
But it was a much different bit of news I had for Trey on this day, twenty-odd years later, and as we sat at the table in his cozy French bakery, I was once again at a loss for words.
“Question one: Are you in trouble?”
I laughed a little jaggedly. “You don’t have to twenty-questions it, Trey.”
“Oh, good. Just tell me who the guy is and I’ll take a baseball bat to his car.”
“I want you to know that I’ve finally made my decision about Shayla.”
I had his full attention. His gray-green gaze narrowed and he kinda squinted at me, waiting.
I went to the door and found Shayla and Dana playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. When I reentered L’Envie, Shayla was propped on my hip, her legs around my waist. I hadn’t really realized before then how convenient those hip bones were, and I wondered if there wasn’t a bit of genius in God’s design plan after all.
Trey stood as we approached, and his astonishment melted into a lopsided grin.
“This is Shayla, Trey,” I said.
“Shayla,” Trey said, as if testing the name’s flavor. He bent so his eyes were on a level with hers. “I’m Trey. And I’m going to be one of your favorite people. Seriously. You’ll be telling all your friends about me when you grow up.” He pulled back as if suddenly struck by a thought. “I think . . .” He peered at her more closely, assessing what he saw. “I think you may be the most beautiful little thing I’ve ever seen.”
Shayla looked up at me and I shrugged. “Trey goes a little poetic when he gets nervous,” I said.
“Don’t listen to her. I’m always poetic.” He smiled a crooked grin at me that held both approval and support. Then he ran the back side of a finger over Shayla’s rosy cheek and said, “How ’bout a pastry? I’ve got these great chocolate croissants.”
And this little girl who had known him for only a handful of seconds followed Dana’s lead and became instantly smitten. She smiled a little and hid her face in my neck, which was a new experience for me and made my stomach do strange things. Then she peeked at him again, smiled more broadly when he wiggled an eyebrow, and let herself fall forward into his arms as he held them toward her.
Dana looked like she’d have done the same thing had his hands been pointing her way. There were tears in her eyes, and I was grateful for that because I couldn’t seem to muster any of my own right then. I figured I’d borrow hers for a while.
A few minutes later, with Dana and Shayla engaged in a coloring contest at a table near the window, Trey and I huddled in the kitchen at the back of the bakery. He’d been shaking his head a lot since I’d arrived with Shayla, and he was still shaking it now.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“You may be the most courageous woman I’ve ever met.”
“Wait a minute. You were the one telling me I should just take a risk and go for it.”
“Yeah, but I never actually thought you would!”
“Trey!”
“Don’t get your undies in a bunch. You made absolutely the right decision. She’s . . . Is it possible that something that sweet really came from our dad?”
“I figure the mother’s genes were pretty potent.”
He glanced out the door to make sure Shayla was securely out of earshot. “So this is Dad’s idea of a parting gift, huh?” He leaned a hip against the stainless-steel countertop mounted to the wall.
“Beats a potted plant any day. More upkeep, though.” I was sitting on a tall stool with a half-finished plate of
mille-feuilles
in my hand.
“Can you believe it?”
“What part—the part where I’m a mother or the part where I have a daughter, neither of which is entirely accurate?”
“The part where the woman who vowed she would never have children suddenly has a little girl to take care of.”
“You’re just jealous ’cause all you got was a condo.”
“About that . . .”
“We’re not going back over this, Trey. It’s yours. Deal with it.”
“The fact is, you’re a mom now.”
“A guardian half sister, actually.”
“And your place isn’t really big enough for both of you.”
“Is that a crack about the five
mille-feuilles
I’ve eaten in ten minutes?”
“It’s a one-bedroom apartment, Shell.”
“Which is why I think we need to move.”
“Exactly my point.”
“But it’s not going to be to your condo.”
“Dad’s condo.”
“Whatever.”
I let the silence lengthen. There was something about my conversations with Trey that made me feel loved, even if he did make veiled comments about my eating habits. There hadn’t been many people in my life who had actually listened to me and worried about me and been willing to make sacrifices for me. Trey was one of those rare ones. He felt like thick, soft slippers and feather
comforters and the hollow of a shoulder. I loved my brother. He reminded me of a past I’d never had but could have had, if he’d been in charge.
“So you’re moving,” he said, bringing my mind back to the bombshell at hand.
“It’s . . . um . . . probably going to surprise you.”
He raised an eyebrow. I think he’d reached his surprise quota for the day, but he let me go on anyway.
“Remember John Burkhart?”
It took him a moment to place the name. “That missionary dude who used to come by the church and guilt us all into moving to Timbuktu?”
“Yup. He lives in Naperville now. Retired. I ran into him at church.”
“Aw, man,” Trey whined melodramatically, “I knew he’d get you to Timbuktu!” He raised his voice in a fairly decent imitation of Burkhart’s impassioned sermons, getting louder with each word he uttered. “‘Don’t waste your lives on materialism and ambition! Bring God to the lost in the jungles and the ghettos, to the outcasts and the hopeless and the poor!’”
John Burkhart was a dynamic speaker with an extraordinary gift for capturing an audience, but he had the bad habit of always ending his talks with a rising crescendo that bordered on comical. I laughed at Trey’s only slight exaggeration.
“Everything okay in there?” came Dana’s voice from the other room.
“We’re fine, Dana! Trey’s just feeling the spirit and channeling Billy Graham.”
“So,” Trey said, his face serious again, “you’re not going to the jungle, are you?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, as long as whatever it is is within a twenty-mile radius from here, I’ll allow it.”
“That’s the problem. Trey, I think Shayla and I may be moving to Germany.”
Trey’s face looked like the bottom had dropped out of his stomach. I saw him swallow—hard—and take a steadying breath. “Germany, huh?”
“The land of Beck’s beer.”
“You going for the beer?”
“No. To try something new. With Shayla.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Did you ask her?”
“Dana told me to wait awhile. See how she adjusts in the next few months.”
“You’ve got a good job here. And now a daughter to raise. You’ve got me, too,” he added, and I could tell there was something fragile bending in his heart. “Why are you going, Shell?”
It was the question I had dreaded, but only because I didn’t really have an answer. Why was I going? Because it felt right. Because I could. Because I needed to. Because . . .
“Because I can’t raise Dad’s daughter on Dad’s turf,” I said.
Trey nodded like it made sense. “What’s in Germany?”
“A school. For missionary kids. In English.”
“So you’ll be teaching?”
“Maybe doing some synchronized swimming on the side.”
“And they’ll pay you well?”
That made me laugh. “They won’t pay me a dime. I’m going to be a modern-day John Burkhart, ministering to the tribes and ghettos of Deutschland.”
“A missionary?” He was having trouble with the concept.