Single Mom Seeks... (13 page)

Andie answered on the first ring, sounding anxious as she said, “Hello.”

“Andie? It’s Jake. Jake Elliott.”

“Who?”

“Your neighbor. Two streets over. I go to your school,” he said, trying to ignore his own humiliation at being completely invisible to her.

“Oh. Yeah. I can’t talk right now. I’m really busy. Sorry,” she said, then hung up on him before he could say anything else.

“Great,” Jake muttered, disconnecting the call, then hitting redial.

“Look,” she said when she answered. “I told you, I have something I have to take care of. I can’t talk to you now. Goodbye.”

Jake swore and hung up.

Maybe he could get her mother home by himself. If she’d go willingly…

Then he realized he’d lost her.

“Mrs. Graham?” he called out, searching the downstairs for her.

He found her in the kitchen with a bottle of Scotch that his uncle kept in the back corner of the pantry. It tasted absolutely vile. Jake knew because he’d sniffed, then taken a sip and nearly gagged. How could anybody drink that stuff?

Mrs. Graham found a glass and poured herself a drink.

“I don’t think you need that right now.”

Jake went to get the bottle away from her, but she wouldn’t give it up, and in the process, the Scotch in the glass sloshed out and ended up mostly all over Jake’s shirt. She dropped the glass, and it shattered all over the floor.

“Oops.” She started to giggle, was worse than his stupid friends when they got drunk. More clumsy and argumentative and harder to handle.

He grabbed her hard, afraid she’d step on the glass and fall off those silly high heels and cut herself. “Watch out. You’ll cut yourself. How about you sit on the kitchen countertop, and I’ll clean up. And then we’ll get you home.”

“Help me.” She held out her arms to him.

He put his hands on her waist and lifted, getting her up there without any problem, and then she grabbed on to him and didn’t want to let go.

“You are absolutely adorable,” she said, her hand fiddling with his hair.

Jake closed his eyes and reminded himself she was old enough to be his mother, and that she was Andie’s mother and very drunk, and tried not to look at her legs, because he was a guy and female legs of almost any kind just seemed to take over his brain at times, and this could not be one of those times.

He had to get her out of here.

“Hey,” he said, figuring out how. “I need to call Phillip. Do you have a phone?”

She pulled her phone out of her tight, tight skirt and handed it to him.

He flipped through her contact list to the name Andie and dialed.

Andie answered. “Mom! Where are you? I’ve been looking everywhere. Are you all right?”

“She’s at my house,” Jake said.

Complete silence greeted him at first, and then very softly Andie said, “What?”

“It’s Jake Elliott. That’s what I was trying to tell you before. Your mother’s at my house. She seems to think someone named Phillip lives here, and I can’t make her understand she’s in the wrong place. I think she’s been drinking.” Jake waited. More silence. Then added, “Sorry. I thought maybe she’d listen to you. I didn’t know what else to do.”

He heard Andie muttering to herself for a moment, and then she talked into the phone again. “I’ll be right there. Just don’t let her leave.”

“Okay,” Jake said.

And then she hung up.

He looked back at Mrs. Graham, who was grinning broadly at him and playing with her blouse. And he thought about how worried Andie sounded when she thought her mother was calling, remembered the times before she’d been looking for her mother here.

Andie had seemed too perfect to him, with her perfect hair, perfect teeth, perfect clothes, perfect body, perfect everything, and now…he wondered if she had an alcoholic for a mother who sometimes left home and couldn’t find her way back.

Andie burst into his house a moment later and the look on her face when she saw the mess and her mother—commenting on Jake’s nice muscles, then playing with his hair some more—was just awful.

She took her mother by the hand and urged her down. “Come on, Mom. We have to go home right now.”

Her mother teetered on her own two feet. “Where is Phillip?”

Andie shot Jake a puzzled look. “I thought, all this time, she was with your uncle.”

All this time?

Jake shrugged, didn’t know what to say.

“Phillip? It must be…oh, no,” Andie said. “Phillip Wrenchler. He lives in the house behind yours. Maybe she’s been sneaking through your backyard and into his. Mom, he’s married.”

Her mother was looking at Jake. She winked at him.

Andie rolled her eyes and swore, then looked at Jake pleadingly. “I don’t suppose…if I begged you. Absolutely begged you. You could promise not to tell anyone about this.”

“Okay,” Jake said.

“Not anyone,” Andie said.

“Promise. Want me to help you get her home?”

“No. She’ll come with me now. I’m sorry. About the mess and everything.”

Jake shrugged. “It’s all right. I’ll clean it up. No problem. Sorry about…your mom.”

Andie looked for a moment like she was about to cry, then took her mother by the hand and led her out of there.

He was still cleaning up the mess when his uncle got home.

Nick caught himself whistling as he walked from Lily’s house to his.

Whistling.

Some kind of song…he couldn’t remember who sang it or much of the lyrics. Something about an absolutely beautiful day…waiting and waiting and at last experiencing an absolutely perfect day.

The woman did the oddest things to him.

And the absolute best things.

He ran a hand across his jaw, felt the abrasive stubble there and remembered the slightly reddish tint to Lily’s cheeks and her pretty lips. If they kept this up, he’d have to start hiding a spare razor somewhere over there, so he didn’t scruff her up.

She was so soft.

He didn’t want to hurt her in any way.

As it was, it was all he could do to drag himself out of her bed and out the door before her girls got home, and he lay in his bed at night alone waiting for the hours to go by until they could be alone again.

He got to his door, pulled it open, walked into the kitchen, and found that the place reeked of alcohol, and there stood Jake with a broom, trying to clean up broken glass.

Well, hell.

Jake froze, broom and a dustpan full of glass in hand, the garbage can sitting to the side of the kitchen. He’d obviously been at work for a while.

“Hi,” he said, looking worried.

“Jake.” Nick tried not to bellow. “What’s going on here?”

“Okay. It’s not what it looks like. I promise.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I can explain.” Jake dumped the glass into the garbage and then stood there, looking more worried with every passing minute. “I mean, I would, if I could.”

“Oh, you’re going to explain,” Nick said, taking the broom and the dustpan from his hands, putting them down and pulling Jake along with him, out of the mess and into the living room. “Sit.”

Jake didn’t. He stood there. “I mean, I kind of promised I wouldn’t tell. But…it wasn’t me. I wasn’t drinking, I swear.”

Nick tugged on the kid’s shirt, which was wet, sniffed, then rolled his eyes. “You reek of Scotch.”

“I know, but I didn’t drink any. I was trying to get it away from her—”

“Her? You had a girl over here drinking?” Nick took that like a kick in the gut. The kid was drinking, and he had a girl over, who was also drinking, while Nick wasn’t even home? “What the hell else have you been doing while I wasn’t here?”

“Nothing. I told you. I didn’t do anything except try to stop her—”

“Oh. Okay. You didn’t drink anything, you just smell like you did, but you invited a girl over here who was drinking, and you were just trying to stop her? That’s your story?”

“No,” Jake said.

“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere—”

“I didn’t invite a girl over. She just showed up.”

Nick swore, wanting to grab the kid and scare him into telling Nick the truth. Because the stuff Nick was imagining on his own was pretty bad. The truth could be even worse.

Had Nick missed this completely? That Jake was drinking? That he had a girl? That he had her here, and they were both drinking and doing God-knows-what behind Nick’s back?

Had he really missed all that?

“One more time,” Nick said, up in the kid’s face, letting the fear show and hoping it looked like he was just royally pissed.
Scared straight, Jake. Come on,
Nick thought. “There was a girl here—”

“Well, not really a girl,” Jake claimed.

Nick let go of him and backed up, not believing the crap coming out of the kid’s mouth. “Not really a girl? What was she, a half girl, half…I don’t even want to know what?”

“No, I mean, it wasn’t another kid. It wasn’t somebody my age.”

“You’re trying to tell me you’re seeing someone old enough to drink?”

“No! You don’t get it at all!” Jake yelled, looking like he was about to cry all of a sudden. “I thought you trusted me! I thought we were doing okay. I thought everything was going to be okay!”

“So did I,” Nick roared back. “Now tell me, what the hell did you do?”

“I got drunk!” Jake screamed. “That’s what you want to believe, fine. I got drunk. I was trying to clean up the mess before you got home, and you caught me. End of story.”

Then he stalked off toward the door, like that was it. Like Nick would just let it go with that.

“Oh, no.” Nick grabbed him by his arm. No way he was letting the kid leave.

Jake jerked away from him, stronger than Nick expected, and then he had to grab for him again. Next thing he knew they were scuffling, him trying to get some kind of hold on Jake, and Jake squirming and somehow slipping away.

“I swear to God, Jake, if you don’t get your ass back here and tell me—

“I already told you,” Jake yelled. “It didn’t do any good the first time, and I’m sure not going to tell you again. Just let me go.”

Nick was trying not to hurt him. He was mad as hell and scared and determined not to let him go, but not to hurt him, either, and it was the Scotch on the floor and the glass that did him in.

Jake got through it, or maybe he got around it, and Nick didn’t, skidded on it and lost his footing and went down hard as Jake shot out the door.

Nick laid there and swore some more.

W
hen he got himself up off the floor, he peeled off his shirt, which smelled as bad as Jake’s did and then cleaned up the kitchen, taking the time to try to calm himself down.

Then he grabbed his phone and called Jake’s cell, fear shooting through him all over again when it rang and rang and then went to voicemail.

“Jake, get your ass back here. Right now,” he said, then could have kicked himself for it.

That was a message sure to make the kid come right home.

He called again, forcing some measure of calm into his voice, he hoped. “Look, we’ll talk this out, okay? We’ll both be calm, and we’ll talk this out. You just…you can’t run off like that, Jake. You just can’t.”

Which was stupid of him to say, because the kid had done just that.

The thing was, Nick had worked Missing Persons for the last year and a half. He’d seen a lot of kids take off after some kind of argument and end up in all kinds of trouble. Or worse, never come back home.

So he was probably overreacting here.

Probably.

But he was scared half to death.

Nick pulled out a sheet of paper with names and phone numbers. He made sure to know who the kid hung out with. He tried the top three kids and all of them swore they hadn’t seen Jake and didn’t know where he was.

And then, more than anything, Nick just wanted Lily.

Hell, maybe the kid had gone there.

He adored Lily, after all.

Nick went tearing over there and pounded on her back door, obviously scaring her from the look on her face when she flung open the door.

“What’s wrong?”

“Jake’s gone,” he said grimly. “We had a nasty fight, and he’s gone. I was hoping he might have come here.”

“No. I haven’t seen him. What did you fight about?”

“Him drinking. I really screwed up, Lily, didn’t have any idea. I must have missed it completely, but I went home and the place reeked of alcohol. So did he, and then he tried to tell me it was all a big misunderstanding and got mad at me for not believing him. Then he took off.”

“Okay.” She put her hands on his arms, like he might need her to hold him up or something. “Just…take a breath. Teenagers can be really dramatic at times. Believe me, I’ve heard it all from Marcy. He just probably needs some time to cool down, and then he’ll be home, and you two can figure this out.”

“What if he doesn’t come back?” Nick said, giving voice to his greatest fear.

“Of course, he’ll come back. He’s not stupid, just mad.”

Nick stood there, chest heaving as he fought for breath, fought to calm down. Lily smiled up at him, like he was being ridiculous, and then wrapped her arms around him and just held him.

Which he would have said was silly and completely unnecessary, for him to actually need someone to comfort him. But he all but crushed her to him, afraid he might squeeze the breath right out of her, feeling like he needed her so much right then it terrified him almost as much as the idea that Jake was out there somewhere, alone, and might never make it back in one piece.

“Oh, my God, Lily!”

“It’s terrifying, I know. You love your kids so much, like you didn’t even know you could love anyone or anything, and then you see that at times you’re powerless to keep them safe, and it’s absolutely terrifying.”

He sagged back against the wall, looking down at her, taking the words in and processing them as fast as he possibly could.

He loved Jake?

Of course he did. Jake was a cool kid, fun to play with when Nick showed up at his sister’s house for a weekend here and there. They’d play ball, wrestle sometimes, battle over some silly video game. That was it.

But Lily was saying something different.

Lily was talking
love,
that fierce, you-are-mine, heart-and-soul, and I-would-do-anything-for-you kind of love he’d heard inklings of in the relationship between parent and child, but never thought to experience himself.

Did he love Jake like that?

“Nick, you didn’t really think you could do this and not feel that way about Jake in the end, did you?” she asked.

“No. I mean, I didn’t really think about it. It all happened so fast, and we were all so shocked that his parents were really gone, and then someone had to be here with them. It’s what my sister wanted, so I said we’d try it, and here we are.”

Lily nodded, smiled once again, like it all made sense to her. “Welcome to parenthood. It’s brutal at times.”

“The kid is gone,” he said, practically yelling. “He’s gone, and I don’t know where he is. I don’t know what to do—”

Lily put a hand to his mouth, trying to shush him and soothe him at the same time, when all he wanted was to scream.

Did she not understand?

He’d screwed it all up, and the kid was gone!

“I know,” Lily said.

“Then tell me what to do now. Tell me how to fix this, because I don’t have any idea—”

“Mommy!”

They both heard Ginny at the same time, stopped talking and jerked apart.

Ginny gave them both an odd look, then asked, “Are you guys arguing about Jake?”

“We’re not…” Lily stopped, then started again. “We’re not arguing. Jake is gone, and his uncle is worried about him. That’s all.”

“It sounds like you’re arguing,” Ginny said accusingly.

“Sorry,” Nick said. “She’s right. I was yelling, and I’m sorry. I’m not mad at your mom. I’m just…scared and sometimes when I get scared, I yell.”

Ginny frowned, like she might take him to task for that, but in the end, decided to accept his explanation. “Okay. Just don’t do it again. You scared Brittany.”

Then she held up the cordless phone and said, “It’s Jake.”

Nick went to grab it from her, but Ginny put it behind her back and told Nick, “He wants to talk to Mom. He said he can hear you yelling at her, and he wants you to stop right now.”

“He can hear me?” Nick asked.

Ginny shook her head, then gave the phone to her mother.

Put in his place by a nine-year-old, Nick stood there, looking out into the darkness. Lily had her kitchen windows open to the night breeze, which meant Jake was either in the house hiding or somewhere in one of their yards.

Which meant, he was safe, wasn’t he?

Nick put his hands on the kitchen countertop, bracing himself, and leaned into them, telling himself the kid was safe, crisis averted, and to calm down.

It wasn’t working.

He was still terrified.

Lily put down the phone and said, “He’s in the tree house. I’m going to go talk to him.”

“No. This is my mess. I’ll talk to him.”

“Nick, trust me on this, okay? You’re not ready to fix this, and he doesn’t want to talk to you right now. And whatever happened tonight doesn’t have to be solved tonight. He’s fine. He’s safe, and I’ll take care of him for now and make sure he doesn’t go anywhere except my house or yours, okay?”

“But—”

“I know. You want to charge in there and settle this right now, and I’m telling you that you don’t have to. You can let it sit overnight, and you both can calm down and this will all look much better in the morning. I promise.”

Nick felt like his entire body was an engine revving at a hundred miles an hour or so, and that charging in to settle things sounded really good to him right now. Essential, even.

And at the same time, he felt like a wet noodle, like there were no bones in his body, no strength, no courage, nothing but a kind of relief that soaked through him and left him weak in its aftermath.

He took a breath, then another, found it just didn’t help. He felt like he might fall down at any second.

He’d wanted so much to do this right, for his sister and for Jake, and worried all along that he couldn’t, that she’d made a mistake in asking him to, and that he’d end up disappointing her and Jake in the end.

He felt like he’d done all those things tonight.

“Just stay here until I get back, okay?” Lily asked.

“Okay,” he finally said, getting out of the way and letting her go.

He watched as she made her way into the backyard and then climbed the ladder into the tree house and disappeared.

He’d imagined the kid hitchhiking to Alaska or someplace like that, and all Jake had done was crawl into the tree house in the backyard next door.

Still, the drinking, the girl, the lying…

How much had he missed? He was afraid to find out.

Nick turned around and found Lily’s daughter waiting there staring at him with a mildly disgusted look on her face.

“Grown-ups are so weird,” she told him.

“Really?”

Ginny nodded, then took him by the hand. “Come on. You have to talk to Brittany. She liked you so much for building her that stupid tree house, and now you ruined it all by yelling at our mom. You have to say you’re sorry and make her think you mean it.”

“I do mean it,” Nick said.

He had no right to take his temper or his fears out on Lily, and he’d never wanted to scare her girls.

“Just make Brittany believe it,” Ginny said, like she might never believe he was sorry, but hoped her sister might.

Jake didn’t think he’d ever been so miserable in his entire life, maybe not even the day his parents had their accident.

Because even then, his uncle had called and made it clear that he was on his way, that he would get there as fast as humanly possible, and that he would take care of everything.

And Jake had believed him.

Then he’d found out his parents had made sure that if anything happened to them, his uncle was to take Jake, and Jake had told himself that it would be hard, but okay, because it was like his parents were still taking care of him, by making sure his uncle was there for Jake.

But now, his parents were gone, and he wasn’t going to have his uncle to count on, either.

Which meant, he didn’t have anybody who believed him and trusted him and was on his side. Which was the absolute worst feeling in the world.

Then he heard someone climbing the steps to the tree house and thought he might jump off the balcony to keep from having to see his uncle right now, but when he scrambled over to the opening, it was only Lily.

Jake got back in his corner, thankful for the near-darkness, and swiped at tears with the back of his hand and waited in all his misery.

Lily wasn’t much like his mom, who said it took a drill sergeant to raise three boys, and she did work hard to keep them in line, tough but fair and lots of fun. Lily was quieter and gentler and really, really sweet.

She climbed into the tree house and sat down beside him, her back to the wall, so she wasn’t really looking at him, just there with him, which he liked.

“Sorry he yelled at you,” Jake said.

“It’s all right. He was just scared.”

“He was mad—”

“Yes, but mostly scared,” she insisted.

“Well, he didn’t have to take it out on you.”

“He didn’t, Jake. I promise. Now why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“He doesn’t believe me. That’s what happened. I told him the truth, and he doesn’t believe it!”

Lily sighed. “Well, you have to admit, it’s kind of hard to believe. I mean, he comes into the house. Someone’s obviously been drinking. There’s alcohol all over the place. It’s all over you—”

“You don’t believe me, either!” he cried.

“I didn’t say that. I’m just saying…try to look at it from his point of view. The situation looks pretty bad.”

“He could have believed me,” Jake argued. “I don’t lie to him. I know he doesn’t really want to be here, taking care of me. But we’re doing okay. And I’ve done everything I could to make it easy for him, but then, the first little thing goes wrong, and he just blows up.”

“Jake, if he didn’t want to be here, he wouldn’t be here—”

“Nuh-uh. This wasn’t his idea. This was my parents’, and they didn’t even say anything to him about it ahead of time. They just decided that if anything ever happened to both of them, he’d take me and my brothers. He was as surprised as we were when we found out, and he didn’t want to come here and take care of me. But it’s what my mother wanted, and it’s kind of hard to say no to your dead sister and your dead sister’s kid, you know?”

“Okay. Okay.” Lily leaned closer to his side and put an arm around his shoulder.

Jake didn’t want to want that. He wanted to handle this all by himself because…well, just because.

But he was really glad Lily was there.

“Jake, you have to cut him some slack. Parents don’t always know the right thing to do, and with Nick, who’s never been a parent before, it’s even harder to know what’s right when—”

“My mother would have believed me,” he insisted.

“Would she really?”

“Yes,” he said, then started crying again.

“Oh, Jake. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

And then he just gave up and put his head on Lily’s shoulder and cried.

They had something of an armed standoff that night.

Jake refused to go home, and Nick refused to leave without Jake. Lily thought they were two of the most stubborn men she’d ever met, and she finally got tired of trying to broker a deal between them.

She put Brittany to bed in her room, offered Jake Brittany’s bed and offered Nick the sofa in the living room.

Ginny thought the whole thing was really funny when Lily explained that Jake wouldn’t go home, and Nick wouldn’t leave without him, so they were both staying.

Then Ginny said, “Sometimes I don’t want to go to Daddy’s new house, but you still make me.”

And then Lily ended up inviting Ginny to sleep in her bed, too, so they could talk about some daddy things and some divorce things, and when both the girls were finally asleep, and Jake was in Brittany’s bed, Lily slipped down the stairs to the living room.

Nick was sitting in the dark, staring at nothing, still as a statue, like a man afraid to move.

Lily curled up in the corner of the couch, just watching him for a moment, aching for him.

“It’s kind of scary, being a parent,” she said.

“Kind of terrifying, don’t you mean?”

She nodded. “Sometimes. But a lot of the time, it’s great. And he’s fine, Nick. He’s upstairs, tucked into a little girl bed with half a dozen stuffed animals watching over him. He’s just fine. You both will be fine. You’ll see.”