Authors: Missy Fleming
D
uncan shifted, moving from foot to foot and fighting to keep his annoyance in check. He and Adam waited, not so patiently, inside a fancy makeup store, two feet from the doors, so close to freedom. They were the only men to be seen, except for a male employee with pink-tipped hair, and estrogen inundated the air, thick and cloying. Add in pounding music and snippets of body glitter comparisons, Duncan figured he may as well be in Hell.
“This place is intense,” his son whispered.
“We should have stayed outside.”
“But you promised Amanda something since you got me the new Xbox controller, so it’s kinda your fault.”
“Momentary lapse in judgment.”
He shared a grim look with Adam and watched Amanda, a few aisles over, listening raptly to whatever Olivia was telling her. From the hand gestures and pointing, he guessed lipstick to be the hot topic. The throbbing in his temples grew and he reached automatically into his pocket, dismayed when his fingers failed to brush against the familiar hard plastic of his pill bottle. Damn. He could use a little haziness right now.
“Dad! I need these.”
Amanda stood before him, face happy and expectant, holding three tubes of lipstick for him to see. Glancing over her head, he spotted Olivia and wished he felt one iota of her calmness. Refocusing on Amanda, he examined her find.
“You don’t need all those.”
“But, Dad!”
“You’re too young to wear that much lip junk.”
“This is lipstick. The other two are glosses, for when I need a little shine.”
He wiped a hand down his face, not in the mood for an argument. “Pick one of the glosses and if I buy the lipstick, you have to promise me it’s only for practice. I don’t ever want to see it on you in public.”
“Fine.” Amanda’s sigh was accompanied by an exaggerated eye roll. “I’ll get Glimmer Vixen.”
“Vixen?” Duncan choked on the word.
“It’s the name of the tint,” Olivia reassured him, stepping forward to place her hands on Amanda’s shoulders. “It’s fun.”
The urge to make it a bigger deal burned hot on his tongue, but he didn’t want to ruin what had been a near perfect day. Sighing, Duncan reached into his wallet and pulled out a twenty. Amanda took it and cocked her head, not moving.
“More than twenty?” he asked.
“Well, yeah. This is the good stuff.”
“Robbery,” he muttered, passing her another twenty. “We’ll be outside.”
Before turning, he noticed the twitch of Olivia’s lips.
“It’s not funny,” he shot over his shoulder as he pulled his son to the safety of the sidewalk.
Leaning against the glass window, he frowned. Was Adam chuckling? He narrowed his eyes and peeked over, met with an amused expression.
“What?”
“Nothing, Dad.”
Duncan heard how hard Adam was trying not to laugh and let a grin slip. “Women.”
Amanda and Olivia joined them minutes later, his daughter bouncing with happiness. “Dinner?” Olivia suggested.
Duncan frowned. It’d been a long, emotional day. He’d be happy going home and finding a moment of peace, but giving in to the darkness was exactly the sort of thing he was trying to avoid. He had to try harder to let the old Duncan go.
“Let’s go to the Hard Rock!” Adam said.
“As in rock music?” Amanda scrunched her nose. “Yuck.”
“It’s right there.” Adam pointed.
“Yeah, come on, Amanda. Let Dad school you in the coolest music ever made,” Duncan teased, unable to deny their infectious mood.
“Again, yuck.” But she followed them across the street.
The place was busy and Springsteen blared from the speakers, singing about his glory days. It bolstered Duncan’s mood, chasing away his desire to return home so soon. He sat beside Olivia and squeezed her leg under the table.
“Find what you needed in that awful store?”
“Sure did. And Amanda got some nail polish to go with her gloss. I hope you don’t mind.”
Amanda smiled proudly, showing him the bottle and he nearly had a stroke. “Black? Are you kidding me?”
“It’s the popular color right now,” Olivia said. Under her breath, so only he could hear, she added, “Relax.”
“Come on, Dad, it doesn’t mean I’m a delinquent because my nails are black. It’s stylish.”
“Supermodels wear it,” Adam tossed in, blushing when all three heads snapped around to look at him. “I saw it on TV.”
“See, even Adam knows it’s cool.” Olivia bumped his shoulder with hers. “I wish I was young enough to pull off black.”
“How old are you?”
“Adam, that’s not a question you ask women,” Duncan warned with an uncomfortable laugh.
“It’s fine. I haven’t reached an age where it bothers me yet,” Olivia joked. “I’ll be thirty in November.”
“Oh my God! You’re like, fourteen years younger than Dad,” Amanda said with a scandalous tone. “I didn’t think he had it in him.”
He opened his mouth to lecture then didn’t see the point. Often, he felt twice his age, but Olivia made him young again. It never lasted long enough, though. Jesus. He took a long gulp of ice water, wishing it was whiskey instead. Stop being such a downer, he lectured himself.
As they waited for their burgers to be served, the conversation lulled, made nearly impossible by the Aerosmith song being played. Anything Duncan came up with, he squashed. The clueless questions would only emphasize his recent absence from his kids’ lives and he didn’t want to remind them of it. Not today.
Thank God for Olivia. She got the ball rolling again.
“So, Amanda, tell me what you do for fun.”
His daughter blushed and curiosity held him in its grasp. When had he ever asked her a similar question?
“I like to write.” She focused hard on rolling and unrolling her napkin. “Nothing much, but it helps when my head feels full.” Her cheeks turned a deeper red. “Sounds stupid.”
“She has lots of diaries,” Adam piped in, earning a swat from his sister.
Duncan ignored the urge to scold his son, concentrating on Amanda instead. “You are far from stupid. What do you write about?”
She turned her gaze to him, nibbling her lip. Her vulnerability and wariness stole his breath. He’d put it there by being the train wreck he was. Going on impulse, he reached across the table and gripped her fingers. Duncan fixed a smile on his face, hoping to put her at ease.
“I envy anyone’s ability to put what is in their head on paper. Hell, I doubt I can even spell the word ‘ability’, so I’m doubly proud.”
Adam, Olivia, and the bustle of the restaurant disappeared. Nothing existed for a moment but his girl. Amanda wiped at her damp eyes in annoyance.
“I write about you.” The words were soft. “Memories I have of us, before. And stories, poems, a little bit of everything really.”
Failure and pride lodged in his throat, warring with the other to escape, a hot iron he couldn’t speak or swallow around. Silence returned to cloak them, not even dissipating when the food arrived. His appetite vanished and he stared at the toasted bun. Olivia reached over, beneath the table, and patted his leg. It was enough to snap him from his stupor.
“What’s your favorite memory?” he blurted.
“Second grade. I brought you for career day. I remember all the kids being so jealous because you had a cool job.” She dragged a fry idly through the ketchup. “Everyone else’s dads worked on Wall Street or in publishing or auto repair. There you were in your bunker pants and helmet, looking like a real live hero. I was the most popular girl in my class after that, especially with the boys.”
The memory hit him hard. He remembered it like it was yesterday; the smell of paper and hot lunch in the classroom, the little boy with glasses who followed him around, the way Amanda had preened and flaunted him to her friends. The feel of her hand in his as she led him to the front of the room.
Determined to keep the mood easy and erase the frown lines on his daughter’s face, he chuckled. “Who was the boy who nearly followed me home?”
“Henry Timmons. He wanted to hold my hand at recess the next day because of you.”
They stared at each other for a while, unspoken emotions bouncing between them. He needed to arrange a father-daughter day, just the two of them. It was time to start making new memories.
“What about you, Adam?” Olivia asked. “What do you like to do?”
“He’s a Lego fiend,” Amanda joked, her voice regaining its strength.
“I’m doing the Death Star right now. It’s like four thousand pieces. Over the spring I did the Millennium Falcon.”
“Star Wars? Cool.” From the corner of his eye, Duncan caught Olivia grinning as she said, “Nice to see kids in your generation showing respect to a great movie.”
“Not you too,” Amanda groaned. “I don’t get it. The special effects are lame.”
“But the story is timeless,” Duncan supplied, feeling lighter. “Romance, comedy, a struggle of father and son, the fight to save the universe from evil. What else do you need?”
“Lame,” his daughter repeated.
“What do you enjoy about Legos, Adam?” Olivia asked before biting into a pickle spear.
“I love building things, the mechanical aspect of it. When I grow up, I want to work with machines, cranes and stuff, be some kind of engineer.”
For the millionth time that day, his kids impressed the hell out of him. He couldn’t help feel as though he was getting to know them all over again. And, to be honest, he was.
“Maybe you can visit one of our sites,” Olivia was saying. “Regardless of what happened with the crane, we’re impeccably safe. I’ll even have one of the foremen take you to the top, show you the tower cranes in action.”
“Will you come, too?”
He felt her shudder beside him and predicted exactly what she’d say. His fear of tall buildings had only lasted a couple weeks. The job made it impossible. Sometimes, though, a secret he’d never admit to anyone, not even Olivia, dizziness washed over him when he stood on the sidewalk, staring up at the steel and concrete giants, remembering a gray cloud hurtling towards him.
Olivia sipped her iced tea, then said, “No, Adam, sorry. I’m not great with skyscrapers. I work in one but I stay away from the windows and try not to look up when I walk in.”
“New York must suck for you then,” Amanda observed.
“I don’t let it. If I was afraid all the time, I’d never leave the house. For me, working in a high rise tests me, forces me to face my fears. I don’t let it cripple me.”
“That’s pretty cool,” Adam said, drawing an enthusiastic nod from his sister.
Duncan savored the respect in their eyes as they watched Olivia and the knots across his shoulders lessened. Until the unwanted desire for it to be his wife sitting here instead surfaced. If the last ten years had never happened, if terrorists hadn’t flown planes into the Twin Towers, would his family be this happy? He imagined dozens or hundreds of days like this, with Leslie and the kids, of dancing with her at their weddings and holding grandbabies. The force of it was like a punch to the gut and he had to stifle his gasp. What was wrong with him? He needed to get his head straight.
“Does Macy’s still do their fireworks over the Hudson?” Olivia asked, refocusing his attention. “The Fourth of July is coming up soon.”
“Yeah,” Adam answered her, vibrating with excitement. “We always go to the West Side Highway to watch. Best place. Mom makes a big deal out of it, picnic basket and everything.”
A tradition he started, but Duncan didn’t see the point of mentioning it. Last time he went anywhere to watch the fireworks, he’d been living with Leslie and the kids. The ghost of their lives together would not leave him alone.
“I remember one year,” Olivia began, “my grandfather took me to the USS Intrepid, to the museum. They sell tickets and let people watch from the deck of the aircraft carrier. It was pretty patriotic. Until he turned it into a history lesson. Quite boring for an eleven-year-old girl.”
Adam grinned. “Not for me. That’d be awesome.”
“Because you’re a boy,” Amanda reminded him.
Duncan almost opened his mouth to suggest they go to see the show this year, the four of them, but he refrained. He didn’t want to mess with Leslie’s tradition and holidays with someone besides his wife suddenly made him uneasy.
“Maybe later in the summer, before you guys go back to school, we can take a trip to the Hamptons. I kind of inherited a house there. It’s big, close enough to the ocean you can step from the deck onto the sand. And it has a pool.” She glanced at him nervously. “That is, if this guy hasn’t scared me off by then.”
“We’re screwed.” Amanda giggled.
“Hey,” he said, feigning a frown. “For the beach, I will be on my best behavior.”
Later, after they’d dropped the kids off and arrived at Olivia’s, he pulled her close.
“Thank you for everything today.”
She relaxed into him, returning his embrace and kissing the side of his neck. “Your kids are pretty great.”
“They are.” He paused. “I’d forgotten. It’s terrible to say, but I forgot what they were like. I’ve hurt them so much.”