Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 82060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Lee pinned me with his eyes.
“Go home,” he ordered.
I nodded, because he said two words, but other words were unspoken. How I knew that, I couldn’t tell you. I just knew.
He disappeared from the window. I heard his knuckles rap on the roof, his macho-man reminder to get the eff out of there. I hit the button for the window, started up the car and we rolled out.
It was a miracle I didn’t plow into some cars considering my eyes were fixed to my rearview mirror, watching Eddie walk through my now vacant parking space to join Lee on the curb, both of them watching us leave.
Toni was right.
That was too much fine.
“Did you see that?” Lena’s voice was breathy.
“Oh, I saw it all right,” Toni answered.
“Eddie was a cutie in high school,” Lena started, and I snorted, because “cutie” was not how I’d ever describe Eddie Chavez.
A baby shark was cute, it was still a shark.
“But…whoa.” Lena finished.
“You got that right, sister,” Toni agreed.
“He was so whoa, and Lee was so oh man, I forgot what I was doing,” Lena said.
I could totally see that.
“And now I don’t know if Michael has a girl in there with him or not,” she concluded.
“Let me put my ear to the ground,” I said.
“What ground?” Lena asked.
My eyes found Toni’s in the rearview.
She knew.
But I hadn’t told my sister.
If Lena knew I was holding out on her, she’d be ticked, but more hurt.
It was just…I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell anyone, but Toni.
And I wasn’t even sure I should tell Toni, but I had to tell somebody, and I trusted her not to do anything I wouldn’t want, like tell my parents, or Lena, or get up in someone’s face who wouldn’t appreciate it.
This being the fact that three years had passed since Liam and I had moved back from Fort Collins, and in that time, it wasn’t a habit, but it wasn’t infrequent, and the fact Eddie and Lee showed up when I was doing something stupid with my sister wasn’t a surprise.
Because, first, Darius Tucker kept an eye on me.
And second, Darius Tucker found reasons to visit me.
It was always at night, when Liam was asleep, and it was always when we needed him.
Like when someone plowed into my car in the grocery store parking lot and didn’t leave a note. Thus, in order that I wouldn’t have to claim it on my insurance, Darius showed with a loner car that very night, had my car taken away and brought back, not only fixed, but detailed.
And when Toni and Tony moved in together, and were in the market for a new couch, and I’d gone with her to look, and oohed and aahed over the furniture. Darius was at my place late that night, telling me I was going to get a delivery in three days, and someone needed to be at my townhouse between noon and four to accept it.
That “it” being entirely new living room furniture, all the pieces I most oohed and aahed over.
So out went the ratty, secondhand furniture I’d scrounged from relatives and friends, and in went classy, expensive stuff I probably would be able to afford only after Liam finished college.
A week later, he was back, sharing someone had to be around for another delivery, and that one was our flat screen TV.
Of course, there were three Christmases and Liam’s three birthdays, when Darius brought wrapped gifts for his son, but all the cards said they were from Santa…or me.
How he knew Liam’s birthday, I didn’t know, because he didn’t ask me.
He also didn’t give me the opportunity to ask him.
In all that time, with all those visits, he never clapped eyes on his son (that I knew). He never asked to see him, not so much as to walk upstairs and watch him sleeping.
And he never hung around enough for us to have a conversation.
He told me what he was going to do to take care of me, of us, and then he vanished.
Okay, not vanished, he wasn’t a superhero. He walked out. But he made no bones about it and took great pains not to be waylaid, those pains being my pains, since he gave me a wide berth and exited, pronto.
I was confused by all of this.
Toni was confused by all of it.
But the only person who could explain it was in my life, in my son’s life, in very real ways.
Except he wasn’t.
And the way he was, he gave no explanation.
It had occurred to me I could probably track down Eddie and ask him, but something stopped me.
Not something, I knew what it was.
I loved Darius.
This was all he felt he could give.
And since I loved him, I was letting him give what he could how he could give it and not push for more.