We were both allowed some kind of cooling-off period, right?
The fact that Dave had brought up a lawyer right away chilled me. I’d almost bit the guy’s head off. But people don’t always say the right thing when they’re in shock. I was going to keep telling myself that. Please don’t be a dickhead, I privately begged. And if you are, it had better not be genetic.
My mother was wiping up bits of Nicole’s dinner from the table. “I’ll get the floor,” I said quickly. After each of Nicole’s meals, my kitchen looked as if a small food grenade had gone off in the proximity of her seat at the table.
“I got it,” Mom said, bending to swipe a wet paper towel across the wood floor. Mom had raised five children, mostly as a single mother. And now she put in more than twenty hours a week babysitting Nicole.
“Thank you,” I said with a sigh. I was looking forward to the day when my family would no longer have to do so much for me. I owed Benito for letting me live here until now. I owed Alec for renting me The Busy Bean at a below-market rate, and I owed Alec and Mom for many hours of free babysitting every week.
I was tired of owing my family. But I’d rather owe them forever than lawyer up and chase down Mr. David Beringer (spelled with an “e,” damn it!) for child support.
“Zara,” my mother said gently. “Is everything all right?”
I chased the scowl off my face. “Long day.”
“If you need more time, I could…”
“Nope, I’m good. Thanks for your help.” I bounced Nicole on my hip. One of her little hands was feeling up my left boob already. My baby wanted to nurse. I carried her over to Benito’s L-shaped sofa and sat down in our favorite corner.
“All right,” Mom said, grabbing her purse off the counter top. “Then I’m going to get to the post office before it closes.”
“Bye, Mom. Say, ‘Bye, Grandma!’” I prodded Nicole, hoping she’d give us a word at last.
Instead she grabbed at my shirt, on a mission for the boob.
My mother smiled at us and took her leave.
I tugged up my shirt and unclipped the cup of my nursing bra. “Have at it, champ.”
Nicole grabbed my boob in two hands and clamped herself on, her little mouth working immediately. Her eyes closed, and she leaned her soft cheek against my arm.
With wonder in my heart, I stared down at my baby girl. She drank milk out of a sippy cup now. Nursing wasn’t necessary anymore, really. But I wasn’t ready to give it up yet. In the early days, when I’d been so scared and tired and sure that I’d stink at motherhood, nursing was the thing that always made me feel calm. My child took daily sustenance from my body. And with the milk I gave her, she grew like crazy. And when she fussed, I’d bring her to my breast, and everything would be okay.
It still was, too. Nothing has changed, I reminded myself. It was still Nicole and me (and a half-dozen family members) against the world. Even if I never saw Dave again, we were still okay.
Chapter Eleven
Dave
“Beri.”
“Hmm?” I looked up quickly. That’s when I noticed we were sitting in front of the cabin already.
The dashboard GPS picked that moment to announce, “You have arrived at your destination!” And its mechanical voice sounded accusatory.
Leo had shut off the engine, but he hadn’t gotten out of the car yet. He was watching me carefully. “What can I do for you?” he asked quietly.
“Nothing,” I croaked. “I just need…” The sentence died on my lips. I just needed…what, exactly? To rewind my life to the point where I hadn’t fucked up? “An hour ago, my contract negotiation was the biggest thing on my mind. Now I have a problem that money can’t fix.”
“I suppose not,” Leo said, leaning back in the driver’s seat. “Did she ask for money?”
I shook my head. “I’d pay it, though. That’s really not the problem.”
“Right.” Leo reached across the gearshift and squeezed my shoulder. “Let’s go inside. You can call your sister.”
“Oh, fuck. I’m not ready.” Bess was going to flip her lid. And usually I was such a trouble-free client.
Leo laughed. “Fine. You said you went grocery shopping. Got some sandwich stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“Great. I’ll make you a sandwich while you strategize what you’re going to say to Bess. Did she know about Zara?” He opened his door and got out.
“No,” I grunted, unclipping my seat belt. I got out of the car and took yet another deep breath. But it didn’t quell the panic. “There was nothing to tell. We had a lot of sex and went our separate ways.”
Or I thought we had. But Zara had spent the last two years with my…
Panic rolled through me again. I hadn’t ever been this flattened. Not even when the doctor had said that I had to sit out the Stanley Cup finals last month.
We went inside. I took a couple more deep, yoga breaths.
True to his word, Leo puttered around the cabin’s kitchen, whistling to himself and rooting around in the fridge. “Wow, Beri—you weren’t fooling around at the store. I don’t even know what to pick. Turkey and swiss sound good?”
“Sure.”
“Mayo? Tomato?”
“Thanks, rookie,” I grunted.
He set several items on the counter and then stopped to study me. “I know you’re freaking. But it’s going to be okay. If it’s true that you have a child, you’ll deal.”
“I can’t be somebody’s daddy.” The word would hardly form in my mouth. I sat down heavily on a bar stool.
“Why not? I mean, nobody is demanding that you marry her and carve the Thanksgiving turkey every year.”
The ridiculous image made me let out a bark of laughter. “Can you imagine?”
Leo made a point to survey all the food I’d purchased and then organized in our shared kitchen. “Thing is, I can. You play the lone-wolf role pretty well, but I’m not sure I buy it on you.”
Jesus. The kid was being nice to me, but I wasn’t in the mood for his theories. Buying groceries had nothing to do with raising a family.
“Now, if Zara isn’t the girl for you, there’s no reason to pretend she is. The child won’t care if you’re married, so long as you show your face sometimes. You know you can’t leave your kid hanging in the wind.”
I groaned, because that was the whole problem. I’d spent my entire life hanging in the wind. Whatever a decent father was supposed to look like, I had never had one. “My dad was the biggest asshole on the planet, Leo. Showing my face? I don’t even know how to do that. At a bare minimum I’d need one of those yellow how-to books. Fatherhood for Assholes, or whatever.”
“For Dummies, you mean? Because that’s what you are. A dummy. Not an asshole.”
“I’m so flattered,” I said in my best asshole voice.
The rookie rolled his eyes. Then he pushed a plate toward me with a well-made sandwich on it. “You’re allowed your freak attack, Beri. Today, at least. But tomorrow you gotta strap on the pads and deal.”
“I’ll need the pads just for Bess.” I took a bite of my sandwich, trying to predict what my sister would say. She was going to be pissed as hell at me for causing drama during contract negotiations. Bess always told her athletes, “This is the month to be on your best behavior.”
Shit. She was going to rip me a new one and then kick me into next Tuesday.
“When are the other guys getting in?” Leo asked, opening a bag of chips.
“Uh…” It was hard to believe that only a few hours ago, I’d been in vacation mode. “Couple hours, maybe. Doulie and Castro are driving up together.”
“Eat your sandwich. And then call your sister after you’re done. Get it over with.”
I grunted at the rookie. But I knew he was right about making that phone call. Even if it was going to be awful.
* * *
“Say that again?” Bess whispered.
I swallowed hard. “A baby, Bess. You heard me. Fifteen months
old.”
“Fifteen…months.” The quiet calm of her voice was scarier than screaming would have been.
“That’s what she said.” I cleared my throat. “The math checks out, too.”
“This is that bartender? Long black hair. Funny name?”
“Christ, Bess. How do you know this shit about me?” There were some things you don’t tell your sister.
“You talk about her every time you’re drunk, Dave!” she yelled. Finally the yelling had started. “Three different times at least! You just left out the part about the BABY!”
“Didn’t know,” I argued. Still, I felt oddly better now that she was screaming. Sometimes Bess’s anger had to burn itself out like a brushfire.
“You said once that if you ever settled down with someone, it would be someone like her. And I said—why don’t you give her a CALL AND SEE HOW SHE’S DOING?”
I held the phone away from my ear to avoid permanent hearing loss. Across the room, Leo gave me a sympathetic look and then got up and went outside to give me some privacy.
“I know I fucked up, Bess.” Not to mention that I didn’t ever remember telling her anything like that. Wisely, I kept that argument to myself.
“You didn’t ever give her your NUMBER? What kind of asshole does that?”
“She didn’t want my number.” I scrubbed my palm over my face. “She was really clear on the subject. Can we get past the details of how it happened, and get to the part where you tell me what to do?”
“I need to talk to your lawyer.”
“Right.” Thank you.
“I’ll deal with you later. Text me the address where you’re staying. Do it now. The lawyer will send you some documents.” Click.
My sister actually hung up on me.
Jesus. I hung up the phone and stood up fast. The cabin walls seemed to be closing in on me. I stomped outside. Leo was sitting in a hammock strung between two trees, drinking a beer and poking at his phone. “The cell service is for shit here. I can barely check my email.”
“Welcome to Vermont. That’s why I used the land line.”
Leo dropped his phone onto the grass beneath the hammock. “What did Bess say?”
“Just some yelling.” I flopped down on the grass. The yelling wasn’t as bad as her disappointment, though. I hated disappointing Bess. “She’s going to call our lawyer and get some advice, I guess. I dunno. I’ll call her back tomorrow or the next day after she’s calmed down.”
“She’ll calm down.” Leo lifted his hand and looked at the wedding band on his finger. “I’m still not used to wearing this.”
“Would Georgia freak if you took it off?”
“Nah. But I don’t need to.” Leo worried the ring on his finger. “I’m not used to it yet, but I don’t mind it at all. Sometimes it catches the light and surprises me. I think—that can’t possibly be mine.”
“I’ll bet it’s weird saying, ‘my wife.’”
The rookie laughed. “I like it. ‘My girlfriend’ sounds like we’re sixteen, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said, although I didn’t really know. I’d never called anyone my girlfriend. Not even when I was sixteen. Leo was what—twenty-four years old? Wearing a ring and happy about it. If Georgia got pregnant, he’d probably dance a jig. “You two going to have kids?”
“Sure. A soon as I can talk Georgia into it.”
“She doesn’t want kids?”
“Oh, she totally does. But she feels like it’s too soon. She wants another year or two in her seat as the co-head of PR. And that’s cool. We have plenty of time.”
“True.” My teammate was awfully enthusiastic about procreating. Then again, Leo had a nice family. His parents showed up at home games, smiling in the hallway outside the lockers to greet him after games. Family made more sense to a guy like Leo than it ever would to me.
“What are you thinking so hard about over there?” he asked.
“How I promised myself I’d never be someone’s deadbeat dad. And now I’ve managed to be one without even knowing it.”
“You can fix that, though.” Leo was quiet a moment. “You think you already failed?”
“Is there any other way of looking at it?” My plan had always been to keep things casual with women. I was a one-and-done kind of guy because I knew long-term entanglements were never going to work out for me. Accidentally creating a child wasn’t something I thought could happen.
The universe should really know better.
“This baby is a year old, right?” Leo asked. “She probably can’t even say daddy. Declaring yourself a failure now would be like having a rough couple of games during the preseason and giving up on making the playoffs.”
I snorted. “But hockey is a game I know how to play, kid. The Beringers don’t do parenthood.” A terrific understatement. My mother overdosed on cocaine when I was five. Then my father beat the crap out of me for nine more years, until people started to notice. He lost custody of Bess and me. We lived with our indifferent but nonviolent grandparents until Bess graduated from high school.
Bess turned out okay, although she didn’t have a husband or a family. Bess thought men were great as long as they were paying her fifteen percent of their major-league paychecks. She was married to her job.
Having a family? Like me, she didn’t seem to see the point.
A memory of Zara chose that moment to smack me right over the head. It had been one of the first times we were together—that night the crazy asshole threw a beer glass at Zara, and I almost had to break him in half. But Zara had handled him. And then we drank a lot of tequila together. That night we hadn’t even made it up to her room. I’d banged her on a bar stool until she’d screamed my name.
Jesus. I remembered it like it was yesterday.
After, though, I’d been holding her, locked into an embrace right there in the bar, breathing hard. She’d suddenly asked, “You’re not married, right? You don’t have a family you’re fucking around on?”
And I’d said, “Fuck no. And I never will.”
Now I lay back in the grass and put my hands over my face. “I used to be such a cocky bastard, Leo. I think I still am.”
“One day at a time, big guy,” Leo said, crossing his legs in the hammock. “Today isn’t the day to make a lot of important decisions. Give yourself a minute, okay? And let your teammates get you drunk tonight.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“It’s what we do,” Leo said, looking up into the canopy of the trees.
“That’s right,” I agreed. My team was the only kind of family I understood. And when one of us had trouble, the rest of us were good at circling the wagons around him. I guessed it was my turn to be in trouble.
“Love you, man,” Leo said. That’s the kind of guy he was—the kind who could say things like that.
“You’re a good kid,” I said in return. Because I wasn’t the kind of guy who did endearments. Never had been, and never would be.
* * *
A few hours later we were sitting like ducks in a row on barstools at the new bar, The Gin Mill. Me, Leo, and our two new arrivals—O’Doul, our team captain, and Castro, another chipper youngster.
“To Beri!” my team’s captain said, lifting his shot glass. “We’ve got your back, man.”
“Thanks, O’Doul. I really appreciate that.” My teammates had decided we needed to go to a bar to properly christen this new complication. So here we were.
“You guys want to run a tab?” the bartender asked, leaning on the bar in front of me. He looked a little familiar, but I didn’t think I’d met him before.
“Sure,” O’Doul said, pulling a credit card out of his wallet.
“Ooh! The captain is springing for drinks. Somebody got a nice contract extension,” Castro said.
The bartender took the card but then paused. “It’s Vermont night, but you need to show a driver’s license to get the discount.”
O’Doul shook his head. “We’re not local. Charge us th
e full freight.”
The bartender left us alone, and Castro gave a happy sigh. “All problems are more easily solved in a bar,” Castro declared.
“Not sure that’s true, man.” I took a sip of my beer. “But it’s good to be here with you guys, anyway.”
To their credit, neither O’Doul nor Castro had laughed or made a big fuss about my crazy news. They both hit me with one-armed man hugs, slapping me on the back and asking what they could do to help.
Maybe I was the world’s biggest asshole, but I had some awesome friends.
“You’re right,” Leo said, tracing the condensation on the outside of his beer bottle. “Since this whole thing got started in a bar.”
“So we’ve come full circle.” O’Doul chuckled. “Drink up, men.”
Castro, O’Doul, and I tipped our shot glasses back and swallowed. Leo had appointed himself the designated driver, so there was no tequila for the rookie.
The tequila burned my throat in a good way. And, damn. I hadn’t chosen the drink, but it sure as hell reminded me of Zara. Whatever poetic randomness had put tequila into O’Doul’s head when he’d ordered our shots, I wouldn’t question. But it made me nostalgic for that more carefree time. When Zara had thought I was a fun fling. Before I’d helped derail her life.
Easy, I coached myself. She was going to be okay. I’d make sure of it. It couldn’t be easy being a single mother and a business owner, though. I wondered how she did it at all.
I wondered a lot of things.
“This is a great bar,” Doulie said, glancing around at the exposed brick walls. “Good vibe. And it’s nicer than that little place we hung out last time we came to Vermont. The Mountain Lion.”
“The Mountain Goat,” I corrected.
The dark-haired man behind the bar grinned as he set a bottle of beer down in front of Doulie. “I’m definitely giving the Goat some competition.” He put a fresh beer in front of each of us. “You boys need anything else right now?”