“You okay?” Grace asked, picking up on my mood. She was good at that. Just like my mom was.
“Yeah, I’m okay. What are you doing?”
“Barry’s bringing Sarah by, we were hoping to kidnap Pea. There’s a circus coming in, my cousin John works at the arena and said we could bring Pea and watch them unload the animals. You can come too if you want.”
“She would love that.”
“Love what?” Pea asked, crawling from the tent. Her feet tangled in her sleeping bag and her hands splattered to the hardwood. As soon as she scrambled to her feet in a laugh, Grace and I laughed too. I walked to the door still laughing to let Sarah in.
My smile was instantly flipped when I opened the door. “Oh, hey,” I said, glancing away when I saw Barry. He stepped aside and let Sarah enter.
“Look at this Mikki,” she exclaimed, pulling a pair of bibbed-overalls from a shopping bag. The smile was a given.
“You guys are going to spoil her rotten, but that is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. The legs zip off into shorts. How cool is that? Look what Grandma Sarah bought for you, Pea,” I said, holding up the jean bibs.
“Oh cool. Just like Wreck-it-Ralph.”
“Who?” Sarah asked. Grace didn’t have to ask. We’d been living with her for the past month and a half so she was well acquainted with Wreck-it Ralph. I watched her shoot herself in the head with darts behind Pea’s back.
“Oh, it’s the best movie ever, Sarah. You and Barry should get it so you have it when Pea’s over there. You’ll love it,” Grace promised. I laughed at her conniving ploy to introduce Sarah to Wreck-it-Ralph, and told Pea to go get dressed. I followed a couple minutes later to supervise the brushing and do something with that crazy hair.
“There’s fresh coffee in the pot,” I announced, following Pea.
“Can you button this?” she asked, trying to get the buckle in the slot.
“You have to turn it like this,” I explained. Pea ignored me and reached for socks.
“Pea, pay attention. If you’re going to wear these you have to be able to pull them down.”
“I don’t want to pull them down.”
“What if you have to pee?”
“My grandma’s will do it for me.”
“Of course they will, but you’re almost five, so they don’t need to, right? Oh wait. Maybe you’re going to be four this year.”
“Nuh-huh. I’ll be five.”
“Well five year olds know how to dress themselves. Watch. Put it in and then turn it so it fits through the loop.”
“I like my grandma’s doing it.” I looked up to Pea’s quiet tone and read her like a book. She was telling me she just got two grandmas for the first time in her life. She wanted to be spoiled.
“Fine, let them spoil you. You’re going to be so spoiled, you’ll start to smell,” I teased, tickling her belly. She squealed and thrust her knee right to my chest. Ouch. That hurt.
“I’ll smell like candy,” she giggled, unaware of her knee going through my left breast.
“You’ll smell like baby diapers,” I countered. “Brush,” I coaxed, shoving a pasted brush in her hand.
“Ouch, don’t brush it. Just put it in a ponytail.”
“No. You tried that last night. That’s why it’s a tangled mess. If you would have let me do it last night it wouldn’t be this bad.”
“I did brush it last night.”
“It’s not that bad, I’m not hurting you. Hey guess where you’re going?” I asked, trying to distract her.
“Where?”
“Keep brushing. There’s a circus coming and your grandma’s are taking you to watch them unload the animals.”
Pea gasped and then spit, “They are? Real animals? Lions?”
“Yeah, I bet there will be lions.”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” she chanted while doing some sort of disturbing dance move. Or was that a seizure?
“Be still. Keep brushing, you goof ball.”
“I want you to come too, Mikki.”
“Up or down? Rinse,” I said, handing her the paper cup. “I’m going to stick around here and get some stuff done. You go have fun.”
“Up, the animals might think I’m an animal too if it’s down.”
“Good thinking,” I agreed, frowning at myself in the mirror. I pulled her hair into a ponytail and then a messy-bun on top of her head. “You’re so pretty. I love you. Go have fun. Make sure your grandma’s send me pics, okay?”
“Well, maybe I should get a cellphone for my birthday so I can take pictures all by myself.”
“Well, I don’t think your daddy would go for that, but there is such thing as a camera. You can take pictures without having a phone,” I explained, taking her little hand in mine.
“You can? How?”
“With a camera. It’s how people used to take pictures before smart-phones.”
“Were they made out of wood?”
“No, London Pea Coast. I would like to be inside of your head for one day.”
“It’s fun.”
I laughed and ushered her along. Silly kid.
I fastened Pea in the backseat and kissed her head. My eyes shifted from Barry’s when I realized he was staring at me. He kissed Sarah and then Pea before getting in his own car. I sensed the sad response from Sarah’s stare when I didn’t respond to his goodbye. I said goodbye to Pea again and walked back inside. I had enough on my plate. I wasn’t dealing with either one of the Holden’s, things were going just fine the way they were.
I poured a cup of coffee and walked out to the patio. The morning sun covered my legs when I sat in the same lounge chair that I’d sat in with Blake the night before. The shade covered my head and the screen on my phone.
Makayla; Hi, you didn’t wake me before you left.
I stared at my phone waiting for Blake to see my message. After ten minutes I wondered if he was ignoring me. Opening up Facebook, I clicked on my only friend, Blake. and posted on his wall that I loved him. Looking through the photos of Blake and Janie, I smiled. I could feel the love they shared even through a photograph.
My eyes caught a timeline on the right side of my name and I wondered about his. Mine only had two years, but his should have more. It did. It had so much more. More than I probably should have been reading. I sat up and sipped my coffee. Blake wasn’t always Janie’s only friend, she had lots of friends. It wasn’t until after later on that they did that. I could see why the further I read down. Blake was angry in a lot of his posts. He was even rude to Janie in a couple of them. There was one picture of the two of them around friends. Janie captioned it, ‘best pizza in New York,’ Blake commented with, ‘Nice, Janie. Why don’t you tell the world what we’re having for breakfast too?’”
I went down a little further and knew this was when it all changed. Blake posted stupid shit on his wall too, but not after December, 2008. You could tell by the look in his young eyes that he’d changed. The look in both their eyes changed. Blake’s looked angry and Janie’s looked sick.
I jumped, spilling coffee down my shirt and the screen of my phone. “Great,” I audibly said, running the phone down my lap. I went to the ringing doorbell and opened it to Barry. Again. Now what?
“Hey, can I come in?”
I shrugged, wondering what was in the box and moved to the side. “Just leave it over there on the bar. I’ll tell Blake you dropped it off.”
“There’s two more. There not for Blake, Makayla. They’re for you.”
“Me? Why? I don’t want anything you have.”
“This isn’t technically my stuff. I’ve just been waiting for the right time to give it to you, but it seems like there is never going to be that right time.”
“What is it?” I asked puzzled. I wasn’t going there. He didn’t deserve the right time.
“I hired a private investigator after I saw you the first time in the dining-room. The landlord in your building said they had some boxes there for you. He wanted you to have the
m.”
“Charlie?”
“Yes, I believe that was his name.”
“Yeah, okay. Thanks. I don’t want to open them now.”
“Okay, I understand. I wanted to ask you something else, too.”
“What?”
“Your mother is buried in a cemetery beside people who didn’t love her. If you would like, I would love to have her moved to anywhere you like.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Good enough. I’ll fetch the other two boxes.”
For a split second I felt bad, it’s a good thing my mother raised me right. The urge to tell him she was in that cemetery where nobody loved her because of him was strong. The state had to put her away. Who else was going to? I watched Barry carry in two more boxes of our things, my heart felt like crying and I didn’t even know what was in them yet. What the hell happened? I went from being in love to feeling alone and scared. Why? Why was I feeling like this?
“You’re pretty close to Blake, aren’t you?” I asked. Talking about Blake was safer than talking about the boxes. Those were going to make me cry.
“Can I have a cup?” Barry asked, nodding to the half pot of coffee.
“Yeah, go ahead,” I nodded in the same direction.
“I shook Conley Coast’s hand when Blake and Janie were fifteen. We promised drunk off our asses that if anything ever happened, we would step in. I would make sure his family was always taken care of if he was ever taken out, and he promised the same. I’ve always felt obligated to Blake.”
“Is that why he was your CEO, because you felt like you owed it to him, or because he deserved it?”
“Both. Blake got a little destructive after his dad died.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know how much you know.”
“It doesn’t matter. Tell me. She was my family too.”
Barry held my strained gaze for what seemed like minutes. “You’re a perfect blend of them both; you’re so pretty. You make some of the same expressions that Janie did. I know that sounds ridiculous with you not ever meeting her, but it’s true.”
I smiled a little, “Blake tells me that too.”
“Pea does too. Good lord, sometimes I think she’s Janie all over again. I would go after the moon for her.”
“Yeah, she has that effect on people.”
“Because of you. I guess I wanted to ignore that side of Blake’s life. I mean, as much as I hated him for getting Farrah pregnant, I understood. Sarah did too. She couldn’t hate him either. He was hurting and we thought it was an escape. I never once thought about her being my granddaughter. Not once,” he explained.
“Do you want to sit outside? I don’t have a chair.” What the hell? I didn’t want to do this, but yet I did. I wanted to hear it; I wanted to hear it from a different prospective.
“I would love to.”
“You said Blake got a little destructive. What does that mean?”
“He was angry. At everyone. I did my best to keep him interested in the business world. That was the only thing that kept him from going off the deep-end, I think. He was very interested in what I did so as long as I kept him busy with a new project, he was fine. Did he ever tell you about catching my previous CEO skimming off the top? He’d taken over five-hundred-thousand dollars from me before Blake caught him.”
My eyebrows raised above the rim of my cup, “No, I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, he did. Blake did a lot of things for the company. He’s the one that insisted a piano be in every dining-room at every resort we owned. We went from making decent money to making a fortune. Zazen Resorts had a three week long reservation list. Unless you were someone very important, you weren’t getting a table in one of my restaurants.”
“Like Tony Rawlings and Drew Kelley,” I clarified.
“How do you even know who that is?”
“Blake told me about scaring the hell out of your guests with the snowman costume.”
“Oh yes, I was ready to kill them both that day. Drew Kelley was beyond pissed.”
I laughed, “Guess he should have waited until he got to his room.”
“Drew Kelley doesn’t wait. Drew Kelley goes by his own rules, but a few of the other guests stopped me to tell me how much fun it was and how they made their nights. I’m sure Mr. Kelley would have agreed had it been his wife screaming.”
“Oh she was screaming,” I teased. He laughed and it felt. I guess it felt good. “As long as they learned their lesson, right?”
“Yeah, if that was the case. Janie didn’t get enough footage yet. She took it to the sidewalk and hid behind a trashcan. Lucky for her and Blake, I knew the cop.”
“It’s not against the law to dress up and scare people.”
“No, but if you skip school enough times, it catches up with you.”
I laughed again, knowing Janie talked Blake into doing that. “So, Blake started working for you right after his dad died?”
“Yes, pretty much. He also finished off Conley’s liquor cabinet.”
“Really? How long did that go on?”
“Not long. Janie got sick that March. He changed that second; the very day he found out. Blake and Janie had a thing, I knew they would always be together from the first time I saw them together. Blake was an amazing piano player, my Janie was an amazing piano player, and when you put the two of them in front of a keyboard, magic was made.”
“Did he still play after that?”
“He did, but it changed. Blake wasn’t playing Sarah’s Whisper anymore. He was playing hate and anger. It was beautiful, but so dark.”
“Like what?”
“Stuff he wrote himself. If he wasn’t working with me, he was in front of a piano with a notebook.”
“Or with Janie,” I offered.
“No, not at this time. They broke up for a few months. I think Blake was with everyone who would be with him.”
“Seriously? They broke up?” Nooooooo, my heart cried, shattering the love story I so wanted to believe in. Blake couldn’t do that to her, he wouldn’t.
“I think it was a mutual thing. Janie met someone she wanted to hang around with too. It was okay for Blake, but when Janie went on a college visit and toured with a good-looking freshman, she wanted to accept the offer for a date. Blake was pissed. He didn’t want her seeing anyone else.”
“But he was?”
Barry shrugged both shoulders, “I heard a lot of fights. I heard a lot of screaming coming from behind her door. I know the accusations, but I never asked him directly.”
“Why? I mean that was your daughter. He was hurting her.”
“I didn’t look at it like that. I saw two things; Blake had fire, he wasn’t afraid to work long hours. Things between the two of them had gone from something out of this world to shit, they couldn’t be in the same room without fighting. The other thing I saw was how hard he was on my daughter’s heart. All she did was stay in her room and cry or sleep, that wasn’t Janie. Janie was a pistol from the time she was born. I’m sure your mother would have told you that.”
I almost said something about her sleeping because she was sick, but I stopped. I knew from experience that you didn’t think about things like that. I never thought for a second that my mom was sick when she suddenly became too tired to go to the shows. She worked a full time job as a nurse and played in a symphony, of course she was tired. I could see how depression could steer you in that same direction.
“Was it Ryan? Was Ryan the college boy?”
“Yes. Blake hated me for hiring him.”
“Why did you?”
“I thought he was a good kid. I knew he was in love with Janie, he looked at her the same way Blake did.”
“Oh, I bet that went over well.”
Barry shrugged again, “The problem was Janie didn’t look back. Even when they were trying to be obstinate, they stared at each other.”
“Like what? What do you mean?”
“Dif
ferent things. Blake brought some Trista girl to his mom’s birthday party and Janie brought Ryan. They did nothing but stare daggers at each other the entire night. Sarah and Grace made them play a piece they’d written together and it brought the place to its knees. I’m not even, joking, Mikki. It caused the hair to stand on every person in that room. They were playing to each other. Their eyes were closed and their fingers did the talking. Janie stormed away with the last note and ran upstairs and Blake ran after her. Of course their meddling mothers had to tell their dates it was best if they left. Ryan was nice enough to take Blake’s date home.”
“What happened after that?”
“I don’t know. They were screaming one minute and silent the next. I got the hell out of there, teenagers weren’t my thing. I handled them much better when they were younger, before it got to be more than friends.”
“I think it was always more than friends.”
“I think you’re right. I also think the same holds true to you as well.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve only seen that look in Blake’s eyes twice. Once was with Janie, and now with you.”
“He looks at me like he did Janie?”
“Surely you’re not questioning that boy’s love for you? Do you have any idea how long it took him to feel that again? He’s dated; there’s no doubt in my mind that Blake’s been with many girls, but he didn’t love them. I can promise you that.”
“Why are you telling me this? Did he say something?”
“No, not at all. I just think you should both fight for this. You belong together. Look, I better get back to the renovations, I’m glad we had this talk, Makayla. I know it doesn’t mean a lot right now, but I also promised your mom that I would take care of you. I’m going to do that.”
“You didn’t talk to my mom,” I accused, looking up as he stood.
“I spoke to her where she was laid to rest. She heard me.”
I didn’t reply. There were no words forming in my mind. I didn’t know what to say. Barry went to my mom. How did I feel about that?
I checked my phone for a message from Blake and sighed. Why wasn’t he answering? He never took this long. Deciding I wasn’t playing games, I dialed his number. It made no sense for me to sit around and stew on it all day. It was probably nothing. He was busy working.