Where We Left Off

Part 2 – Twelve Years Later

“You gotta catch those, man!” My voice carried across the field as the ball rolled to a stop against a tuft of unmowed grass. Summer heat beat down with a sweltering punishment and I felt the sweat collect against my collar and bead upon my brow. I swiped it from my forehead with the back of my hand and shaded my eyes against the glare. Northern California summers were brutal, and though I’d been back for a dozen years now, I still couldn’t say I was acclimated to the heat. Not sure I would ever be.

“It had a funny hop to it!” Nico defended. His back was to me as he raced to the collect the wayward grounder. All legs and overgrown feet like a puppy, he stumbled his way to the ball with exaggerated clomping. “There’s no way I coulda snagged that!”

“You gotta make the effort. Always. Your coach is going to expect it of you. One hundred percent at all times, Buddy.”

“And remind me just how many years it’s been since you’ve been on a team, Uncle Heath?” He had his mom’s quick wit and smart mouth. Everything else was his dad’s—down to his unibrow and dimpled, butt chin—but it was those two inner qualities I adored. I absolutely loved that kid, cheap shots and all. He was free to fire them my way anytime.

“As long as you are old, but some things you never forget.” I caught his pop fly with ease and lobbed it skyward. “Like the smell of a well-worn glove or the feel of a championship win.”

Nico flashed a brace-filled smile. He was an awesome kid, for sure. Though the little brother in me hated to admit it, my sister had done a great job with him. I knew she’d loathe the comparison, but she was her mother’s daughter through and through. I watched her with my niece and nephew and it was like she channeled our mom to a T. Her mannerisms, her rules, her love. It was all passed down the family tree and blossomed out of her beautifully.

“Come on, kid. We should head in. Nana’s got a killer smelling pot roast in the oven and I hear Papa made his infamous angel food cake, fresh whipped cream and all. We don’t want to miss out on that now, do we?”

As he skipped my direction, I made sure to rough up Nico’s ebony hair with my balled up fist, and I hip checked him just hard enough that he didn’t fall down, but knew he was still lower on the food chain. I was a twelve-year-old boy once and vividly remembered the cocky, false confidence I tended toward. It was my job as an uncle to make sure Nico stayed humble, and it was a job I took incredibly seriously.

Just as seriously as making sure my niece, Natalie, knew that she was an absolute princess. Because she was. I bought her a tiara with more rhinestones than any child had business owning. Whoever she ended up with best be rolling in the dough, because she’d become used to all things that glittered and shone, compliments of her Uncle Heath. That little girl had me wrapped around her ten-year-old finger and held my heart in her delicate, small and perfect hands. I loved that.

Hattie said it was because I was in the delivery room when she arrived—that the bond we had was born out of that lifelong relationship—but I thought it was more than that. I saw so much of Hattie in her spirit, her passion, and her challenging smirk. There wasn’t anything that girl set her mind to that she didn’t accomplish, and it was an inspiration to me each and every day. I loved that I got to learn from these incredible kids. It was a gift I didn’t take lightly, and though I didn’t always show my appreciation, I hoped my sister knew how grateful I was to be a part of their lives. She’d given me so much by giving me them.

By the time we reached the porch, my brother-in-law was already there, standing in the frame of the farmhouse doorway, waiting with an outstretched hand and an ice-cold Sierra Nevada for the taking. I swiped it from his grasp and felt the cool glass on my lips, the even cooler liquid sliding down my throat as I took a hearty swallow. “Thanks, man.” I tipped the bottle toward him in a gesture of appreciation.

He cracked the cap off his own bottle with the help of his wedding ring and clinked it against mine. “Of course, Heath. Looks well deserved. Hotter than hell out here, isn’t it?” He threw his head back and practically drained his beer in one gulp.

Anthony was a great guy—the perfect brother-in-law. He and Hattie met in college and married two months later, which was one month after finding out they had a bun in the oven. I knew it wasn’t the way Hattie had planned out her life, but plans weren’t all they were cracked up to be. I’d learned that firsthand. Multiple times. Hattie planned on falling in love and starting a family. Maybe the order was jumbled, but the outcome was the same. In the end, the timeline didn’t really matter. It all resulted in love.

I nodded toward Anthony and took another swig. “Nico’s got a great arm on him. A few more seasons under his belt and I think he could easily make starting pitcher by high school.”

“Really?” Anthony’s eyes sparked. With one hand, he tugged at his necktie and swiveled it loose, shrugging the day’s stress from his shoulders. He was a businessman, not an ounce of athlete or outdoorsman in him, which was fine because it allowed me to fill that role. That was what family was for, wasn’t it? Took a village or something along those lines. This was my village and I absolutely loved it.

“Definitely, man. He’s got natural talent. You should be proud of your boy.” I took a long pull from the bottle and felt the welcome and intimate warmth of alcohol spreading through my veins. “I know I sure am. Love him like he’s my own.”

Anthony looked at me—right at me—and his eyes softened, which was the exact look I’d been trying to avoid. Soft, sympathetic eyes. It had been six months, and you’d think sympathy had a shorter expiration date than that, but evidently not. It still clung to nearly everyone I came in contact with.

“Listen.” I settled the empty bottle on the chipped, white railing and leaned up against its frame, my hands gripped over the rickety ledge. Dad asked for my help last week in repainting the decking, and it looked like it was something that needed finishing sooner than later. I made a mental note to come by this weekend to help him out. “I’m fine. Honestly. Moved on.”

“Oh yeah?” With a cocked head, Anthony challenged me. “With who?”

“No one, necessarily. But the idea of someone, and that’s something.”

“Heath.” Two hands dropped onto my shoulders. I wasn’t sure why everyone felt the need for physical contact when attempting to comfort, but it was getting a bit tired and overdone. I’d been hugged, coddled, stroked, and pet. I was beginning to feel like a damn golden retriever. All I needed was a, “Hey man, your ex-wife was a bitch,” and that would suffice.

Instead, I got actual caring and affection, which was not what I wanted.

“I’m fine.” I pinned him with a stare and he backed off. When he bent down to fetch another cold one from the open ice chest on the porch, I knew he’d made the right decision. Beer—a better comfort than any hug or sage advice.

Anthony knew to leave well enough alone and I appreciated that. We shared a half dozen more bottles on the porch, the dry summer heat oppressive and undesirable, but oddly inviting all the same. We could’ve easily escaped the temperatures by finding shelter in my parent’s air-conditioned, expansive ranch home, but I’d escaped so much already that sometimes it felt necessary to suffer. To stop running. To avoid the false comfort and soak in the real discomfort. Life was not all sunshine and roses. At least not mine. It was once, but that changed, and it seemed like every day since I’d been chasing that lie—the one that said happiness was meant and purposed for everyone.

Because there was nothing happy about the fact that right now—as I drained frosty beverage number eight—my ex-wife was at the local hospital delivering her first child, the one that supposedly belonged to me, but, in reality, shared her boss’s DNA.

No, there wasn’t any happy in that.

But there was happy on this porch, with this family that I loved and these people who called and claimed me as their own. And there was plenty of happy at the bottom of this longneck of beer.

It might not have been the happy I dreamed of, but I’d take it all the same.

It was hours later and I was in the barn with Mom stacking hay bales from an earlier delivery when my phone dinged in my back pocket, the familiar alert of a received text. I figured it was Paul, wanting to know if I’d be home tonight or if it was safe to bring a woman back to the bachelor pad. My parents lived just far enough away and I was just enough drunk that I had a feeling I’d be crashing in their spare bedroom for the night, which would be fine if I was in college or recently graduated. But I wasn’t. I was one month shy of my thirties, which made for a whole new level of pathetic. Possibly a plateau as I wasn’t sure it got any greater than this.

I fished my phone out and when the image flashed across the screen upon unlocking it, my hands reacted before my brain and I tossed the device into a muck bucket placed near the door like it was on fire, its burn too much to handle. My eyes reacted quickly, too, because they welled up right away. Maybe it was the alcohol. I’d always been told I was a sad drunk.

Mom tugged her black gloves from her hands with a bite from her teeth and shoved them into the pocket of her denim jacket. She had the phone in her grip, never mind the fact that I’d thrown it in a tub of horseshit. Mom wasn’t bothered by things like that. Maybe it was the years of work in the hospital, or maybe it was the cowgirl in her that had recently been reawakened with retirement. Or maybe—plain and simple—it was the maternal instinct to protect her young, and she knew I needed protection from whatever it was that occupied that phone screen. No amount of crap was going to keep her from that.

“Oh, Cliffy.” She swiped the phone across her chest to dust it off. When she looked at it again, she squinted deeply. “That’s the honest-to-God ugliest baby I’ve ever seen. Spawn of Yoda if I didn’t know any better.”

I dropped down onto a hay bale and laughed. “He’s not that bad.”

“Did you get a good look at this?” She fished her reading glasses out of her jacket pocket and her neck pulled so far back with the second look that she could’ve gotten whiplash with the movement. “That baby is hideous! No way on God’s green earth would anyone think it’s yours. If there was ever any doubt that Kayla was a lying, cheating—”

“There’s no doubt, Mom. We’ve been over this.”

“All I’m saying is that the proof is in the pudding. And that little puddin’ is the spitting image of her ugly ass father.”

“Mom!”

“Oh, come on, Heathcliff! We all know Kayla wasn’t interested in her boss for his physical looks. It was the looks of his bank account that was much more attractive.”

Maybe, but that never made any sense to me. Logan Tallmadge was a successful CPA and I’m sure his income was substantial, but I wasn’t completely hurting for cash, either. Anything she’d ever wanted, I’d given to her. The weight on her left hand had to be a reminder of that. The smell of her newly purchased Audi had to be the proof. And the half million dollar Tuscan-style villa, where our life was meant to take place, should’ve been the backdrop for our ever after.

I gave Kayla everything. Everything except the little life growing in her belly for the past nine months. Someone else gave her that, and when he did, he’d taken over her future and ensured his place within it. I could never compete with a child, and it wasn’t something I was willing to even fathom doing.

My life with Kayla was over, and her’s was just beginning. I was the end of a chapter for her, and that reality churned my stomach in a violent and tumultuous way. I was beginning to feel like I was constantly the end. A beginning would sure be nice.

Mom sensed my despondent mood. “Know what you need?”

“Another drink?”

“That’s a given. Alcohol is always a given,” she said with a laugh. “But no. You need a good, old-fashioned, tried and true rebound.”

“Not what I thought you’d suggest.”

“Oh, come on, Cliffy.” Mom slapped me hard on my back, right between the shoulder blades. The barn had been spinning the entire time we’d been in here, but that shove set my eyeballs rolling. My tongue was thick and dry. I was going to pay for this misery tomorrow morning, but for the moment, I welcomed the blur. “Rebound time!”

Then I saw her fingers scrolling. At least that’s what I figured they were doing. There was a light echoing palely off her features and I saw the reflection of my contact list arcing across the lenses of her glasses.

“Tanya Bording?” She pursed her lips. “I remember her. Man hands, right? And that hook nose, like Gonzo. Not what you need right now. Let’s keep looking.”

“Mom.”

“Claudia Heldwig. She was that German girl? The foreign exchange student living with Cousin Marty in Santa Clara, ya?” I laughed at the fake accent. “Huge rack if I remember correctly. She’s upgraded to the Maybe List just for her tits alone.”

I dropped my head into my hands and closed my eyes. What happened to me? What happened to my life that I was twenty-nine years old and hanging out in my parents’ barn at eleven o’clock on a Friday night, listening to my mom critique my equivalent of a little black book? Where did life go so wrong for me?

“Mallory Alcott.”

There. That was where.

“No.”

“She was a sweet girl—”

“No.” I stood to my feet and pulled my phone from my mom’s hands. I shoved it in my back pocket and grabbed the hay hooks hanging near the door. I shouldn’t be trusted with such sharp objects in my current inebriated state, but I had parental supervision so I was willing to risk it.

“Heathcliff, she’s the perfect option.”

“It’s only two letters yet you’re having an impossible time interpreting them.”

Mom planted her hands on her hips. “I’m well aware what your voice is saying, but your reaction speaks something entirely different.”

I pulled another hundred-pound bale down onto the ground from the top of the stack and dust clouded around my feet as it slammed, hay spraying into the air.

“There was never any closure,” Mom said as I continued arranging the bales, ignoring her prodding. “And she liked you so much, Cliffy. I’m sure she’d love to hear from you after all of these years.”

My neck snapped. “Really?” I didn’t condone shouting at women—especially ones who gave birth to you—but my voice rose sharply in my throat and spewed out with enough volume to rattle the barn windows. “Really? You think she’d like to hear from me, hmm? Then why the hell didn’t she return any of my twenty-seven phone calls after the accident? Why didn’t she reply to the dozen or more letters or the texts or the e-mails?”

The can of worms was flung wide open and they were squirming all over the barn floor. I was drunk enough to think I actually saw them.

“I don’t know, Heath, but I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

I was defeated, plain and simple. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

“Call her.”

“It’s going to take a lot more alcohol before I’ll ever consider calling Mallory Alcott.” My thumb was raw from gnawing on it. I wished I could give up my adolescent nervous tendencies like this one, but it was clear I had my hang-ups. Loads of them.

“Seven.”

“What?” I looked up at Mom. She was still quite beautiful with her salt and pepper, sleek bob and full lips, feathered with well-earned wrinkles on her face. She wore her concern and her love in her present expression, and I was a fool to assume this whole shenanigan was for anything other than her wanting the very best for me. She loved me deeply, more so with each passing day. So far, she was the only person in my life to ever offer me that. “Seven what?”

“Beers. Seven beers,” she answered. “It took seven beers for me to say yes to your father, but it was the best stupid risk I’ve ever made. Sometimes we need to take the stupid risks in order to get the best reward.”

“And you don’t think I’ve taken enough risks? The masters program? Marriage?”

“Those aren’t risks, Cliffy. Those are plans. Big difference.”

“I don’t plan on calling Mallory.” My head throbbed to the point where I thought another beer was the only thing that could take the edge off, but I knew it wasn’t the wisest of decisions. Hangover remedies often begot greater hangovers.

“Rebounds are rarely planned.”

Mom smirked at me like she knew something, like she was privy to some secret I’d yet to uncover. She was keeping something back.

But the thing was, I was the one keeping it back. I was keeping back the fact that it was impossible to rebound with the person you’ve been rebounding from all these years.

Calling Mallory wouldn’t solve anything.

Calling Mallory would be a stupid, stupid risk, one I wasn’t willing to take, no matter how drunk I got.

Some things were always crystal clear.