“I’ll live.”
Jackson dragged me down a narrow hall and into a small, square room. His twin bed was made, a thin Batman comforter covering it. A small white dresser sat against one wall, a tiny matching desk against another. Bins of Legos spilled out from beneath the bed and he fell to his knees next to them.
I sat down next to him and he started talking a mile a minute, holding up and explaining a multitude of different pieces, then dropping them into a pile. He was literally shaking, he was so excited. He could barely get the words out of his mouth.
I felt Bella behind us but I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t paying attention.
“And this one, this one is like a space shuttle,” he gushed. “Like a rocket ship. The one that goes to the moon. I built it all by myself. And it has a station where it launches from. We could build it. Do you want to?”
“Jax, baby, we’re going to eat in just a few,” Bella said from the doorway.
“Awwwwww.”
“Maybe after, okay?” she said.
He looked at me. “After dinner?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
He thrust his fists in the air like he had at the beach. “Yes!”
“You clean up your pieces,” Bella said. “I’m gonna have Noah help me in the kitchen.”
“I’ll hurry!” he said, grabbing armfuls of pieces and tossing them into the bins.
Bella motioned for me to follow her and I did, back down the hallway into a small, galley kitchen.
“I figured I should rescue you,” she said. “Otherwise, you’ll be in there all night.”
“He likes his Legos.”
“And then some. You want something to drink? Beer, soda, water?”
“Beer would be good.”
She opened the fridge and held up a Blue Moon. “Good?”
“Good.”
She pulled out a second, grabbed a magnetic opener off the fridge door and popped the tops on both.
She handed me one. “Hope you like lasagna.”
“I do.”
“Should be ready in about fifteen minutes,” she said. “That okay?”
“Sure.”
She led me into the living room, a tiny space sparsely furnished. Brown, slip-covered couch, glass-top coffee table, a scratched-up pine entertainment center with an ancient television. Most everything looked like cast-offs or items picked up at a local thrift store. But it was clean, meticulously so. We sat down on the couch and I could feel the springs through the cushion.
Bella took a long drink from her beer but kept her eyes on me. I gazed across the room, focusing on the hallway to Jackson’s room, on the door that led back into the kitchen. She kept her eyes locked on me.
“What?” I finally asked.
She pointed the neck of the beer bottle at me. “I can’t figure you out.”
“What does that mean?”
She clasped the bottle between both her hands. “You’re this big, hulking beach boy who rarely says more than five words at a time. You brood. You seem distracted. Yet, you seem totally content with being my kid’s best friend. You don’t just tolerate him. You actually…I don’t know what you call it. But you do it with him. And you live in a garage.”
I took a drink from the beer.
“So I can’t figure you out,” she said. “And I have this feeling you aren’t going to help me figure you out.”
“I’m not good at talking about myself,” I said.
“Not good is different than not wanting to,” she said. “But I get it. And it’s totally okay. I’m not prying. Well, I mean, I probably am and obviously I’m curious. But I’m not trying to push you. So I’m sorry if that’s what it seems like.”
“It’s OK,” I said, hoping she meant it.
“Plus, you’re the first guest we’ve had over since we moved in here and I sometimes manage to screw up meals, so I’m a little nervous.”
“I thought you said you were a good cook.”
She tucked her legs under her on the couch. “I am. But that doesn’t mean I’m perfect.”
“No one is.”
She pointed the bottle at me again. “True. So if it sucks, remember that.”
“I will,” I said. “But it won’t suck.”
“If you say so.”
It did not suck. It tasted fantastic, as did the garlic bread and the salad she put together. Jackson ate an entire plate full of lasagna, splashing sauce all down the front of him and around his plate. He scrambled away from the small kitchen table as soon as he was done, back to his room and his Legos.
Bella and I talked. Or rather, she talked and I listened. I learned that she was originally from Tampa and that she was an only child and that her parents divorced when she was sixteen and that her father moved to New York and married a model while her mom became a missionary and moved to the Philippines. She did a stint in community college, general education classes, then got pregnant with Jackson. Now, at 26, she had no clue what she wanted to do.
She noticeably skipped over one part of the story, though.
“Where is Jackson’s dad?” I asked after we’d done dishes and moved back to the couch.
She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “He’s dead.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “Don’t be. He was awful.”
“How?”
She ran a hand through her hair, memories taking up uncomfortable space in her expression. “Just a bad guy. Everything he did, it was pretty much wrong. He hurt people. He lied. He stole.” She squinted, as if it was painful to even talk about him. “There wasn’t much good in Evan.”
I had some experience with people like that, so I believed her.
“How did he die?” I asked.
Her fingers tapped the back of the couch. “He was big-time into drugs. A bunch of other crap that I probably didn’t even know about, but he was a whatchamacallit? Like the head of a group? That was Evan. He had a pretty big thing going around Tampa. Most of the dope that came through the area apparently went through him somehow.”
Tampa was one of those places that looked glamorous on the outside because of its physical location on the bay. But I knew I’d read that its seedy underside could rival that of nearly any city in the country. If Evan was that big in Tampa, he’d been a significant player.
“Anyhow, some deal went bad, I guess,” she said, waving a hand in the air. “Bunch of guys showed up one night and shot him.”
“Were you there?”
She shook her head. “No, I was long gone. He’d already declared he wasn’t going to be a father and I’d finally gotten it through my thick head that maybe, just maybe, I shouldn’t be hanging around a guy who always had a gun in his pants.” She laughed derisively. “Took me awhile.”
“How long were you together?”
“Off and on since high school,” she said. “I knew he was bad news then, but…but I really don’t have an excuse. My life was going to shit with my parents divorce, he was unbelievably good looking and he could be insanely charming when he wanted to be. And he liked me.” She shrugged. “I latched onto him and had a hard time letting go.”
“So Jackson never knew him?”
“Nope. And I think that’s a good thing.”
I’d gone nearly my entire lifetime without knowing my father and when I’d finally met him, I wished I never had. So I wasn’t going to argue.
