A Little Hope(54)
He feels a lump in his throat. He will never find someone as good as she is. There is something so whole and decent about her. But he is gripped by a quiet longing now, a pain of regret. She won’t ever be over this guy. You don’t get over loving and losing someone like that. One way or the other, they needed resolution, and she’ll never have it. He hates Luke for a second. Hates what he didn’t know he had in Ginger, what he gambled with by doing drugs or drinking or whatever led to that accident. Screw yourself, Luke, he thinks, and then regrets insulting a dead guy who didn’t mean to die. Sorry, Luke.
“I almost yelled after you to come back,” he says, surprising himself. He looks at her. At her worried eyes. At her perfect neck with the small diamond hanging from her necklace. “I know that sounds ridiculous. I know it was a hard night for you. But before that, it was one of the best nights of my life.” He gulps. Something tells him to keep going. “I like you so much.”
She smiles, and her face crumbles slightly—as if she might cry. Her eyes are wet but sincere. Then she puts her hand on top of his. “I like you, too,” she says.
His insides get tight. He is on a raft, and she is pulling him in. He almost starts to shiver. He imagines his teeth chattering and how embarrassing it would be. Her hand. Her warm hand on top of his. He never wants this to end. He wants to put his other hand on top of hers to keep it there.
17. Just That Sort of a Day
After the man she always thought was her father left her mother, Iris stared at his things in her parents’ closet for months: a pair of two-toned golf shoes he had worn once, a tweed blazer, and two shirts (one pink, one gray) in a dry cleaning bag. She touched the thin plastic covering his shirts. She put her feet in the barely worn shoes. She smelled the dusty wool of the jacket sleeve. She would look at all her mother’s things—the robes, the sequined dress, the shelf on the floor of sandals and shoes—and wonder if he’d ever come back for his handful of left-behinds. Iris remembers reaching into his jacket pocket and finding a ticket stub for a dinner dance he and her mother had gone to. She stared at the writing, the picture of music notes. Then, each time, she would slip it back into the pocket. Doug with the sideburns. Doug with his blond knuckle hair. Doug who seemed to have loved her.
And then it turned out Doug wasn’t her father.
And she had a new father.
She was so young then, only four or so, but she remembers everything. She remembers New Dad’s car in the driveway, something shiny, expensive. She remembers how cool yet cordial he was to Melinda, who made Iris wear a blue lacy dress that day with the sash tied too tightly. Melinda had pulled Iris’s hair into small braids and washed her face with a hot washcloth. Suddenly the moment seemed to be about Iris, her mother, for once, standing back. This man with his kind eyes and worn face, shiny watch on his wrist, shirt so white and starched, a thick gold wedding band. She remembers he handed her a gift: a jack-in-the-box she still has.
She remembers only wanting Doug when New Dad asked her about nursery school. Wanting Doug’s song about the bear going over the mountain. Wanting to crawl into Doug’s familiar lap when New Dad sat on the living room chair while he folded his handkerchief into something as she stared. But now she has mostly forgotten Doug. One day, she can’t say when, she noticed Doug’s things were gone from her mother’s closet, and she forgot what Doug’s voice sounded like. Doug, who her mother said got a job in Florida and that’s why he left. Doug. Another casualty of her mother’s. Doug, who will forever be thirty-something, broken, shrugging as he blew her a kiss and walked down their porch steps.
And New Dad, who introduced himself as Alex, was wonderful. He would tell her stories about being in the army, which fascinated her (a soldier in real life, and he was her father!). He would do that thing where he made his thumb tip look like it came apart from the rest of his finger. He would give money to her, as well as necklaces and a jewelry box. He’d kiss the top of her head, call her Sunshine in a way that made her heart soar. She found out, years later, he didn’t even know about her until that time he first showed up. Another Melinda game, she guessed.
Now, twenty years later, Iris says, “Love you, bye,” to New Dad on the phone and hits end. Alex Lionel, who lives an hour away but calls to check on her every day. “How are you feeling?” he always says. “Get some rest now while you can.” She smiles and takes the portable baby heart rate monitor she got from Amazon out of its package. She looks up at the sound of the door scraping open as Melinda walks right into the apartment without knocking.
“Cold in here,” Melinda says, holding a white box from the bakery. “Here, babe, sticky buns.” She plops the box onto the table and looks around. Melinda is always looking around. Always a small piece of green gum in her mouth. Always flipping her hair.
“I can’t eat those,” Iris says. She almost salivates. She feels an urge to rip the box open and push a whole bun into her mouth. Her favorite. She imagines the glazed pecans, the warm dough.
Melinda rolls her eyes. “Oh, they just tell you that stuff.” She looks down at the box and starts to pick at the tape with her nail. She tugs and tugs but nothing happens. “What’s that?” she asks, and zeros in on the heart rate monitor. Iris remembers Dave made coffee this morning, but she doesn’t offer any to her mother yet. Maybe in a minute. Outside, she hears car motors and an occasional horn. The hanging papier-maché angel she got from Mexico moves with the breeze from the open window. She loves springtime.