Everything You Are(26)
If I should fail, I commit to picking myself up and trying again.
He has to try something.
Allie needs him.
He signs. As the pen makes the last upsweep of his signature, he hears the sound of a plucked string, so loud and clear he startles. Except for Phee, the others at the table don’t even blink, talking quietly among themselves. But her eyes widen as if she hears it too; her gaze holds his.
A half memory surfaces, or maybe it’s a fragment of a dream. Another pen, another signature, that same sound of a plucked open C string. It’s not mortgage papers, or his marriage license or the insurance contract, or even the divorce papers. He’s younger, the writing is less automatic, he has to think about the formation of the letters in his signature.
Damn it. This is Phee’s fault for bringing up the bizarre contract the luthier made him sign when he’d bought the cello. He doesn’t want to think about that, about how he’d felt on that day and how he feels now.
Oscar and Dennis come in and resume their places at the table.
“We have plotted the terms of your intervention,” Oscar intones in an official voice. “You will be informed of time and place when we have the details confirmed. Bring a friend. And maybe a potato salad.”
“Thank God. I thought you were going to make me go scuba diving with a bunch of sharks.”
“What makes you think we’re not?”
“Potato salad.”
“Fish. Seagulls. Both love potato salad.” Oscar grins at him. “You’ll be here next week?”
“I’ll be here.”
“Braden?”
He looks around the circle of faces, eyes lingering on Phee. She gives him that half smile, and his heart surprises him by skipping a beat.
“I’ll be here.”
“Awesome!” Katie exclaims. “Make sure you take somebody on an adventure!”
Chapter Eleven
BRADEN
Braden stands in the kitchen, summoning up the willpower to make yet another doomed breakfast. It’s both pointless and hopeless, and yet he persists. He’s always believed that good parents make sure their kids are fed, sheltered, educated, and loved. It had never occurred to him that all or any of these offerings could be refused.
Allie has yet to eat a bite of anything in his presence. She must be eating somewhere, because she’s not wasting away, but for seven days now, he has been preparing breakfasts and she has yet to touch one of them. There’s evidence that she’s raiding the refrigerator at night after he goes to bed, heating up leftovers in the microwave and eating them in her room.
Maybe Allie isn’t a breakfast girl, and logic tells him he should abandon his efforts, but he can’t seem to stop. He’s tried scrambled eggs. Omelets. French toast. Pancakes. Cereal. Even chicken-fried steak. Every weekday morning, she stalks into the kitchen, fully dressed, her backpack hanging over one shoulder, as pale and dire and quiet as a vengeful ghost. Every morning, she glances disdainfully at the breakfast, pointedly ignores his “good morning, how did you sleep?” and pours herself a to-go mug of coffee.
Then she slams out of the house, returning late, long after dinner has cooled and been put back in the refrigerator. Her vehement, steadfast rejection is wearing him down, day after day. He reminds himself that he’s here for her, that his own heartbreak is irrelevant, but his resolve is crumbling. He’s so damned thirsty, and not for water. His brain and body hurt in a physical way.
Phee is wrong about sobriety. It sucks.
This morning, he is seriously debating giving up on breakfast. Repeating the same act over and over and expecting a different result is said to be the definition of insanity. Maybe he’ll skip it. Go back to bed. She’ll be relieved not to see him in the kitchen.
A memory hits him.
Allie, tiny, her hair in pigtails so short they stuck straight out of her head, humming happily over a bowl of oatmeal.
“Daddy’s oatmeal is the bestest,” she’d proclaimed.
Braden hunts through the cupboards and finds a carton of oatmeal and prepares it the way she used to like it, with cinnamon and bits of chopped apple. He dishes it up when he hears her bedroom door open. Pours cream over it and sprinkles brown sugar on top. When she appears in the kitchen, he’s standing there holding the bowl in both hands, a supplicant to an exacting goddess.
Allie’s eyes go wide. One hand covers her mouth. She makes a choking noise, like she can’t breathe properly. And then she swivels around and literally runs out of the house, as if the gates of hell have opened and a thousand demons have been unleashed.
“Well, that went well,” he mutters, sinking down onto one of the stools at the counter.
He desperately needs advice but has no idea where to get it. Maybe he should call Alexandra. Maybe he should call social services. Maybe the mysterious Phee knows something about teenagers. Probably he should take Allie to a grief counselor.
Maybe he should call his sister. Jo always knows what to do.
Impossible. He brushes the idea aside, but it refuses to go away. Jo. Practical, capable.
But he can’t, won’t, call his sister for help. He burned that bridge for a very good reason. You don’t call somebody you haven’t spoken to in years at seven o’clock in the morning and ask for help with your teenage daughter. Especially when . . .
Well. You just don’t.