Never Have I Ever(44)
“Sure we do,” I said, and he turned his skeptical face toward me. It was a good face, I had to give Charlotte that, hiding behind the fusty, 1950s dad glasses. And what looked like a good body, too, buried under the tweed.
“This needs scuba lessons,” Maddy said, pointing at herself, her eyes shining. She broke away from us, heading to the side wall where the wet suits hung in sleek, black rows, dappled with pops and edgings of bright color.
“I’m going to kill you,” Davis said, still mild and calm, to Charlotte.
“If you don’t want Maddy running wild, you need to let her do something she wants to do,” Charlotte said. “Busy kids are happy kids.”
“Don’t they have a needlepoint club?” Davis asked, and again I didn’t recognize his humor. He was so deadpan. But Char laughed.
“I’m sure they do, and you can sign up right after you swap out Maddy for an entirely different child,” Char said, and turned to me, adding in a confiding tone, “He caught Maddy smoking. Cigarettes! She nicked them from her friend Shannon’s disgusting, smoky uncle.”
“Do we need to go into all of this?” Davis said.
This struck me as the kind of Waspy, hide-the-dirty-laundry crap that I’d been raised on, and I decided that I didn’t like Davis Whey very much, cute or no.
I looked past him to his daughter, already pulling a Lotus that was way too big for her off a hanger, trying to strap it on, hollering, “What’s this vest? Does this hose go to the air-tank thingy?” over her shoulder, flushed with pleasure.
She was hooked before she’d ever gone under, and I think I fell for the kid right then and there. I’d had a cold, stiff, distant father. I’d come from a family that buried anything ugly or painful, even if they had to bury their own child right along with it.
I saw myself in Maddy, so I called back, “That’s a buoyancy-control device—call it a BCD and you’ll sound like a pro,” as I pulled out paperwork and set it on the counter, giving Davis a cool, professional smile. “She can start with the Seal Team kids doing pool dives and learning the equipment and safety procedures right away. After she turns ten, we can get her in the ocean.”
“There, you see?” Char said. “Tell him how safe it is. Better yet, come with us for ice cream and tell him. Aren’t you about to get off work?” She knew darn well I was. Plus, she was dangling ice cream as extra bait. We were pretty tight by then; she’d told me how she’d flirted with an eating disorder as a teen. I’d downplayed my own war with my body, but I’d admitted that I’d flirted, too. She knew that I only ate sweets when I was out with friends, their presence controlling my portions. “Maddy? Want to go to Scoops?”
“In a minute,” Maddy called. She was reading a colorful poster about gear packages, pointing to the list of beginners’ must-haves. “It says here I get a knife! And a strap to put it on my thigh, which is so freakin’ cool. I want to strap a knife to my leg! Why do I need a knife?”
Before I could answer, Davis said, “To stab the shark while he’s eating you. So he will at least regret it.”
“It’s in case you get entangled,” I explained, irked.
I thought he was trying to scare her off, but Maddy laughed again—she had a huge, honking, rowdy laugh—and then mimed stabbing the air, saying, “Back off, shark!”
“Are there sharks?” Davis asked me, serious.
“Well, it is the ocean,” I said. “That’s where we keep ’em.” His forehead creased, so I added, “But it’s not like the movies. Maybe we should go get that ice cream.”
I wanted to talk about my sport with him, set his mind at ease so he’d let Maddy dive. And not for nothing, I wanted a chocolate-mint chip.
Char, thinking I had other motives, gave me a series of embarrassing winks and thumbs-ups behind Davis’s back.
At Scoops I began to realize he wasn’t half as cold and stiff as he seemed on first impression. Davis unbent enough to flick Maddy with a few sprinkles from his spoon when she sassed him, and I saw that the snarky talk was really banter, part and parcel of a deep connection. He wasn’t like my father at all. He was battened down, sure, but he loved his kid like nuts just under. It was buried so shallow that a single afternoon revealed it. Plus, he had really nice biceps and a clear sense of right and wrong. Within a month Maddy was my secret favorite Seal Team kid, and I’d been on seven dates with Davis. I knew by then that I could love him. Really love him. I was even getting a sense of the kind of life the two of us might build together. I could see its outline, forming. It looked very, very good.
In part it appealed to me because Davis loved rules, and tidiness, and order. He fell for the Amy I was now: disciplined and mature, quiet and strong. Even after we were lovers, even after he had whispered his own worst thing to me in the darkness, I had not told him mine. I’d talked about my background, my chilly, moneyed parents, my much-preferred brother, but he didn’t know about my wars with food and my own body. I’d downplayed how wild I was when I lived out west. I kept my secrets, telling myself that they were the past. I ignored the ones that were still alive. The ones that touched my every current breath, the ones I couldn’t even tell myself.
If I did not pay Roux off, he’d see all of it. See all of me.
I did think that he would forgive me. I was his wife. I loved and looked after his girl, and I had borne his son. He’d be the easiest person to tell, so I tried to picture it, how it would go.