The Almost Sisters(72)

“You’re doing the right thing now,” I told him, and it hardly sounded grudging at all. “That counts.”

JJ took my words as forgiveness. I saw naked gratitude writ plain on his face, and to my surprise I realized I had actually meant them as forgiveness. He swayed quietly for another moment with his girl in his arms. Forgiving him was like balm on an old hurt place, and it felt sweeter than his apology. Sweeter even than the moment I’d said all the things I’d held in my mouth for twenty angry years. Forgiving him felt like relief.

He set Lav down. She was snuffling, and she kept her arms looped around his waist, her wet face pressed into his side.

“Let yourselves in when you’re ready, but be quiet. My grandmother isn’t well, and she’s sleeping,” I said, and left them to it.

I went around the house to the back stairs. Damn JJ, I thought, but with less rancor than I would have thought it four minutes prior.

Still, if he’d gotten here a scant half hour earlier, he might have caught his own daughter on the way out, and I wouldn’t have to help kids pull dew-soaked shreds of TP off Martina Mack’s gardenia bush tomorrow. He hadn’t gotten into his car and headed for Birchville immediately, though. Not like Rachel. He’d stewed for a few hours, waffling, trying to decide. As if coming for his grieving, worried kid were a decision and not the only open course.

Forgiveness or not, I thought Apologizing Ken was still a jackass. Sure, there were worse fathers in the world. Jake didn’t beat his family or smoke crank, but that was setting the bar pretty low. Jake’s run at fatherhood seemed to me a bit like eating chalk. It wasn’t toxic. It wouldn’t kill anybody, but that didn’t make it delicious.

Still, I thought of Lavender’s face when she’d recognized him. The way she’d run to him, and even the way he’d caught her up, like he was welcoming a missing piece back to his body, as if his own wayward hand had finger-walked home and barnacled itself onto his wrist again. Maybe, when it came to fathers, kind-of-a-jackass beat an absence.

I wouldn’t know for sure. I’d only known the absence.

I went inside, flipping both switches by the door to turn on the back-porch floodlight and the brass chandelier over the breakfast-nook table for them.

Jake would need a nap, but I had no idea where on earth we could put him. The Princess Room? Lavender could tuck in with her mother. Although it might be moot. When Rachel woke up and found him here, we might all be cleaning dew-soaked shreds of Jake off our own gardenia bushes.

I retreated to my nest in the sewing room, even though I was so jazzed up that there was no way I was going to fall asleep. I’d walked home half expecting to find Cody Mack here, waiting for me in his cop car. Maybe he hadn’t been on duty, or maybe he was smart enough to know that firing a gun at children trumped toilet paper on a pine tree. Of course, the night wasn’t over. He could still ring the doorbell and arrest me for vandalism.

My sketchbook sat on the Singer table, open to the picture that had upset Rachel. I sat down and looked at my version of the ruined town square. On the right, Violet cuddled the apocalyptic Batkitten. She was in the world as Violence had left it, a place that had no next, and I had a sudden impulse to put some hope in it. To put a kid in it. What I wanted to do now was draw in Digby.

I picked up the pencil, and I plopped my boy right down in the middle of Violence’s world. I didn’t draw him as a fetus or even a new baby. Babies all looked the same to me, like cute potatoes. I drew Digby as he might look in five years or so, when the swaybacked potbelly shape of toddlerhood elongated into straight, thin lines. By age five Digby would have his own distinctive face.

I gave him my high cheekbones, my straight, serious brow line, and my deep-set eyes. I let him have the Batman’s lush lashes—you’re welcome, kid—and his straight, wide nose. I added a dark stubble of close-shorn little-boy hair. I was working in pencil now, but when I drew him in color, he’d have warm brown skin that seemed lit from inside, like good bourbon. I could see it.

Digby took shape on the scant surviving grass, wearing miniature work boots and khaki shorts, his bare legs thin as strings, each with a knotty knee in the middle. He had a confident stance, with a touch of swagger in it. His hands were tucked into his pockets, and the set of his shoulders was easy, maybe even brave. He was in a scary place, but he was smiling anyway, because the pencil was in my hand and I willed it to be so. I looked at this bright, confident boy, standing on the largest patch of grass that I could make for him in Violet’s ruined park.

Digby in the Second South, I thought.

Through the wall I could hear faint voices and the clink of pans in the kitchen. While I was working, Lavender and her father had come in. They were talking quietly, making eggs or cocoa.

I went back to my drawing. Digby’s jawline wasn’t right. It was too round. I wanted it to be shaped more like the Batman’s. Softer, younger, but still similar.

I turned to my laptop and navigated to Batman’s profile page. His privacy settings were so lax, I could have gone through his whole photo album. That felt stalkery, so I opened up his profile pics instead. I’d likely find close-ups of his face there, and I only needed a couple of good angles to get Digby’s jawline right.

I began flipping through. Here he was, my baby’s father, captured in moments that had happened in his real, full, life. Batman smiling, then Batman serious. Inside on a sofa, then outside by a lake, then in a ski hat with some snowy hills behind him.