Mack Daddy(5)

“Alright. Maybe I’ll see you in the morning anyway at drop off,” I said.

“Okay.” After a long pause, she said, “Mack?”

“Yeah?”

“He’ll be okay. We’ll take care of him. Even when he’s having a bad day, we’ll do our best to make him feel safe.”

“Thank you, Frankie. I knew you would. That’s why I’m here.”

For him.

And for me.

For you.

I’m here for you.

I want you in my life again.

Even if all you’ll give me is your friendship.

Fuck that. That will never be enough for me.

Not with you.

There was so much I wanted to tell her but couldn’t.

She’d hung up without saying anything further.

Even though moving to Boston had been a huge adjustment for my son, for the first time in years, I’d felt like myself again. I’d only spent a few years here in my early twenties, but those were the best years of my life. I felt like I was finally home again. If only my feelings for Frankie didn’t feel like they were stuck in a goddamn time machine. I feel no differently about her today than I did the day I left our apartment in Kenmore Square and never looked back.

She said she was happy with this guy, but I knew Frankie. She’d tell me that even if she wasn’t. I needed to really know for sure that there was definitely no chance for us. The only way to do that was to earn her trust again, show her what kind of a man I was now since becoming Jonah’s dad. Be her friend. Then she’d tell me the truth. I just didn’t know if I could handle it. I didn’t know if I could handle going back to being only friends with her if she ended up marrying this guy.

I loved her.

She just never knew that.





“Hey, Mrs. Migillicutty!” I said, waving as I rolled in my trash barrel from the curb.

My next-door neighbor was an eighty-year-old widow who lived alone in the house she’d owned for fifty years. She’d spent the better part of the past month trying to get me to date her divorced granddaughter despite my repeatedly turning down her offers to help set us up.

“Mack, why don’t you come over for some Italian rum cake?”

“Thank you, but I’d better get back to work.”

“Come on. You work from home. You’re your own boss. Give yourself a break and have some goddamn cake.”

Chuckling, I conceded. “Well, okay then. I guess there’s always time for cake.”

I followed her into the house, which was a dated, split-level design. It had the same layout as the house I’d bought, except mine was much more modern inside.

“I can save a piece of cake for Jonah when he comes this weekend. There’s not really that much rum in it.”

“He’d love that. Thank you.”

I couldn’t help the fleeting thought that a little rum might do some good for my son’s mood.

“How’s he been adjusting to the new school?”

“Whenever I ask, he tells me his day was okay, but he wouldn’t tell me if it wasn’t.”

“Every day will get a little better.”

“Thank you. I hope so.”

“What is it you do for a living again?”

“I’m a business intelligence analyst.”

“Sounds fancy.”

“Yeah. Well, it’s just a fancy way to describe someone who gathers data. It allows me to not have to go into an office, and since I work for myself, I can be there for my son when he needs me. His mother has a different kind of job. She travels a lot. So, it’s more important for me to have flexibility so he never has two parents gone at once.”

“What does she do?”

“Before we moved here, she was a political consultant in D.C. She started out working as an aide to my father.”

“Who’s your father?”

“Michael Morrison, the Virginia senator.”

“Wow.”

The last thing I wanted was to talk about my father. “We won’t get started on him,” I said. “Anyway, Torrie sort of moved her way up in the ranks over the years and was just recruited by a public affairs and advocacy firm in Boston, which is why we moved.”

“Wow. Smart people, you folks are.”

“Not really. It might sound like it, but no. Far from it. We’ve made a lot of mistakes,” I said, playing with the whipped cream frosting on my cake.

“What’s wrong, Mack?”

Her question caught me off guard. “What do you mean?”

“You seem to have something preoccupying you.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Just a sense I get.”

“It’s nothing, Mrs. M.”

She put her fork down, and it clanked against the table. “I’ve got the time, Mack. Does it look like I have anything better to do? I’m a lot cheaper than a shrink. I have no one to even tell your secrets to. Take advantage of me. Lord knows, if I were younger, those words might have meant something else. But I’m old enough to be your grandmother.” Sliding a glass of milk toward me, she said, “I could use some drama.”

She was making me laugh. “Alright. You ready for a doozy?”

“Shoot.”