One To Watch(57)

“What happens when you try?” Bob asked gently.

Bea shook her head, crying in earnest now. “I drown, Bop. Every single time. I drown.”

Bob nodded tightly, tears in his eyes too. Sue smoothed back Bea’s hair.

“Safer to stay where you are then, isn’t it?” she coaxed. “Even if where you are makes you miserable.”

“What do I do, Mom?” Bea pleaded, feeling incredibly young. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You know,” Sue’s voice was raspy, absent her usual affected cheer, “when your father left—not Bob, your biological father—I thought I was done. A woman alone with four kids, no savings, this run-down house. I thought, Who could possibly want me?”

“Mom.” Bea exhaled. In her entire life, Bea could count the number of times she’d heard her mother talk about her biological father on one hand.

“The night he called to say he wasn’t coming home was the worst of my life,” Sue went on. “All you kids were asleep, or I thought you were, but then I heard you crying. So I went into your room, and you were standing in your crib, and you said, ‘Up me, Mama.’ That’s what you used to say, ‘Up me.’ So I picked you up, my sweet girl, and you were crying, and so was I. And I was so afraid, Bea. I didn’t know what I was going to do. If you think you’re hopeless, well, I was so far past that point, I was completely shut down. Until I met Bob.”

“And he made you believe again?”

Bob laughed. “Hell, no. Your mother didn’t want a damn thing to do with me.”

“Wait, really?”

Sue shook her head. “Between working and raising all you kids, I was completely in survival mode, focused on whatever was in front of me—I couldn’t possibly consider adding another person into the mix! Bob saw I was running myself ragged, and he offered to help. That first time he came to the house, that was when things started to change.”

“Because of you, Bean.” Bob rubbed Bea’s knee affectionately.

“Me?” Bea was bewildered. “How? Wasn’t I only five?”

“Four,” Bob corrected. “When I came over here, the whole place was chaos. Your brothers were running around the yard, your mother was trying to get dinner on the table, and I didn’t know how to help with any of it. Then you came running over to me, and you were about the cutest thing I’d ever seen. You had this big book of fairy tales, you remember? You never went anywhere without it.”

Bea pointed to the bottom shelf, where the tattered book in question still rested.

“That one there?”

Bob smiled. “The very one. You held it out to me, and you said, ‘Story?’ Bean, I don’t know how any man could say no to you, but I sure as hell never could. You were so trusting, you plopped right in my lap and we sat there and read for hours.”

“That was it.” Sue was choked up. “I saw you two together, and I thought, Oh. She’s going to have a father.”

“You make it sound so easy,” Bea whispered.

“No”—Sue grabbed Bea’s hand—“no, Beatrice, it’s the hardest thing in the world. To have been that hurt, to feel that afraid, and to know that the only way you can be really, fully happy is to risk going through it all again? It’s a terrifying choice to make. But if you want to let someone be that close to you, it’s the only way.”

“That’s it!” Bob lit up like he always did when someone hit on a new insight. “It’s about choice. A lot of people live their lives by default, walking through the doors in front of them because it seems expedient. That’s one way to have a family. But us? We chose each other. And that’s what you’re doing here, Bean—that’s why it feels so scary. Because it is. You’re choosing your family.”

“And what if I can’t?” Bea wiped the tears out of her eyes. “What if there’s something inside me that’s just—I don’t know, incapable?”

“Not possible.” Bob smiled, his whole face warm and crinkled. “Bean, everyone in this family knows how much love you have inside you. We’re together because of you. Your good heart was the key that unlocked our whole lives.”

“I don’t know what to do, Bop. I want to be brave, like you two, but I just—I don’t know what to do.”

“It starts with the choice, just like your mom said. Here in this room, it seems to me you have a sense that you might want one of these fellas to be your family. If you want that, you can have it. But first, you have to tell them that’s what you want. Bean, you have to choose.”


Bea was worried Lauren would be furious when she came back outside, but there was so much going on that her twenty-minute absence appeared to have escaped unnoticed.

Bea scanned the busy yard looking for Asher—he was chatting with Duncan and Julia, all three of them laughing. Asher was holding baby Alice, booping her nose and puffing out his cheeks to make her smile. It was obvious that he was wonderful with children, and Bea wondered how he could be so natural with this little baby and yet so stilted with her. Duncan had an arm around Julia’s waist, and she leaned comfortably into her husband, the two of them easy in a way that sent a twist of pain through Bea’s chest. She wanted this. And if she kept on like she was, she would never, ever have it.