Chapter 27

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

NOVA

Monday night, I counted eight days in a row that Carter had called to talk to the kids and Ben had refused to come to the phone. Eight days of ignoring his dad.

“What have you said to him?” Carter asked, disbelief marring his words.

I had just gotten Alice out of the bath and wrapped in a towel while Carter spoke on speakerphone from the counter. “Careful,” I said. “The kids can hear you.”

Well, Alice could as she dripped on the bath rug in front of me. As soon as I mentioned that their dad was calling, Ben jumped up from the tub and ran out of the bathroom, trailing water along the linoleum floor and out to the carpet. I’d grabbed a towel and chucked it toward him, which he came back for, but the carpet was going to take a while to dry. I could’ve used one of those giant fans the firefighters had.

I had finally answered the third time he called and held the phone out so Alice could chat with him while she played with the bubbles and her Barbies.

“Then take the phone to another room,” he snapped.

Okay. Wow. There were two options here. First, I could hang up on Carter. He didn’t have a right to speak to me like that. Or second, I could go in the other room and try to get to the bottom of it with him. Were our roles reversed, my heart would be broken if Ben didn’t want to talk to me for over a week.

Then again, that wouldn’t happen. I always paid attention to my kids.

I took him off speakerphone and put it to my ear, nodding at Alice to go on and get her pajamas on. I waited until she left the bathroom, sank onto the closed toilet seat, and clenched my teeth. “Let’s chat when you’ve had time to find a better mood.”

“Nova—”

“No, Chad, seriously. It’ll give me a chance to talk with Ben and?—”

“Who’s Chad?”

“What?”

“You called me Chad. Who is Chad?”

My stomach fluttered anxiously. Had I? I must have, or how else would Carter know his name? “Just a friend.”

“The guy who was at your house last week with the cat?”

“No.”

He was silent for a second. “So…what? Are you dating two guys?”

“I’m not dating anyone.” Again, not that it was any of his business. “We aren’t going to talk about this. Let me speak to Ben. He’s probably going through something, and we need to get to the bottom of it. I don’t know why?—”

“I have an idea why he won’t to talk to me. It must be your new boyfriends.”

“What?” I asked, exasperated and surprised by the insane leaps he could make. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Sure it does. Why would Ben want to talk to his dad if he has other men poisoning him against me? What are you saying about me to all the hicks out there?”

“Nothing.” Which was almost true. Dusty wasn’t a hick. “ Why would I talk about you, Carter, to people I’m not even dating?” This entire conversation had spiraled out of control so quickly, I was losing my place. It felt like someone had tossed me into the center of a tilt-a-whirl at the pier and I had to find the car holding my family, but the floor was moving and everything kept spinning away.

Besides, if that was the first thing he jumped to, it stood to reason he was talking about me to other people.

I wanted to hang up, block his number, and lose myself in White Collar reruns. But that wasn’t even a legal option.

“The kids need me,” I said. “Can we try again tomorrow?”

Carter was quiet for a minute. “I don’t like this.”

Inhaling for patience, I waited for him to continue. The man loved to hear himself talk, so it was only a matter of time.

“I don’t like the kids being so far away and having no way to see them regularly. It’s going to strain our relationship.”

Answering the phone regularly would help with that. Carter had only started calling every day after he’d FaceTimed during the tornado warning and Ben hadn’t wanted to speak to him. It was a classic Carter move. Everyone wasn’t worshiping him, so he would pester the kids until balance was restored. I had the sick feeling that as soon as Ben went back to wanting to hear from Carter, things would go back to the way they were pre-tornado night. We’d get him on the phone once a week if we were lucky.

There had to be a better way. It wasn’t fair to send my kids on emotional roller coasters without breaks.

“Honestly,” Carter said. “I didn’t want it to have to come to this, but we might have to discuss location?—”

An ear-splitting scream rent the air, curdling my stomach. I didn’t think. My feet were up and racing to the kids bedroom. I flung the door open, frantically searching—I knew the bunk bed was going to cause one of them to break their arm—until I found Alice crumpled on the floor in her hot pink Barbie nightgown, clutching Peaches to her chest while sobs racked her tiny shoulders.

I dropped to my knees. “What happened?”

She shook her head, tears streaming down her reddened cheeks.

“Alice,” I said firmly. “What happened?”

Her little arms peeled away from her body, separating her pink monkey into three pieces—the body in one hand, two arms dangling from the other. Clean slices went through the fuzzy pink appendages. This act of brutality was clearly done with scissors.

“Ben!” Alice wailed, like he had stolen her firstborn child. “He did this!”

Yeah, I had jumped to the very same conclusion. But innocent until proven guilty and all that. “We don’t know for sure until we ask him,” I said gently.

“I did it,” Ben said from the doorway behind me, his arms crossed over his chest and his mouth flipped into a frown.

Oh, that little punk. “Honestly? Why, Ben?”

“She shouldn’t have ruined my Chewie.”

“Agreed, but she didn’t try to ruin it on purpose,” I said, exasperated. “She didn’t know it would melt.”

His frown was unrelenting.

Alice’s sobs keened through the air.

No one was going to get to sleep anytime soon.

Alice started yelling at Ben, and his response was to yell back. The animosity grew in the room until my arms began to itch. Great, add a wave of hives to the mix.

“Okay,” I shouted. “Everyone, enough .” I pointed one hand at each kid. “You both messed up. You both made bad choices. You both owe the other an apology.”

“But Peaches is dead !” Alice screamed. “She’ll never live again!”

An idea hit me. “She’ll live just fine. I can sew. ”

“Unlike Chewbacca, who I had to bury in the grass!”

What? When did he do that? “Where?”

“Not telling,” he said, still glaring at his sister.

Oh, good grief. Emotions were high, it was past bedtime, and Alice would never go to sleep with a broken monkey. “Come on, both of you. Shoes on. We’re going out.”

“Where?” Ben asked.

“The monkey hospital. But not until you both apologize.”

I was pretty sure I’d intrigued them, because while I went searching for the phone I’d flung on my run to the room, I heard them mutter half-hearted apologies to each other. Carter had tried to call six times since our conversation had been interrupted, but my first call was to Gigi.

“Hey, sugar,” she said when she answered.

“We’re having a sibling war over here and Ben cut Peaches’ arms off. Any chance you have some pink thread? And a needle? I left my sewing kit in New York.”

“Of course. Come on over. I might not have pink, but I know I have white.”

“Great. That works too. We’ll see you in a minute.”

We hung up, and I dialed Carter to update him. He must’ve been out of his mind after hearing his daughter scream like that.

It rang once before a woman answered. “Hello?”

I looked down at my phone, but it was still Carter’s face. Putting the phone back to my ear, I heard her speak again. “Hello?”

Okay. So this was really happening. “Is Carter there?” I asked.

“He’s busy right now.”

Silence. Why had she answered his phone if he couldn’t come to it? This had to be his new girlfriend, and it suddenly felt ridiculous that I didn’t have my sewing kit, but she could pull it from the closet right now if she wanted to hem a pair of pants .

“Do you need something?” she asked. Her voice was higher than mine, silkier too.

“I just needed to talk to Carter. I’ll call back another time.”

“I can take a message,” she said.

So could his voicemail. It was an icky situation, and I didn’t like how it felt to have my conversation hijacked like this, then made to feel like I was the weird one for not telling her why I wanted to talk to her boyfriend. We shared children , for heaven’s sake. It didn’t take rocket science to figure out that I probably wanted to discuss them, and not with a stranger.

“Mom, can we go?” Alice asked tearfully behind me.

“Yeah, babe. Just a sec.” I cleared my throat to speak into the phone again. “If you’ll have Car?—”

“Was that Alice?” the woman asked.

“Okay, who is this?” I asked, my patience gone. If she knew my child’s name, I could learn hers.

“Kristen,” she said, and if I wasn’t mistaken, she sounded a little hurt.

“What are you do—hello?” Carter said into the phone. “Nova? What happened?”

“Peaches’ arms are broken. I need to run so I have time to sew them back on so Alice can sleep. Just wanted to let you know why it sounded like our child was dying. She’s fine. Or she will be.”

“Okay.” He sounded slightly mystified.

“Bye, Carter.” I didn’t wait for him to say anything more. I was shaking, overwhelmed, itchy, and in need of a good, long scream into a pillow. I turned my phone to Do Not Disturb mode, slid it in my pocket, and went in search of my shoes. And maybe some Benadryl anti-itch cream.

Gigi had water boiling in her kettle when we arrived at the house. She ushered both kids into the kitchen to assemble their hot chocolate and make some toast to dunk in it. “Sewing box is on the sofa,” she called before they disappeared.

I got thirty blissful, quiet minutes on Gigi’s plush floral sofa, hearing my kids put aside their feud and giggle together while I stitched Peaches’ arms back on with white thread that didn’t quite blend in but wasn’t too obvious either. Once the second arm was firmly in place, I leaned my head against the back of the couch and breathed. Everything felt so much worse in the moment, but time helped soothe each of the awful bits I’d endured this evening. All of them but one.

Kristen.

“Mom!” Alice said, rushing into the room in her Ugg-style Target boots and Barbie nightgown. She had chocolate smeared and dried on her upper lip. “Gigi said we can have a sleepover!”

“On a school night?”

“No, she said it has to be Friday or Saturday. She said it was up to you.”

Gigi came through to the living room and sat on the sofa beside me with a sigh. “What do you think, lovey?”

I thought it sounded absolutely marvelous. “The fundraiser is this weekend, but we can do Friday.”

“Let’s do Saturday,” Gigi said. “You can go to the fundraiser and take yourself out for an ice cream afterward.”

“I think it’s a family event.”

Gigi looked at me. “I know.”

“I want ice cream,” Ben said, joining us.

“We’ll have our own fun,” Gigi said.

Why did it feel a little like scheming? I eyed her. “Don’t you want to go to the fundraiser?”

“No. I’ve been to plenty, and I’ll go to plenty more.” She smiled at me. “But I know you won’t want to miss it. ”

There was a hidden message there. I tried to figure out what she was trying to say.

Gigi leaned down and lowered her voice, looking at the kids. “Will you both go upstairs and see if I have enough pillows in the guest room? Then you’ll know if you need to bring your own. Count the blankets folded on the cedar chest, too.”

“What’s a cedar chest?” Ben asked.

“It’s the wooden box at the end of the bed. Work together, okay?”

“Okay!” they said in unison and ran up the stairs.

I cut the final thread and lowered Peaches onto my lap. We didn’t have much time and I didn’t want to waste it. “What are you trying to say?”

“The kids told me about Carter.”

“That Ben won’t talk to him?” I asked.

“No. Alice told me Carter doesn’t want to talk to them very much, and today you fought on the phone.”

I had a hard time seeing how what we did could be misconstrued as fighting, but the reality was that kids could often read emotions better than adults did. They were intuitive. “Apparently he has a girlfriend, and she just moved in with him. I haven’t told the kids yet.”

Gigi’s face hardened. “How are you?”

“Not hurting, I promise. He can move on. But the woman answered his phone tonight, which threw me off. I left so many of my things there. I just…I don’t like the idea of someone else having them. You know we couldn’t fit everything in my car.”

“Then go back and get them.”

I laughed.

“I’m serious. I’ll take the kids for a week if that’s what it takes. Go back and get your things.”

“Not possible. Our settlement is signed and everything I left in the apartment belongs to him now. I really am okay with him moving on. It was kind of nice when I learned all of it and wasn’t jealous.”

“It’s also okay to grieve, sugar. Don’t force yourself to be strong all the time. Take some time to feel what you need to feel. If Dusty is part of that”—she shrugged—“then so be it.”

“Aunt Gigi,” I said with mock shock. “You’re the one who warned him away from me.”

“Because I didn’t want you to be bombarded when you arrived, and that man is a flirt. But even I can see that the feelings go both ways here.”

Both ways? She thought Dusty might like me, too. I wanted to believe that. I longed to believe it.

“He might have been a punk kid,” Gigi continued, “but I admit he’s a changed man.”

“Even after that altercation with Chad?”

“That wasn’t Dusty’s fault, which I think you already know. That was Chad being the idiot he is.”

Little footsteps ran down the stairs while the kids shouted numbers at Gigi. She squeezed both of them in hugs and saw us to the door so we could get home.

“Think about it,” Gigi said, waving from her porch. “It’s okay for you to move on, too.”

I took my kids’ hands, Alice clutching a repaired Peaches to her chest, and walked away, Gigi’s words floating in and out of my head for the rest of the night.