Chapter 11

A ddie’s whole face lit up in happiness. “Are you serious? Are you serious, Sophie?”

I had been, so I nodded. “Yes,” I added, when she still seemed to be waiting for a reply.

“Holy Mary! This is like a dream come true!”

“Really?” I asked skeptically.

“I mean, to get to work with my sister? My smart sister who’s so good at everything?” She shook her head in amazement. “I can’t believe it.”

“Addie, I’m not that smart and I’m definitely not good at everything,” I cautioned, although I could admit that it was nice to hear that she thought so.

“This is a great idea,” Granger said, in his gravelly way. I checked his expression but his face was (as usual) impassive, so I couldn’t tell if he meant it or not.

“Really?” I repeated.

“Of course!” my sister answered. She was beaming at me. “I’ve been taking classes in landscape design and I’ve been doing some projects for our neighbors, but the business side of things really daunts me. You can do that part, and I can do the drawings and the measurements, and we can both get the plants together, and you can come with me to installations because sometimes people get upset and you won’t take any lip about that…wow. Just, wow. It couldn’t be better.”

“I’m glad you’re considering a career change,” Granger noted. “Last time we talked, it sounded like you’d decided to stick with investigating people.”

I looked next to me at Esme, seated in a high chair that Addie had purchased for her and for Nicola’s baby, when that niece or nephew was born. We’d come over for dinner and the baby had been entranced by their cat, who was currently curled on the floor at her feet. Apparently, the cat was equally entranced by the baby or maybe she had a sense that in the future, snacks would be dropped.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do,” I said. “Even if the thing with the criminals wanting to kill me—”

“If they had wanted to, they would have,” Granger muttered, and Addie was horrified.

“Even if that thing hadn’t happened, I was having trouble keeping up with my job, anyway. I hadn’t realized how much time I was spending on it.” I must have been working almost nonstop to accomplish everything that I’d been doing, and I just couldn’t, not anymore. “I’m going to look into daycare for Esme,” I continued. “If you and I are working together part-time, I can also try some other projects.”

“Like what?” Addie asked.

“I’ve been writing lately,” I said. “Longer article kinds of things. It probably won’t go anywhere and it’s not a great way to make money.” Juliet had given me another mysterious wad of cash to pay me back but I still couldn’t live off my savings forever.

“Well, I think our company is going to be a success and will be a great way to make money,” my sister announced, because she was already one hundred percent on board with my suggestion that we work together on the business she’d been wanting to start, landscape design services.

“So she’ll go to a sitter?” Granger asked. He lifted Esme out of her chair and they studied each other. “Where’s Patrick?”

“Right now, I think he’s in Chicago,” I answered. “I’m not sure.”

“Mom doesn’t even know,” Addie said, nodding. “Neither does JuJu. I hope he’s ok.”

I didn’t share that hope. I was furious at him, so if he’d happened to sail off into Lake Michigan and his boat happened to sink…no, I didn’t want him to die, but I would have liked him to struggle for a while before the Coast Guard picked his butt up. It turned out that he hadn’t really rented an apartment in Detroit like my mom had said; he’d only been staying with friends to hide out. If he’d had a job, like she’d also reported, he must have lost it. Employers usually weren’t fans of new hires taking unscheduled vacations for indefinite lengths of time, and he’d been gone for more than a week with no sign of a return.

“You’ve got to get on him legally,” Granger said. He smiled at the baby. “I think she looks like Juliet,” he mentioned. “Doesn’t she? Hello,” he told her, and she smiled back and babbled at him, which he then imitated. I had a sudden vision of him and my sister as parents, and I thought that would work out very well.

But things with Patrick weren’t working in the least. “I know I have to do something,” I said. I did know it, but I didn’t like it at all. “I’m looking into it.” I had even talked to a lawyer and gone over some options with her. None of them were great.

“Mom is going to have a fit,” Addie said, and that was one of the problems. It would cause a huge schism in our family, and it would have been much, much better if Patrick decided on his own to come home and step up to his responsibilities. If he wasn’t going to do that, though, I was going to take him to court. I would get custody, I would have Esme permanently. In doing so, I would definitely lose my only brother and I would probably lose my mom and my sister Juliet, because they were ride-or-die with him.

But if it was best for the baby? I leaned over and kissed her and she smiled and grabbed my hair.

“What other changes are you making?” my sister asked, her voice very innocent.

“Addie, just spit it out,” I told her.

“Ok, where’s Daniel? He was included in the invitation tonight.” She had sent me specific instructions to tell him to come, actually. “I said that the three of you should be here, didn’t I?” she asked Esme, and kissed her other cheek.

“We’re not a couple,” I said, “so I thought your inclusion of him in the invitation was strange.”

“Not if we wanted to see him,” my sister told me. “Daniel and I knew each other way back when. He may not know many other people in Detroit anymore, though, and even when he was a kid, he wasn’t very outgoing. He probably needs friends.”

Well, fine. That made me sound like a big jerk. “I assumed that you’d asked him so that he and I would have to spend time together,” I explained.

“You were right about that,” Granger told me. “Sorry, honey,” he said to his fiancée, and he leaned over to kiss her, making Esme squawk.

“Addie, you and Nic have to keep out of my life,” I started to say, but as the words left my mouth, I rolled my eyes at myself. When had they ever been able to do that in the past? Why would they have changed their behavior now?

“I can’t,” my sister admitted. “I want you and Daniel to get together.”

“I thought you got over the delusion that I was going to find true love!” I chastised. “That idea was dead years ago.”

“Does it have to be? What’s so bad about Daniel?”

“Nothing! There’s nothing at all wrong with him. He’s great. He’s handsome, and nice. He’s stable and…and we won’t get together. I made a decision to be single and he just broke up with someone else. He’s not looking in my direction,” I concluded. “It wouldn’t work out and we’re better off as friends.” Of course, right now? We weren’t even that, because we weren’t even talking very much. We hadn’t been since the day we’d driven to Ann Arbor. I had now semi-officially moved back in with my parents, so I couldn’t run into him on our street anymore. I sighed, thinking about it.

“It’s hard when you love someone and you don’t think he loves you back,” my sister commiserated.

“If that comment was directed my way, I realize that I was an asshole when we first met, but I smartened up. Luckily for me,” Granger said, and that led them to kiss some more.

Enough. I had too much food in my stomach to sit and watch this display—he was a great cook and I’d over-partaken. “Please,” I hissed, and they broke apart.

Addie delicately patted her lips with a napkin but she was also blushing bright red. “Why couldn’t it work out now?” she asked me after a sip of water. “You said that he broke up with that girl. Maybe you made a promise or vow or whatever about never being with another man, but that was so long ago and you don’t have to be bound by it, not really.”

“Addie…”

She persevered. “You were hurt back then, yes, but you can move on now. Don’t let that guy ruin your entire life just like he ruined your Caribbean vacation. You didn’t even have a chance to try for a tan,” she reminisced sadly.

“I’m not letting anyone ruin anything. I chose this life, and I’m very happy with it.”

She looked at me for a while and I could see that she had something to say.

“Go ahead,” I prompted.

“You haven’t seemed very happy to me,” she burst out. “Not at all. You say that you are, but I haven’t seen it for myself. You get so mad when we try to force you out of your house, but how would you have reacted if I had shut myself in my apartment, isolated from everyone?”

“If you had wanted to stay in your apartment with your annoying neighbors knocking and asking you for favors all the time, then I would have respected your choices,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have,” her boyfriend said. “That place was a damn dump.”

My sister was saying how it wasn’t so bad but I responded, too. “I would have respected your decision to stay in that dump, just like you should have done with my decision to stay in mine,” I informed her. “Not that my house is a dump, either.” Addie’s eyebrows went up and she opened her mouth, but I kept going. “Anyway, now I’m outside all the time and I’m also wearing new, clean clothes.” That was thanks to my mom, who had thrown out everything else. “I’ve changed a ton about myself and yet you’re still trying to force me into more. Why can’t you just accept things as they are? Accept me as I am!” I told her. “I don’t want a relationship with Daniel. I don’t want a relationship with anyone, and that’s the end of it.”

It was quiet except for Esme shrieking. “Ok,” Addie said quietly. “You’re right, I shouldn’t try to force you into being with someone. If you’re really happy with your choices, then I’m glad.”

“I’m making a choice right now myself,” Granger announced, and stood up with the baby. “You need a new diaper because you smell terrible,” he told her, but she never bothered about that.

I didn’t care, either, not about anything. I certainly wasn’t interested in Addie’s opinion that my life sucked, and I didn’t care that my other sisters probably felt the same way that she did. “I really don’t,” I said in the car on the way home. “It doesn’t matter at all what they think, because other people’s opinions don’t have any effect on me.”

Esme also didn’t care what I was saying right now. She made distressed sounds and I tried singing, but that made her angrier. I did have a terrible voice.

“Ok, I’ll stop. See? It doesn’t bother me that you hate it when I sing,” I told her. “In the same vein, I don’t care if Mom, JuJu, and Patrick end up hating me for getting into a custody fight over you. You’re worth it. I don’t care if my dad is going off the deep end. I don’t care if Danny and I aren’t friends now.”

She hollered back at me.

“I mean, Daniel,” I corrected myself. “It makes sense that he’s not using the nickname anymore, because he really is a new person now. He was so afraid back in high school, so quiet and timid. He remembers me getting into it with his math teacher and I do, too. I would have gladly smacked that guy with a calculator that day. I was glad to stand up for him when he needed me.” I thought about it. “He’s not like that anymore,” I told Esme. “He stands up to everyone all by himself.” He stood up to me, for example, and told me what he thought. “He doesn’t do it by fighting and getting mad, but he’s not a doormat,” I continued to explain. “But now that I think about it, he wasn’t a doormat back then, either. He was tougher than I gave him credit for. He had to survive his dad, and I don’t know if I could have done it.”

Esme didn’t care about that, either. She had started to cry because she was only interested in getting out of her car seat. “We’re almost home,” I told her. I hated driving when she was upset like this, and I hated how everything in my life seemed just as uncontrollable as her tears. I wished that I could go back to my pink house, but also back in time to when Daniel didn’t live across the street. I wished that I were doing my job, sitting alone in my office, wearing only my underwear, with crap piled on my dirty furniture that no one else liked.

I had been happy with that! No, I hadn’t been doing cartwheels with glee, but I had been content with my life. I had been satisfied. I had been, at the very least, neutral. I hadn’t been crying about it, that was for sure. I had been able to get out of bed every day, at least most days.

But if I’d gone back in time, then I wouldn’t have had Esme. “I love you,” I told her, which did nothing to stop her tears.

We turned into Daniel’s driveway and I stopped, and then I got her out of her seat. It was a beautiful night and the summer day had dissipated into gentle coolness, so all his windows were open. Many of the neighbors were walking their dogs (and cat) and talking to each other, too. I held the baby, soothing her as she screamed, and the woman with the cat decided that it was the perfect time to chat with me and walked over to join us.

“Oh, did she have a bad ride in the car? Poor thing. You know, I used to give my kids just a little whiskey when they got cranky like this. Rub it on the gums to soothe her,” she advised me.

“She’s not teething yet,” I said. “And I won’t be giving her whiskey, even when she is.”

“To each her own.” She bent and picked up her animal. “Want to see the kitty?” she asked Esme, who was interested. She and the cat stared at each other and she gradually stopped crying.

“I didn’t even know that you were pregnant, and poof, there’s a baby,” the woman said, and I had to explain that this was actually my brother’s baby, but that we spent a lot of time together.

“I love her a lot,” I said. “She’s my niece, but I love her so much.”

“Well, yes,” the woman responded, as if that was obvious. “The blood between you is why you look alike. Too bad.”

“There’s nothing wrong with how I look and she’s beautiful!” I exploded. “How dare—”

“I meant that it’s a shame how she’s not yours,” my neighbor explained. “Everyone on this block is so goddamn old, I was looking forward to having kids around again. I keep telling my boys to get married and have grandchildren for me.”

“That really doesn’t work,” I said. “It just makes people furious when you suggest it. It’s none of your business.”

“It is my business, since it’s my genetic material,” she informed me, and I wasn’t going to argue with Mendel. “Luella, Franz! Come here and see the baby,” she called to some of the dog owners, and they strolled over to meet Esme, who had put her head against my shoulder and was still interested in the cat. I met the other neighbors, too, and they were interested that I was the strange, single woman who lived in the pink house.

“It was a better color before,” Franz told me.

“To each his own,” I answered, and Vanda, the woman with the cat, agreed with me. But I threw them a bone. “This has always been a beautiful street.”

“You’re right about that. The people who live here work hard to keep it up,” Luella noted, and they eyed me.

“I’m doing better with my yard,” I defended myself, and they agreed that I was making an effort, at least. I could also admit that theirs still looked better, but they’d had more practice. “How long have you guys lived here?” I asked.

Thirty years, twenty years, forty-five years—a long time. They’d been here when I’d driven down this street in the car my grandparents had given to me and my sisters, with Daniel in the passenger seat and Cineribus playing from a speaker we’d hung from the rearview mirror because the sound system never worked very well. It had been his favorite neighborhood and his favorite street. “I could live in a place like this,” he’d said then. “Someday.” So when a little stucco house had come up for sale, the ugliest one on a beautiful block, I’d put in a bid. I’d thought of him, my old friend, and I’d wondered if he would ever come back.

He was here now. Daniel’s front door opened and he stepped outside, probably wondering why the neighbors were coalescing in his driveway. “I thought that was your car, Sophie,” he told me, and said hello to everyone else. He reached for the baby, too, and she went right to him. “Are you tired?” he asked her, and she seemed to be. It had been a big day for someone so small, what with our dinner out and meeting two cats.

The other people and their pets departed and left the three of us. “What are you doing here?” he asked me.

“We were on our way to my parents’ house, but she got very upset.” I put my hand on her little back. “She was crying so hard.”

“Were you?” he asked Esme. She seemed perfectly content at the moment, but she also looked sleepy. “Want to come in?” I nodded and followed behind him. It smelled vaguely of paint but none of the downstairs furniture was covered.

“Are you still working on projects here?” I asked as I looked around.

“Yeah,” he answered and sat on the couch. “I still have a long list.”

“I could help you,” I suggested. “I helped a little before, remember?”

“I remember. You haven’t been around much lately, though.” He moved Esme from his shoulder to cradle her in his arms. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“I’m mostly moved into my parents’ house. Patrick took off,” I explained.

“He was never there, anyway.”

“Yes, but I think he might have run away from Detroit.” I looked at the baby and stopped the invective that was about to pour past my lips. “He’s her dad, so I’m trying not to badmouth him around her,” I said instead.

“That’s a good idea. You don’t want her to grow up thinking that her parents don’t love her.” He smiled at the baby. “They do. Everyone loves you, and now you weigh more than my drill. Now you’re about the same as a pressure-treated two by four.”

“She’s growing so well. She’s so wonderful, and I hope she never feels like her mom and dad were trying leave her because she did something wrong. It isn’t about her—at least not for Patrick. His problem is that he doesn’t want to grow up at all. He didn’t want to marry Liv because he couldn’t stand the thought of having real-world responsibilities, and taking off and leaving his daughter is the same thing. They’re both great, but he’s not.”

“I liked him when he was a kid,” Daniel said. “He was funny back then, but now—now I’m not going to badmouth him either.” He looked up at me. “What’s going on, Sophie? Your parents don’t live that far away from here. Why did you come to my house instead of going to theirs?”

“She was crying and I got upset, too. I was thinking about everything that’s going on and how I hardly understand any of it.”

“Like what?”

“Like my dad being so weird. Weirder than usual,” I explained. “Like you and I and how we haven’t seen each other for a while, and I’m sure that’s my fault. Juliet used to tell me that I was too much. She’d say that no boy was going to like me if I was so much Sophie. I think I was too much for you, because I was acting annoying, not paying attention to what you said and getting angry.”

“No, I think that you were right about what you said that day. You’re the one in charge of the decisions about your life, and me trying to throw in my two cents was…what’s the word I’m looking for? It starts with a P and it’s like I was taking too much on myself.”

“Presumptuous,” I filled in and he nodded, but I disagreed. “I don’t know about that. You were there when those guys broke in and you saw how upset I was. It makes sense that you’d try to make sure that the situation doesn’t repeat. It’s like, if you’re sitting and watching a car wreck but you can do something to stop it, how do you keep your mouth shut? You know…hold on.” I got out my phone and texted one word to my sister Addie: “Sorry.”

“Are you ok? Where are you?” she immediately wrote back, and I said that things were fine and she was also entitled to her opinions and to share them with me, no matter if I agreed or not.

“Ok,” I said, when the messages were over, but Daniel held his finger to his lips.

“The baby fell asleep,” he said quietly. “Can you turn off the light?” He tilted his chin toward a switch on the wall.

I clicked it off and then sat down next to them. “I watch her like this sometimes,” I whispered. “That sounds so creepy.”

“No, I can imagine. You know I’m not very religious, but it’s like you can see a plan when you look at her. Like there’s a meaning to things.”

I nodded. “I think I might have been missing that. I was looking at other people so critically, finding out all their mistakes. And a lot of them deserved to be caught, there’s no doubt about that,” I added. “Like that Horner guy was a giant jerk. I’m sorry about the punishment that probably came to him, and I’ve been thinking about his blood being on my hands…” I trailed off as I looked down at my palms. Lately, when I was awake at night, I was wondering a lot about what had happened to him and considering my part in it all. I hadn’t come up with anything that made me sleep better.

“They would have found out about him anyway. He wasn’t hiding anything very well.”

No, he’d practically paraded around with a sandwich board announcing that he was a cheater. “I’m still sorry for my part in it. I’ve spent the last few years sitting in my office and digging into the messes in people’s lives, and I wasn’t doing a great job with mine. I’m really sorry. I’m saying it to you, too.”

“For what?”

Again, there were a lot of things that I needed to apologize to him about, but I settled for the most recent. “I’m sorry that I snapped at you and was cranky. I’m sorry that I didn’t listen to your ideas about changing jobs. I actually was listening,” I said softly, “but at the time, I was angry about it. The whole thing didn’t seem fair to me, but it wasn’t about me, after all. Mr. Horner is gone and we know what that means. Nicola called his work just to be sure—”

“She shouldn’t have done that, Sophie!” He’d spoken with too much force and Esme looked disgruntled, so he also said, “Shh, shh, shh,” and jiggled her gently until her expression smoothed back into peaceful sleep.

“I know that she shouldn’t have called, but try telling Nicola anything,” I hissed back. “She used a phone at the hospital where she works and Granger doesn’t seem too concerned, but he also tried to tell her to knock it off. Anyway, she asked for Mr. Horner and they said that he’s no longer employed there. But there hasn’t been anything in the news about his disappearance—”

“And you’re looking? You shouldn’t be involved, either!” He was just as angry, but he’d kept the volume lower.

“I know that! I happen to read both local papers back to front every day, because my dad subscribes to the online versions. I’m not searching for the name or doing anything to draw attention to myself, I swear.”

Daniel seemed calmer. “Ok. Please don’t.” We both watched Esme for another few moments, then he spoke again. “I’m sorry, too. I should have been reaching out to you and I haven’t.”

“Because we disagreed? Or because I’m too much?”

“It was more like, I was pretty pissed at you for getting into that situation,” he answered. “I know that you didn’t plan for it and you didn’t think anything like that could happen, but it scared me. It’s easier to get mad at someone than to feel scared, so that was what I did.”

I nodded. That was very true, and I’d done it plenty of times myself.

“So I got mad at you,” he went on, “and then I got mad at myself for being an idiot. And I decided that I needed a break to figure out what I was doing. I had to think about it.”

I nodded again. He’d needed a break because Juliet was right. I was too much, just like she’d told me. I could recognize it about myself, and it had never bothered me as it might have bothered others—basically, it meant that I was annoying, right? I was someone who tired out others with too much personality, someone who took too much air out of the room.

My sister wasn’t the only one who’d made that kind of remark. The girls in high school had conveyed the same message (they were the ones who had called me “Bitchy Sophie” instead of the wittier “No-Trophy Sophie” which would have done a much better job in emphasizing that I was a loser). While JuJu was probably trying to help me out, in a way, those girls were just nasty. “Can you ever shut up?” they’d ask. “No one wants to hear it! You’re so fucking annoying!”

And of course, I’d had a lot to say right back, so they might have been right that I couldn’t shut up. I certainly couldn’t sit and listen to them insult me, although what they’d said hadn’t bothered me at all. But I found that it did bother me quite a bit if Daniel didn’t want to be around me, that I was too much for him.

“Are we ok now?” I asked.

“I am. I’m done thinking it over.”

Ok. Whatever that meant, I was also ready to move on.

“What are you doing about Esme? What about Patrick?” he asked, and I broke out of my unhappy reverie.

“I’m going to try to get my father to talk to him,” I said, but I rested my head against the cushion. “He’s the only one whom Patrick has ever listened to, but our father never had much to say to any of us until things got really bad. He stepped in when our problems became his problems, like when Grace dropped out of college again and couldn’t keep a job, so she was living on his dime.”

“Or when you erased the hard drive on his computer and he hadn’t saved his stuff anywhere else, so it was all gone.”

“Yes, like that.” The computer thing hadn’t been bad, it had been absolutely terrible.

“So he’s going to step in and make Patrick act like a father?”

“He already is a father! I want our mom to stop excusing him and I want our dad to force him into being mature and…that probably won’t work,” I acknowledged, “but Dad needs to try.”

“In the meantime, I’ll just hold her,” Daniel suggested.

“That sounds like a great plan,” I said, and he smiled at me. I told him about my other plans, how I had suggested to Addie that we could work together, and he told me about a house he was renovating and how he and Connor were looking for the perfect mantel for the living room. After a while, it felt like whatever had been wrong between us was now ok, or at least mending.

Maybe things were still weird with my dad, and maybe they were bad with my brother. I was worried about Nicola giving birth and it hurting her, I was thinking that I wouldn’t want to leave Esme in daycare and how that would be an argument with my mother. I was considering that Addie did seem to think I was smart enough to run a business and I was also pretty sure that I could manage it, but what if I messed up her dream? And if I was talking about taking custody of this baby, would that make me her mother? I didn’t want to be anyone’s mother. That wasn’t the life I’d been working on for myself, not at all!

“Sophie?”

I looked over at Daniel. “Yes?”

“You ok?”

I leaned and rested my head against his arm, and I put my hand on the baby’s little leg. “I think so. I think I just need to keep my eyes on the prize.”

“That’s what I’m doing, too. Just keep plugging and have faith that it will work, eventually.”

I was going to try to hold onto that, but for right now, I was holding onto Esme. And onto him.