Our Song Page 5

  She nodded absently. “I was thinking . . .”

  “And?” This was it. He saw the other shoe, high over his head, poised to come crashing down.

  “You said you had Andie all day, every day . . .”

  “Yes?” The shoe came in a little closer.

  “Well, my kids are at day care on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I could take Andie for part of the day on Mondays and Wednesdays.” She clarified with the usual it’s-no-trouble and I-have-my-kids-anyway and what’s-one-more?

  JD just stared.

  How could he turn down free time? It wasn’t free. That was it. “I’d love to, but I could never re-pay you in hours.”

  Her hand moved toward him, palm up. “You don’t have to. Not for those days.”

  “Why not? I don’t get it.” He fiddled with the tab on his coke for a moment. “Why are you doing all this for us?”

  “It’s not just for you.” She set down her own drink, and her hands made the beginnings of several different gestures before catching each other and sitting, calm in front of her. “My kids like Andie. I haven’t been the best mother to them, and she’s really—”

  “You are shitting me.” He stood up. “You’re super-mom. You guys are all glued together. Your kids listen and speak politely and don’t throw their dinner plates. So what else do you need? A plaque?”

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes found designs in the ceiling and the floor tiles, but she didn’t answer. A full minute dragged by, and just as he was certain that she had decided that he should leave, she spoke. “The family of five that bought that mini-van is the one in the pictures in the living room.”

  He eyed her askance then went to check out the photos. He’d seen them, but not examined them. He didn’t have to. They were of the happy, all-American family: mom Kelsey, blonde-haired blue-eyed dad, two happy kids, and a woman who had to be Kelsey’s mother. On closer inspection all he saw was more of the same.

  Kelsey just pointed. “That’s my Mom. She died three years ago.”

  Kelsey pointed again, this time to Dad. “And that’s my Andy. He died last year. We lived in D.C., in this little house my mother had bought. Andy died the day after I mailed the last house payment.” He could see her head tilt as she thought. “All the shrinks told me it was the wrong thing to do, but I sold the house, packed the kids up, and moved here.”

  “Did you want to become a singer or something?”

  She smiled, her hair sliding across her shoulders as she shook her head. “I was so sad that for a long time I was barely able to get food on the table on a regular basis. I’ve just been functioning, not being.”

  That sure explained the look in her eyes, and the way she laughed, almost like she felt bad about doing it. JD looked at the photo again. “I guess when you love someone like that it just holds you and doesn’t let go.”

  A cloud slipped over her expression, as quick as if it had always been there. Then, as fast as it came, the cloud slipped away and the photo was forgotten. “Is that why you’re here? Because it’s music city?”

  He laughed and turned back to the kitchen to toss his soda can in the trash. “I’m from Texas and I moved to Nashville and I’m in a band. Take your best guess.”

  “Are you guys country?”

  He shrugged. “We’re some sort of fusion. We’re too country to be pop, too pop to be punk, and too punk to be country.”

  “So you really have your own niche.”

  He wanted to laugh, then howl at the moon. That was the nicest way he had ever heard it put that, no matter how good they were, no one was going to take them.

  Just like that, the caffeine expired on him, and he was dead tired on his feet. He wouldn’t even get to sleep in. Andie would be up and breaking things with the sun. The clock read a quarter after one. Which meant he had maybe five hours to sleep, and that was if Andie didn’t wake up howling.

  Kelsey read him, she seemed very good at that, just watching what was going on around her and stepping in. “Tomorrow’s Wednesday. We usually get started around nine. If you want to bring her by between nine and ten, I’ll return her by three or four.”

  She didn’t say anything else, just padded off in her bare feet and returned a few minutes later cradling a sleeping Andie. He took the weight from her, and thanked her again.

  Softly, she closed the door behind him. As he watched, lights went off in the house, one by one, and he imagined her flipping each switch and looking in on her kids.

  Andie slept even though the streetlights glared harsh on her features. They rounded the cinderblock wall, JD with his daughter heavy in his arms, as he wondered how he’d come to be here. Two months ago he would never have taken a bet that he would have a five-year-old who wasn’t even his. Or that, in spite of that fact, he wouldn’t be able to let her go.

  He struggled to unlock the back door with the weight of her still precariously in his arms. But he got it done.

  JD knew he was going to set Andie down and then be lucky if he made it to his own bed before he collapsed. He poured every last effort of the night into getting both of them up the stairs. Just before he got to her room, she turned, still sound asleep, and snuggled into him.

  Chapter 5

  Andie was making progress, Kelsey thought. But not for JD, apparently. Which was a damn shame. It didn’t really matter in the end if Andie liked her and her kids. It mattered how she liked JD and how they got along. Because one day JD and Andie would pull up roots; they would stop renting that condo and get a place of their own. Kelsey suppressed a sigh at that thought.

  The kids played together in the backyard, and she heard snippets of conversations they had. They played ‘death’ far more than was usual. But Kelsey wasn’t going to haul the kids to a shrink over that crap. The way she figured it, they needed to play ‘death’: each of these kids had lost a parent, tragically, and at a very young age. Any reasonable coping skills were fine by her standards.

  “Mom.” Daniel protested, but only his mother would have known he was upset. “Andie says we don’t pull a sheet over her head.”

  Kelsey wasn’t getting in the middle of that one. “It happens the way you all decide together. So wake Andie up and ask her what she thinks, and the three of you all talk it out.” She turned her gaze back to Glamour magazine, in a constructed effort to force the kids to work out their own issues. She, on the other hand, would work out the issues of long-wearing blush. 5 Great Tricks to Try in Bed Tonight sounded like fun, but about as useful as a white elephant.

  It was close to three forty-five, and that meant JD would be here any minute to get Andie. If only there were articles in Glamour about how to get kids to connect with the parent they didn’t know.

  “Mom! We decided we need cookies!” Allie jumped in front of Kelsey, certain to get her attention. “Can I go get them?”

  “Yes, but they stay closed until you get back out here if you want to have any.” It was all she could do to stifle the simultaneous laugh and sigh of relief that wanted to force its way out. It would all be okay if the resolution to a game of ‘mortuary’ was that everyone needed cookies.

  The chain link that ran along the side yard rattled behind her, startling her into early next week, and she almost dropped her soda.

  “Can I come in?” JD stood on the other side of the fence, fingers grasping the links. His gaze darted from one kid to another.

  “JD!” Allie shrieked as she bounded up to him. “We get to have cookies!”

  “That sounds great. Can I come over?”

  Allie nodded with a slow exaggerated lift of her head.

  JD rattled the fence again until Kelsey looked up. He was in his usual uniform: old jeans, old sneakers, old t-shirt. He even had an old grown-out haircut that sometimes dipped over one eye and was starting to make ducktails at the back. Maybe it was a ‘band thing’.

  He should have looked like such a kid, but somehow he didn’t really. At least he looked better rested than he had this morning. She suspected tha
t he dropped Andie off most mornings and went back home and went to sleep. All he ever said was that he was ‘working’. Not that she knew what an amateur band boy did for work.

  “Can I come over, or should I walk around?”

  She raised her eyebrow at him. “It’s a seven-foot fence. You’re just going to come over?”

  “Sure,” and with that he reached up, easily grabbing the top bar and wrapping his hand around it. While the kids stood watching with glee, he kicked over the top, then hopped effortlessly to the ground.

  Kelsey told herself he was a kid. “Allie, I think that man deserves a cookie.”

  Allie peeled the bag open, handing an Oreo to JD, then eyeing her mother. “I deserve one, too.”

  She nodded. “I think we all do. Two each, maybe.”

  There were squeals all around. Allie handed out cookies, Daniel asked if JD would teach him how to do that, Kelsey intervened so that JD didn’t say ‘yes’ and she didn’t have to say ‘no’. Only Andie didn’t have anything to say to her father. She ate her cookies quietly, then headed up into the little fort atop the wooden jungle gym.

  No, she definitely wasn’t improving for JD.

  He sat on the edge of the picnic table, looking after his daughter with a longing that he tried to keep hidden. Even so, Kelsey couldn’t bear to look at him. Andie surely didn’t know what a kind word from her would mean to this man who had turned his world upside down for her. Kids could be so casually cruel. It was a hard lesson she had had to learn repeatedly with her own Andy.

  She was a master at cleaning it up, too. “So what did you do today?”

  JD looked away from the fort as he polished off the last cookie. “Wrote some music, made some money.”

  “Can I ask, what is it you do to make money? Or should I not?” She only at the last moment realized she might not like the answer.

  He laughed. “I literally made some money today.”

  “You counterfeit?!”

  “No!” He threw his head back and she could see the laughter as well as hear it. “I invest my savings and live off the proceeds. I spend a few hours each day watching the stock market.”

  “Then why . . .?” Why was he barely making ends meet? Why didn’t he just get a real job?

  The air left him. “Because I don’t want to. I won’t touch my principle investment, so I’m not making all that much.” He looked himself up and down with new eyes. “I don’t know what you see when you look at me. But I did that other life. I wore a suit every day,”

  He had to see her eyebrows rise.

  “I bought a high-rise condo in Dallas with chrome and granite, but I was too busy working to make the payments. Later I realized that I didn’t enjoy what I was doing. And when I decided I might quit, I left work immediately to run the idea by my girlfriend. Only thing is, I arrived home to find she’d let herself in and was making use of the granite countertop for the first time. She was using it to run lines of coke.”

  Her eyebrows went higher.

  “So I sold the place, took the meager profit, and headed to music city to try my hand at song writing. That was three years ago in December.” He looked at her and waited while she digested.

  That was not the story she had expected from JD. So she said the only thing that was still in her brain. “You wore a suit? Every day?”

  He laughed again. “Yes, even most weekends.”

  She couldn’t hide it. She tried, but the shock of it all had to be plain across her face.

  “Close your mouth, Kelsey.”

  She did. Then she opened it. “So, if I gave you a wad of my cash you could make it grow?”

  “I don’t work in cash. It’s all e-money.” He looked uncomfortable, and her first instinct was to soothe. But her first instincts had gotten her here, and here didn’t include Andy anymore. She didn’t have to tiptoe around JD. He would weather it if she asked a question he didn’t like. And it was time Daniel got over being so soft-spoken. She knew it was the remnants of having a father who flew off the handle at no provocation, and a surrogate mother who worked to keep the tantrums from happening.

  “So, if I gave you e-money?”

  “I could, but . . .”

  Okay, that was it. That was the boundary of New Kelsey. Maybe tomorrow she’d push further.

  He changed the subject, and not very deftly either, but she let him. “We went to church yesterday.”

  “Oh, how was it?”

  The left side of his mouth pulled up, and for the first time she realized he hadn’t shaved today. “I remembered why I quit going.”

  “Oh, no.” She loved church, and for the life of her could only vaguely comprehend that other people didn’t find it as soothing as she did. “Why was that?”

  “The service was partially in Latin. The part I understood was mostly about how bad I was being. Although I did figure out why they stand up to sing so much—It’s to keep me from falling asleep. Right as I would work up a good doze, I’d have to stand up and sing again.”

  “Don’t you like singing?”

  He shook his head. “I think I described my band as vaguely punk. So while I like singing, I don’t think what they did is going to cut it for me. I won’t be joining the choir anytime soon.”

  That gave her a fit of giggles. It was all she could do to contain the mental picture of JD, darkly handsome and equally wicked-looking in a choir robe, singing sweet hymns.

  “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up.”

  He stood to stretch and called out for Andie to come, it was time to go home.

  Kelsey could see on his face, even as he spoke, that he was bracing himself for the response.

  It didn’t come.

  He tried again, and again Andie pretended deafness.

  Kelsey fought her urge to jump in and help. It was like watching a baby colt learn to stand—necessary, but painful. Only this colt never seemed to get up.

  “Andie!” He stood right behind his daughter, having looked in the entryway of the fort. But still she didn’t respond. She put on quite a show and didn’t even flinch at the sharp edge in his tone.

  Kelsey couldn’t stand it any longer. “Allie, Daniel, we’re going inside now.”

  Her kids said good-bye to Andie and headed in the back door. They didn’t tell him to have a good evening, or even anything so simple as ‘good-bye’. Of course they wouldn’t. She realized as she ushered them inside, they had lived under the shadow of Andy’s disease. A little tension and they would jump when they were told, trying not to speak unless spoken to. And she suddenly felt like a horrible parent for letting Andy’s illness take them all over like that.

  Allie was starting to come out again, but Daniel had lived under it longer, and Andy was his father. In that moment, Kelsey realized that it wasn’t just the kids, but her, too. She had to make the effort to bloom, she had to show her kids how it was done, so they could do it for themselves.

  Andie’s scream pierced her ears, and Kelsey could have sworn that she heard the windows rattling. “You’re not my Daddy.”

  Kelsey turned so cold inside at the thought—how much longer could JD hold out against that onslaught before he yelled back, “That’s right, I’m not”? Not that she thought he’d do it, but she herself had said many just as harmful things when pushed to breaking.

  He didn’t say it. His voice was low and stern, though she couldn’t hear the words.

  Lord only knew what the neighbors were thinking as Andie screamed. “Kelsey will be my Mom! I don’t need a Daddy.”

  Kelsey felt her eyes squeeze shut.

  “Mom, what’s wrong?” Daniel looked up at her, the small knit in his brows telling her he was afraid.

  She was ready to brush him off, tell him it was all okay, before she realized he deserved more credit. “I’m scared about Andie and JD.”

  He nodded solemnly. “Me, too.”

  Allie had wandered off, happily oblivious to the turmoil around her. But it had always run deeper in Daniel. “What makes you
scared?”

  “She doesn’t love him. She wants a Mommy. He’s her Daddy, and she thinks Daddies are bad.” He shrugged. “Are all Daddies bad?”

  Kelsey was certain her heart broke into at least fifty pieces right then. “No baby. Your Daddy wasn’t bad, he was sick.”

  “He didn’t seem sick.” Daniel eyed her that way every time she used the term to apply to Andy.

  “He was sick in his brain.” She sighed as she scooped him up, realizing even then just how heavy a six-year-old was. “It did make him seem pretty bad at times, though, didn’t it?”

  Daniel nodded. “Is JD a bad Daddy?”

  “No, he’s a really good one. He’s trying really hard; he didn’t even know he was a Daddy until a while ago.”

  He frowned. “How did he not know he was a Daddy?”

  She smiled but she wasn’t touching that one. “Pop Tart, that’s a story for another day. Tell me, why does Andie think Daddies are bad?”

  Daniel shrugged even as he squirmed to be put down. “She just does.” Then the moment of lucidity was gone and he was six again. He ran off.

  Kelsey stopped, her spine stilled in that sudden feeling that something isn’t right. She breathed deeply, and listened to the house around her, Daniel yelling at Allie.

  And that was it. That was what was wrong. Daniel had yelled at Allie. But really that was so right. He was six, his sister was almost four. They were supposed to yell at each other.

  Maybe Andie’s temper tantrums were having at least one good effect.

  Kelsey looked out the window to see what had happened to Andie and JD, but they were gone.

  Chapter 6

  That Wednesday, When JD picked Andie up, Kelsey invited the two of them swimming with her and her kids on Friday. Andie accepted for herself, but graciously declined for JD.

  “Andie, we can’t go without JD.”

  “Yes, we can.” At least it was stated factually and not rudely.

  “No, we can’t.” Before Andie could protest, Kelsey put up her hand and explained. “Daniel and Allie and I usually go on Mondays, but we haven’t been able to because there are now too many kids for one adult. So we need JD if we’re going to go.”