Beneath the Night Tree (11 page)

It was the first time I had responded with more than a single word.

* * *

I longed to talk to someone about Parker’s sudden appearance in my online world, but the person I would normally run to was the last one I could ever tell. Though I shared everything with Michael, I wasn’t ready to baptize him with the full reality of loving a single mom. It seemed cruel, an unexpected splash of ice water in the face. Of course, we had endured our share of trials already—nap schedules when Daniel was little, jealousy issues as he got older, and blank stares from people when they heard my son call the man whose hand I held “Michael” instead of “Daddy.” But that sort of trouble seemed pale in comparison to the sudden appearance of Daniel’s deadbeat biological father.

If Parker wanted to worm his way back into our lives, it changed the landscape of everything. Michael, who had been a father figure to Daniel—and Simon, too—would be relegated to merely my boyfriend, a man who had no claim on the boys he had grown to love. And Parker, a virtual stranger, could enter our lives out of the blue and profess the title of birth dad. It wasn’t fair.

And it certainly wasn’t fair that I had to shoulder this alone.

I prayed for wisdom, for guidance, but God seemed tight-lipped. Or maybe He was just biding His time, following a schedule that I couldn’t access no matter how earnestly I begged to catch a glimpse of His agenda.

There was a time in my life when I would have waited. I would have worried, chewed my fingernails down to the quick, and obsessed about what people were thinking of me. But much had changed. I had faced my mother, forgiven her, and lost her again all in a span of a couple months. I had become a mother myself. I had more or less parented my brother through the same heartache I faced as a child—the abandonment of the woman who gave us birth. In some ways, Grandma was right. God was working in me, and I was no longer the sort of girl who just let life happen to her.

I decided that whether or not it would break my heart, it was time to tell Grandma about Parker. We were a family. We existed, for better or worse, together. And I had failed us by keeping Michael’s proposition to myself. I wouldn’t make the mistake of keeping secrets again.

My classes at the local tech school began the second week in September, and before I abandoned myself to the dash and scurry of work, family activities, and night class, I carved a couple hours out of my week for some one-on-one Grandma time. Mr. Durst was willing to let my schedule at Value Foods be flexible as long as I got everything done, and after I e-mailed Parker the final detail that had the potential to unleash the unknown—my son’s name—I worked through several lunch breaks so I could leave early on Friday. Grandma and I would have the rare chance to be alone before the boys got home from school.

Grandma wasn’t expecting me when I pulled into our winding driveway. She looked up from her roost in the garden, where she was plunging a narrow spade into one of our potato hills, and gave me an uncertain wave. I expected her to return to the task at hand while I parked and walked across the browning grass, but instead of thrusting her shovel back into the black soil, she folded her hands over the wooden handle and watched me come.

“What are you doing home at one?” she called when I was within earshot. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Fine.” I smiled, hoping that the sentiment reached my eyes.

“I thought you had to work until four.”

“I’ve been skipping lunch breaks, putting in some extra hours.”

She buttoned her lip on one side in an expression that I had learned long ago meant she was skeptical of my actions. More likely, she questioned my motives. “What for?”

I laughed. “What is this? twenty questions?”

“Something like that. It’s just unlike you to be home in the middle of the day.”

“I’d like to talk to you,” I said, skipping the trivialities so that I could get straight to the point. “I want to take you out for lunch.”

“I already had lunch.”

“You did not! You rarely have lunch when we’re not home. Maybe an apple or a leftover muffin from breakfast . . .”

“Fine.” Grandma leaned against the spade with a resigned sigh. I would’ve been bothered by her less-than-enthusiastic reception if it hadn’t been for the sparkle in her eye. “Let’s have lunch. But I don’t want to go out. We have fingerlings.”

I followed her gaze to the woven basket at her feet and marveled at the modest crop of diminutive potatoes. “I thought we needed to give them a few weeks yet,” I mused, bending to select one of the delicate yellow tubes. It was heavy for its size and crusted with a fine layer of dirt as dark and moist as used coffee grounds. I rubbed it off with my thumb.

“I decided to check this morning, and it turns out there are a few ready.” Grandma thrust the spade into the hill and came up with a fibrous root system and a harvest of potatoes that clung to the tangled vines like fat fish on a line. “This plant was more decayed than the others, so I dug here. For some reason it matured faster. Must be in just the perfect spot.”

“Must be,” I parroted, dropping to my knees so she didn’t have to. I loosed the potatoes from their moorings and placed them in the basket beside me. “I think that’s everything this plant has to offer.”

“Good enough. We’ll give the rest a bit more time.”

In the house, I sent Grandma to go clean up while I prepped the potatoes. They were small, golden cylinders, covered in knots and bumps like the fingers of an arthritic centenarian. I wondered for a brief moment if that was why Grandma loved them so. Maybe they reminded her of my grandfather. Maybe she couldn’t hold his hands anymore, but she could harvest little reminders of him every fall.

I scrubbed the potatoes gently and placed them in a pot of cool, salted water. They didn’t need much to dress them up—a quick boil and a dollop of Dijon mustard was more than enough to make them delicious. While the water began to simmer, I scoured the fridge and came up with some leftover chicken and enough spinach for two small salads.

By the time Grandma emerged from the bathroom, arms rubbed pink from fingertip to elbow and a bemused look on her face, there were two plates on the table all dressed with a piece of cold barbecue chicken and a pear and spinach salad drizzled in a vinaigrette I had whipped up in less than a minute. In spite of the solemn nature of our impromptu lunch date, I couldn’t help but admire my own domesticity. It was impossible to pinpoint the moment I grew up, but it had happened little by little, and I knew that no matter where life took me from here, I would always be equipped to care for my family. Grandma had taught me much.

“The potatoes will be done in a couple minutes,” I told her. “They’re pretty slender; they shouldn’t take long.”

“I’m still wondering why you’re home,” Grandma murmured so softly I wondered if she intended me to hear her or not. She seemed tired to me, as if we were sitting down to a late dinner after a long, exhausting day instead of a quick lunch in the early afternoon.

“I need you,” I whispered back.

She either didn’t hear me or chose to ignore my comment. I let it pass because I wasn’t even sure myself of what I meant by it and moved around the table to pull out a chair for her. At the last second, I found I couldn’t let go and ended up holding on to her arm as she lowered herself. My hardy grandmother had never needed assistance before, but this time she didn’t shoo me away or cluck at my overbearing attentiveness. In fact, I was troubled by the way she leaned into me, by the sudden give of her knees when she was inches above the uncushioned seat. The tiny sound that escaped her lips when bone hit wood was enough to nick a hole in my heart. I made a mental note to add chair pads to my next Wal-Mart list.

We didn’t say much as I drained the potatoes and separated them onto our plates. I grabbed mustard, salt, and pepper and poured tall glasses of cold milk. The entire time I bustled around the kitchen, I watched Grandma out of the corner of my eye. Her blinks were long, her head heavy. I almost wanted to skip lunch altogether and tuck her into bed.

I held her hand as I recited the Lord’s Prayer, feeling the fragility of her bone-thin fingers and wondering when my invincible grandmother had gotten so old. “You shouldn’t have been out in the garden,” I chastised her after I said
amen
.

“Why not?” She extracted her hand from mine and picked up her knife and fork. The first bite that she brought to her mouth was a sliver of new potato, bare and unadorned, still steaming.

“You seem really tired today.”

“I’ll take a nap after lunch.”

“Do you usually nap in the afternoons?”

Grandma’s timid shrug was enough to tell me that regular naps weren’t the only secret she was keeping from me.

“I’m glad you sleep,” I told her. “If you’re tired, I want you to rest.”

“I don’t sleep for long.”

“Of course not.”

I almost broached the topic of her health then and there, forsaking my reason for coming home early. But Grandma didn’t let me. “So,” she said, touching the corner of her mouth with a napkin, “to what do I owe the pleasure of your company this afternoon?”

For days I had been planning what I would say, practicing the words so that they would slip over my tongue like warm tea. It would be easier for her, I reasoned, if I was calm, confident. But the house was unnaturally quiet, and Grandma’s gaze inescapably weary. It scared me. I didn’t mean to, but I blurted out, “I don’t know what to do.”

“About Michael?”

And then I had no choice but to say his name. “No. About Parker.”

I expected her brow to tighten in confusion, but the way my lips formed the syllables of his nickname—as if I were holding shards of glass in my mouth—told her everything she needed to know.

“Daniel’s father?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“But I thought—”

“We’ve been in contact,” I interrupted, my words coming in a sudden rush. “He e-mailed me, and it was . . . not awful. It was nice. He apologized, and I felt sorry for him, so I wrote him back. Then he sent me another message and I sent him one, and it’s been going on for almost three weeks.”

“You’ve been talking to him for three weeks?” Grandma’s appetite must have left her because she pushed the plate away from her and put her hands on the table palms down. I assumed she did it to steady herself, but she began to run her fingers over the worn wood grain, tracing patterns and fitting her fingernails into divots where life had scarred our gathering place. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought that she hoped to divine answers from the knots and whorls.

“Not talking, not exactly . . .” I trailed off, but she didn’t prod me further, and I found myself rambling on. Telling her everything. Who Parker was, how we met. Why I thrilled at his attention in the beginning, and why I loathed him by the end. How Daniel reminded me of his dad every day. “But Parker has no right to Daniel,” I said, shaking my head as if to clear it. “He’s no daddy.”

“Yet he is Daniel’s father,” Grandma reminded me. Her first words in several minutes were the five-pointed tips of a throwing star. I had read once that the Japanese called their tiny weapons
shuriken
, “sword hidden in the hand.” And though I knew that my grandmother meant no harm, it pierced me to hear her say the very thing I feared.

I had known the truth before, pressed it down deep and tried to ignore it, but I could disregard it no more: Patrick Holt was about to reenter my life.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I breathed.

Grandma raised her hand to my face and let her fingertip trace my hairline, the curve of my jaw. She said simply, “You have to.”

All This Time

Grandma and I agreed on one thing when it came to Parker: I would never offer more than he asked. It wasn’t my responsibility to draw him in, to convince him that Daniel needed to know his biological father. It wasn’t my place to facilitate a loving father-son relationship. That one small concession was like a burden lifted; it gave me a reason to hope.

After our lunchtime conversation, I found myself praying without ceasing. Wasn’t that the sort of devotion I longed to achieve? And yet I knew that my desperate entreaties weren’t exactly the sort of communication God wanted from me.
Don’t let Parker ask; don’t let Parker ask . . .
hardly constituted meaningful interaction.

It didn’t work anyway.

Parker e-mailed me one more word on Saturday afternoon.
Please?
I knew precisely what he meant.

I endured a sick, gut-twisting feeling that left me breathless and dry-mouthed while Parker and I worked out the details. He offered to call me, had the gall to actually ask for my phone number, but instead of giving him the satisfaction of such an intimate connection, I insisted on continuing our pithy e-mail exchange.

In response to his monosyllabic plea, I wrote,
Next week Saturday, 10:00, Fox Creek Park, Mason, Iowa.
I had no idea where Parker lived or if it was even possible for him to make such a set rendezvous. Frankly, I didn’t care. If he wanted to make it, he would. If not, I had my answer.

He wrote back,
Where’s Mason?