Threads of Hope: Quilts of Love Series (24 page)

“Nina, what’s wrong? Something, for sure. You won’t even go through a drive-through without being dressed.” She turned to Luke. “Maybe I should go with her . . .”

“No. I appreciate the thought, but no. I need to do this on my own, and I’ll tell you later. Just trust me.”

Nina pressed the doorbell, which wasn’t a bell at all. It sounded like a cattle prod. She pressed it again. And again. And again. Her parents were probably sitting within two feet of one another, each one waiting for the other to open the door.

“Hold ya horses out there.”

“Dad, it’s Nina. Open the door, please.”

“Why, Nina, what brought you—”

“Is mom home? I need to talk to you both.” She edged past her dad into the house. “Mom. Where are you?”

Sheila walked out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a frayed dishtowel. Nina recognized concern on her face, one she found at a fire sale.

“It’s not Sunday. And where would you be going dressed that way?”

“I think, mother, you might want to pay more attention to my emotional cues, not my yoga pants. Should it matter how I dress to go to my parents’ house? Were you expecting company?”

Her father patted his shirt pocket to check if he had his cigarettes. He quit smoking ten years ago, but the habit stayed. Especially when he felt uncomfortable or anxious. “Honey, what’s going on?”

“Let’s sit at the table,” said Nina. “I have something I want to show you.”

They sat, neither one of them taking their eyes off of her.

“I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to tell me the truth. The real truth. Not the truth with a spin on it. Or the one you want.”

“Nina, you’re being—”

“Actually, Dad, I’m being Nina. The one that’s been showing up at your house on Sundays? She’s the lie. It’s time for all of us to stop lying to one another.” The way their eyes darted back and forth between themselves and Nina, the perplexed expressions? Nina considered they may not know the truth themselves. But she was about to find out.

“What really killed Thomas?” Each word held its own weight and landed on the platform of Nina’s conviction.

“I can’t believe my own daughter . . .” her mother pushed her chair back from the table.

Nina would have tackled her if she tried to leave the conversation. “You’re not running away from this. And you didn’t answer my question.”

“Honey, why should she? You already know the answer,” said her father, pleading like a child.

“I know what you told me. But there’s more that you’re not.” She opened her iPad, found her notes, and handed the tablet to her parents. “Recognize those?”

Her dad reached in his empty shirt pocket. Her mother pushed the tablet back to Nina. “Do you know how much that hurts your father and me? Why are you making us look at all this? You know Thomas got sick, pneumonia, and died.”

“You’re not going to let go of that are you? Guess you’ve said it for so long, you believe it yourself.” Nina closed the iPad. “For the past two months, I’ve been writing a series for the twenty-fifth anniversary of The AIDS Memorial Quilt. I need to research HIV and AIDS because of the families I interviewed. And there they were. It’s not a coincidence that these symptoms were Thomas’s symptoms. Or that you wouldn’t let me go to the hospital. Or that you buried him without waiting for his friends or even some of your own relatives. Thomas died from AIDS.”

She watched her parents’ faces pale and shift until they bore almost the same expression Kelley’s did when she said, “What kind of mother lies about why her child died?”

“We wanted to protect you,” said her father. “Things were different then. Your mother and I didn’t really understand or know what AIDS was until the doctor explained it to us. Even then, we were in shock.”

“What did you think you were protecting me from? For all you knew, I could have used his toothbrush or shaved my legs with one of his razors . . . How was that keeping me safe?”

“Thomas made sure that didn’t happen, Nina,” said her mother, the exasperation evident in her voice. “We wanted to protect you from other people who might say things to you. What do you think would have happened to you at school if people knew your brother died from AIDS? Especially all those years ago, before people with HIV lived for decades. Even today, some people think you get AIDS from hugging or swimming or sharing food. What do you think people said then?”

“I don’t know. But Thomas was my only sibling, and I never had a chance to tell him good-bye.” Nina didn’t try to stop herself from crying. “Were you ever going to tell me?”

Her parents looked at each other. Her father clasped his hands on the table. “I don’t think so. We didn’t want it to change the way you saw your brother.”

“Why because of the AIDS or that he was gay or both?”

Nina’s father leaned back in his chair and stared at his daughter. For the first time in years, Nina witnessed the man inside the shell he’d become.” If you don’t believe us, I guess I would understand. But your brother wasn’t gay. His first year in college, his friends made fun of him because he was a virgin. They all went out drinking one night, and the next morning he wasn’t alone in his room. She called him three months later to tell him she’d tested positive for AIDS.

“Guess you can understand how easy it is to make assumptions about people with HIV and AIDS. Even with all your research and interviews, you thought your brother was gay. That’s exactly what we were trying to protect you from . . . people like you.”

Paloma, that bow is almost as large as my daughter’s head. Are you sure about that? I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep the butterflies out of it.”

She laughed so much that even he and Jazarah joined in. “She will be very chic. This is a gift from your sister, so I am certain she would never select anything to make your daughter look like a bumpkin.”

Greg arrived at Nina’s house, unbuckled Jazarah, lifted her out of her car seat, and onto the sidewalk. He smoothed her pink smocked sundress and adjusted her pink bow just slightly off-center as Paloma showed him. “Okay, hold daddy’s hand and let’s go meet Nina and Manny.”

Hearing Manny bark, Jazarah pushed in a bit closer to Greg. Nina opened the door, and Greg realized he hadn’t checked the affection protocol for child of single dad meeting . . . what was Nina? Surely not girlfriend and boyfriend. That might have worked ten years ago. Or longer. More than a friend, less than a fiancé? The complications were exhausting, which was why many single parents stayed home, popped popcorn, and rented DVDs. Just gave up dating until the kids hit high school or older.

Lately, though, with Nina in his life, Greg considered himself one of the fortunates. Since Nina continued to say yes, Greg assumed she enjoyed his company as well. He prayed she continued to want to be with him, but he trusted that God had a path. He just needed to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

For now, all he had to do was walk forward to Nina and feel the curve of her cheek in his hand as he kissed her on the forehead. His daughter, still held his hand, but leaned as far as she could without letting go to peek at Manny, resting in his crate.

Nina crouched down to eye-level with Jazarah, introduced herself as a friend of her daddy’s, and offered her hand for a handshake. Which she promptly took and pulled Nina closer and hugged her neck. Greg felt as concerned as he did comforted. Though Greg told Paloma she had to stay until she was ninety, he knew the day would come when his daughter’s nanny might want to have a life somewhere else with someone else. He tried not to think about it because the separation for all of them, but especially for Jazarah, would be brutal. Yet, his relationship with Nina, while he wanted it to be more, was still, what did Elise call it, marinating. “Sooner or later, you have to get cooking,” she said.

When Greg and Jazarah moved closer, Manny thumped his tail, and stayed perfectly still while Jazarah’s little hand wiggled through the sides to pet him. She smiled at her father. “I yike him,” she announced.

“I yike him, too,” said Nina.

“Thanks, Manny,” Greg whispered as they started to leave. “Tell the puppy good-bye,” he said to his daughter. She turned and smiled sweetly and waved at the dog. “Bye-Bye, Ne Na.”

Nina smiled. “The kid’s got my number already.”

“Definitely not just a kid’s place,” Greg said, awed by the simulated tropical rainforest that was the Cockrell Butterfly Center. A fifty-foot waterfall fell from the top of the three-story glass building that housed a lush pathway lined with exotic plants and flowers from top to bottom. Butterflies were everywhere, hundreds of them . . . like finely drawn artwork dripping with color flying around and through and over and under foliage and people and sprays from the waterfall.

Nina asked Jazarah if she could remove her bow. Greg waited to see if there would be a standoff. “Your bow is so beautiful, a butterfly might think it was a flower and not be able to get out. And that would be sad.” Nina summoned a woeful expression as she spoke, and the performance paid off. Off came the bow, which she held as they walked along the path, and waved away a few curious butterflies.

Three floors of butterflies was Jazarah’s limit, especially when one landing on her hand sent her into ambulance siren mode. When Greg suggested lunch, she applauded. He told Nina, “Guess that means it’s time to eat.”

They walked to a nearby deli for sandwiches, Jazarah between them, holding her hands and swinging her over cracks in the sidewalk. Greg appreciated how relaxed Nina was with his daughter. Sometimes people without children tended to get crazed about things that didn’t matter. Things that, once you became a parent, you realized were insignificant. Like it wasn’t important to wake a sleeping child to put her jammies on. Sleeping in play clothes was not going to lower IQ points or permanently damage their self-esteem.

Jazarah invited Nina to help her color the maze on her placemat. Filling in the lines with her green crayon, Nina asked Greg questions about his relief work, and when he planned to start working full time at Dr. Maxwell’s clinic. Greg answered,
but Nina seemed distracted. Entirely too focused on staying inside the lines, and not focused enough on the conversation.

After his daughter lined up her chicken fingers with the “just right” squirt of catsup, Greg asked Nina if she wanted to join them next weekend at the Children’s Museum.

Nina chewed, sipped her tea, cleared her throat, and fluffed her napkin. There weren’t many other distractions available unless she aligned Jazarah’s French Fries with her chicken strips.

Greg swirled a fry in his daughter’s mountain of catsup and received a stern warning to not eat her food, “Mine,” she warned him, shaking a fry in his direction. She eyed him for a few more bites, then rearranged her pickle slices.

“Nina, did you hear me, about the Children’s Museum? Would you want to go? I thought we could ask Luke and Aretha to join us. For some reason, those places are just as much fun for adults who don’t have legitimate play time anymore.”

“I heard. I’m sorry,” said Nina. “I’m not sure yet if I’ll be able to do that . . .”

“No need to apologize. It’s wrong of me to assume you might not have other plans,” he said. Greg didn’t consider that she might be seeing someone else. Someone whose idea of an event didn’t include shopping in the make-believe grocery store and arguing over who ran the cash register.

She looked around like she’d dropped an answer on the floor somewhere. Clearly, she had something to tell him. “I didn’t plan to talk about this here.”

“Unless it’s something unfit for my daughter’s ears, it’s going to be here. You can’t look as if you just left a horror movie and expect me not to wonder what you saw there.”

“Then please don’t ask me any questions until I’m finished, okay?”

He nodded, and she began.

As Nina explained the offer she and Elise discussed, Greg felt like someone about to be pushed off a ledge. He couldn’t stop it, and he had no idea if there would be anything to hold on to on the way down. He controlled his voice so as not to alarm his daughter, but he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to maintain it for the entire conversation. “You’re moving to New York? As in the next week or so? I . . . I had no idea that was even on the menu.”