Chapter Eleven
Gray
The sun was high when Alicia made her way outside. She hadn’t come out often over the past month or so we’d been working on her property, but when she did, she garnered a lot of attention.
I thought her chosen attire had something to do with that.
As per usual, she sported the highest shorts imaginable, her navel showing with the sway and swish of a canary-yellow top that left her shoulders exposed due to the tiny straps. Hair bundled behind her head, she brought a tray of lemonade and cookies I knew she spent the morning making. The smell had wafted into the backyard through the kitchen window and caused my mouth to water most of the morning.
Taking a definitely unscheduled break, both the men and women left their stations and sprinted up to Alicia with her baked goods and cool beverages. They devoured the tray, bantering with her and making her laugh, and I could only shake my head as I rammed a nail into the roof from my position on the garage.
Pulling another from my teeth, I slammed the nail into a shingle, the sweat beading down my arms and to my knuckles.
Alicia’s… generosity was very nice. I didn’t particularly believe she enjoyed being outside, but she did come out to make sure the workers were cared for. Though nice, it was very much a distraction and messed with everyone’s pacing.
Especially mine.
I had to make sure everyone got back to work when all they wanted to do was laugh and talk after their work pace had been messed up.
I passed a glance in that direction, Alicia’s tray more than empty but my workers still talking to her. Some had gotten back to work, but a few remained. Eventually, our distracting guest went inside, but that didn’t keep a couple of the guys from lingering on—talking—and I was well aware what their gazes did after Alicia left from the backyard and back inside.
Borderline leering, their more than observant gazes travelled up the full extent of Alicia’s shapely bronzed legs and it took a couple howls of “back to work” before I could even get them to go back to their stations.
We can’t be doing this.
Not if she wanted us to finish that was, not if I wanted to finish.
Knowing it wasn’t possible for my kid to be here any more extended time than we were, I got down from the roof.
Many workers watched my back as I strode from the garage to the house. I didn’t say a word, but a look told them to mind their own business. They went back to their task and I pushed the screen door open, going inside. Alicia was at the kitchen sink, washing the empty tray of cookies she brought out and a few cups my people had siphoned down in front of her.
I cut the air into her space, her rose scent travelling around me within seconds of setting foot into the kitchen. She could fill the room with whatever perfume she wore. She often did with the soft scent. Sometimes I’d catch it outside, always on the wind.
“Hey,” she said to me, watching as I made my way over to her. She smiled. “Sorry I didn’t make it over to you. Everyone cleaned me out before I could get to the garage.”
I had no idea what she was talking about at first.
Right, her cookies.
Precisely the reason I came into the kitchen, to tell her about that and the distraction of them.
“It’s all right,” I said to her, not wanting to come off as an asshole, but we really needed to get our work done out there. I bunched my hair in my hand. “Can I talk to you about that? The cookies?”
“Did you want me to make more? I can.”
God, no.
I raised a hand. “Actually, I’d like it if the cookies, at least their frequency, stop for a while. It’s getting distracting and it’s hard to get everyone back to work after you leave.”
There, I said it. I put it out there and it all sounded reasonable enough.
So why did her expression sock me like a mallet to the chest?
It was like I told her Santa wasn’t real or something with the way her expression fell and I nearly wanted to take back what I said.
Her gaze severed from me.
“I wasn’t aware of that,” she said, plucking a cup out of the sink before washing and rinsing it. “I’m sorry. I won’t do that so much.”
I should be grateful for what she said.
So why did I suddenly feel like an asshole?
She made me feel that way a lot when I was around her, but of no fault of hers. I just didn’t know how to talk to her, act around her. She threw me off when we were in the same room and my reaction was always clipped and abrasive because of it.
Silently, I stood there while she rinsed the rest of her dishes. I thought I should probably apologize for the way I came off, but I noticed her attention passed both me and the situation.
Drying, she stood in the middle of the kitchen with a glass and rag in her hand. From her position, she could see right into the living room.
We both could see my daughter.
Laura had taken to the piano again, her hands hovering over the keys this time, but not in front of herself. She stretched them to where Jo usually played.
“Gray?”
I barely heard Alicia’s voice I was so focused on my kid, and had I not been, I might have been able to anticipate what she asked me next.
One of my worst nightmares.
“Where is her mom?” she asked.
Where. Is. Her. Mom.
“Laura’s,” she pushed when I didn’t answer her quick enough I imagined. She lowered her drying towel and her dish, her finger playing along the top of the glass.
“She’s irrelevant,” I stated, the best I could do by a first response. She’d caught me off guard.
Alicia, though in our short weeks of knowing each other, had never once asked anything personal about myself or my kid. She had many opportunities to, but she never did.
Really, she should have let it all go after that, the topic of Laura’s mom. The information wasn’t her business and I didn’t feel comfortable discussing the matter with her—essentially a stranger.
But then I guess that would have made it all easier, wouldn’t it?
Grabbing the glass, she looked at me before placing it into the cabinet above the counter.
“Irrelevant,” she stated, as if testing the word. She grabbed another dish, drying before looking up at me. “Irrelevant?”
I wished to escape those eyes at the moment. She shouldn’t mess with this, especially with my daughter right in the next room.
We didn’t talk about her mom, Laura and me. We didn’t need to and that was understood, but Alicia didn’t know this, the can of worms she was attempting to open here.
Moving away from her, toward the door, I opened it to the backyard.
“The topic of Laura’s mom is a moot point because the woman is irrelevant,” I told her, the snip in my voice readily known to me. I moved my jaw. “She’s not in our lives and hasn’t been for a long time—”
“Does that mean she’s alive or…” Alicia’s voice came down as she made the journey to me by the screen door. “I don’t mean to butt in or step where I shouldn’t here.”
But she was. She was and quite frankly, the place in which she was speaking out of turn did nothing but unsettle me—as well as piss me off.
The words flew form my lips before I could stop them and because they had I couldn’t take them back.
“She was abandoned,” I said, nostrils flaring. “If you must know, the mother of my kid didn’t want her child. She left her, tossed her away like she was trash.”
I spoke too much, but I couldn’t quit.
Why couldn’t I stop?
“That’s what makes her irrelevant,” I went on, more emotion in my voice than I liked. I pushed my hand across my lips. “And I need to go back to work.”
I pushed the door open so quickly Alicia’s hair breezed back. I’d never forget the expression on her face when I left her standing there by the screen door. The shock was evident.
But the sadness trumped it ten times over.
I had no idea if it had been sadness for Laura, me, or just the situation we were both currently in. In a different reality, I might have accepted that sadness for me. I might have had our situation not been my fault, which it was. Laura’s mom had definitely abandoned us both.
But it had only been to take a shot at me.
My thoughts, wild and angry at no one but myself, I tossed around tools and hammered at the structure too long before I finally came out of it, finally understood what I said and who I said it to. Alicia had only asked questions, honest ones because she was human. I never spoke about anything in regards to my family and she was naturally curious.
And she definitely didn’t deserve what she’d gotten.
Shaking my mallet, I took an unsteady breath. I’d gone off on her/reprimanded her literally twice today, each of which had been uncalled for. Knowing that, I got off the roof of the garage again, hoping to find her in the kitchen though not surprised when I didn’t find her there. Too much time had passed.
A glance into the living room, I spotted Laura still steadfast in her position at the piano. I left her there, then backpedaled through the kitchen and into the hallway, my intent to take the stairs and find Alicia on the second level. I planned to apologize to her amongst other things.
I didn’t make it past the first step.
Something about that hallway, a change in the air or something made me look. I needed to look in the direction of my kid, feeling the necessity of that.
Letting go of the banister, I found something I’d never seen, not just my daughter in there but Alicia too.
She wasn’t two feet away from my kid.
Laura’s head angled in Alicia’s direction, she watched the woman, Laura’s hand sliding away from Jo’s area of the piano and I left the staircase, not knowing what Alicia was trying to do but definitely feeling the need to put a stop to it. She knew the situation at hand. She knew she couldn’t approach Laura or talk to her but something about the moment had the woman ignoring the warning. She stepped lightly toward Laura, softly, then suddenly her hand was on the piano.
She was playing the piano beside her.
My breath, all wind seemly knocked out of me, left me dry, a sucker punch to the gut literally leaving me with more air. I knew I needed to move, but I couldn’t.
I watched, watched my little girl’s shoulders tense as someone was clearly getting in her personal space. Shifting, Laura looked as if she suddenly might flee.
But then she didn’t. She stopped. She listened like I was currently doing.
I couldn’t help it, the notes, the playing, so beautiful. It’d been like that day I first heard the notes after Josephine had passed. I thought I’d been losing my mind and it’d been Jo playing, my head tossing tricks at me.
It hadn’t been Jo. It’d been this woman, her niece playing an older woman’s piano like an angel.
Struck silent by it all, I watched, my daughter in awe as I was. Her shoulder’s relaxing, she moved not an inch as Alicia got closer to her, her gaze on the keys and not Alicia. She let Alicia come near her, her notes sounding through the room like a gift from the heavens. That’s when I realized they were a gift.
Alicia
I didn’t know how long I played that afternoon, how long it took for my hands to finally perspire and my brow shortly before. I was unaware of a cramp in my hands until it was there, nor the stiffness that rode in an achy wave across the length of my back. These things just all of a sudden seemed to appear, the music the same. I knew I was producing it. I knew that much but after a while I disconnected from my hands and their role in the creation of the music. Oddly enough, once upon a time, my parents believed I might do something with all the years of piano lessons behind me. I’d gotten quite good and probably could have gone to a prestigious school such as Juilliard or somewhere else quite equally proficient. That hadn’t been the life I chose and the playing ended up falling to the wayside. I enjoyed tinkering with it all once in a while and did have a keyboard at home for such days, but usually for the most part, I didn’t play. That had been another life.
No, I didn’t remember how long I played that day in the old house of a woman who’d since passed, but I did remember that moment I finally sat down. When I sat next to a child who had been motherless for who knew how long for. Gray had been elusive about those details about Laura, not surprising as that’s just how he was. He didn’t let on about himself on a personal level or even a cosmetic level. He didn’t let on at all, himself and his daughter a world of privacy I never thought to understand before. It hadn’t been my place, and though it still wasn’t now, I couldn’t ignore what he did allow me to hear. He and his daughter were alone in this world in the sense they were shy a third party I had twice in my life.
His little girl didn’t have a mom.
That had been enough for me I guessed. It’d been enough to impulse me to do something I never usually do. I played piano again and I played for a little girl who seemed to not only love it, but also breathe because of it. She didn’t shy away from me when I had sat on the piano bench beside her. If anything, she welcomed me to it, a place beside her needing to be filled. I knew it to have once been by my aunt.
“She doesn’t get along with a lot of people…”
She probably wouldn’t, would she? A quiet little thing that most people wouldn’t or didn’t bother to understand. My aunt must have taken that time in the passing moments underneath this roof. She must have been there and let the earth move around them.
Laura had to be just as stiff as I was, her head angled and her long and flowing locks breezing across the piano keys on her side. If she was uncomfortable, she didn’t voice the fact. She probably wouldn’t in the end.
I continued to play, never looking too long at her before staring off above the piano. I watched the sun travel down over the trees, the air change and turn to a soft breeze instead of thick with heat. I listened to the sounds of the workers outside dim down until there was no trace of them at all. I listened until it was just me, playing tunes through both muscle memory and the titles filtering in my brain. I had dozens upon dozens in there locked away, ready to pluck for the most opportune moment.
That moment must have been now, the perfect time to play and feel. I only stopped playing when a little hand moved into my designated zone, the sound from the key I last stroked fading off into the dimly lit room. I never turned on the lamps in the house after it’d gotten dark, but in the end, someone must have.
Laura’s hand stroked above the keys I last played and when she looked up at me, I saw something in her both large and vibrant brown eyes I hadn’t before. I saw something of a change, a life there I realized in that moment I had never seen. It was like not noticing something was there until one saw it. I saw it now.
I saw her now.
Something strummed heavy in my heart upon catching it and that something made me want to play for forever and an hour. I wanted to play so the life in this little girl’s eyes would never leave.
The room lay silent after my last stroke. I allowed the tunes to fade out in the wide living room, Laura and I both sitting there on the piano bench. I think we might have sat there forever if not for a voice, Gray.
He’d called his daughter from somewhere in the house and when she heard her name called her feet touched the floor.
Turning, I realized someone had indeed turned on the lights in my aunt’s living room, a single lamp lighting our way into the evening. We really had played for a while, no sounds in the room and dusk settling outside.
I could see it from beyond the piano, the workers gone for the day and myself all alone. A creak in the floor had me turn around and I rose to the sight of Gray, Gray and Laura.
His hand holding hers, he must have found her, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at me.
I stood from the piano bench, his gaze moving with me. He said nothing and made no moves toward me, his deep-blue eyes focused, yet soft in my direction. Squeezing Laura’s hand, he guided her out the front door before I could get to the pair. I might have followed them out had I not seen the note by the door.
I assumed it was from him, reading it as I heard his truck pull away outside. It didn’t say much, cementing how a man of few words he really was, but that didn’t take away any of the meaning from them.
Nor how they made me feel.
“Thank you.”