Chapter 9

Tim

I sit at Denise’s kitchen table as the midmorning sun shines through the window over the sink, leaving a streak of light right across my plate of half-eaten eggs and bacon. I take a sip of coffee and watch as Sam awkwardly scoops eggs up with the fork in his left hand.

“You’re getting better at using your left hand,” I tell him. He looks up at me with a grin, and I wink back.

“You’ll be so good with that left hand,” Denise says as she leans in and tweaks his nose, “that you’ll be switch hitting this baseball season.”

“What’s switch hitting?” Sam asks as he takes a bite of bacon.

“It’s where you can hit both left and right handed,” I tell him.

“That would be cool,” he says, looking far more serious as he takes his fork up again in his left hand and navigates it through the eggs. “Will Holly come watch some of my games?

I blink in surprise at the innocent and completely unprovoked question. When I glance over at Denise, she gives me a knowing smile. We talked the other day about Holly while Sam was taking a nap. I told her everything about Holly’s father—who she called a slime-bag prick—and what Holly did to get away from him and his evil ways. Denise remembered well my relationship with Holly in high school. She was only two years older than me, living at home while she attended a local community college. Holly was a frequent visitor at our house when we were together, and she and Denise had become close. When Holly broke up with me, Denise never had bitter feelings toward her the way I did. In fact, she had told me she was convinced there was something nefarious going on we didn’t know about because that would be the only reason Holly would break up with me.

Me, being the dumbass that I was at eighteen, couldn’t see it and wasn’t as open minded about the situation as Denise had been.

Now, she is sort of enjoying rubbing my nose in the pile of hindsight. But that’s okay by me… I’m happy to know that Denise has been right about Holly all these years.

Denise’s lips curve into a smirk and she nods her head toward Sam, indicating that I need to address the “Holly situation” with him.

“Holly might visit us in New York during your baseball season,” I tell him carefully. “I’m sure she’d love to come to one of your games.”

“Will we come back to visit her?” he asks, even as his brow is furrowed in concentration on his eggs.

“Maybe,” I tell him. “You want to visit Holly again?”

“She’s nice,” he says absently, now finding his eggs a bit more interesting than talking about yucky girls.

“Hey Sam,” I say gently but with enough firmness to get his attention. His eyes come up to mine, his fork stilled on the plate. “You know Holly and I use to be really good friends a long time ago, right?”

He nods at me, but not clearly understanding why this is an important subject.

“Well… I like Holly a lot. And she likes me, and she really likes you. So, she’s thinking about moving to New York… so we can see a lot more of her.”

“Cool. She can come to all of my games then,” Sam says, and then the subject is immediately forgotten as he turns back to his plate.

I glance over at Denise, and she’s clearly enjoying my awkwardness in trying to explain that I have a serious girlfriend to my child. She gestures with her hand toward me to keep the conversation rolling, but before I can even think about what to say next, Sam turns back to me.

“Will she move in with us?” he asks suddenly. “The way David lives with Mommy at our house?”

David is the man that Bonnie has been seeing for almost two years now. He moved in about six months ago, and he’s a pretty decent dude. And I have to give him and Bonnie credit… they sat down with me and asked if it was all right first. But I had been around him enough at Sam’s various functions to know that first, he was a good guy, and second, that he loved Sam and Sam loved him in return. They haven’t discussed marriage, but I’m sure it’s on the horizon.

“I don’t know,” I tell Sam truthfully, because Holly and I didn’t talk about that. If I had my heart’s desire, fuck yeah… she’d move in with me. But I don’t know what she wants. “It depends on where she gets a job.”

If she gets a job, I think dismally to myself. I want her in New York like yesterday, but I recognize this could take quite a while to make the transfer. We talked well into the night about what opportunities there may be for her. She’d prefer an emergency room setting, but those options could be limited. She’d take a private practice position though, if she had to. I told her that I wanted her to wait for the perfect job, even if it killed me to be away from her a little bit longer.

“Well, it would be cool if she did,” Sam says. “Because Mommy was really happy when David moved in, and I know you’d be really happy if Holly lived with you.”

“Out of the mouths of babes,” Denise murmurs softly with a gentle gaze at Sam. We seem to say that a lot about that child of mine.

I swallow hard, because it’s amazing to me how a child’s pure soul can see through to things that we may be unwilling or unable to recognize. Sam takes a last bite of his eggs, and I nudge him on the shoulder. “Okay… how about you go get cleaned up. We need to get packed soon so Aunt Denise can take us to the airport.”

“Okay,” Sam says as he scoots away from the table.

As he trots down the hallway, I call after him, “And don’t forget to brush your teeth.”

He doesn’t respond but I hear him go into the bathroom, so I know he’s doing his dreaded duty.

“That kid is pretty amazing,” Denise says as she stands from the table to clear the plates. I pull my own back closer to me, intent on finishing my breakfast.

“Pretty close to perfect,” I agree.

Denise scrapes the remaining amount of food from the plates into the garbage can and starts to rinse them. I watch her silently, a thought bubbling in my head. We had always been close growing up—even closer when our parents died. Even though she’s only two years old than me, and we were both adults when our parents died, she couldn’t help but take on sort of a mothering role with me.

“Let me ask you something,” I say after I chew a bite of eggs.

“What’s that?” she asks without turning to look around at me, and instead opening the dishwasher.

“Do you think this is all too sudden? With Holly?”

“I don’t,” she says firmly. “You two were practically babies when you fell in love, and some would scoff that those feelings could carry over, but I disagree.”

Placing the last plate, she leaves the dishwasher open until I can finish my food but turns to face me, leaning back against the sink counter. Taking a towel, she wipes her hands. “I think young love… first love… it’s the truest form there is. It’s pure and uncorrupted by all the dark things we learn about later in life. I think it would only be perfectly natural for both of you to remember those feelings and fall to them pretty quickly. It was good stuff, right?”

Images of Holly and me together in high school flash before me. Holding hands while we walked, her laying her head in my lap while we studied on the Quad outside, long conversations on the phone late into the night, warmth and security from the way she would look at me, the sweet way we would make out, and the even sweeter way we had sex when we finally got up the mutual nerve to go all the way.

No… it wasn’t good. It was fucking amazing.

Those memories… feelings… experiences. They are all still there. They’ve been revived… bolstered by our new experiences this week.

“It feels right to you, doesn’t it?” Denise asks.

I give her a wide smile as I stand from the table, taking my plate over to the sink. “Yeah… it feels unbelievably right. I actually feel complete.”

Denise intercepts me, takes the plate from my hand. “Then I expect we will be having a wedding before too long.”

“Whoa… wait a minute,” I say quickly as I hold my hands up with a laugh. “Who said anything about marriage?”

“I did, you fool,” she says as she puts my plate in the dishwasher and closes it.

“Just because you think—”

“Tim… baby bro… you are built for marriage. You are the type of man that will love unconditionally and with his entire being once you find that one person who’s worthy of it. Bonnie, while I adore her, wasn’t the woman for you. Holly is. I know this, and you know this. I will lay money on it that you two will be married before the year is out.”

I just stare at her with my mouth hanging open, and yet… I can’t find anything within myself that wants to argue with her. The image of Holly in a wedding dress… Holly pregnant… Holly holding our baby.

Fuck, I want that.

And I want it bad.