Chapter Eighteen
CALLIE
I shifted to allow the sliver of light from the window behind me to illuminate the robot’s realistic expression—the skillful shading around his mouth and eyes. Brandon had been practicing. A lot. And he’d used many of the techniques I’d shown him in my studio. All those hours he’d spent cooped up at his grandmother’s garden club had likely pushed his creativity to the next level. And quite possibly to a few how-to YouTube channels, too.
“This is his character, the one he draws in every sketch he shows me.” I touched the robot’s upper body of grates and bolts and then the shadow work he’d done on the bot’s accordion-style arms and legs. “With the more complex layering work he’s done here and here, I’d guess this took him about eight or nine hours to complete. And that’s being conservative, given the fact that spray paint dries quickly.”
Davis side-eyed me. “You’re serious.”
“You know I am.”
At first his stare was unreadable, almost calloused, as if his mind wouldn’t allow him to see the display of talent behind me. And then slowly, a mosaic of emotions twisted Davis’s features, taking him from self-assured to self-accusing. A strange sort of sadness spread through me—I could only guess at his internal war. But as much as I wanted to fix his pain and patch the disconnection between him and his son, I knew I couldn’t. Not until Davis stopped seeing him for the kid he used to be and started acknowledging him for the young man he was becoming. The punklike attitude and the sneaking around was all a front for a bigger, more crucial issue, an issue I was finally starting to understand.
He scrubbed a hand down his face and took an uncertain step closer to the artwork.
“He uses color so well,” I admired. “Most beginners drench their designs with bright, imposing shades—much the way children do in their first coloring books. But like so many things in life, contrast is what draws us in. Draws us closer. Vibrant shades work best when they’re paired with a shade that makes them stand out. That pop of red in the robot’s hand—the can he’s crushing—it’s in perfect balance with the rest of his body.”
The bob of Davis’s throat made my own feel thick and strained.
“How did I miss this?” A question barely louder than a whisper. “I’ve never even seen him hold a can of spray paint. I figured the school thing was just a stupid prank, peer pressure or . . . I don’t know, a dare, maybe. This is just so hard to accept.”
I looked around the sparse room at the dozen laundry machines and DMV-style chairs. If Davis hadn’t ever seen Brandon with spray paint, then he must have hidden his supply somewhere inside the building. I tried the janitor’s closet first, but the doorknob didn’t budge.
“He probably purchased the cans at the hardware store down the street, loaded them into his backpack, and stocked his supply in a place where no one would . . .” And I knew exactly the place he’d hidden them. Of course. The kid was ingenious. As I pried open the sticky dryer door, a popping sound bounced off the walls. Bingo.
“Explains why he was acting so strange with his backpack the other night,” Davis murmured. “Another sign I ignored.”
“Is your mother’s gardening club close to here?”
“A two-minute walk at most.”
Probably came here instead of getting lunch. A perfect alibi. I bumped the dryer closed with my knee and returned to stand at Davis’s side. He hadn’t moved, his gaze still fixed on the robot.
“I never imagined I’d be a disconnected father. That certainly wasn’t what I grew up with. Somehow my dad managed to be both a hardworking businessman and an involved parent.” Without turning to face him, I wrapped my fingers around his, and an unexpected warmth spread through me.
Davis’s voice thickened. “Every good thing I’ve done in my life . . . all of it has been for him. Because of him.”
I felt the truth of his words resonate inside me. “You’re a good father, Davis. Finding this today doesn’t change that. But it should change what comes next for you both.”
When he turned to search my face, I saw the question in his eyes. “I don’t know how to pull him out of the world he lives in.”
Slowly, I raised our joined hands and flattened Davis’s palm to the wall. “Then go into his world.”
Two hours after we parted ways—Davis back to his clinic and me back to my unfinished mural at the bakery—I regretted my decision to skip lunch. But the scene in the laundromat this afternoon had tampered with my appetite, as had the extended physical contact with Davis. Who knew hand-holding could be so intimate?
I adjusted the wide-brimmed sun hat I’d borrowed from Clem’s closet earlier that day to shade my still-tender shoulders and crossed my arms over my chest, stretching my neck from side to side. The soreness from angling on the ladder hour after hour was catching up to me. One day I might actually break down and rent some quality scaffolding. But while my bank account was secure in the black, I simply couldn’t justify the excess.
Standing now on the far side of the alley, I frowned at the chalk sketch I’d outlined earlier on the bakery wall. Something felt off.
Or maybe it was me who felt off.
My stomach grumbled, and I checked my phone again for a text from my sister. Nothing. I’d asked if Collin could bring me a sandwich—at this point a simple PB&J would taste like a pot of gold. I should have taken Mabel up on her free day-old cupcake offer while I’d had the chance, but she’d been closed for the better part of an hour now.
Once again, I stared at the outline of a buffet table of toppling sugary treats—cakes, donuts, cinnamon rolls, and, of course, cupcakes—but no new inspiration took hold.
I sighed and allowed my thoughts to go where they wanted. Back to Brandon’s imaginative robot. Back to Davis’s heartrending honesty. “Every good thing I’ve done in my life . . . all of it has been for him. Because of him.” Brandon hadn’t a clue how lucky he was to have a father as dedicated as Davis.
A car I didn’t recognize pulled into the dead-end alley, and I shaded my eyes against the glare reflecting off the windshield. As it pulled closer, I realized it wasn’t a directionally challenged tourist. The driver was my brother-in-law.
Chris parked his company’s metallic sedan to the side of my art supply buckets and exited the vehicle, carrying a lavender My Little Pony lunch box.
I tested the waters between us. “That’s a nice look for you.”
He lifted the pail right on cue, and something inside me sighed with the familiarity of this moment, the comfortable brother-sister ribbing that had always been a part of us. “Just don’t tell Corrianna. I’ll never hear the end of it if she knows I borrowed it without asking.”
“She’s a big believer in the whole ask-permission-first thing, as evidenced by the ten warning notices taped to her bedroom door.”
Chris nearly chuckled. “My favorite is the one with the bright-red slash through Stick Figure Collin’s midsection.”
“No brothers beyond this point,” I quoted from memory. “That’s my favorite one, too.”
He handed me the lunch box. “Hope you don’t mind PB&J on whatever this seeded mystery bread is. I stopped asking Clem about the food she picked up from that organic co-op months ago—I never pronounce the names right anyway.”
“Mystery bread sounds great. At this point I’d eat peanut butter straight out of the jar with my finger, so bread of any kind is a fancy upgrade.” I tipped over the five-gallon bucket filled with random cloths and rags and offered it to Chris, and then I did the same with the bucket holding my sketching supplies. “Have a seat.”
“Thanks,” he said on a yawn. “I was hoping the fresh air would help me avoid taking a jet-lag nap.”
“That’s probably the worst part of traveling internationally, right?” I sat and popped the metal tabs on the pail’s edge to open the box.
“No,” he said quietly. “Not the worst part.”
Abandoning all sense of propriety, I unwrapped the sandwich and took a less-than-ladylike bite.
“If you choke on that, you can count me out for CPR.”
I shot my foot out to kick his shin, but in true Chris fashion, he scrambled back before I could make contact.
“After fifteen years, I’d think you’d give up on trying to best my reflexes,” he said.
“I was banking on your jet lag.” I laughed, and surprisingly, Clean-Cut Chris laughed, too.
“Never place a bet against the master.”
I rolled my eyes. Sometime between my thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays, I’d adopted Chris as my big brother. There were few teenage memories that didn’t involve him and my sister in some capacity. He was always touching her—kissing her cheek, stroking her hair, circling an arm around her middle while she prattled on about the names of their future children ages before he’d even popped the big question. Truth was, the last fifteen years hadn’t been nearly as timeless for him as they’d been for me. His life was a predictable timeline stamped with passport-style milestones: Marriage. House. Children. Career. It was strange that while he’d worked so hard to climb life’s ladder of success . . . I’d worked so hard to avoid it.
His shoulders slumped forward as he bent and studied the laces of his athletic shoes, a casual look for what felt like the most casual exchange I’d had with him in, well, years. Our rushed conversations over the past few summers had been a revolving door of comings and goings, fancy suits, and even fancier job titles.
I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I’d just sat in one place with him.
He scraped the rubber sole of his shoe over a pebble as if he were fourteen and not a nearly forty-year-old man. “I’m not sure what all Clem’s told you.” He paused and raked a hand through his hair—now thinner and lighter around the temples—and started again. “But I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that things haven’t been great between us for a while. That said, we both agree that you being here this summer is a tremendous help, to our kids especially. Even what you did for us last night, taking them out so we could have some space to talk. I appreciated that more than you can know. Thank you.”
My chewing slowed as my pulse ratcheted to a sickening slam-thud combo in my ears. What was he trying to tell me? Chris had never been one to shy away from personal details—not the way my sister did, but a sudden wave of vertigo threatened to rock me off center. The dry, sprouted bread scratched all the way down my esophagus.
“I don’t need to be thanked,” I said around a hard swallow. What I wanted was for them to get over whatever rift had caused this whole thing and move on from it. “I’m an aunt. It’s my job to love on those kids. They’re my family. And so are you.”
He pinched his lips into a staunch, patriarchal line that aged him by a decade or more. I had the strongest urge to kick his bucket out from underneath him for real this time. I didn’t want Diplomatic Chris right now. I wanted my family-loving brother back. I wanted reassurance.
I leaned in and dropped my voice to an octave I rarely used. “Fix this, Chris.” As if expecting my rebuke, he didn’t flinch. “Do you hear me? Whatever you need to do, just fix it.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Sure it is!”
“I’m doing everything I can right now—”
“Do more.”
“That’s not how marriage works.” He lifted his head, and I stared through him, envisioning my father’s eyes seconds before he said goodbye and walked out the front door. “There is no insta-solution.”
I slammed the lid closed on the My Little Pony lunch pail. “Then what is there? Because if you think I’m just going to sit back while the two of you destroy the lives of your childr—”
He held his palm up to cut me off and shook his head. “Nobody’s giving up here, Callie. Not me, at least.” He exhaled and rubbed his hand on his knee. “I knew when I accepted the promotion last winter that our marriage wasn’t in a strong place. Maybe that was part of the appeal—an escape from everything I was failing to do right at home.”
An escape? Fear crept up my spine, the words creating an image too familiar to push down. “What do you mean ‘everything you were failing to do right’?”
“We just . . . we got used to working around each other instead of working with each other. And I really started to believe this job could be the best thing for our family—that the distance we felt would mend itself over time. Of course, it didn’t. And then last week, while I was eating yet another meal in my Beijing hotel room, I started to think about how long it had been since Clem and I last talked. Not just her passing the phone off to the kids when I called—but actually communicating with each other.” He paused, swallowed. “And I literally couldn’t remember.” He lifted his head, and his eyes misted.
“It wasn’t until I booked the early flight home that I realized how many signs I’d ignored. How many things I’d chosen not to see.” His voice faltered. “Please know that I love your sister. Deeply. I may have lost sight of my priorities over the last year, but I swear to you, there has never been and never will be anybody in my heart but Clementine.”
The passion and conviction in his voice left no room for doubt. Although I still didn’t know Clem’s take on the story, Chris was owning his part of the divide—unlike my father, who’d blamed his marital failure on his personality flaws and wandering spirit.
But Chris wasn’t that kind of man. He was the kind of man who kept the commitments he made. The kind of man willing to do whatever it took to keep his family intact.
The same kind of man I saw in Davis Carter.
I blinked and bobbed my head slowly as if I were still a gangly thirteen-year-old girl listening to my sister’s boyfriend instruct me on the proper hold of a yo-yo. “Okay.”
“You don’t seem okay.”
How could I be? I’d lived all my life trying to avoid the exact heartache that he and Clem were living in now.
He seemed to know exactly what I was thinking. “This isn’t the same as what happened between your parents.”
“I know that,” I said more sharply than I’d intended. “Clem was never the one in danger of inheriting our father’s defective genes. Those fell only to me. Good thing is, your kids should both be in the clear.”
When Chris refused to respond to my quip, I tossed out an I’m-just-playing-around laugh that fell short by a mile. “Come on, that was funny.” As well as painfully accurate.
“Callie.”
But I was already standing, the bucket scraping against the pavement as the lunch box swung from my hand for him to grab. “Thanks so much for the sandwich and the chat, but I should get back to this.” I gestured to the wall. “A storm’s rolling in tomorrow night, and chalk and rain don’t mix well.”
Reluctantly, he took my offering and said the same words he’d spoken to me a dozen times during my adolescent years. “I’m sorry he left.”
Without permission, an unprovoked series of snapshots surfaced.
My father crouching before me.
An auburn ringlet wrapped around his finger.
His whispered secret that explained what I hadn’t wanted to understand about people like him.
And about people like me.
“That was a long time ago,” I said, glancing at the clouds overhead.
“Doesn’t matter how long ago it was, you and Clem deserved better. So did your mother.”
Unable to display a smile, I nodded. “We did okay for ourselves.”
I waited for him to lift the tension, to make some kind of closing wisecrack about my gypsy ways or my artist intuition, or even my hippie Tiny House, before he climbed back into his fancy car and drove away. After all, that was how we usually finished out our brother-sister chats.
Only, there was nothing teasing about his expression. “I hope you don’t actually believe what you said before, about being defective. Because you’re nothing like him.”
Though his question dripped with sincerity, there wasn’t a chance in this life I could answer it honestly. Chris wouldn’t understand. How could he? He wasn’t even in the same stratosphere as a free-spirited personality or a wandering soul or whatever the newest cutesy label was for my kind. He and my sister—just like Davis—were the commitment types. And no matter how I’d wished and hoped and even prayed for God to change me into one of them . . . He hadn’t.
“Chris, I think it’s fair to say your jet lag has affected your humor filter. I’m all good. Now get out of here and let me work.” Plastering a phony smile onto my face, I saluted him and held my expression firmly intact until he climbed into his car and backed out of the alley.
As soon as he was gone, an invasive emptiness tore through me, and I regarded my work again. Who was I kidding? None of this was salvageable. Without a second thought, I turned away from the outline, knowing that nature would soon take its course.
Sometimes in life it was best to let the rain come and wash the slate clean.