Chapter Three
Most mornings, Trent didn’t know which was worse—getting his daughter out of bed for school on time or letting her sleep. Either way it was a pitched battle and one he dreaded like the bubonic plague.
Your choice, pal, he reminded himself firmly—again—as he eased open her bedroom door and slipped inside. She was buried under a mound of duvet and pillows, just a shock of her deep red hair showing. Trent sighed and watched her breathe for a few minutes, relishing the quiet and the time he was allowed to spend loving her so much his chest ached.
It had been his choice, being a single dad. And most days he didn’t regret it. But as she eased into adolescence he was beginning to worry for his sanity.
He sat on the edge of her bed after making his way through the detritus of dirty clothes, laptop, computer tablet and whatever else lay on the floor. Giving himself an extra few seconds to gaze at the half of her face now exposed since she’d flung the covers off, he could practically feel her perfect infant-self, cuddled into his chest or neck—the only way she would sleep for the first six weeks of her life. Smiling, head locked in on the memory sensations of her in his arms, helpless, his to protect and hold forever, he put a hand on her shoulder.
“Shit,” she spat out as she sat up, rubbing her eyes. “Jesus, Dad. You scared me.”
Trent sighed and stood, trying not to lurch into pissed off mode at her cursing. It was too early for anger and God knows she’d learned it all from him after all. Why be a hypocrite as long as she knew when not to use such language?
His daughter groaned and flopped onto her back, yanking the covers up over her head. “Five more minutes? Please? Daddy?”
“No, sorry, princess. I gave you an extra ten. Time to make the donuts. Up and at ’em.”
“Fuck off,” she muttered from underneath the denim-covered duvet.
Trent pulled it back and glared down at her. She matched it, using her mother’s beautiful eyes to send him spiraling backward into the sort of memories that were the opposite of sweet. He ground his teeth together, reminding himself that the girl was not her mother. She was her own self—a heady mix of two personalities that had no real business procreating.
“Nope,” he said, keeping his voice as neutral as he could manage. “Up. Now.” As he headed to her bedroom door and escape, she lobbed her latest volley.
“I hate that school. It’s stupid. You should send me to boarding school back east, so I can be challenged…like Mom told you.”
Trent rested a hand on the doorjamb and counted to ten before answering. “Taylor, stop baiting me. Get up. Get in the shower. Get dressed. Your breakfast will be ready for you.”
“Whatever,” came the mumble from behind him.
Deciding that deflection made up the better part of valor this day, Trent walked out into the hall, down the steps and into the kitchen, leaving her to her anger for a while longer.
By the time Taylor finally emerged he was fastening on his watch and had cleared the tall granite eating counter of all dishes. She glared at him from under her bangs. “Great. Starving me now?”
“Yep. That’s me. Dad the torturer king. Here.” He tossed her a granola bar. She caught it and shoved it into her backpack along with the lunch he’d already packed for her. “Get your ass in here on time and you get a hot breakfast. You’ve known this rule for how long?”
She scowled at him, setting him back for a split second at her increasingly eerie resemblance to her gorgeous bitch of a mother. He smiled at her, determined not to touch a match to the simmering pile of potential confrontation. He had a long day ahead and needed to focus.
“Ready?” he asked, sliding open the metal door of the loft to the hall.
She shouldered her pack and stomped toward the elevator. Trent bit his tongue hard against the urge to mention the ripped tights and the short skirt. She knew the dress code—had violated it enough times to be on semi-permanent probation over it. The row of shiny earrings in the delicate cartilage of each of her ears caught his gaze but he bit down harder. He’d lost that battle in a massive compromise—she could pierce whatever she wanted as long as it wasn’t her nipples or genitals and he’d not protest, as long as her fair, perfect skin remained ink-free.
So far, so good on that.
So far as he knew, of course.
Shoving down the creeping anxiety that threatened to overwhelm him, he hit the button and the elevator doors slid open. Taylor flounced into the lift, her eyes on her phone. There were times when he wanted to turn back the clock and be the dad chasing the toddler around, getting up every four hours with the newborn, playing his eighth consecutive game of CandyLand—anything but this. It was as if she’d turned sixteen and a switch was flipped whereby he was relegated to the realm of the barely tolerable. And this from the little girl who’d been his shadow, going with him to construction sites, the office, the hardware store—barely able to let him out of her sight.
When she flopped into the passenger’s seat of the Jeep, Trent knew she was itching for a fight. But he didn’t have the energy for it this morning. He let her sulk on the drive to her high school, blew her a kiss as she got out and forced himself to smile when she flipped him off before flouncing down the sidewalk to the delight of way too many punk-asshole boys.
As he waited impatiently for the traffic to move around the circle and back out to the main road, he indulged in his usual form of self-torture—recalling his precious little girl once she’d grown out of her super-colicky baby stage and had latched on to him as if her life depended on it. She’d been a hardcore daddy’s girl from the get-go. And he’d adored being her hero, father, champion, everything she needed in the entire universe. He’d never felt more alive than he had then.
But no need to let thoughts of his pretty, precocious, more than a little spoiled, auburn-haired waif of a daughter—replete in her pink tutus and princess crowns and clutching as many tiny stuffed animals as she could carry—spill over into memories of how much he hadn’t wanted to have her in the first place. Not if it had meant tying himself to her mother, Sheila, the ex-Mrs. Hettinger.
But he had. Because he was the sort of guy who always did the right thing.
The light beep of a horn behind him dragged him back to the present, and to the day ahead. He waved by way of apology and sped out into the street, joining the line of traffic heading away from the school.
* * * *
“Yo, Brad, you here? How’s it hanging?”
“Low and heavy, or so the wife tells me,” he called back. “You ready for this wild-ass day, pard?”
“That’s a double hell to the yeah.”
Trent smiled at the tall, bearded man who was stacking boxes of liquor bottles in the tiny cramped office space behind his original store. When he’d decided to make the leap from mere employee to owning retail, he’d only hesitated for a second. Thanks to the success of this, his first big liquor store, he’d been keeping an eye on a few of the better locations for a while and had also latched on to the looming craft beer boom in the nineties. When the opportunity had come to buy out the old guy retiring and heading south who’d owned The Wine Cellar for the last thirty years, he’d jumped.
That had been almost fifteen years ago now, he mused, flipping open his laptop and pondering the myriad fires to be extinguished in his mini-empire today. Running a hand across the smoothness of his scalp, he allowed the love of his job—of controlling his own destiny on a day-to-day basis—to muffle the vague sense of worry and frustration over Taylor.
When the email he’d been dreading hit his inbox, he sighed, opened it and started plotting how he might salvage his purchase of an abandoned city block in Kalamazoo. He had hoped to open a coffee bar there—something new for him, but he had an expert coffee guy ready to jump in and run it, plus leads on at least three other high-profile potential tenants. The damn city wouldn’t allow it for some reason, and he figured it probably had something to do with the fact of his own success. He was victim of it, in some sense. There were too many small-minded eggheads on the city council who simply didn’t want him to expand.
Small-minded fuckers.
He leaned back in his creaky chair—a leftover from when the old guy still owned the place since Trent knew what to throw away and what to keep. With a glance at the large whiteboard he’d installed during his first week of ownership, he studied the last month’s-worth of sales reports. He now owned two large, thriving liquor stores, one of which was among the first to feature craft beer on its shelves. Both stores were in Grand Rapids, anchoring it on east and west sides. He also was part owner of a successful farm-to-table restaurant, a somewhat dive-y beer and burger joint that he was angling to buy out in the next year, and had recently been approached by a restaurant ownership group about a new, exciting project downtown.
But now, he wanted this goddamned coffee bar and the mother fucking empty city block.
“You’re too single-minded,” Sheila’s bitch-voice popped into his brain. “You get focused on one thing and won’t let go of it until it goes your way.”
“Yeah,” he said to her, relegating her back to the dark recesses of his brain. “Which is probably why I’ve got a cool two million in the bank, bitch. And that’s just my walkin’ around money.”
With a lunge forward, he started typing out his reply to the council’s rejection of his city block project. Two hours later, satisfied that his response was both obsequious in deference to their collective egos, but at the same time firm in his resolve that the damn block should be his to revive, he rubbed his eyes and looked up from the screen. Someone was calling his name.
“Trent? Yo, dude, you need to take this call.”
Hank, the bearded, long-time manager of his flagship store, was peering around the office door, holding the store’s cordless phone in one hand. On reflex, he stuck his hand into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out his phone. Ten missed calls. All from Grand Rapids High.
Shit.
Fuck.
Hell.
He held out his hand. With a sympathetic look, Hank handed it over then shut the door behind him. Trent took a breath, then put the receiver to his ear.
“Hello. This is Taylor Hettinger’s father,” he said, laying his head down on the desk in front of him.