Two days ago, Anne Elise didn’t exist. A day ago, I didn’t realize she’d have this euphoric effect on me, but as I sweep her into my arms and sway around Laurel’s hospital room with her, happiness explodes inside me. Laurel’s still asleep, and her parents have gone for the night. Moonlight peeks through the blinds. Everything feels charmed with magic. I close my eyes and wonder if the rest of my life can be as perfect as this moment. There must be a way to bottle this feeling, prolong it, keep everything else at bay. My conundrum about what to do with Trish and Laurel seems insignificant compared to this monumental sense of joy. I cup the back of Anne Elise’s head in my palm, supporting her, and when she opens her eyes, she stares straight into mine. Mirth lights her eyes.
“You like her, don’t you?” Laurel says, awakening. With only her hospital bed’s stainless steel railing between us, she looks at me, her face pale and radiant. Although hormonal acne blemishes erupted over her cheeks since giving birth, she truly never looked more beautiful. “Isn’t our baby the fanciest fly? The cutest Chihuahua?”
I laugh, amused by Laurel’s phrases. Her quirky expressions can be strange to my ears—things that may be the slang of her generation or stuff she totally makes up on her own—but it’s one of the endearing things about her that first caught my attention.
“Do you ever wish a moment can last forever?” I’m rarely tongue-tied but, attempting to express exactly how taken I am with Anne Elise, I struggle to leap past the hackneyed superlatives: She’s wonderful! I love her so much! “It’s strange. From the moment I first saw her, I felt this instant, irrevocable love for her. Powerful. Emotional. Affirming. But it’s more than that. It’s like—god, this is going to sound silly.”
Laurel reaches through the steel bed-railing bars and pats my hand. “Go ahead. You can tell me.”
“When I was a boy, before my father left us, my parents sent me to a Catholic elementary school. A parochial school. We weren’t Catholic, but my mother thought the Catholic school was better than the public schools where she taught, so they sent me there. Every Friday, nuns from the convent gave us religious instruction. There’s this prayer Catholics say when confessing their sins. We had to memorize it. In this prayer, there’s a line about God being ‘all good and deserving of all our love.’”
“The Act of Contrition,” Laurel says.
I look at Laurel. So much of what we know about each other—our favorite cocktails, basketball teams, classic rock bands, and superhero movies—amounts to trivial stuff. I hadn’t realized she, too, went to a Catholic school. Or perhaps she is Catholic. But she’s right about the name of the prayer. The Act of Contrition.
“That’s how Anne Elise is—all good and deserving of all my love. She makes me want to be someone better than me.”
Laurel gasps. “Oh my god! That’s exactly like I felt too.”
I sink back into the recliner and listen to Anne Elise’s short snoozy breath. It’s remarkable how much better you hear when the lights are off, how depriving yourself of one of your senses kick-starts the others to greater perceptivity. I can see how wonderful Anne Elise is, not only how wonderful she is now but the supersmart girl she’ll be in the future, the valedictorian accolades that will follow her through school, and the accomplished businesswoman she’ll grow into. At some point, Anne Elise is destined to look at me with that same embarrassment that seized Laurel when she introduced her parents to me. I’m nothing but a get-rich-quick man who fails to get rich. Without Trish, I’d be broke, a flat-out loser who’d otherwise be sleeping on sidewalks.
“Do you think it’s possible for people to change?” I ask.
“I don’t want you to change. I love you the way you are.”
Laurel. Poor Laurel. She doesn’t know who I really am. All she sees is who she wants to see—a tall, debonair man with good manners and a natural gift for flattery, which, let’s face it, is all most people want, but she doesn’t know my humiliation every time Trish bails me out of another financial mess. I’m not all good, nor do I deserve anyone’s love. I should be bankrupt and destitute. Even now, in debt up to my eyeballs, I have no available funds to invest in what might be my best ever chance to make an investment killing. Where am I going to get a quarter million dollars? Laurel doesn’t know any of this. Instead, she sees a wildly successful financial genius, and it feels good, knowing someone—anyone—believes in me, even if her trust in me is misplaced.
“Seriously, do you think people can change? For the better?” I ask.
Laurel looks down at her hands and stretches her fingers. Pregnancy hasn’t done her fingernails any favors. Unlike most women, whose fingernails get stronger, her nails became weak and brittle, cracking and splitting more frequently since we learned she was with child. Torn and ragged, they look as if she’s been biting them. “I’ve been wondering the same thing.” Her head bobs up. She looks me in the eye. “Hey, where’d my parents go?”
Laurel’s parents slunk out of the hospital an hour earlier, claiming a long drive lay ahead of them. Before leaving, her father pulled me aside in the hospital waiting room. He looked me over, drumming his meaty fingers against a blue-graveled aquarium where goldfish stared out at us. It felt weird, him coming up to me and thinking I was his daughter’s fiancé. I feared he was going to hit me up for money. That or threaten bodily dismemberment if I ever, so help me god, lift a hand in anger against his daughter.
“What can I do for you, Tully?”
“Tull,” he said.
“Huh?”
“Call me Tull. All my friends do. Besides, family’s family. Now that you’re about to be family, I’d be proud to get to know you better.”
“Okay, uh, Tull.” It made my skin crawl, thinking that if I were to marry Laurel, I’d have him as a father-in-law. If I were to set him straight right there in the waiting room, I was pretty sure he was the kind of man who’d make a scene. Or resort to violence if he knew I was unprepared to make an honest woman of his daughter.
“You weren’t bullshitting me, were you? Laurel’s really coming round to respecting me again?”
Two bug-eyed goldfish swam around the fish tank. It was the kind of brightly lit splashy aquarium designed to hold a child’s attention. Seashells and fluorescent-blue gravel lay on the tank’s bottom. In one corner, a plastic deep-sea diver figure stood next to a treasure chest. Every few moments, the lid to the treasure chest swung open to reveal pearls and gold coins.
“Admittedly, I don’t know everything that happened when Laurel was younger, but I can tell you this in all truthfulness: she’s never said a bad word about you to me.”
Tully glowed. He was like me: a man who screwed up big time during the course of his life, but, hope being the eternal cog that keeps us all going, he wished to be redeemed through the love of his daughter. He fished a rubber band out of his pocket, pulled back his long gray hair, and slipped the rubber band over it, bundling his hair into a ponytail. I couldn’t get a handle on him. Neither Gatsby nor Buchanan, he’s a hardworking man reeking of the Big Mac and french fries he wolfed down prior to arriving at the hospital. That’s who Tully is, a character so earthy and real that Fitzgerald never deigned to write him into his fictions.
“Hey, can you do me a solid?” Tully asked.
“What’s that?”
“Tell Laurel I love her. Tell Laurel I’m happy for her. And happy that she reached out to Belinda and me again after all these years.”
“Sure. I’ll do that.”
Tully reached around and slapped my back, a loose affectionate gesture he probably shared with the grease monkeys at the garage where he worked. He smelled of chewing tobacco and the type of heavy-duty hand cleaner designed to cut through the automotive lubricants, manly scents that took me back to the days of my youth before my father abandoned my mother to run off with another woman. On weekend mornings or at nights after he came home from his grocery store job, my father would pop open the hood of the family Chevy, put a socket wrench in my hands, and point to the bolts that needed to be unfastened. Tune-ups. Oil changes. Resealing head gaskets. My father did all his own automobile repairs. The smell of Tully’s hand cleaner brought it all back to me, the early mornings with my father and the thermos of coffee that would keep us awake. Nowadays, I can’t change a sparkplug, so rusty have my mechanical skills become.
“Hey, it’s going to be good having a tycoon like you in the family,” Tully said.