Chapter Twenty-Three
Harley
The sky stretches with endless blue, the shade so pure and perfect it seems unreal. The sun inches its way overhead, and the waves crash into the sand, the powerful Pacific Ocean pushing and pulling at the sandy shore with its mighty force.
“I told you so,” I say to Trey the next morning. “I told you you’d want shorts.”
He holds up his hands in surrender as he throws another tennis ball to the dog. Trey’s jeans are cuffed up, but the cuffs are soaked. He wears a T-shirt, but without board shorts he looks out of place on the beach and, frankly, a bit silly.
“You look like an interloper. Like a city boy. You’re embarrassing me,” I say, as I kick sand onto his feet playfully, the grains sliding through my naked toes. I love the feel of the sand on my bare feet, the breeze on my arms, and the salty bite of the waves in my nostrils.
The Sheriff returns to Trey, trotting by his side and making big puppy-dog eyes at him as we cut across the beach toward the house. Already, the dog has adopted Trey, or maybe it’s the other way around. I never knew my guy had that side of him—the dog-person side. Then again, he never knew he did, either.
“I’ve never had a pet,” he’d told me this morning when he woke up, laughing as The Sheriff licked his face, the dog’s way of asking for breakfast. “But this dog kind of rocks.”
We reach the deck of the house; Robert and Debbie are drinking their morning coffee outside.
“He needs shorts,” I tell Robert.
“The Sheriff? That’s crazy. He only wears clothes at night, when he puts on his PJs. He goes full monty during the day.”
I laugh and point my thumb to Trey. “Him.”
“You telling me I need to take your boyfriend shopping?”
I nod. “Pretty please.”
Robert shakes his head, but he’s already giving in. He turns to Trey, and claps him on the shoulder. “Now son, I’m giving up my man card to take you shopping, but she’s right. I’m thoroughly embarrassed by your lack of appropriate beach attire. Surprised, too, that TSA didn’t confiscate your bags at the airport yesterday. We usually don’t let anyone into San Diego with jeans on,” Robert says, pointing to his own cargo shorts.
They leave, and I join Debbie on the deck. The dog follows, parking himself in a perfect sit next to me, and looking expectantly at Debbie with the ball in his mouth.
She takes the ball and tosses it far away in the sand, and the dog is off like a shot.
“Why’d you name him The Sheriff?”
“When we adopted him we had cats, and he was always trying to herd them, and round them up, like they were his posse or something. So we called him The Sheriff.”
“I like that name.”
“Thank you. Would you like some coffee? Tea, or lemonade?”
It’s only ten in the morning, but lemonade sounds delicious. “Lemonade, please.”
She heads into the house and returns quickly with two tall glasses. She takes a sip, sets the glass down, and presses her palms against the white wooden deck railing, gazing out at the water.
“I bet it never gets old, this view,” I say, drinking in the gorgeous sky and the sun that bakes my skin slowly, luxuriously.
“Never does. Every day it feels new again,” she says, and then she turns to me. “So, how’s it going with the two of you? How is he with being a dad soon?”
I’m momentarily startled by the directness of her question. She reminds me a bit of Joanne; going for bluntness. It’s such a change from what I’ve been used to my whole life over.
“He had a hard time at first, but he’s changed a lot in the last few months. Sometimes, he’s too sweet for words.”
“That’s how it should be. And you’re very serious about each other.” It’s half a question, and half a pronouncement.
“Very serious.”
“I can tell,” she says, her blue eyes holding mine. “The way he looks at you. How he talks to you. And you, with him. You have this connection that goes beyond most people. One that runs so deep it’s almost like a secret language. I think that’s what it’s like with true love. With soul mates. You just have it.”
“You can tell with us?”
She nods, and taps her heart. “Oh yeah. I can tell. I have a soul mate detector.”
“We are soul mates. I’m sure of it. What about you and Robert? Is that what you have?”
“Absolutely,” she says as The Sheriff trots up to the porch, dropping the ball with a loud thunk then staring at Debbie. She grabs the ball, and tosses it back out to the sand.
As The Sheriff tears away, I spy a seagull careening towards the sand in hot pursuit of a french fry. The seagull lands and grabs his carbohydrate prey, gulping it down.
I turn back to Debbie, shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand. There’s something I want to know, and she doesn’t mince words so I go for it. “My parents didn’t have that, did they?”
“No,” she says with a sigh. “They didn’t. They tried hard. But they didn’t.”
“Will you tell me about them? Is it okay to ask?”
“Of course it’s fine to ask, and of course I’ll tell you. I figured you’d want to know. Let’s sit,” she says, gesturing to a pair of white wooden chairs with a small table between them
“What were they like together?”
Debbie tilts her head, considering my question as a breeze gently rattles the wind chimes that hang above the screen door. The pretty tinkling sound fades away and she turns to me. “They were like this.” She makes her hands into fists and bumps the knuckles together. “They were metal against metal. They were both brilliant. John is a very smart man, and Barb fell hard for that. She loved his brain, and she loved the way he could hold his own with her. She was taken with him, and he very much was with her, as far as I could tell. He was a political advisor, and they met when she was on an internship for a paper out here. I don’t even want to say they fell in love; it was more like they crashed into something volatile. Each other, maybe. Because they argued all the time. It was as if they were always locked in a debate. We’d have dinner with them, and they were always looking for some mistake in the other.”
“That sounds sad,” I say and my chest hurts for my parents.
The Sheriff arrives again and deposits the ball. Debbie reaches for it and fires it off. The dog’s black furry legs blur through the sand.
“But sadly, John is like that.”
“Really?”
“He’s not a happy man. Oh, on the surface, he’s the life of the party, but deep down, he’s not a happy soul. I love him, he’s my son, and I’d do anything for him. I could beat myself up and say I’m a bad mom and it’s all because of me, but I don’t know why he is the way he is. I just know he’s like that.”
“Is that why you don’t talk to him much?”
“I don’t talk to him much because he went his own way. He’s been living in Europe for years now. He made choices that I didn’t agree with, and while I love him, I don’t love his choices, and he knows that.”
The pit in my chest deepens, threatens to tunnel its way through me. Yet I need to ask. I open my mouth, and it’s almost painful to say the words; they taste like tinfoil against my tongue. “My mom told me something. I want to know if it’s true. She said he was a sex addict, and in therapy when I spent that summer with you. Is he an addict?”
Debbie stretches her hand across the small table between us and grasps mine. “Oh, sweetie. There are things between them that I will never understand. There are things between a man and a woman that need to be between them and them only, right?” I nod my agreement and she continues, her fingers clasped tight around my wrist. “But I know this. John has been married six times. Every time, he falls in love with someone else and leaves his marriage for another. I love him, but I don’t love the addict in him. I don’t love the choices he’s made, and I’ve told him so. So call him a sex addict. Call him a serial cheater. Call him a ladies’ man. What it amounts to is he is a person who has not changed, and because of that, I’m not close to him. He doesn’t want to engage on a meaningful level. But then, this isn’t surprising, is it? He wasn’t much of a father, was he?”
“He wasn’t one at all.”
Debbie sighs heavily. “I’m sorry, sweetie. You got the short end of the straw.”
Her kindness and her blunt honesty pierce me straight through to my core. My one-time modus operandi—lying, hiding, keeping secrets—no longer fits. “I felt all alone sometimes. I don’t know if I even realized that’s what it was. I don’t think I could name it till I was older. But when I saw your cards, I knew it was loneliness, because I didn’t know anyone except my mother.” My throat catches, but I rein it in. I might be becoming more fluent with the truth, but that doesn’t mean I need to shed tears every time. “Did you ever think about why I was never in touch with you?
She nods several times, her eyes widening, the blue in them so pure and true. “I did think about it a lot. I missed you. You probably don’t remember our times together because you were so young. But I remember them, and oh, how we loved when our little Harley was coming. You were a busy, brave and chatty little girl, and you loved being here as much as we loved having you.”
“I do remember it. Not the specifics, but I remember the feeling.”
“What did it feel like?”
I flash back to the night I met Trey, to what I told him about being here. “It felt like happiness. That’s what I remember.”
“I’m glad, sweetie. Because that’s all I ever wanted for your life. Even when I had no idea what had happened to you.”
“Did you ever think I was ignoring you?”
“That thought never crossed my mind. And look, I don’t know your mom anymore. I only know the articles she writes, and the pieces I see her do. I knew her then, and she was a tough woman, and she was pretty much shattered by John. They might have butted heads, they might have disagreed, but she was crazy for him. And the summer you lived with us, she fought like hell to save her marriage. We gave them the space they needed, and we took care of you. But, you know what happened . . .” she says, her voice trailing off, tinged with melancholy.
“My father cracked her, didn’t he?” I ask, and I should feel some shards of sympathy for her, but I feel entirely clinical.
Debbie shrugs, and her blond bangs blow into her eyes with the breeze. She brushes them away. “Maybe. It’s hard to say what anyone’s breaking point is. Was it hers? It’s possible.”
“Yeah, it is possible. But you know what? That happens. Stuff happens. You need to move on, and I’m not sure she ever did.”
Because my mother, whether she was broken by him or not, let him affect how she led her life. She has never truly moved on, as far as I can tell. It seems every choice she’s made about relationships was a futile attempt to stave off the hurt. Late-night affairs, clandestine phone calls, breezing from one man to the next, even falling for Phil—a married man who she could never truly give her heart to.
Maybe my father did break her, but now she’s brittle, and I don’t feel bad. I feel sorry for her that she was never able to change.
“Did it bother you when you never heard back from me?”
“I wanted to see you again. I hoped to see you again,” Debbie says. “And I think I knew, deep down, that somehow I would. I just didn’t know how. But I knew that it wasn’t you keeping us apart. It was your mother’s hurt.”
“Do you forgive her? Because I don’t think I can.”
“I can forgive her. Because she’s not mine. And I can let it go because you’re here now, and you wanted to reconnect. Can you forgive her for keeping us apart?”
I scoff. “The list of things I have to forgive her for is so long, you’d be shocked. But I guess this one doesn’t matter because I’m here now.”
“Then we don’t have to worry about the past, because we have this—the present—and then the future.”
But the thing is, we do have to worry about the past . . . at least, I do.