Birchie and Wattie briefly shone their approval beams on me. I snatched a couple of biscuits out of the basket as I turned to go.
Rachel said, “You know those are a mass of simple carbs.”
I wheeled back in a surge of Rachel rage so clear and blue and bright that I was about to make my breakfast protein-rich by means of biting her whole head off. But she wasn’t even looking at me. She sat slumped with her own biscuit untouched in front of her. Her phone was beside her on the table, waiting for a deciding text from JJ that was never going to come.
Across the table Lavender was staring at her mother with fear and a heartbreaking kind of pleading in her eyes. In that look I could almost hear the lost and piping voice of three-year-old Lavender, calling from her dark bedroom, Mumma, halp! Dere a munstras in my closet.
Lav’s phone buzzed, and instantly the scared child with MIA Ken and Walking-Dead Barbie for parents was gone. Instead there was a disaffected teen, sneak-checking texts from boys under the breakfast table. A teen whose father still hadn’t called me back, though I’d left him three more messages, each meaner and more insistent than the last.
It was one thing to decide that I was going to help Lav, but another to figure out how to actually do it. Rachel-style commando assistance—armed, invasive, and permission-free—was an art form, but it was not my medium. Watching Lav sneak-text, I had a new idea.
“Hey, kid,” I said. “No phones at the breakfast table.” I held my hand out.
She looked up, startled and busted.
“You know better,” Rachel said mildly.
Lavender rolled her eyes and passed the phone to me across the table.
“Come and get it after breakfast,” I said.
“Let’s make it after lunch,” Rachel was saying as I hurried away.
I got the phone back to my room, fast. It would lock itself up in a minute or two, and I didn’t know Lav’s passcode. Jake hadn’t taken my calls, but he might well take one from this number. I closed my door and sat down on the sofa.
It took me a sec to find him, because I went looking in the J’s out of habit. In Lav’s world Jake’s number was stored up in the D’s. I touched that word, “Daddy,” and saw that my hands were trembling. It wasn’t a word that had ever been lucky for me.
He answered, though. And fast, picking up on the second ring.
“Lav?” he said, his voice breathy and grainy.
“Guess again,” I said.
“Jesus Christ!”
“Strike two,” I said, downright bitchy.
It was mean, but for the first time since Jake had cut me out of his life like I was a tumor, I had the option to be mean to him. When he’d reappeared at my family’s drop-in Christmas party, thrusting wine at me as he sauntered by to charm my stepsister, I’d been knocked for such a loop. I’d avoided him that evening, then fled back to art school in Savannah. Rachel was courting distance from Norfolk at U Richmond, but I’d been sure that it would come to nothing. He wasn’t good enough for Rachel, and my stepsister had a rigorous belief that she deserved the best. I hoped she’d see past the new money and the newer nose. When they got engaged, I’d taken refuge in good manners, hyperpolite and horrified. Once he’d fathered my niece, I was committed to that politeness. But now? I had cosmic permission to tear him a new one, and I had a lot of mean saved up.
“Why do you have my daughter’s phone? Is she with you?” Jake asked.
“You don’t know? Jesus Christ back at you, JJ,” I said, incredulous. “Why haven’t you called her?”
A pause.
“Rachel told me not to.” Maybe even he heard how pathetic that sounded, because he was talking again before I could answer, defensive. “Anyway, I did go by the house. No one was home. Is Lavender hurt?”
“Of course she is, you douche. All her limbs are still attached, if that’s what you mean, but her dad’s gone missing,” I said. “Every day you spend hiding, that hurt gets deeper and less repairable.”
He made a huffing noise. “It’s complicated.”
I huffed back. “Let me simplify it for you: Call your kid. If you need permission, I am giving you permission. If you need some testicles, I can’t help with that, because it sounds like you let Rachel pack them up and bring them with her down to Birchville. Beg, borrow, or steal, but get a set. Get one, and call your kid. Today. This afternoon. She’ll have her phone back after lunch.”
“They’re both with you in Alabama?” Jake asked. “Are they okay?”
“No. No, they are not. When your most important person ditches you, it feels like he pulled the world out from under your feet and took it with him. It feels like a long, fast fall, and there is no soft landing,” I said, and I wasn’t speaking only for Lav now. I was talking on my own behalf as well, finally defending the kid I’d been back when we were Lay and JJ and everything we did, we did together. Back when he’d screwed me and screwed me over. “It can ruin a kid. Ask me how I know.”
“Are you making this about you?” he asked, trying for incredulous. Trying for disdain, but I could hear a hitch in his breathing.
“Me? No. And it’s not about Lavender or Rachel either. This is about you. This is big-picture stuff,” I told him. “How many times can you do this, JJ? Do you think you have nine lives in you, like a cat? Keep on and you’ll have to change nursing homes when you’re ninety because you screwed over your roommate. Every time you mess up, you stick the people who love you the most with the consequences. Try apologizing. Try making it right. I know firsthand exactly how shitty it feels when you cut and run because you can’t face whatever awful thing you did. I paid for what you did. Every guy I’ve dated since has paid for what you did, and I was only your best friend. This is your wife. This is your own child. If you do this to your child, Oregon is not going to be far enough to let you get away from yourself. Japan won’t be far enough. Mars won’t be. You will have to go all the way to hell to get far enough, and if you don’t call your kid now, if you abandon her without a word like she is nothing, then you deserve to stay there.”
He was definitely crying now, but he didn’t speak. I didn’t either. I had nothing left to say.