The Almost Sisters

“Daddy?” she said.

Once she said it, I recognized him. He’d gained a little weight in the two weeks he’d been MIA. The points on the top of his head were his messy curls. I hadn’t seen him without his hair blown out into that sportsy flop across his forehead, not for years.

But it was Jake all the same, and the moment he heard Lav’s voice, he sped up. He hurried down the stairs, and Lav tore her hand out of mine and ran, so fast she was like a teeny Flash in the waning moonlight. He reached the bottom step and started running, too. They met in the middle of the yard. She swarmed up him, and at the same time he was lifting her, and she wrapped her arms tight around his neck. Her feet dangled in the air, and one of her sandals had dropped off onto the ground. She didn’t seem to notice. I could hear that she was saying something, too choked by crying for me to make out the words. That was okay. They weren’t for me.

Watching them from the road, I felt a small pang for Hugh, because that was done. She might not know it yet, but I did. Jake swayed gently, as if he held a fussy baby instead of a half-grown girl.

He said, “Hush, sweetie, hush. I’m here now,” and she was still talking and crying all incoherent with her face buried in his neck.

I looked around for Jake’s truck and spotted it across the road. He must have just arrived when I’d seen his shadow cross the cemetery gate.

I climbed up the steep slope of the yard, angling toward them. Up close he looked worse. He had big bags under his eyes, and his skin had an unhealthy sheen, as if he’d been living on Swanson’s and bourbon without Rachel there to infuse him with wild-caught salmon and organic beets.

“It’s okay,” he said to Lav, but his eyes were on me.

“If you guys want to talk out here on the porch swing, I’ll leave the back door unlocked,” I said quietly.

I tried very hard to sound gracious, and welcoming, and unsour, because this was a good thing. He’d done better than call. He had come, and I could see that it was what she needed.

“Thank you,” he said, all meaningful, like he was thanking me for more than the unlocked door.

“No need,” I said, and it did come out sour. Too bad. I tilted my head pointedly at Lav and said to him, “I didn’t do anything for you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He was still rocking his daughter, holding her tight, but his eyes were locked on mine, his so wide with sincerity I could practically see white all around the iris. “I panicked and I ran. It was wrong, and I’m so damn sorry. I shouldn’t have disappeared like that.”

His face was puffy from the weight gain and, I guessed, some heavy drinking. It softened his chiseled jaw. Add the hair sticking up in little poinks and he looked almost more like my old friend JJ than like Jake. It made me wonder if his plan to flee to Portland had ever been about creating a third life. Perhaps his recent setbacks had instead cracked him open, exposed the raw boy he’d packed away under caring about football, and playing golf, and booming, manly laughter. Maybe he’d just been running. Cowardly more than ice cold.

Lavender said a muffled “It’s okay” into his neck, but he hadn’t been talking to his daughter.

Not entirely anyway.

Beneath the Jake who was saying he was sorry to his child, I could see JJ, fat and dorky and hopelessly in love with Rachel, talking to seventeen-year-old me. It was twenty years too late and doing double duty as an apology to Lavender, and it hardly covered everything. He was still the same jackass who’d breezed into my parents’ Christmas party, almost knocking me sideways, shame-running past me with bravado to get to Rachel. On the other hand, he was finally acknowledging that I had been hurt. That he had hurt me. He was attempting to put paid to an old, old debt here, with shitty coin, but still trying. Perhaps it was the only coin he had.

“You’re doing the right thing now,” I told him, and it hardly sounded grudging at all. “That counts.”

JJ took my words as forgiveness. I saw naked gratitude writ plain on his face, and to my surprise I realized I had actually meant them as forgiveness. He swayed quietly for another moment with his girl in his arms. Forgiving him was like balm on an old hurt place, and it felt sweeter than his apology. Sweeter even than the moment I’d said all the things I’d held in my mouth for twenty angry years. Forgiving him felt like relief.

He set Lav down. She was snuffling, and she kept her arms looped around his waist, her wet face pressed into his side.

“Let yourselves in when you’re ready, but be quiet. My grandmother isn’t well, and she’s sleeping,” I said, and left them to it.

I went around the house to the back stairs. Damn JJ, I thought, but with less rancor than I would have thought it four minutes prior.

Still, if he’d gotten here a scant half hour earlier, he might have caught his own daughter on the way out, and I wouldn’t have to help kids pull dew-soaked shreds of TP off Martina Mack’s gardenia bush tomorrow. He hadn’t gotten into his car and headed for Birchville immediately, though. Not like Rachel. He’d stewed for a few hours, waffling, trying to decide. As if coming for his grieving, worried kid were a decision and not the only open course.

Forgiveness or not, I thought Apologizing Ken was still a jackass. Sure, there were worse fathers in the world. Jake didn’t beat his family or smoke crank, but that was setting the bar pretty low. Jake’s run at fatherhood seemed to me a bit like eating chalk. It wasn’t toxic. It wouldn’t kill anybody, but that didn’t make it delicious.

Still, I thought of Lavender’s face when she’d recognized him. The way she’d run to him, and even the way he’d caught her up, like he was welcoming a missing piece back to his body, as if his own wayward hand had finger-walked home and barnacled itself onto his wrist again. Maybe, when it came to fathers, kind-of-a-jackass beat an absence.

I wouldn’t know for sure. I’d only known the absence.

I went inside, flipping both switches by the door to turn on the back-porch floodlight and the brass chandelier over the breakfast-nook table for them.

Jake would need a nap, but I had no idea where on earth we could put him. The Princess Room? Lavender could tuck in with her mother. Although it might be moot. When Rachel woke up and found him here, we might all be cleaning dew-soaked shreds of Jake off our own gardenia bushes.