“Besides, Echo gets me.”
“Ah. She gets you.” He was willing himself to stay calm, but the defensiveness was beginning to creep into his tone.
“Yeah, she gets me. She just wants to be my friend. Your friend, too, if you let her. That’s why she gave you those pictures, you know—so you could write your book and everything would work itself out. Isn’t that what you want?”
He furrowed his eyebrows at that. Jeanie wasn’t supposed to know about the photos. Had Echo brought it up? He couldn’t decide whether to be pissed off or let it go. Jeanie already knew about the house, so what difference did it make?
The difference is that Echo isn’t her mother. The difference is that she’s stepping on my fucking toes.
“I think you’ll be better off finding friends your own age,” he told her. “I’ll take you into town. I’m sure there’s someone . . .”
“Oh, whatever.” She breathed the word at the window. “It’s been over a week and we haven’t gone into town once. Kinda how like we haven’t been to the beach when it’s, like, two feet away. Either way, don’t ask Selma to watch me anymore. Echo is going to teach me how to make cherry cider from the trees out back. And I’m going to go over there—”
“Enough,” he snapped, cutting her off. “I’ve had enough, Jeanie. I said I was sorry. I know I’ve been nothing but a screwup, but I’m still your dad. I’m sorry, but you’re not going over there.”
“Why not?” she demanded.
Because I don’t trust her was poised on the tip of his tongue. Except he’d asked her to watch Jeanie, which made him look like a hypocrite. “Because I say so,” was all that he managed—a typical I’m-the-parent cop-out response he swore he’d never use. “Just drop it, all right?”
Jeanie frowned and rolled her eyes, then shifted her weight and turned away from him, her knees pointing toward the passenger-side door. “Whatever. Not like you can stop me.”
“Oh no?”
“No,” she muttered. “You’re too busy, remember?”
Jeanie went silent after that. She was done talking, and so was he.
Lucas would have done just about anything to drive straight to Mark and Selma’s and have a couple of beers. All he wanted was to sit on the couch, glare at a TV screen, and mull over the conversation he’d just had with his kid. He needed time to digest the tension that was threatening to eat him alive, that was urging him to lash out with a string of what-do-you-means and you’re-just-a-kid snubs. But rather than taking the off-ramp that would take him to his best friend’s house, he continued into the city with his silent, brooding daughter. It was only when he pulled into a mall parking lot that Jeanie abandoned her silent treatment and suspiciously peered at her dad.
“Where are we going?”
“Where all twelve-year-old girls love to go.”
She shot a glance at the huge building before them, then looked at her father again as if to judge whether he was screwing around. When Lucas pulled the Honda into a parking space, her annoyance melted a shade. But the happy girl he’d hoped would return didn’t quite make it back.
A Nightmare Before Christmas T-shirt and black stationery set later, she ditched him among the stacks at Barnes & Noble. “We still have to stop by Uncle Mark’s to grab the car,” he called after her. “Text me when you’re ready to go.” She lifted her arm and gave him a slight wave to let him know she’d heard him, but her aloofness stung. It reminded him of Caroline with her tight-lipped smile and tense shoulders. Caroline, who, the moment she turned away from him, walked toward another man. He could at least take some small comfort in knowing that Jeanie was still too young to follow in her mother’s footsteps.
He bought himself a latte at the in-store café and settled into a comfortable armchair with a few books in his lap. Nearly an hour and no text later, he rose from his seat, dumped his empty paper cup into a nearby trash can, and searched the two-story monster of a store for his kid. Jeanie wasn’t perusing the young adult books, and to Lucas’s relief, she wasn’t anywhere near Romance. It took him fifteen minutes, but he finally located her by New Age and Spirituality.
Sitting cross-legged on the carpet with a stack of books on her right, Jeanie’s face was half-hidden beneath a veil of goldenrod. Seeing her that way made him love her even more intensely than he already did. Moodiness and recent vindictiveness aside, he was incredibly lucky. She had come home on the last day of sixth grade with straight As and a triumphant grin to match. The girl was going places; he only hoped he’d be there to see where those places were.
Lucas sidled up to his kid and took a seat next to her on the floor. “What’re you exploring?” he asked, glancing over her shoulder at the thick volume she had open in her lap.
“Paranormal stuff.” She didn’t look up.
Lucas usually enjoyed the paranormal. He’d watched more than a few ghost hunting shows with his daughter, having sat down just to see what it was all about only to be sucked in for the entirety of the episode. But with the house they were living in what it was, the topic made him nervous. Had Jeanie not already been big into ghosts, had she not known about the history of the house, her interest in the metaphysical wouldn’t have been cause for alarm. But she did know. Had she seen something? He wanted to ask—but no . . . Pandora’s box, he thought, and kept his mouth shut. Despite his own trepidation, he gave her an approving nod anyway. He wanted just one evening without any drama, without Jeffrey Halcomb looming in the background. “Anything cool?”