Here For You (25 page)

Remembering the question Jim asked me, I answered him. I would rather not have talked about this with Bill around; he didn’t need to know my business, but whatever. “Yeah, it’s pretty serious. I love the girl, always have.”

Jim laughed out loud. “Bro, did you just grow a fucking vagina?”

Bill couldn’t help but chuckle at the comment Jim made. Fucker.

“Fuck you, asshole.” Shaking my head, I make my way to Jim and helped him out with the measurements so we would be done quicker.

After writing down the numbers that Jim was calling out and making sure it was what I had down too, I peered over to what Bill was sketching. “Wow, that shit looks amazing, bro,” I told him with a slap on the back. I couldn’t wait to see it in person, but first, we had to go over the sketch with Eddie, the one who’d hired us for this job.

“Well, James, it’s about time you two got together. I’m happy for you.” Jim turned around to get more measurements, shouting them out to me. I went over what I already had to make sure it matched. So far, so good.

“Whatever happened to that piece of ass you were dating?” he yelled out from the other side of the empty bathroom. His voice echoed off the walls.

Bill looked up to me. He was an older guy. He had salt and pepper hair, his dark brown eyes were covered by wrinkles, and his hands trembled a little when he sketched. But he was awesome at what he did. “You got two ladies at once?” he asked me, nodding his head.

Great, just what I needed.

“No I don’t, and nothing happened, it’s over. I broke up with her the day after I came back to deal with that incident at work, remember Jim? The day we had to fill out all that shit for that asshole’s accident.” I didn’t want to think about what happened the night I came back.

“And she was fine with it?”

Jim, would you please just stop?

“Yeah, I guess so.”

He came up to me. “Please, tell me you tapped that ass one last time before all of this?” I didn’t want to respond, and by not responding he knew my answer. “Oh shit. Fuck, yes, bro! She was a smoking hot piece of….” Then his smiled dropped from his face. “Wait?”

I raised my eyebrows.

“That means you cheated on Becca already?” He was shocked. Nothing surprised him easily either, so for this to happen I knew I was screwed.

“Oh shit,” I hear Bill mumble under his breath.

“I didn’t cheat on h…” I started to say, but he continued.

“That doesn’t matter, bro. You basically poured your heart out to Becca, told her you loved her, then you go and sleep with that chick?” Well, when he put it like that I just wanted to take this pencil and stab my eyes out. “If you said you didn’t cheat on her then answer me this. Did you fuck that other chick before or after you told Becca?”

“Get your ass back to work, dick.” I didn’t want to answer that question. Would that mean I cheated on Becca if I wasn’t technically in a relationship with her?

Jim didn’t believe you should go around cheating. He said if you were going to do that then let the person go first before you did anything. That way, if something happened, then nobody was to blame because you weren’t in a relationship. But technically, Becca and I weren’t together; Juliana and I were, so when he said it like that, why did I feel bad? It’s not like I wanted that to happen. I was just tired and it happened. Besides, it wasn’t like I did anything; she was the one that did every single thing that night.

“After, but Becca and I weren’t in a relationship.” I finally answered.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk. That’s crazy, James.” I heard Bill whisper looking at his sketch.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Jim was shaking his head back and forth. “Damn, James. Do you think if Becca found out you slept with that chick she would be cool with it?
Especially
after telling her how you feel?”

He had a point. But she would understand, I hoped. I was new to this shit and I didn’t want anything to happen, but how was I supposed to break Juliana’s heart after all those ‘I miss you, wish you were here’ text messages? Plus, I was planning to do it the next day anyway. I was just so tired and it was hard to say no once my dick was poking through the sheets. Women had that affect on men. They used their seductive ways to capture us.

I didn’t bother to respond to Jim because I knew he was right and he would be hounding me if I actually admitted that Becca, would indeed, be pissed.

She agreed, like Jim, that you shouldn’t be with a person if you were going to cheat. But Becca and I
weren’t
together. Juliana and I were. I didn’t want to start off this relationship with lies, but if she didn’t ask me then I didn’t have to worry about it. So, I wasn’t going to stress over it. What I was thinking about was what we were going to do when I got there. It had been over a week since I’d last seen her and I missed her. I never thought I could miss someone like this, or have feelings this strong. But Becca wasn’t just some other chick, and quite frankly, this FaceTime thing was not working when I couldn’t touch or feel her. Fuck, I wanted to feel her in the flesh.

I could remember when she first moved here. My mom’s house wasn’t far from the new place her dad had just purchased. An elderly couple lived there and had passed away, so their children put it up for sale. It wasn’t the nicest house, but it had potential, and it seemed perfect for a father and daughter. I was outside with some guys I’d been hanging out with. I didn’t know how to pick my friends back then so the guys I was with were into drugs and alcohol. But there she was, helping her old man bring in boxes, sometimes two or three at a time. She had on a red and black plaid shirt with a black tank top inside. Her light blue jeans looked like someone had just cut them to make them shorter. On her feet were black and white converse, not new at all, they looked like they had been to hell and back. Her long, wavy, chestnut hair was up in a high ponytail. Her body was weird, like she was just hitting puberty or something. Her breasts didn’t match the hips she was rocking and her legs were too skinny for her body.

After she was done, she looked around for a couple of seconds before disappearing inside the house. Two minutes later she had a blanket and just laid it out on the crabgrass they’d just purchased.

Going down on her knees, she straightened the rest of the blanket before completely lying down and looking up. I looked up as well, but all I saw was a sky painted with pink and blue.

I wasn’t sure if she noticed me that day, but I sure noticed her, and at that moment I knew I had to introduce myself one way or another. But never did I think that we were going to end up best friends. We talked about things that I’d never spoken to other friends about, whether it be about my asshole father or my love for my mother and the pain I was causing her. But I noticed that she hurt just like me. Her situation was different from mine, but we still rocked the same lone-parent boat. And I knew that I needed her in my life, always.

“Did you hear me, shithead,” Jim said, slapping the back of my neck.

“Yo, fucker,” I said, bending down next to Bill to retrieve the pencil I just dropped. Once the pencil was in my hand I leaned toward the sketch and made a tiny mark next to where the bath was supposed to go. “What about this here?” I did another small mark to show that maybe the hot tub Eddie wanted could be opposite the shower. I didn’t want to talk about Becca, Juliana or the possibility that I might have cheated on Becca. Bill moved his head up and down in agreement with my ideas.

Jim’s hands were waving in the air trying to get our attention. We were so wrapped up with making things work we’d forgotten he was there. “Eddie just called me. He’s coming to check what we got so far.” He paused, pointing to the sketch in Bill’s hands and mine.

“When’s he coming?” I asked him.

Bill was beside me. He erased a few things and then rolled up the blueprint and put it in the tube to secure the sketch.

Jim looked down at his watch before saying, “In about fifteen minutes.”

We gathered all our tools and headed outside to wait for him.

As I stood there, I looked up and saw it was going to get dark soon. Almost anywhere you go in Florida you could smell the ocean. It wasn’t a fishy type of smell, but that warm salty breeze that you could taste. I inhaled a nice lungful of air before I looked up to the sky. It was painted a faint pink and white with bits and pieces revealing blue skies. Quickly, I took my phone out of my pocket to take a picture.

Me: {photo attached} I wish u were here, so I could wrap my arms around u as we look up to the picture painted before us. The sand between our toes, my lips sucking on ur ear making you giggle, the giggle that I've loved since I first discovered it. U would love this! (7:03pm)

I saw a Black SUV pull up the driveway and I knew it was Eddie. I slipped the phone in my pocket and walked toward him. Stretching out my hand, I greeted him. We small talked a little about the day and shit.

“So, would you like to look at the sketch and let us know your thoughts?” I asked him.

He looked at all three of us and his eyes lit up. “Yes, yes of course. We can go inside.”

chapter - 14

becca

I was so happy to finally have my father home. The house now felt so complete and it was like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I mean, I knew he was dying, but him being here made it seem like that wasn’t going to happen. I needed to have hope or I was never going to survive this. Since coming home, things had been difficult. We had to move things around and my dad had been sleeping in the guest room downstairs. The bad thing was the bathroom being upstairs, so every morning I had to bring him a bucket so he could wash himself. Naturally, he didn’t want me to help him.

His leg seemed to look better but it still gave him uncomfortable pain. He said it didn’t, but I could read his facial expressions. He’d had two appointments since he came home a week ago and both went well. They couldn’t control the spread of the gangrene in his system but they said his leg was healing, as it should. I was truly happy to be here with him, but I could have used some help. The day dad came home I wished James were here with me. My dad was still a big guy and it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be to help him get settled, but we worked it out. Of course, I talked James’ ear off about it that night.

I yelled over the steps with toothpaste in my mouth, “What time is your appointment today, Dad?” I had already asked for the time off work to take him to the doctors, but I couldn’t remember what time he’d said.

I was totally going to get fired from my job if I kept missing days. At least someone was covering me, not like last time, but I was hopeful they wouldn’t get rid of me. With everything that was happening I didn’t want to imagine the hospital bills.

I didn’t hear my dad answer my question so I quickly spat the paste out of my mouth, rinsed, splashed my face and filled up a bucket of water before I left the bathroom. Passing by his original bedroom, I missed my dad’s room being not too far from mine. Opening the door, everything was the same as the day he’d left for the hospital. I didn’t bother to pick anything up or clean anything. This was how it was going to be until the day he came back upstairs. It would be a while but I was determined he’d get there.

Going downstairs, being careful not to drop the bucket, I made my way to his new room. It was smaller than his bedroom upstairs but it fit what he needed it for and he was closer to the living room so he could watch TV whenever he wanted.

Leaning against the door, I opened it with my back, careful not to spill the bucket everywhere. He was sitting as best he could on the side of his bed. The only things in this room were a bed and a dresser with a mirror.

Setting the bucket next to his bed, I grabbed a few rags he kept in his drawer and handed it to him.

“Thank you, Becca,” he said, reaching for the rags in my hands.

“No problem, old man,” I told him, sitting next to him on the bed. Leaning into his ear, I whispered, “I love you, Daddy.”

Since the hospital, my dad had put on a little weight. The skin under his chin that sagged when he was at the hospital seemed to have a little more meat keeping it tight. Slowly, he was getting back to looking like the father I knew. Looking at him like this, I wondered if he missed my mom. I mean, if she were here, let alone any other woman, she would’ve been able to help him more than I could. Like, he didn’t want me to help him bathe but maybe she could’ve helped and he wouldn’t have had a problem with it.

I placed my hand on his shoulder as I inched closer to kiss his forehead.
 “You’re the best, old man.”

He turned his head towards me and smiled. “I love you too, baby girl.”

“So, your appointment today?” I reminded him.

He didn’t bother to move an inch, only his lips. “You think I didn’t hear your big ass mouth from the bathroom?”

“Oh, you’re so funny.” I fake laughed. Which, in turn, made him laugh.

But the laugh turned to coughing, leaving me suddenly serious.

“Calm down, Becca, I’m only coughing.”

I released the breath I didn’t know I was holding. “Not funny.”

He didn’t have a smile on his face anymore, actually, his eyebrows bunched together. And frown lines appeared around his lips and eyes. He released a breath of his own as he tried to move his body towards me.

“This fucking leg,” he moaned. I couldn’t imagine having a leg taken from me and me just having to deal with it. At the hospital, he was all fun and jokes and now it was clear he was aggravated.

“Dad?” I placed my hand on his shoulder.

He turned to look at me, opened his mouth, but then closed it. He was thinking or something, but he didn’t know how to put it together. Should I be worried? He shook his head as he positioned himself with his leg bent on the bed while the other just lay there.

“I’m sorry, Rebecca.”
Rebecca?
My dad never called me that. He knew how much I hated that name. I once told him I was going to pay to change my name to something else because I didn’t want anything that would remind me of
her
.

But for him to say sorry, I wasn’t following.

I crossed my legs, Indian style, facing him to make it easier for me to see him fully. “What are you talking about? What are you sorry for?”

My heart was beating fast, like a moth flapping uncontrollably against a hot light. It felt like every second it took for him to talk was an hour passing.

“I chose wrong for you.” The volume of his voice was turned low. I wished he would speak up because he wasn’t making any sense. But before I could ask him what he was talking about he explained. “If I would’ve chosen a better partner, you would’ve had a mother in your life.”

Where the hell was this coming from?

I inched closer to him. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about?”

He looked at me and I saw water forming in his old eyes. In all my years I’d never seen my dad cry. I was too little to know if he cried when my mom left. All I know is that whenever I was around him he never shed a tear. Seeing him sit in the middle of his bed looking at me with tears in his eyes, scared me half to death. Maybe the thought of him dying was starting to settle in? He hadn’t spoken about it since he came home but I wondered if he wanted to now?

“She just left you. You were just a beautiful baby and she left. If I had dated someone else you would’ve had a mother in your life. All those times you had those dolls and nobody to play with you, all those times you looked at kids with their mothers.”

I couldn’t help but swallow back tears. He was right about my dolls and having nobody to play with. I used to ask him to play with me but he never knew how to play right, so I stopped asking. Whenever we did go to the park I would see moms and their kids playing. I questioned a few times why I didn’t have a mother, but I never regretted just having a dad. And now, with all that had happened and was happening, I couldn’t think about anything different. I let that go when I was thirteen years old.

“Hey, old man…” He looked up at me. “…I have never regretted having you as a father, let alone the only parent in my life. And let me just say that if you chose someone else I wouldn’t be here. I would be a boy or some other girl. I wouldn’t be
me
.”

The look he gave me was one of pure
love.
That was when a few tears cascaded down my face. My father and I always had funny conversations, the only serious ones being about the guys I’d dated, or school. This was totally different from any of those things.

A tear escaped his face. I reached out to wipe it from his cheek but he grabbed my wrist, pulled it to his chest and smiled. “You’re a wonderful woman. Don’t ever forget that.”

“Well, you did raise me.”

We both chuckled.

His face grew serious again. “Becca, I lied to you,” he said, straight out.

The lump in my throat became difficult to swallow. “Lied to me about what?”

“About your mother.”

I didn’t get it. He’d just said that she left when I was young. I already knew that, so what could he have lied about? Honestly, I wanted to talk about him and his health, not about my mother.

He had a trail of wet on his cheeks, but no more tears. “Remember the week we moved here?”

I thought back to that very day. It was basic and boring, a lot of moving. I nodded.

“Remember the last time you asked me about your mother?”

As I got older, I spoke less and less about my mother. But the one constant I never gave up on was if she ever wrote to us, if she ever tried to contact us, if she knew where we were now and that we’d moved. I didn’t want to know of her, but curiosity left me weak. I remember moving in, being so fucking bored and pissed. Dad said this would be our last move but I didn’t believe him. Instead of arguing, I just let it show. I didn’t want to do shit. I walked around like a zombie after unpacking some of our things. I was outside, looking up to the sky all the time.

One day, I was walking around the town, or down the block, I should say. I passed a house not too far from mine. There were a couple of boys outside, very cute boys, but I was the awkward chick that nobody wanted to know back at my other schools so I didn’t bother to let myself be noticed too much. But then again, I was new. One of them stood out the most. He was a hot boy, but looked like one of those bad boys that you knew if given the chance he would break your heart. His hair was slightly long as it passed his forehead and he was wearing a black t-shirt with blue shorts that passed his knees. When he laughed he had a set of dimples. I’d never seen that on any guy before. Anyway, he was sitting outside a house when a woman in an apron and a tray full of cookies came out. All of the badass boys were salivating over them and I couldn’t help but chuckle. After placing the tray on the floor she turned toward the hot boy and kissed the top of his head. That little gesture made me think of my mom. Where was she? Did she know we were here? Was she thinking about me now? What would she be doing if she were here with us?

The next night, we ate spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, and I asked my dad a string of questions that had been bothering me since. He responded with the same answers; he didn’t know where she was, she didn’t know we were here because she hadn’t contacted us at all, and he was hoping she was thinking about me. But I never asked him what would she be doing if she were here with us. I told myself that night that I should just stop hoping that I’d get to see my mother one day. She obviously didn’t care about me, so why should I care about her? I think my heart turned to rock that day, for her at least.

That was eight years ago.

“Yeah, what about it?” I asked him, still not sure where he was going with this.

He brought his hands over his mouth and dragged them down to his chin, stroking his beard that had grown a lot while he’d been gone. He liked the way it grew out, so he kept it, only trimming it from time to time. “She…she knew where we lived, before moving here.” His voice was but a whisper, but it was loud to my ears.

I was stunned. Shock. Surprised. “Why tell me this now, Dad?”

He didn’t bother to look up. He was ashamed, and he should be, hiding this from me. “Because you need to know.”

I stand up and start to pace back and forth in his tiny room. I needed to calm down and relax. It didn’t matter.
She
didn’t matter. Why was I getting so pissed over a woman who had left me?
Just take a second to recuperate.
“You know what? It doesn’t matter. I don’t care.” I flapped my hand against my side.

He finally looked up. The single tear he’d cried minutes ago had grown to many, and were now traveling down his face. I couldn’t help but drop to the floor, placing my hands on his knees. “Don’t cry. Please.” He made a little noise from the contact I made with his missing leg. I removed my hands quickly.

He was on the verge of sobbing. His breathing picked up some, causing me to see red flags. He was still extremely ill. I didn’t need for something to upset him and him to end up in the hospital again. My strong dad was weak and vulnerable now.

“I’m so sorry,” he cried, “I should’ve told you, but I couldn’t. The things you said, how hurt you were about her not being around, I just couldn’t let her in your life with the possibility of her leaving you again.”

I got up to sit next to him, putting my hand on his back and rubbing it up and down to sooth him. “It’s okay, I understand. You were looking out for me. I will never be upset about that.” I continued to rub his back until I felt like he’d calmed down enough.

He reached around me to grab his crutches. They were the only way he could get to his wheelchair or living room, or even just to stand up. Once he had steadied himself he moved to his dresser and opened one of the middle drawers. When he turned around to me he had a folded up piece of paper in his hand. I still couldn’t overcome the fact that my father didn’t have a leg.

“This,” he said, holding out the paper to me, “Is for you.”

My hands were shaking as I reached out to grab the paper from his grip. I just looked at it like it was some sort of treasure map before holding it up next to my head. “And what is this exactly?”