Look Again - Lisa Scottoline [54]
“You seein’ anybody?”
“Huh?” Ellen didn’t know when the topic changed. “You mean, like a date?”
“Yes, exactly like a date.” Her father smiled.
“No.”
“Not since what’s-his-name?”
“No.”
“Not interested in anybody?”
Ellen thought of Marcelo. “Not really.”
“Why not?” Her father puckered his lower lip, comically, and she knew he was trying to cheer her up. “A knockout like you? Why put yourself up on the shelf? You should go out more, you know? Live a little. Go dancing.”
“I have Will.”
“We’ll sit for him.” Her father took her hand in his, encircled her with his other hand, and started humming. “Let me lead, you follow.”
“Okay, okay.” Ellen laughed, finding the box step of the fox trot, letting herself be danced around the kitchen to her father’s singing “Steppin’ Out with My Baby” as he steered her from the small of her back, his firm hand a perfect rudder.
“Will, come see your ol’ Pops!” he called over his shoulder, and in the next minute, Will came thundering into the kitchen.
“Ha, Mommy!” He ran to them, and they took his hands and the three of them shuffled around in a ring-around-the-rosy circle, with her father singing and Will looking up from one to the other, his blue eyes shining.
Ellen couldn’t sing because of the sharp ache she felt inside, a sudden pain so palpable that she almost burst into tears, and she wished that her mother were still alive to take Will’s hand and dance with them in a circle, all four of them happy and whole, a family again.
But it was an impossible wish, and Ellen sent it packing. She looked down at her child with tears in her eyes and all the love in her broken heart.
He’s ours.
Chapter Thirty-nine
It was late by the time Ellen got Will home, having had dinner at the clubhouse with her father. Will and his repertoire of napkin antics had been the focus of attention during the meal, which had helped her forget about Timothy Braverman, at least temporarily. She wondered if God had intended children to provide such a service for alleged adults. We were supposed to be taking care of them, not the other way around.
She read Will a few books before bed and tucked him in, then went downstairs to close up the kitchen. The cardboard box of her mother’s things sat on the butcher-block counter, and Oreo Figaro crouched next to it, sniffling it in his tentative way, his black nose bobbing to and from the box.
Ellen stroked his back, feeling the bumpiness of his skinny spine, regarding the box with a stab of sadness. It was so small, not even a two-foot square. Could a mother be so easily disposed of? Could one mother be so quickly traded for another?
You could swap ’em out, and nobody would know the difference.
Ellen opened the lid of the box, and Oreo Figaro jumped from the counter in needless alarm. Stacked inside the box was a set of photographs in various frames, and the top one was an eight-by-ten color photo of her parents at their wedding. She picked it up, setting aside her emotions. In the picture, her parents stood together under a tree, her father wearing a tux and his I-made-my-quota smile. Her mother’s smile was sweet and shy, making barely a quarter moon on a delicate face, which was framed by short brown hair stiffened with Aqua Net. She had roundish eyes and a small, thin nose, like the tiny beak of a dime-store finch, and at only five-foot-one, Mary Gleeson seemed to recede in size, personality, and importance next to her larger-than-life husband.
Ellen set the photo aside and looked through the others, which only made it tougher not to feel sad. There was a picture of her parents in a canoe, with her father standing up in the boat and her mother laughing, but gripping the sides in fear. And there was another of them at a wedding, with her father spinning her mother on the end of his arm, like a puppeteer.
Ellen set the photo down. She remembered seeing it and the others at their house, and now they were all being exiled, along with that part of his life. She resolved to find a place for them here. No mother deserved