Page 39 of No Kind of Hero
“Nah, it’s just Bunco night. They can start without me.”
He smiled. “I appreciate you, you know that?”
She’d been putting dishes into the dishwasher, because the kitchen was a little bit of a disaster area—like it had been a Fussy Baby Day—but now, she turned around and studied him. “What?”
“What what?” He grabbed for the box of Kleenex on the coffee table and wiped Gracie’s nose. “You’re kind of a mess, squirt,” he told her. This time, she hit him with her rattle and wiped her nose some more. On his T-shirt, which made him smile again.
“What’s got you in a good mood?” his mom asked. “Did you scratch off the winning numbers or something?”
“Could be.” He bounced Gracie, since she was making fussy noises. “Hey, some good news. We’re stepping out painting the old theater. Going to be a peacock thing. Pretty sweet.” He explained the scheme to her. “And I’ve got a woman question. Maybe you could help me out with it.”
She started wiping down counters. “Last I checked, I qualify. Shoot. Tell me it’s your love life and get double points.”
He ignored that. “What do you think about Zodiac signs in the bathroom stalls? Would you read that? Something about your sign? Would you think it was fun, or just . . .” He shrugged. “Strange?”
“Sounds all right to me. Better than graffiti. Is that Dakota’s idea? That and the peacock?”
“No. The peacock’s mine. I suggested it, and the owner liked it. The horoscope was . . . ah, somebody else’s.”
His mom stopped wiping counters, eyed him some more, and said, “Ah. Well, you’ll tell me when you’re ready, I guess. I sure do like to see you smiling again.”
He bent and kissed her cheek, something he didn’t do often enough, and said, “I love you.” Something else he didn’t do often enough. “Best mom in the world,” he added. It was what he’d always used to say growing up, knowing it made her happy. It was even true. When had he stopped saying it? “Thanks for teaching me how.”
In response, she gave him a squeeze and said, “Any time. Watching your kids be good parents is about the best present a parent could ask for. Especially seeing you know how to be a dad. Can’t tell you what that does for me.”
She almost never mentioned Evan’s own father. When Evan’s brother Grant, always angrier and louder than Evan, had asked why way back during their teenage years, she’d said, “I didn’t want you boys to hate him in case he showed up again.” Which he hadn’t, but Evan admired the sentiment. He hoped he could do that. He wasn’t so sure.
And being a dad wasn’t so different, surely, from being a mom. You changed diapers and fixed bottles and got up in the middle of the night just the same, and that squeezing around your heart when you were snuggling that trusting little person who loved you best of all and counted on you to keep her world safe—that was probably the same too. And when you were the only one there every night and the only one paying the bills, and you knew it was all on you? He’d bet his mom knew all about that one.
He had to wipe Gracie’s nose again when he put her in the van, which made her twist away, shove at his hand, and squawk. Shewasfussy, and he was hungry. Starving, in fact, and with Gracie like this, how long would it be before he got dinner? He climbed into the driver’s seat, pulled out of the forested lot where his mom’s doublewide had stood since forever, and told Gracie, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to go buy you a humidifier for that nose, because don’t tell anybody, but I might watch baby care videos sometimes while I eat my lunch. Just to pass the time, of course. If you spill the beans on me, I’ll deny it, but they say humidity helps, so we’re doing it. After that, we’re going through the drive-through and getting burgers. If you decide you don’t want yours, I’ll eat it.” He stuck the Kidz Bop CD into the van’s ancient sound system, because it kept Gracie happier in the car, and headed to the hardware store to the accompaniment of extreme perkiness.
If he bought two burgers and a couple packs of fries in the drive-through, well, hewashungry enough for it. It was only a few blocks out of his way to swing by Russell’s, too. He hadn’t mowed the lawn over there for almost two weeks. He’d better check it out. He wasn’t driving slowly by a girl’s house and hoping she’d be outside so he could stop and pretend he hadn’t realized she lived there. That would be stupid. Also juvenile.
When he turned the corner, there she was. Her hair back in its braid, but all of her way too messy otherwise to be Beth. She was standing in the middle of the lawn peering at an upside-down electric edger and didn’t even notice him, so he parked a little short of the driveway and told his daughter, “Looks like our lucky day, squirt. Your dad gets to be a hero.”
Beth kept on not noticing him until he was almost on top of her. And when she did see him, she jumped.
“Need a hand?” he asked.
“I want to say no,” she said with a sigh, letting the edger fall to the ground in clear disgust and wiping her face with her tank top, exposing all of her midriff, which wasn’t the worst thing Evan had ever seen. “Hi, Gracie.” She smiled at the baby, and Gracie smiled back. “I won’t swear,” Beth told her, “because you’re very young. But I’m hoping your dad notices that I can’t figure out how to get the roll thingie to stay in. This plastic . . . cord. Cutting thread. Thingie. And that he fixes it without making me feel stupid.”
Oh, yeah. He could do that. “I’ve got this,” he said, bending to pick up the edger and the coil of white cord, which had fallen a little distance away. “If you want to take Gracie while I do it.”
“While you show me how it fits in there, sure,” Beth said. “But I can do it. The edging, I mean. I read how. I just had an angry moment there.”
“Ever done it before?” He handed the baby over. She could be picky about the company she kept, but he’d already noticed she liked Beth.
“No.” She got Gracie snuggled up the way the baby liked, and he’d been right. Gracie didn’t seem to mind. “But like I told you, I researched it. It’s not rocket science. And this is my trade.”
“Uh . . . what’s your trade? You taking up landscaping?” Beth’s parents’ dog Henry had come over now, wagging his tail, and Gracie was making put-me-down-nownoises and reaching for him.
Beth smiled. “Ha. That’d be some stretch goal. No, I’m cleaning up the yard and the house in exchange for staying here.”
“Right. You asked if you could stay, and Dakota said, ‘As long as you earn it.’ Why don’t I believe that?”
“No.Isaid that. Do you want the New Me or don’t you?”
That wasn’t a very tough one. “I want the new you.”
