Love at First Bark Page 4

  If not… No. She locked down her thoughts. She didn’t have the energy to think about that today.

  She hesitated before entering the bedroom and beelined for the closet, determined not to let memories press in and oppress her. In and out. She was going to grab her stuff and leave, that’s all.

  Mia grabbed a couple more sweaters and pairs of heavier pants from her side of the closet. Bee hopped from the bench at the foot of the bed to the mattress. The sweet dog made for the mess of pillows and wadded-up comforter and circled and scratched at them, readying herself for a second morning nap.

  “Sweet Bee, we aren’t staying long enough to get comfortable.”

  Undeterred, Bee kicked up something small and shiny and blue, and it caught Mia’s attention. She crossed the room with her arms full of clothes and stared at the bed next to the dog. There, in plain sight, was a condom wrapper.

  You haven’t seen one of these since just after Ollie was conceived.

  After a troubled delivery, she’d had an emergency partial hysterectomy. There’d been no need to worry about birth control during the entire course of her marriage.

  She stared, frozen in place, thoughts rolling over her in waves.

  Brad had been begging her to come back and give their marriage another chance. And all the while screwing someone on our bed.

  Was it the same woman he’d cheated on Mia with, the one he’d promised had been a mistake and had meant nothing to him? Or someone else?

  She noted the anger inside her. It was there, rising to the surface, making her want to yell and stamp her feet. But something else, a sharper and stronger emotion, fought it and won.

  For the first time in a long time, Mia felt free.

  And one thing was brilliantly clear. She was never, ever coming back to live in this house.

  Chapter 4

  Although the lightened-up version of A Christmas Carol that Taye’s middle school was performing tonight was packed with comic relief, Ben hoped he didn’t end up second-guessing his decision to bring Ollie along. He’d promised to bring him back in September when Taye had been awarded the part of Jacob Marley, but a lot had changed in Ollie’s life since then. Even filled with jokes and modern slang, the play still carried its share of heavy messages, which Ben wasn’t sure Ollie needed so soon after losing his dad.

  Ben had mentioned his hesitation to Mia, and they’d come to the decision that Ollie should still attend. Ollie idolized Taye. He had helped Taye practice his lines half a dozen times over the last few months and was excited to see his performance.

  But as the audience quieted and the second act started, Ollie leaned against Ben and resumed rolling one of his Hot Wheels atop both their laps and along the side of Ben’s chair.

  Ben wished Mia had come along, and not just because of the opportunity to spend a few hours with her. He wanted to see if she really was holding herself together, and since no one could read Ollie as well, she’d know if a quiet, introspective moment was becoming something more challenging.

  But she’d been off tonight. A headache, she’d claimed, though Ben suspected something else was boiling under the surface, and he intended to ask her when they were alone. When he’d suggested she stay behind to have a few rare hours to herself, and Ollie had seemed excited for the one-on-one time with him, she’d taken him up on the offer.

  Ollie shifted, nestling deeper into the crook of Ben’s arm as up on the cafeteria stage, Ebenezer watched his family’s merriment from outside a makeshift window.

  Ben couldn’t remember a time that Ollie hadn’t been comfortable snuggling up next to him or clambering for a ride atop his shoulders. Somehow, he’d managed to navigate the rocky waters of loving Ollie unconditionally despite the fact that he was secretly in love with his best friend’s wife. Ben’s love for Ollie was pure and clean, and nothing could touch it.

  He’d been at the hospital the night Ollie was born four weeks early after Mia and Brad’s car accident. The wreck had been a bad one. Brad had been distracted and had driven into a concrete divider, injuring himself and sending Mia into early labor.

  Afraid his feelings might show, Ben had done his best to avoid her before then. In fact, before that night, he couldn’t remember having exchanged more than a few minutes of conversation with her. He’d even convinced himself that he’d been doing a good job of burying his love for her.

  But then he’d seen her in the hospital bed, in pain and vulnerable and afraid, and he knew the love he had for her wasn’t the kind that could just be gotten past.

  In the hospital that night, he’d been the one to pass Ollie to his father, and he’d held Mia’s hand sometime later when they couldn’t stop the bleeding and she was told she’d need an emergency hysterectomy. Out of that crazy mess of a night, he’d been named Ollie’s godfather, and he’d been a regular part of Ollie’s life ever since.

  Aside from when he was away on a climb, Ben had spent an evening every week with Ollie since the boy was three and a half or four. Tonight was a Friday, but their usual night together was Wednesday and one of Ben’s favorite nights of the week.

  Enthralled by Ben’s climbing stories, Ollie had wanted to learn to climb. Their Wednesday nights most often involved a trip to the climbing gym, followed by dinner and hot chocolate or ice cream. As the seasons went by and Brad became less and less interested in sticking to routine, it had usually just been Mia in the house when Ben brought Ollie home.

  He’d lost count of how many times he’d stayed to help get Ollie to bed. The boy was a cuddler and most so right before sleep. Ben loved reading with him or lying next to him and listening to the creative kid make up stories that became more outlandish the sleepier he got. After Ollie fell asleep, Ben would sit in the kitchen with Mia, reminiscing over the highlights of Ollie’s day and anything else the conversation led to. These quiet hours sharpened his longing for a life that might have been his if fate hadn’t intervened.

  Most of those years, all that stuff had been easy enough to do. He was in Mia’s life as a friend, and he was Ollie’s godfather. That was it, nothing more. He got pretty good at blocking out the other stuff, like how beautiful she was and how he could imagine the way their bodies would fit together, or the way he appreciated the easy curl of her mouth when it turned up in a soft smile or the impossible deep gray-blue of her eyes.

  But things had gotten complicated this summer after he returned from his second attempt at Everest.

  He hadn’t meant to, but he’d carried his love for Mia onto the mountain with him. He’d only done three climbs at altitudes higher than seventeen thousand feet. He’d hoped the first two climbs had prepared him for the way the lack of oxygen messed with a person’s thoughts. But the higher he got on his ascent, the harder it was to think, to reason, to be anything but present, and the harder it was to separate himself from that love.

  Ben had always looked forward to climbing because it took one hundred percent focus, one hundred percent presence. But this time, even as exhausting and dangerous and rewarding as the ascent had been, he’d not been able to leave his love for Mia behind. Even during the hardest, most technical parts of his climb, she’d never been far from his mind. He’d seen her face on the mountain, and as he’d fallen asleep in his tent at night, doing his best to doze in the severe cold and ignore the shallowness of his breathing and the way, that high up, it was hard to tell when he was asleep and when he was awake. Everything up there was a dream. A magnificent, waking nightmare. And Mia had been with him through all of it.

  He’d come down that mother of all mountains laid bare. He was weaker than he’d ever been in his life, and the experience had been transcendent in a way he’d not expected. He’d also come down committed to telling Mia the truth. No matter how complicated it might make things, he’d lived with his secret long enough.

  Ben had lingered in Nepal at Kathmandu for an extra week, trying to recover
his strength and put back on some of the weight he’d lost as he worked through the enormity of what declaring the truth might mean. For all of them.

  And then he’d come home to St. Louis and walked into a surprise party that his staff had thrown for him, and two very different things had kept the words from rising to his lips. The first had been the look on Mia’s face out on the balcony the night of the party, and the tender hesitance in the way she’d reach out to brush her fingertips over his bottom lip. She’d met his gaze, and he’d seen it in her eyes for the first time. She loved him; he just wasn’t sure in what way. Maybe she wasn’t either. It occurred to him that no matter how much he might want to persuade her, he needed to let her work through her feelings and whatever came of them.

  Then, a week later, the second thing had happened. This one was a phone call from Brad.

  “I messed up.” It was the first thing Ben heard due to a skip in reception. “It didn’t mean anything,” he’d added. “It was one night, eight months ago. I was drunk off my ass, and it didn’t mean jack. It was ten minutes in a car.”

  Fury had flashed through Ben’s veins as his friend’s words sank in. “You cheated on her! If this isn’t some sad joke, you know I’m going to kick your ass!”

  “You’re too late to preach. This girl… She’s practically a kid, and she’s pregnant.”

  “Shit, Brad. Shit. Define ‘practically.’”

  “She’s legal, if that’s what you’re asking. Twenty maybe. I haven’t seen her in months, but she tracked me down and says it’s mine. She wants to give the kid to some couple she found online. Only first she wanted to see if I wanted dibs.”

  “On the baby?”

  “Yeah, on the baby.”

  Dibs. On a human life. A wave of nausea had rolled over Ben. “Have you told Mia?”

  “Not yet. I don’t even know if the kid’s mine.”

  “Does she know you cheated on her?”

  “You know things haven’t been good. If I tell her I cheated, it’s over. I’m sure of it.”

  Ben’s silence had likely made as strong a point as the words that followed. “Maybe it needs to be over.”

  When Brad spoke again, the tension in his voice was sharper than Ben had heard in years. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Thanks for the help, buddy.” After that, the line went dead.

  From that point on, their already-strained friendship had been pushed to the brink.

  Brad told Mia about his infidelity in August, just after the kid was born but before the DNA test results were in. Most likely Brad had taken one look at the baby and known he didn’t need to wait for test results. Somehow, even wrinkled and helpless, the kid bore an uncanny resemblance to his father.

  And now Brad was dead, and Mia didn’t know any of this. But Ben knew way more than he wanted to know. The girl had fallen in love with the baby and kept him. Brad had been funneling her money he didn’t have to help her keep afloat. Mia had no idea of the baby’s existence or the bad financial shape Brad had gotten into during the last few months. And Ollie had a half brother living twenty minutes away in a two-bedroom apartment shared by four punky twenty-year-olds.

  Ben was at an impasse. How could he tell Mia any of this when he’d been keeping so much from her for so long?

  He couldn’t. This was the sort of news that wasn’t his place to share. Besides, when he thought of telling her, it was hard to decide if it would be in her best interest…or in his.

  Though he did his best to focus on the play and the middle schoolers who got their lines right more times than they didn’t, Ben was only successful when Taye was onstage. When it was over, he and Ollie wove through the crowd and met up with Taye’s extended family.

  Ben offered to take them all to dinner, but the group was headed to Taye’s aunt’s house. Ben and Ollie hung out with them until the parking lot cleared, and Ben snapped a dozen pictures, promising to make plans with Taye tomorrow.

  A half hour later, Ben found himself across a booth from Ollie in the Pancake Hut, cutting the most perfectly round of Ollie’s pancakes into zigzag slices. He was doing his best to visualize the weight of all the secrets swimming inside him sliding off his shoulders and settling on the tile floor, but it wasn’t working.

  Ollie crunched a slice of bacon and watched the pancake cutting, his slight, bony shoulders hunched forward uncharacteristically. Ben wondered if he were processing some of what he’d been exposed to tonight, but decided not to lead the conversation into anything heavy. Once the first pancake was cut into zigzags, Ben reassembled it into the nearly perfect circle it had been and started cutting small, deliberate pieces from the second pancake.

  Ollie leaned way out over the table and twisted around to see the shapes from Ben’s perspective. He’d been making shapes out of Ollie’s pancakes since he was two.

  “I like the zigzags.” Ollie’s nose was a little stuffed, and he was close enough that Ben could smell the bacon and orange juice on his breath. “What’s round and zigzagged?”

  Ben cocked an eyebrow and added a few small circles on two of the zigzagged lines, a topper, and a hook, and scooted the rest of the second pancake to the side, then twisted the plate so that Ollie could see it upright.

  “Oh! An ornament! Cool. You never did an ornament before. Mom has one just like that on the tree.”

  “Yep. I noticed it when I picked you up. I think it’s an antique.”

  “It was my great-nanna and pawpaw’s. All the ornaments are. We aren’t using ours this year.”

  “That makes sense.” Ben waited to see if Ollie would offer more. He suspected it would be best to let Ollie lead the conversation tonight.

  Ollie slid the plate across the table and started to sink back onto his bench, but changed his mind and slid in next to Ben, ducking underneath the table and squirming up onto the seat next to him.

  “It’s cold,” he said by way of explanation.

  Ben draped an arm across the boy’s back and pulled him closer. Ollie leaned against him as he decorated his pancake ornament with drops and squirts of syrup. At first it looked good, but as was typical, he kept going until it was a syrupy mess. Then he looked up and grinned mischievously, making Ben laugh. “With all that sugar in you, you aren’t going to be able to fall asleep tonight.”

  “I can stay up late. There’s no school tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday.” Ollie stabbed a long zigzagged slice of pancake and dangled it overhead, then munched from the end up.

  “That’s right. I knew that. Only since we’re hanging out, it feels more like a Wednesday.”

  “You’ll keep coming on Wednesdays, won’t you?” Ollie’s eyes grew wide in anticipation.

  “Yeah, of course, Ol. And not just on Wednesdays either.”

  Ollie released a sigh, and his shoulders dropped as he abandoned his fork and lifted a wedge of pancake with his fingers. He dipped it into a puddle of syrup before popping it into his mouth.

  “Do you think Jacob Marley was buried in a yern?”

  Ben had just taken a bite of his own pancake, bacon and pecan, and it stuck in his throat at the question. He washed it down with a gulp of coffee. Most likely, there was much more to that question than had been spoken. “Well, first off, Jacob Marley is a fictional character, Ol, just like the ones from the stories your mom reads you. He isn’t—wasn’t—real. So he never actually died.”

  “But would he have been?”

  “I don’t know, honestly.” He suspected the answer was no, but didn’t want to go into the fact that cremation was more popular now than it had been back in Charles Dickens’s time.

  “I thought my dad’s yern would be bigger,” Ollie added, washing down his pancake bite with a gulp of milk.

  Ben blinked. This was the first time Ollie had said anything about his dad’s funeral.

&
nbsp; “It’s called an urn, and I can see why you’d think that.”

  “They knew for sure, didn’t they? Before…” Ollie dropped the remaining half slice of bacon he’d just picked up and focused his attention on the table, making sticky marks with the tips of his syrupy fingers. He curled forward as if preparing for a blow, breaking their connection. “They for sure knew he was dead?”

  It came out in a whisper so quiet Ben had to piece it together. “Yeah, Ol, they knew for sure.”

  As he sat with Ben’s answer, Ollie drew a sticky line connecting the syrupy fingerprint smudges. Finally, he settled back against Ben. “Mom says spirits don’t have bodies, but in my dreams, he looks the same.”

  Figuring the topic was best pursued by Mia, Ben started on a safer subject. “Did I tell you that your dad and I were seven like you when we met? He drew pictures in syrup too.”

  Ollie smiled. “Did you?”

  “Maybe, but I think I had more fun making pancake towers.”

  “Did you always like to draw buildings? Even when you were my age?”

  “No, not always. Though when I was your age, I had a pretty sizable Lincoln Log collection. I didn’t start drawing buildings until after I started climbing. It was the landscapes and rock formations out in the southwest that first made me think about architecture.”

  “What’re Lincoln Logs?”

  Ben paused with his ceramic coffee mug halfway to his mouth. “You’ve never played with Lincoln Logs?” When Ollie shook his head earnestly, Ben added, “We’ll have to fix that. They’re like LEGOs, only they don’t lock in the same, and they’re small wooden logs instead of plastic blocks.”

  “What do you build with them?”

  “Buildings mostly. Towers, cabins, fire lookouts, fences, that sort of thing.”

  “I’ve seen ’em. If my mom gets me some, could you come over and play them with me?”

  “Yeah. Sure. I’d like that.”

  “Are you going away again? To climb another mountain?” Ollie had been using his napkin to wipe up the smears of syrup on the table near his plate but stopped to look up at Ben.