Saturday, day of the picnic . . .
Apart from some slight sleep deprivation—apparently Black & Blue had some pretty ardent fans, and they noisily filled the streets with drunken “Woooos!” as they spilled out of the Misty Cat last night, tempting Eden to slide open a window and dump buckets of water on their heads, but she didn’t. Her mom had picked up Annelise from school yesterday, and Annelise had met one of the guys from Black & Blue at their sound check at the Misty Cat. She said he was really, really nice and had taught her to play another mournful chord. So since the guy from Black & Blue was nice and generous to her daughter, Eden decided she’d be nice to his fans, even if his fans were obnoxious.
All in all, however, Eden felt amazing. As though she were wearing clouds for shoes.
Avalon had already picked up Annelise, who only knew she was going to be spending a delightful day with her aunt and uncle and the goats and the donkey. It was too soon to tell her about Gabe.
Today, for the first time, Eden was going to have hours and hours with Gabe, and hopefully a lot of those hours would be spent at least seminude out in the wild.
She was just getting ready to load the day’s deliveries into the van for Danny to handle, after which she’d hang the “Closed” sign on the door a little earlier than usual, when the door jingled.
And in walked a god.
Not the Michelangelo-Statue-of-David-aquiline-nose sort. Maybe less a god than a faun. The rakish kind that lived in the forest, slept on beds of moss under blankets of leaves, and captured and humped nymphs, not necessarily with their express permission.
He wasn’t classically handsome. His jaw was a little too square, his lips a little too pillowy, his nose too big, his eyes maybe a little too narrow. They were shiny and mischievous as a bird’s. It was all topped by a pile of dark curls, so loose and unruly one would need a compass and a machete to untangle them.
Things seldom turned out well for the various nymphs these kinds of gods pursued, regardless of whether they were willing. They were turned into trees or spirited off to Hades for months at a time.
In Eden’s case, she’d been quite willing. And she’d wound up knocked up.
And yet it had taken her a split second to recognize Jasper Townes, because he was literally the last person she expected to see in her shop, though maybe that shouldn’t have been true. She now thought she understood what it truly meant to have the living daylights shocked out of her.
She froze in place behind the counter, three-quarters of her turned toward the door, one hand reaching for a shelf, as she’d turned herself into a tree, already out of self-defense. Which would not look out of place in her shop.
Jasper Townes was Sexy. Capital “S,” land hard on the “X,” sexy. But it was more a result of some aura, something he was born with, rather than the net effect of a series of qualities, such as reliability and foresight and protectiveness or those other Boy Scout (or navy SEAL, if she was getting specific) type things that got her motor running these days.
Being lead singer of a now very popular band called Blue Room was all part and parcel of Jasper’s sexiness.
“Eden?” His low, raspy voice was sure familiar.
“Yes?” she said pleasantly in her shopkeeper voice, although thanks to nerves she’d acquired kind of a dry-mouth click. “And you are?”
He actually laughed at that, quite genuinely.
Because, ha ha ha, wasn’t it funny that everybody in the whole freaking world knew who he was.
He had a pleasant laugh, he really did. It was just that suddenly the world was an echo chamber, and everything, even the poor baby roses in the courtyard, looked sinister in light of the moment she’d been sort of dreading for the last decade.
His band had a drummer who played a double bass drum.
It had nothing on the beat of her heart right now, though.
“Wow, you look pretty much the same as I remember,” he said. Admiringly.
She didn’t say anything. She just stared. Was that . . . was that a feather dangling from his hair? Did a bird crash into him or did he deliberately install a feather into his hair? Maybe it was a remnant from a down pillow.
“From the front, anyway,” he added excruciatingly.
And very, very wickedly.
Oh, God.
He’d been like a freaking Chinese acrobat that night. She’d been wheelbarrowed and scissored and flipped like a pancake inside of an hour. For a laconic poet type, he’d sure had a lot to prove about his prowess.
She’d been more bemused than anything about the whole thing, though it had been interesting the way trying all the rides in the carnival was interesting. A one and done. That had been her plan, anyway.
She stared him down until the roguish, pleased-with-himself twinkle vanished from his eyes.
“I bet you get away with saying anything you want these days, huh, Jasper?”
“Sorry. Maybe that was a little, um, graceless.”
“Um, yeah. A little.” Tersely as a nun with a ruler about to smack his hand.
“I was trying to lighten the mood.”
“I was unaware we had established a mood.”
A little silence.
Became a long silence.
“I never forgot that night with you, you know. Thought about it quite a bit over the years,” he tried carefully.
“I always think it’s funny when men say things like that. Like they should get a medal for bothering to remember boinking someone.”
He looked faintly surprised. “I never thought of it that way.”
There was, in truth, no reason she should be rude to him. Apart from nerves and guilt that she didn’t really deserve, because she had tried to get in touch with him.
Was that why he was here? Oh God.
She steeled her nerve. “What brings you to town, Jasper?”
He looked surprised again. “I thought you’d know. I’m the ‘Blue’ part of Black & Blue, my side project with Renfro Black from Powder Keg. We played a set at the Misty Cat last night. Then I’m off to Europe with Blue Room after a few NorCal gigs.”
Oh, God. Jasper’s band was Blue Room, after the lyric in that David Bowie song, “Sound and Vision.” Black & Blue!
Oh, shit shit shit. How had that escaped her?
Oh right: she’d been riding Principal Gabe.
The hypervigilant part of her brain had kind of been anesthetized by fantastic sex and giddy infatuation.
And she’d been busy being a mom.
And then the last part of what he’d just said registered:
He’d been at the Misty Cat for sound check.
Which was when Annelise was there yesterday.
And he was the guy who’d taught Annelise a new chord.
And just like that, her heart was in her throat.
Honestly. Did the universe have to pack two moments of truth into one weekend?
“You own this place now?” He looked around, wonderingly, frowning faintly, as if he was puzzling out what a flower shop precisely was.
“Forgive me, Jasper, I’m afraid you caught me at a bad time. It’s nice to see you again, but I have to get these arrangements out to the van for delivery. So . . .”
Now that was purely chicken-shit, and she disliked herself for it, because it spoke to who she was when backed into a corner. Apparently she was willing to just attempt a dodge on the off chance she got away with it.
She couldn’t imagine Gabe ever doing that, but then, Gabe was six foot a jillion, and he’d never gotten knocked up by a rock star.
Or had a daughter all to himself for ten years.
She desperately wanted Jasper to leave. Leave us the way we are, she urged him, as if he were a tarot deck she was clutching. Willing her question into him.
And yet she’d never forgive herself if he did leave.
He just smiled, a bemused little smile. “Literally no one has ever told me to go away in at least a decade.”
“I’ll give you a second to Google what those words mean, if that helps.”
He glanced over his shoulder, as if he was reflexively looking around for an assistant to do the Googling for him before he caught himself.
And then suddenly, something about his posture signaled . . . intent. He was here for a very specific reason.
He drew in a deep breath. Like he was steeling his nerve.
Portent gusted through her soul and her stomach turned like a chicken on a spit.
“Okay. Listen. I didn’t just come in for old times’ sake.”
He stepped forward and slowly laid something on the counter. Like he was playing a card.
It looked like a scrap of paper. A dollar bill? A coupon for a bouquet? Good Lord, wasn’t he making good money by now?
She peered closer.
All the little hairs stood up on the back of her neck.
It was a faded Polaroid.
Of Annelise.
Her baby. Eden’s lungs seized up. All skinny colty legs and long shining hair to her waist, standing in front of what looked like a suburban house, her eyes squinted closed, smiling that adorable gap-toothed smile.
“Where the hell did you get this picture of Annel . . .”
And then she stopped.
Because she somehow understood before he even confirmed it aloud.
“It’s a photo of my mom when she was eleven,” Jasper said.
It was like a trapdoor had opened beneath her feet. Eden pressed her fingers against the counter to steady herself against a swoop of vertigo.
She didn’t look up.
She couldn’t yet.
The longer she looked down the longer she could pretend he wasn’t standing here in her shop.
Her breathing was rough in her own ears now, though.
“I met Annelise at the Misty Cat during sound check. She’s a sweetheart. Told me she could play guitar, too. She actually told me a lot of things.” He smiled faintly. A little nervously.
He was nervous.
“Yeah. She takes lessons,” she said faintly. “And she’s . . . she’s a gregarious kid.”
“She’s a charmer. She told me she was ten years old. She showed me her new favorite chord. It’s—”
“A minor.”
She and Jasper said it at the same time.
There was a little silence.
He breathed in. Exhaled at a steady length. He was gathering courage for something.
“She told me she used a lot of A minor to write a song called ‘Invisible Dad,’” he added.
Fuck fuck fuck triple fuck.
“She said she doesn’t know who her dad is, but he had to leave town for an appointment. She says she’s pretty sure he has big shoulders.”
Bless Leesy’s friendly, talkative little heart and her dreams of a certain kind of dad.
Eden had nothing to say to this. All she could think of was Gabe, and his shoulders, and his warm eyes, receding like a dream. Like he was standing on the opposite shore and she hit a sandbar just as she was about to walk off the boat into his arms.
“She has one of these, too.” Jasper pointed to the dent in his chin.
Eden had nothing to say to that.
“I connected the dots,” he concluded.
Yep. Jasper was no dummy. She remembered that well.
She slowly leveled her head up and stared at him. She caught a glimpse of her own face in the mirror up in the corner of the store: pale, eyes big and hunted. She herself looked like a shoplifter who’d just gotten caught.
Annelise not only had the chin dent. Annelise had his eyebrows, the way they sort of winged up at the end. And probably a thousand other subtle little things.
She said nothing, as the full import of all of this washed over her. As if she’d gone down in a dunking booth.
“So, I’m just going to come right out and ask. Eden . . . am I that kid’s father?”
She was pretty sure her expression already answered that question.
“Yes.”
Absolute and total silence reigned for a few seconds.
Then he pushed his hands back through his hair and sucked in a long, long breath.
She was surprised things didn’t fall out. A dime, or a gum wrapper. The kinds of things one found in sofa cushions. Because he still looked like a guy who’d partied hard the night before and fell asleep on the couch.
“Huh. Wow. Well.”
A long silence ensued while Jasper looked off into the middle distance pensively. He swallowed. Then he pressed his lips together.
“Do you need to sit down?” she asked solicitously. With her foot, she nudged a chair over toward him.
He shook his head.
“Do you need a . . . drink? I only have water,” she added hurriedly.
When she’d learned she was pregnant, it was also about the time Jasper was in the news for dating a British supermodel with whom he subsequently loudly, publicly, and drunkenly argued in an airport lounge, about, bystanders said, the fact that she preferred John Mayer’s last record to his.
“THAT PRAT?” he’d shouted, waving his arms in an outraged inebriated fashion, like those inflatable men outside car dealerships.
It had become a meme.
He’d in fact been girlfriend-free for all of about five minutes after he left Hellcat Canyon.
Shortly after that he’d gone to rehab for some unspecified “dependency.”
His unspecified dependencies were something else she ought to learn about. For Annelise’s sake.
He shook his head again.
“Jasper . . .” she said carefully. “I still have to get these flowers in the van or they’ll wilt. This is my livelihood.”
“Eden . . . it’s just . . . why didn’t you tell . . .” he began. His volume escalated a little.
He caught himself.
“I did tell you,” she said instantly, evenly, with as little emotion as she could muster. “Or at least I did try to tell you. Multiple times. I managed to get through to your agent. Or one of them. You seem to have a slew of agents and managers of various kinds running interference for you. I was told very kindly that approximately twenty-five women a day claimed to be pregnant with your child. I left a message for you. When I didn’t hear back, I figured you just didn’t want to know. Which was actually fine with me. I was only fulfilling what I thought was my moral obligation. I couldn’t imagine the news would thrill you at that point in your career.”
Jasper was white about the mouth now. He didn’t dispute that last part.
“I swear to you I never got any of your messages. I did have a phalanx of people protecting me from other people back then. I guess I still do.”
The thought popped into her head: how Annelise would love the word phalanx.
Because all thoughts led to Annelise. She was her very heart; the world was like the circulatory system.
And yet Jasper was part of Annelise, too. And Annelise was part of him.
The push-pull of that thought was a sort of sweet anguish.
“By the way, that was right about the time you fought with the supermodel and went into rehab and then after that dated another supermodel.”
“Which one was that? Annika or Marie Hele—”
“Are you kidding me right now?”
“Right. Right. Sorry. Just thinking out loud. Kind of . . . kind of thrown.”
“Okay. Well, that makes both of us. Maybe you can get a song out of it.”
He remained quiet.
Perversely she liked him for not blathering something insincere, or defensive, or self-righteous.
Something terrified and tense in her was easing: she’d liked him back then for a reason, not just because, well, he was sexy and a musician. Apparently he wasn’t a bullshitter. He was, in fact, an actual person. Her judgment wasn’t entirely awful.
The news of children pretty much sobered everyone in a damn hurry. Shock was great for burning off the mists of bullshit.
“I would have gotten in touch,” he said quietly, finally.
She wasn’t positive she believed that.
His tone suggested he wasn’t even certain he believed it.
The guy he was back then might not have.
The guy he was today apparently believed he would have. He was here, anyway. And that took some nerve.
She let it lie.
They stared at each other in the hush of her little store. So precious to her, like Annelise, like her mostly predictable life in Hellcat Canyon.
“You never got married, huh?” he said next.
She sighed. “C’mon, Jasper. I’m barely thirty, and you’re not much older than me. And I’ve been kind of busy raising a child and running a business.”
“Sorry. I meant . . . It’s just that . . . so it’s not like you were . . . um, waiting for . . .”
When his meaning dawned on her, she coughed a laugh so incredulous it fluttered the leaves on her floral arrangement. “For you?”
She said it with such genuine, scorching amazement color actually rose in his cheeks.
She was also amazed anything could still make him blush.
“I’m sorry, I’m a little thrown, too, and I default to snarky when I’m thrown. I don’t mean to be unkind, Jasper, but, uh, no. I had no interest in a relationship with you. Now, or then. I wanted what you wanted that night, and that’s all.” She tried to say this a little more gently. “It was fun, though. It was memorable. And I guess I don’t regret it.”
That was hardly flattering.
He accepted this with a wry twist of his mouth.
He looked so stunned and so oddly stranded in her store, like a creature abandoned by his mothership. He had always had that quality of otherness about him, that charisma that rock stars exuded, that drew the world in and kept it at a remove.
She tried her soothing voice, the same voice Lloyd Sunnergren had used that time a coyote had wandered into the feed store a few years back.
“Jasper . . . just so you know . . . in case you were worried . . . we never needed or wanted anything from you. And we still don’t. Not money, not time, certainly not publicity. We are really, really great. Annelise has dozens of people in her life who adore her and will always be there for her, and we have a really great, happy, full life. So you have absolutely nothing to worry about.”
She stopped just short of saying, So you can walk out guilt free right now if you want. She knew he was smart enough to recognize what she’d just said for what it was: the ladder dangling from the rescue copter for the guy who’d tumbled into a ravine. And if he latched on to that ladder, it would be an out for her, too.
“I’d like to talk more with you about this. Can we? I’m here for the next two days. Staying in J. T. McCord’s house while he’s in Los Angeles filming some spots with Franco Francone. Then I’m off to Sacramento, and from there San Francisco, then Europe. Here’s my number.”
A collection of bracelets jingled on his wrist and seemed to collectively act as a fan that sent a little waft of patchouli toward her when he held out his card.
What adult male had time to dab on patchouli? None of the men in or on the periphery of her life were scented by anything other than deodorant soap and deodorant and sweat and in the case of Giorgio the grill cook, hamburger grease. Gabe always smelled clean in a way that immediately made her picture him nude in the shower.
When she didn’t immediately take the card, he placed it on the counter and slid it over to her.
And slid the photo back into his own hands.
“I don’t have too many photos of her. I carry this one around with me. Prop it up on hotel room nightstands when I’m on tour.”
He carried a photo of his mom and parked it on his hotel nightstand like an anchor, she supposed. Because he was a rootless guy. She remembered that about him. “I flow like a river, baby,” he’d told her then, and that had struck her as profound right before she slept with him, and a month later when that pink plus sign showed up it seemed like possibly the most dangerous thing a man could say.
And now she understood him a little more.
Why now, was the question?
She asked it. “Why now, Jasper?”
He hesitated. “Eden . . . I swear I don’t have an agenda. I don’t want to disrupt her life or yours. I just . . . happen to know what it’s like not to know who your dad is. I still wonder about mine. And even if Annelise doesn’t pester you about it, I’d bet my left nut that she wonders about it. And my left nut is my favorite.”
He waited for the laugh, which of course wasn’t coming. Not today.
“I didn’t know my dad. And you know what? After a while I stopped asking about him, because I didn’t want to hurt my mom’s feelings, because I didn’t want her to think she wasn’t enough.”
She couldn’t say a word, because he’d just voiced precisely everything she’d been thinking for going on two months.
“Anyway. Good seeing you. Call me or text me if you want to have dinner to talk about it tonight. I’ll let you get back to . . .”
He waved his hand vaguely, puzzled, to indicate the shop, her life. Her ordinary, extraordinary life that had just shifted to allow in the possibility of an extraordinary man. Gabe Caldera.
She was no stranger to sacrifice, but what she had to do next seemed so wildly unfair she was arrested in a moment—just a tick of the clock—of grinding self-pity at the injustice and gracelessness of the universe’s timing.
And then, because she always had, she did what she had to do.