The next morning, me, Momma, and Baby Lucy got up early so we could talk and have breakfast together as a family. With JimDaddy. He told me everything, and I listened, squeezing Baby Lucy tight like a boa constrictor. Nah, not really. But she did look at me, brows furrowed, when I gave her a little more hugging than necessary.
“Sorry, Baby,” I said, my lips in her curls.
Momma wiped down the kitchen counters. They gleamed. The sink sparkled. I could tell she stayed on the edge of things so she could hear what we had to say to each other.
I glanced at the doorknob. Shivered.
“You listening?” Momma asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I was listening all right.
Tommie was nowhere to be seen. Did she watch us? See us all the time? Even in the bathroom?
Yuck.
This is what JimDaddy said:
Him and his wife were separated for more than two years. (Separated before their divorce? More news to me.)
He got the house (this house, with the jiggly doorknob) because his ex moved, with Tommie, to Daytona.
He’d let Tommie redecorate her room, and they spent every other weekend together and three days every other week (the best parts of his life), and then Tommie and her mother were killed in a car accident after visiting him.
“Me,” JimDaddy said. “It was raining and I insisted my ex bring Tommie here after they all went to the show. It was my time. My time to see my baby. I didn’t care but that I got it. No matter the weather.”
His voice rose. “You know how it rains in the summer.”
His eyes filled with tears that didn’t fall.
I nodded.
Momma looked like she had witnessed the wreck with her very own eyes.
JimDaddy said, “Your momma and me, we’d started dating a few months before the accident, Evie.”
Momma turned away then. Walked over to the stove. She had stopped stirring the oatmeal, and I could hear the bubbles popping, making a for-sure mess on the stove. Momma gathered her hair with one hand, kept her back to me. Was she crying? About Tommie? For her husband?
“You were together that long before you said anything to me?” I said. “I mean, I knew you were around but I didn’t know know.”
“It wasn’t her fault.” JimDaddy’s voice dropped to almost nothing. “She told me about you, and I couldn’t bring myself to meet you. Not for more than a year. I couldn’t.”
I nodded. Remembering. Remembering how Momma said to me one day, out of the blue, “If Jim Fletcher doesn’t meet you soon, we are done.” I’d said, “Who?” “Someone I’ve been seeing,” Momma had said. She’d wept for a week, too, after that announcement.
So what? I hadn’t met my gonna-be stepfather. I hadn’t cared one way or another if Momma stayed or went.
Except.
Except Momma was broken up about not being with him. I could see that. Those days grief was all over her face. In lines and worry and sadness.
“Whatever,” I had said. I was watching an old Legend of Korra show when Momma mentioned the ultimatum.
Not two weeks later Momma took me to meet JimDaddy, and he stared at me a good long time, not saying a word, just adjusting his tie (’cause we were at his office with the indoor palm trees), and then he’d scooped me up and held me tight for a long time. I hadn’t dared to move.
It’s uncomfortable when a strange man grabs onto you like that.
“She looks like you,” JimDaddy had said. They were married not long after.
Now I stood, Baby Lucy on my hip.
When JimDaddy talked, I could hear the anguish. Could see it sweating off him. Could smell it on his breath. It was too much.
“I still miss her,” he whispered. “Them.”
And he cried.
My heart twisted.
“I gotta get, Momma. Me and Aunt Odie are headed back to Cassadaga.”
I handed Baby Lucy to my stepfather, then walked out of the door and down the street to my aunt’s house, trying to breathe all the fresh Florida air I could get to keep the sadness away.