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We are sitting out on the deck, in the faded canvas director’s chairs, when I hear Grams pull into the driveway. She rushes through the back gate, grabbing the hoe that always leans against the back fence.
“Hello, Frances,” Jack says, standing to greet her.
She stops, frozen in place.
“Jack? Jack Dillard?”
Grams looks from me to Jack and back again, confusion written on her forehead. She stands, immobile, still gripping the hoe, as if ready to use it as a weapon.
“The red Honda . . .”
“It’s his,” I tell her, nodding in Jack’s direction.
Slowly, she lowers the hoe, then sinks into the chair across from me.
“I thought . . . I thought . . . Thank God you’re all right.”
I can see her hands trembling, and suddenly I realize how it must have looked to her, driving up to our house and seeing the red Honda parked there.
“It’s okay, Grams,” I tell her.
She looks up at Jack, who is still standing, watching.
“So much I don’t understand these days . . . you here, the Honda, Lauren’s sudden change of personality . . .”
“I’m sorry if my car frightened you,” Jack says.
“It’s just . . . we . . . someone has been stalking Lauren. And the car out front . . .”
“I wasn’t stalking Lauren,” Jack says. “I only wanted to see her. But I was afraid to make myself known. From a distance I could imagine that we’d get to know each other again.”
“You scared us,” Grams says.
“I didn’t think anyone noticed me.”
“We filed a complaint,” Grams says.
For a fleeting moment Jack’s face registers something that looks like fear. Then, in an instant, the calm returns.
Grams gets up and walks over to the African daisies at the edge of the deck. She bends down and begins pinching dead flowers off the plants. Jack sits back down in the director’s chair. No one speaks. In the long silence, my thoughts are drawn back to the fight with Shawna. I’ve never hit a person like that before, only pretended, with the volleyball. I feel funny inside. But Tyler! Tyler and Shawna! My thoughts move on to betrayal and emptiness. On to the image of Tyler and Shawna on that awful night. Another image creeps in, though. It is Tyler fighting against Jack, taking on a man twice his size in an effort to protect me.
Back and forth the contrasting images of Tyler compete with one another, until finally Grams leaves the African daisies and stands close in front of Jack, scowling down on him.
“What do you want with us, Jack Dillard?”
“All I want is a chance to get to know my daughter.”
Grams looks from Jack to me, then sits back down in the chair across from me.
“You have no custody rights. Your name’s not even on her birth certificate.”
“I’m talking about visiting now and then, that’s all.”
“She’s got enough trouble right now, she doesn’t need you, with your drug habit and your sleazy past.”
Grams keeps talking louder and louder, faster and faster. “What do you want with her anyway? Don’t think you’re taking her back to Texas!”
“I just . . .”
“You and Marcia! What an awful, selfish, stupid thing you did, taking this child from me and neglecting her to the point where her very health was in danger!”
Grams is red-in-the-face mad, something I’ve never seen before.
“You’re right. I don’t want to argue with you about the past, but I will remind you that I wasn’t the one who took Lauren.”
“You knew it was the wrong thing for that little girl! You could have stopped it.”
It’s as if I’m not even here, the way they’re talking about me. Sitting at the coffee place with Jack, hearing his story and the story of the explosion, I was enthralled, thinking of nothing else. Now, the Tyler emptiness is back with me, distancing me from the reality before me. I’m barely interested in their conversation, hearing it as if it were about a stranger instead of about me.
“I only want to get acquainted, Frances. I know even that’s more than I deserve, but I’ve been clean now for over three years. I’ve got a decent job and I’m involved in a program to try to help kids avoid the mistakes I made.”
Grams goes to the side door of the garage and brings back a large pitcher full of bird seed. She begins filling the bird feeders, first the ones outside my window, then the one hanging from the lowest branch of the walnut tree. She refills the pitcher, then takes care of the feeders hanging suspended from an iron pole at the back of the yard. Jack and I sit in our chairs, watching. The squirrels sit on two high branches, also watching. The squirrels get at least as much seed from the feeders as the birds do.
Grams returns to her chair and starts talking, as if the long pause in conversation was perfectly natural.
“I don’t trust you, Jack.”
“I’m not asking you to. But if I’d wanted to kidnap Lauren, I had every opportunity this afternoon. And we’re sitting right here, with you.”
Grams nods. “I suppose you’ve got a point,” she says.
“If I could just visit with Lauren once a week or so. You know, stop by with some sodas and chips or something and just sit and talk. I’d only come over when you’re here, if you’d feel better about that.”
“I don’t know,” Grams says.
Although I’ve not been paying close attention to the conversation, I notice no one is considering what I might want.
“Does anyone want my opinion?”
They both look at me, startled.
“You are talking about me, aren’t you?”
“I guess you’re right,” Grams says. “What is your opinion?”
“Well, I’d like to get acquainted, too,” I say.
I glance over at Jack and see tears welling in his eyes.
“All right, then,” Grams says. “You’re nearly grown up now, anyway. It should be your decision. But I want it the way Jack said, short visits here, in my presence.”
“Fine,” I say.
Grams wants to hear about the explosion. Jack tells her the story in the same manner as he told me—head back, eyes closed, monotone voice. Grams, too, closes her eyes as she listens, unmoving except for an occasional shiver. I listen to the whole thing again, too, vividly imagining the scene, seeing it as Jack describes, mixing it with dream images, wondering if memory is creeping back.
“At least she did something good at the end,” Grams says, her cheeks wet with tears.
“She wasn’t all bad,” Jack says.
“God damned drugs,” Grams says.
Jack pulls his chair closer to Grams.
“Nothing I can say can express how grateful I am to you, Frances. I see what a wonderful young woman Lauren’s become, and I know it’s because of the security and love you’ve offered her. I’d give anything if I could go back and be the kind of father I should have been, but that’s useless talk.”
“Being able to raise Lauren is one of the greatest gifts of my life,” Grams tells him. “I wish it had happened under other circumstances, but getting Lauren gave me new meaning. What a wonder she is.”
Grams’ love is so kind, and so strong, it seems I should be happy with that. But my loss of Tyler keeps dragging me down.
––––––––
Twice while Jack is there, the phone rings and it is Tyler. Jack watches as I let the call go unanswered. “Please talk to me,” is always the message, and I always erase it immediately.
“I know it’s too soon for me to be giving fatherly advice, but I think you ought to hear the guy out,” he says to me as he’s getting ready to leave.
“You don’t know what he’s done,” I say.
“I know one thing he’s done. He tried to protect you today. And, as far as he knew, he was putting his own life at risk in the process. That’s no small thing.”
“The other thing he did was no small thing, either.”
“Well, you maybe ought to hear his side. You heard my side and it made a little difference, didn’t it?”
I nod my head.
“Well, then, at least think about it,” he says, standing to leave. He looks from me to Grams and back again.
“Keep calling me Jack, if you like, because that’s how you know me. But when I finally decided to put my drug life behind me, I went back to Jacob, the name my parents gave me.”
Before he walks out the gate, Jack, Jacob, opens his arms to me. This time, I let him hug me. “Rennie, Rennie, Rennie,” he whispers.
As mad as I’ve been at him for most of my life, I sense a connection, some mysterious father-daughter thing.
I walk to the driveway and watch the little red Honda drive down the street, and I think about how different it seems now than it did yesterday, when seeing the same car cast fear in my heart.
For a little while I feel at ease within myself, but then I think of Tyler. And Shawna. And betrayal and emptiness again fill my soul.