I try to stay busy the rest of the day so I won’t have time to think about Derek, but every time I see his number on the inside of my hand, a hot wave flushes through me. Eventually I go to the bathroom to wash off the ink, but not before I jot the number down on my calendar pad. I’ll need to get in touch with him about his mother’s funeral, I tell myself that’s the only reason I save it. I should also call him now while I’m thinking of it, tell him thanks but I’m sorry, I have to bail tonight after all. I don’t call, though, and throughout the rest of the day I remind myself I have to, I must back out of whatever he’s planning for later. But the longer I put it off, the harder it is for me to pick up the phone.
Before I know it, six o’clock rolls around, my workday is over, and I still haven’t called. And now it’s too late to cancel.
Riley waits for me in the employee break room. She sits at the lunch table, a coloring book open in front of her, a handful of crayons scattered around. When I enter, she gives me a lopsided grin, displaying the gap where an eyetooth fell out earlier in the week. “Daddy, look!”
She holds up the coloring book to show me the page she’s working on. Hello Kitty has been rendered yellow instead of white, giving her a jaundiced appearance.
I don’t point this out. Instead I ruffle the hair on top of Riley’s head and smile down at her. “Very nice, honey. How about you start cleaning up? It’s time to go.”
“Go where?” she asks as she carefully selects another crayon. Obviously she isn’t done coloring yet.
“Time to go home.” I can still cancel with Derek, I think, but I know I won’t. Cautiously, I say to Riley, “Hey, listen.”
Her head dips to one side, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth. Without looking up from her coloring book, she asks, “Hey, what?”
Squatting down beside her, I start, “I have this friend…”
She stops coloring to tell me, “I have a lot of friends, Daddy.”
With a laugh, I say, “Well, my friend wants us to come over his house for dinner. If you don’t want to…”
Interested, she drops the crayon to look at me. “What’s he making?”
Her question confuses me. “What?”
“For dinner,” she explains. “What’s he making? Is it something I like?”
I pretend to think a moment, then struggle to keep from smiling as I tease, “Hmm, well, I told him your favorite food was Brussels sprouts.”
“Ew! Daddy!” Riley shrieks. “It is not! My favorite food is—”
“Broccoli?” I joke. She wrinkles her nose in distaste, so I try again. “Liverwurst? Headcheese?”
“Daddy, stop!” Riley shrieks. “Those foods are yucky!”
“How do you know?” I joke. “You’ve never had headcheese before.”
Riley covers her mouth with both hands. Her voice is muffled as she tells me, “And I’m never going to, either.”
“How about…”
Shaking her head, she says, “No, I’m not going. You can’t make me!”
Actually I can, but I don’t point out that as long as I’m driving her around, she has to go wherever I do. Instead, I give her an exaggerated pout. “That’s too bad. Because even though I told him those were all your favorite foods—”
“They are not,” she declares. “I hate them all!”
“He insisted on having pizza instead,” I tell her. “But if you don’t want to go…”
Riley’s eyes widen, and she beams at me. Her smile lights up the whole break room. “Pizza! That’s my favorite, Daddy! You know it is.”
I shrug. “Too bad you don’t want to go. I guess he’s going to have to eat the pizza all by himself. Unless you want to go home with Ms. Molly instead, then I can go over and help him eat the pizza.”
“I want pizza,” Riley announces. She scrambles out of the chair, sending crayons rolling away in her haste. “I’m coming, too. Pizza pizza pizza!”
“Clean up in here first, then we’ll go.” As she sweeps the crayons together, I can’t help but add, “Maybe we can get broccoli and Brussels sprouts on the pizza. What do you think?”
“I think that’ll ruin it.” Shoving the crayons into their box, Riley tells me, “I want pizza without anything green on it.”
“Not even green peppers?” I ask. “Or green ham?”
Riley gives me a long-suffering look. “Daddy, it’s green eggs and ham. Not green ham. The eggs are green.”
She has a point. “What color’s the ham, then?”
With a shrug, Riley scoops her coloring book up off the table. “I don’t know, but I don’t want that on my pizza, either. Just cheese, that’s it, or I’m not going.”
Six-year-olds can be picky eaters, and Riley’s one of the worst. I just hope Derek doesn’t want a lot of toppings, or the two of them will be off to a rough start.
* * * *
The drive to Mrs. Duran’s is a familiar one—it should be, I made it every day for years to pick Riley up on my way home from work. This past week, I caught myself signaling to turn down her street sometimes, even with Riley in the car, instead of taking the shorter route home and bypassing Mrs. Duran’s altogether.
I wonder if I should warn Riley that that’s where we’re going. Some kids might be scared going to a house where someone died, but Riley isn’t one of them. She’s a lot like I was at her age. Death is all in a day’s work when your father’s a funeral director.
But Riley recognizes the street when I turn down it. When I pass the intersection where I normally turn to go home, Riley turns in her booster seat, keeping the streetlights in view. “Daddy, are we going to Mrs. Duran’s?”
I glance at her in the rearview mirror. “Would that be okay?”
She nods, but the front on her face doesn’t disappear. I let her think things through as I pull to a stop in front of Mrs. Duran’s house. Riley stares out the window at Derek’s rental car in the driveway.
Finally she asks, “Does your friend live here?”
“He’s staying here for a few days,” I tell her. “He’s Mrs. Duran’s son.”
The frown is back. “Her son?” As if she’s never heard the word before.
Turning off the car, I unbuckle my seatbelt. “You know, like you’re my daughter? Derek is Mrs. Duran’s son. I bet you didn’t know she had any children, did you?”
“She always said I was her little girl,” Riley admits.
“She never mentioned Derek?”
Riley thinks a moment, then squeals as she remembers. “She used to show me pictures of her little boy. They’re in a big book beside her bed. Is that him?”
“Probably.” I give her a smile over my shoulder. “Was I in any of them?”
“Daddy!” Riley laughs. “You’re not little, you’re old!”
Thanks for the reminder. “Come on, let’s go.”
I hold Riley’s hand as she leads the way up the sidewalk to the front porch. I have a flash of déjà vu when I knock and wait—the last time I was here, in this very spot, was on the day Mrs. Duran passed away. I half-expect Ellie Stewart to answer again, but this time it’s Derek who opens the door.
Seeing him again makes my heart beat quicker. So he’s here, really here, I hadn’t dreamed him up this morning. He has the same smirk on his face that I used to love kissing away when we were younger. A smirk that hints at mischief, and God, so much more.
Then he glances down at my daughter and smiles. “Let me guess. You must be Riley.”
“You’re old, too!” she cries in surprise.
Derek jerks back, affronted. I shake my head. “Long story,” I mutter. I tell Riley, “Those pictures Mrs. Duran used to show you were taken a long time ago, honey.”
“Hey!” Derek warns. “I’m not that old.”
“Older than me,” I joke. His birthday was a few months before mine, if I remembered correctly.
Riley’s eyes widen and she giggles. “You’re older than Daddy? I didn’t think anyone was!”
“Alright, alright,” I say. “That’s enough, young lady. We can still put Brussels sprouts on your pizza, you know.”
Her nose wrinkles up in disgust. “Ew, no!”
* * * *
Derek invites us in. The living room looks much the same as it did when I came by earlier in the week for the removal—everything in its place, neat and clean, as if ripped from the pages of a home furnishings catalog. Then I notice a couple large cardboard boxes on the floor by the sofa, and the guitar case leaning against the wall. “I see you already started going through everything,” I say, nodding at the boxes. “It’ll probably take some time.”
With a frown, Derek shrugs. “I haven’t done much of anything yet.”
“I sort of thought you’d have the lawyer set up an estate sale or something,” I say. “I didn’t know your mother had a guitar.”
“What? No, that’s mine.”
“And you brought it to your mother’s funeral? Riley, don’t,” I warn as she reaches for the guitar case. She pouts at me, one hand petting the case like it’s a dog I’ve told her she can’t keep. I shake my head. “Leave it alone. That isn’t a toy.”
She pouts harder, but before she can get too upset, something across the room catches her eye and she hurries to the other sofa. Plopping onto the floor, she lays down to look under the sofa, then pulls out an old cookie and a stack of coloring books. The tin holds a collection of crayons—I’ve seen her with it before. Now she pulls off the lid and crosses her legs, Indian-style, as she starts to color.
Derek laughs. “Just make yourself at home.”
“She’s a little shy when she first meets someone,” I say softly, though I know she can hear me. “She’ll warm up to you, probably once the pizza gets here.”
“So we’re having pizza, then?” Derek asks.
From where she sits on the living room floor, Riley growls, “Plain only, Daddy.”
“Plain pizza,” Derek repeats. He raises an eyebrow at me, questioning. “What’s that mean, exactly?”
I explain, “Cheese, nothing else. If you want, we can get two, a small cheese for her and a large whatever you want for us. I’ll pay for hers.”
“No, it’s cool.” Derek’s smirk returns. “You already know what I want.”
My heart stutters in my chest, blood surges in my ears. Does he mean what I think he means? What I hope he means? “Derek…”
Then I remember. He really is talking about pizza.
The only job I’ve ever had was working at the funeral home, but in high school, Derek had a couple part-time jobs. They were the type of jobs usually held by underpaid teenagers—working retail at the record store in the mall, bagging groceries, cutting lawns, even delivering pizzas.
Back then, pineapple wasn’t yet a popular pizza topping, but the company Derek worked for did have a Hawaiian pizza on the menu. The thought of eating fruit on pizza seemed strange to me the first time I heard it, but Derek swore it was great. “I don’t like the ham, though,” he’d admitted. “Why don’t they do a pineapple and pepperoni pizza instead?”
“Because that sounds gross,” I told him.
We had crashed at my place one evening—it must’ve been a school night or he would’ve been at work. We wanted to get a pizza and I suggested the Hawaiian one since I hadn’t had it yet. I was curious to know what it tasted like.
But Derek wanted to mix things up, try it his way instead. He called in the order, and got in an argument over the phone when they didn’t want to substitute ham for pepperoni. If he hadn’t worked there, they probably wouldn’t have made the switch, but we ended up with a strange pizza I was reluctant to taste.
Derek had no qualms, however. “Have some,” he told me as he tore into his second piece. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
I picked off one of the pieces of pineapple, unsure about the whole thing. To my surprise, it was hot—I hadn’t expected that. When I popped it into my mouth, the sweetness of the fruit mixed with the spiciness of the pizza sauce in a surprisingly good way. “Mmm, not bad.”
Grinning around a mouthful of pizza, Derek said smugly, “Told you.”
I haven’t had a pizza like that in years. With a grimace, I ask, “Don’t tell me. Pineapple and pepperoni, right?” His grin widens and I shake my head. “It still sounds gross.”
“But you know it’s oh so good,” Derek replies. And damn him, he’s right.