Fireside

Kim touched her hair, feeling an uneasy kinship with the troll. Then she lifted her coffee mug in salute. “Here’s to enjoying your childhood.”

“On the weekends, at least.”

“What do you do during the week?” She pictured Daphne working at a roller rink or surfing the internet, bookmarking anime sites.

“I work in a local law office. It’s up over the bookstore in town. It’s okay. I prefer Saturdays, though. Back-to-back Looney Tunes, you know?”

Kim offered a bright smile. “My fave. So, a law office?”

“Parkington, Waltham & Shepherd. A full-service firm. I’m the receptionist and office manager.” Daphne lifted the bowl to her mouth and took a sip, leaving a milk mustache. “So, really, you can relax. Your mom’s not running a group home for wackos here. The tenants are just regular folks, who happen to want to live simply.”

“I’m relaxed,” Kim protested.

“Nah, I saw your face when your mom introduced us. You were worried I’d turn out to be a one-woman freak show,” Daphne said easily. “Most people do, when they first meet me. Trust me, I’m totally normal. Just—like I said—having a late childhood. In my family, I was the eldest of five siblings. My mom got sick and my dad took off, so I ended up raising my brothers and sisters. I did a lousy job, too, seeing as I was all of eleven years old when it started. That’s why I never want to have kids. Heck, I don’t even want to have a place of my own.”

“Because you missed out on your childhood?”

“Yeah.” Daphne took her bowl and spoon to the sink, and grabbed a pitcher of orange juice. “I decided to have my childhood now, and that means living here, where I don’t need to worry about adult responsibilities. Those responsibilities include, but are not limited to, property taxes, utility bills, meal preparation and long-term commitments.”

Kim stared at her for a few seconds. She studied the black wool leggings, the snug leather skirt and Doc Martens, the black manicure. Daphne just looked so comfortable, being herself.

“Good plan,” she said. “Is there any orange juice left?”

Daphne poured her a glass. “Cereal?” she asked, offering the box.

“No, thanks. Without the prize, what’s the point?”

Daphne grinned. “I like the way you think.”

Kim grinned back, liking the ease she felt with this girl.

“Good morning,” said her mother, bustling into the kitchen. She looked fresh and younger than her age in a Fair Isle sweater, jeans and Ugg boots. In fact, she looked younger than her old self, the upper Manhattan maven in St. John’s suits and pearls. Tying on an apron, she said, “Did you sleep all right?”

“Well enough.” Kim sipped her coffee. “I was fired. By email.”

“Harsh,” said Daphne.

“Cowardly,” her mother said.

“They’re not being cowardly. I’m not important enough to scare them. It’s just more convenient.”

“I’m so sorry,” her mother said.

“Don’t be. It was the worst job ever.” Not really, but she felt better, saying it.

“And here I thought you enjoyed it,” her mother said.

“What do you do?” Daphne asked. “Or—past tense. What did you used to do?”

Kim took a seat across from Daphne and peeled a satsuma for herself. “Sports media relations. It seemed like a good career for me. I was always into sports, all through school and college. After graduation, I went to L.A. to look for a job. On a whim, I tried out to be a Laker girl. I was completely shocked when they chose me as an alternate. It was probably the most grueling three months of my life. And the steepest learning curve. The training I could handle. Even the politics—I watched other girls crumble, but I got along fine. It turned out what I was best at was PR. When I was injured—”

“You were injured?” Daphne asked.

“Tore my rotator cuff.” Unconsciously her hand went to her right shoulder. “It put an end to a very short, inauspicious career as a Laker girl. Going into sports PR seemed like the obvious next step for me. Clearly I didn’t have the chops to be a top athlete, but I knew what it took to represent them.”

She’d been assigned to look after a second-string rookie, Calvin Graham. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he was being hounded by the press about the Lower 9th Ward neighborhood of New Orleans, where he’d been born and raised. Seeing him floundering, she’d stepped in. Within a week, Calvin Graham was serving as honorary chairman of a relief effort, raising money to help people rebuild. He’d never had much of a career in the NBA but he’d gone on to create a foundation that, to this day, provided low-interest loans to Katrina victims. Kim had found her role incredibly gratifying.

In time, however, she forgot how much she liked her work. Well, not forgot, exactly. The role of mentor got lost as she was assigned to other players. She found herself saying things like “Get your drunk ass out of bed” and “Learn to verify a girl’s age before you sleep with her.” She missed guys like Calvin. She missed the good guys.

“Sounds like a cool job,” Daphne remarked.

“Sometimes, I have to admit, the work was so satisfying. A lot of people with a God-given athletic talent are brilliant to work with. It was my job to smooth the rough edges.”

“How rough?” asked Daphne.

“I worked with guys who were fearless at facing a wall of defensive linebackers out for blood, but who tended to crumble in front of a microphone. I helped them with that part of their career. It went well most of the time. But something happens when you work with people like that. It’s hard to describe. You’re working with clients on a strangely intimate level, even though it’s just a job. I never let things get too personal—until Lloyd.” She shook her head, remembering. “The two of us just clicked—at first, anyway.” She felt again the bittersweet joy of falling for a guy while doing media training with him. It was like a second-rate romantic movie—if she succeeded in grooming him, then that meant losing him, because once he had mastered the art of handling the press, he would move on.

Except that didn’t happen with Lloyd. Her mistake was in letting herself believe it could work out for them. She wouldn’t be that stupid again.

Six

Bo woke up early, shivering from the cold as he groped for his comforter. Then he remembered he’d given it to AJ last night, and that thought caused him to sit up instantly, squinting through the morning light.

There, the lump on the sofa confirmed it. His kid was staying with him. His son. Bo waited to feel … what? Paternal? Not happening. The kid was his flesh and blood, and Bo was going to do everything in his power to reunite AJ with Yolanda. But fatherly feelings eluded him.

He yawned and stretched, tried not to make any noise as he got out of bed and headed for the john. He never got up this early unless he was in training. It was funny, how easy it was to get up in the morning when he hadn’t sucked down a bunch of beers the night before. Well, not funny ha-ha, but funny as in, he might ought to consider doing it more often.

Call me, read a message scribbled on a Post-it note stuck to the bathroom mirror. Chardonnay—and her phone number. The message was punctuated by a lipstick kiss. It was kind of depressing to realize he had actually dated a woman named Chardonnay. That was really all he remembered about her.

Bo snatched the note and stuck it in a drawer. Then he changed his mind and stuck it in his pocket. In the drawer, he spotted a box of rubbers. Whoa. He shoved the box in the cabinet under the sink, back behind the pipes, then gave the place a once-over to make sure there weren’t any other sketchy things lying around.

He didn’t consider himself the kind of person who kept secrets, but for the time being, there was a kid in his life, and he had to make room for that. The sudden responsibility felt crushing, but what was he going to do? Clean up his act, for one thing.

When Bo himself was a young boy, his mother had shielded him from nothing—not the late-night visitors, not the laughter or the fighting, not the strangers he encountered in the house when he got up in the night to take a leak. Things like that had taken a toll on him, made him a distrustful and cautious child, who had grown into a distrustful and reckless man.

He had enough sense to know there were some things a kid just didn’t need to see. At least until someone other than Bo could explain them.

Although Bo and his brother, Stoney, had grown up without a father, they’d had a lot of uncles. Not uncles by blood, of course. “Uncles” was a euphemism for whatever shitkicker or oilfield trash happened to be banging his mother.

So even though he didn’t know a damn thing about raising a kid, he understood that you didn’t put stuff in their face before they were ready to deal with it. He remembered lying awake too many nights, feeling sick to his stomach as he listened to the low voice of a stranger through the thin walls of the trailer where they lived. One of his earliest memories was hearing his brother say, “I swear, if you piss the bed again, I’ll pound your face. Swear to God, I will.”

He and Stoney had taken to peeing in empty Coke bottles rather than getting up in the night and risking an encounter with Uncle Terrell or Uncle Dwayne, or whoever else was keeping their mama from getting lonely that night.

That was how she explained the visitors to her boys. “It keeps me from feeling too lonely.”

“I can do that,” Bo used to tell her, when he was really little and didn’t understand. “I can keep you from getting lonely. I’ll sing to you, Mama. I’ll play the guitar.” He wasn’t very good, but he knew all the words to “Mr. Bojangles,” his namesake song.

His mama had tousled his hair, offered a sad smile. “This is a different kind of lonely, baby boy. It’s the kind you can’t help me with.”