I raised my voice over the construction. “How long have you known my mom?”
Charlie gestured for me to follow him into the kitchen. I did, and he let the swinging door close behind us, muting the noise. “We’re getting to know each other.”
“Is that code for dating?”
“Absolutely not.” Charlie set the tray on the kitchen island. “I was good friends with your father, Bean—”
I prickled. “Don’t call me that.” My dad started calling me Little Bean when I was a baby, because I was the second, smaller twin. It was a nickname I’d hated all my life, until I realized he’d never say it again.
“Sabine.” Charlie smiled the way Southerners do—like his smile had nothing to do with the rest of his face. “I was about to make my famous Mississippi hot cocoa. I’m from a small town not far from where your dad grew up. Why don’t you sit.”
“I thought you met my dad through work,” I said, thinking of the letters.
“His firm assisted me with a personal matter.” Charlie opened one of the old-fashioned fridge cubbies and took out milk, then a container of Cool Whip.
Cool Whip?
“So, you were his client?” I asked.
“At first I was,” he said, fussing with the burner to get it to light beneath the pan of milk.
“Then one day . . .” I said, “you woke up and decided to help his widow raise her kids.” If there was one thing my dad had taught me, it was that people always had a vested interest in the outcome. What was his?
Charlie measured the hot cocoa and leveled it, then tipped it into the mugs. “There’s more to it than that.” On the stove, the milk popped.
I waited until he was pouring the milk to speak. “The city’s letter listed your names together. Like a couple. Is that what’s more?”
His eyes flicked up to mine, and he winced as boiling milk trickled over his thumb. “I told you not to talk to Bernie McMichaels.” He set the Cool Whip on the burn like an ice pack.
“How was I supposed to know who she was?” But I knew. And he knew I knew.
He leveled his eyes at me. “What do you want to know, Sabine?”
“Who you are? Why you’re here? If you’re with Mom.” Keeping his eyes on mine, he spooned a huge flap of fake whip into one mug, and then the other. As if he weren’t doing anything wrong. As if he weren’t ruining the integrity of hot chocolate.
“I already told you. The answer hasn’t changed in five minutes.” He held the mug out to me. When I ignored it, he set it down.
“If you were friends with my dad,” I asked, “why don’t we know you?”
“It’s not possible that we’ve met?”
“I knew everything about my dad.” Except one thing, I thought. Except how he died. The official line was: infection. But when we asked Mom for more, she said she couldn’t talk about it. We didn’t press her. But I didn’t think Charlie was going to cry if I asked him. “If you knew him so well, how did he die?”
Charlie covered his mouth, then he walked to the bank of windows looking out on tangled rosebushes. He splayed his hands on the countertops. “Here’s what I know. Your father liked salmon in his eggs. And he would take it like that at dinner just as easily as brunch. He never had more than one drink at a time—ever—but it was always a double. If he drank vodka, it was Grey Goose. If he drank bourbon, it was Maker’s Mark.”
Maker’s Mark was the bottle topped with red wax, like a candle. After he died, I found an empty bottle in his desk drawer. Charlie looked over his shoulder at me. I stared back. “Still don’t believe me?” He lifted his slim blond brows. “His favorite shirt was a short-sleeved polo, and he had them in every color known to Ralph Lauren. He read you and your sister poetry at bedtime. His favorite was Emily Dickinson. I think yours is, too.”
I’d asked to hear this. I’d asked, but now my hope bird was caving in on itself from all the knowing. Words bubbled up inside me, Emily’s words in my dad’s drawl. I skimmed my thumbnail over my lower lip. “It’s easy to invent a life. Easy to invent—any life, just any life. A fake life, a real life. It’s just that easy.” I gripped the edge of the kitchen island to stop the words.
Charlie waited. When I spoke, it was to my hands. “How do you know all this?”
He ignored my question and walked back to the island, close enough to touch me. But he didn’t. “I know something else about your dad, Sabine.” When I looked up, Charlie’s eyes shone with tears. As if he really did know my dad. As if he’d lost him, too. “He’d want you to try my famous Mississippi hot cocoa.”
I closed my eyes. Charlie even knew my favorite drink: hot chocolate. I took one.
Charlie swept the back of his hand across his eyes. “Take one to Blythe.” I picked the mugs up, and, without thanking him, I walked out through the construction zone. In our room, I handed Blythe her hot cocoa.
She smacked her lips. “What did you use? Whole milk?”
“Charlie made it.” I put mine aside. “With Cool Whip.”
She looked into the hot cocoa as if she could read the recipe there, then drank deeply. She savored it while I watched before she set the mug down. “Prepare yourself,” she said. “You may never hear this again.” She flopped onto her stomach on the bed and tapped the heels of her graffitied Converse together. “I think you were right.”
My stomach clenched. “Charlie and Mom?”
She nodded, holding up her fingers. “First, Mom has a type. Southern charm. Second, if Charlie were a friend of the family, he would have made lasagna or sent flowers like everybody else.” She went on with a five-point rationale. But nothing could explain Charlie’s name beside Mom’s on the house documents. Except maybe . . . cheating. I opened my mouth to tell Blythe about the house documents, but she was holding her empty mug, her face close to her textbook, murmuring to herself, a faint smile on her face from figuring out the sticky problem of our lives.
I walked to the window and stared out at the willow tree on the hill, alone and swaying. I could almost imagine my dad there, looking up at the tree. I felt a tickle in my heart, like the brush of feathers, then a deep pinch of pain. That’s when it hit me. That heart squeeze that lets you know you’ve lost something. A little squeeze for your phone, a bigger one for a fight with a friend, and one that almost makes you pass out for a lost person.
But my dad wasn’t lost. He wasn’t misplaced. He was gone. Forever.
I curled up on the pink chaise with a first-edition Emily and lifted my thumbnail to my lips. I let the words fall out. When silence filled the room again, I stared out at the willow tree, the vast sky leading, in the distance, to the Bay Bridge. Charlie had answered my questions, but nothing he said convinced me that he belonged here, or that we did. I had to figure out what he wanted with us before his presence became a permanent situation.