Dancing Hours (29 page)

It had never occurred to him until that moment that diapers came in multiple different sizes.  Babies wore diapers…
where was the one size fits all?
  He tried calling Noah’s cell, but Noah didn’t answer the phone.  He stood there staring at the brightly colored packages until he realized that there were weight ranges for the various sizes.  He looked over at Jessica, who looked back at him and grinned. 

“What size are you?” he asked her, pointing at the packages.

She pointed at the packages too and repeated “Size you.”

He picked her up out of the cart and tr
ied
to compare her weight to the free weights he lifted at the gym…
maybe 20 pounds, 25 pounds
he thought. 
She giggled at being jostled about. 
He grabbed two packages and then, on the way by, he picked out some wipes. 
Jessica started to get fussy after he put her back in the cart and he was wondering why he hadn’t brought Holly with him.

The fussiness
gave way to
a
full blown tantrum by the time he got out of the store, but
Jessica
calmed down as soon as he started to drive.  She stuck her thumb in her mouth and fell fast asleep before they made it home.  He was amazed that she trusted him, even though she didn’t know him very well.
  And even though he didn’t know her very well, he loved her.

The family made it through the week
end
of Thanksgiving and most of the time one of the adults in the house made an effort to take care of Jessica, so David justified going back to school and not worrying too much about them.  He did look up the installation instructions for the
carseat
on the internet and made sure he hooked it into his mom’s car properly before he left, though.

He made up an excuse not to go home over winter break and spent a semester abroad in Italy like he had already planned.  To make up for the number of classes that didn’t go toward completing his major, he took on a couple of independent study projects chronicling
American
authors who had spent time in Europe. 
He
spent the semester exploring the countryside and not worrying how he would pay back the massive loan he’d taken out.  When summer came, he stayed on in a flat with some friends he’d met in the program until he ran out of money and had to return home.  By then, Holly and Noah barely spoke to each other.

Jessica didn’t seem to mind and filled the silence with myriad questions and monologues about her toys.  She was the only one who didn’t seem to be uncomfortable.

When he moved back to school
, he started worrying about Jessica between classes.  He came home on weekends and m
ade sure she had clean clothes and
milk
in the fridge
.  He met Holly’s sister, Janna, a couple of times when Janna ran out of places to crash and stayed on their mom’s couch until she’d worn out her welcome.  David hated those weekends because he had to sleep on the floor, but Jessica made it into a campout when she got old enough to know what that meant. 
His frequent trips home put a serious crimp in his dating life, but David had a hard time finding a girl who was mature enough, someone that he wouldn’t mind introducing to his niece.

He really didn’t know what was in store for him after graduation.  It seemed to David like he’d spent his entire life trying to reach that one goal and then he didn’t know what came after that.    His mother came to graduation with Jessica and Noah, but Holly wasn’t there. 
It wasn’t until he was out drinking with Noah afterwards that he found out Holly had left and not said goodbye.

H
is excitement turned to anger
.  Rage at the whole situation.  Whether David knew it or not, that was the moment he decided he would take care of Jessica himself.  Going home to find his mother passed out was just the added incentive. 

He had a long talk with Noah that night after they put Jessica into her own bed.  They sat on the floor beside their drunken mother.  Somehow
it
made David feel like she was a part of the decision process. 
H
e didn’t really give Noah a choice.  He explained that Noah was a screw up
without a diploma or a job or the maturity to raise his own daughter.  Noah
didn’t disagree
.  David knew Noah had been trying to do the right thing, but he wasn’t in love with Holly and didn’t want to be a father.  It was probably painfully obvious to Holly, too, but it didn’t make David any less angry at her.

For a week or two, t
he three of them tried to be a good set of parents, with David being the primary one to cook, clean and take care of Jessica; but it wasn’t working.  Noah was
n’t
working, Theresa wasn’t working and David felt like Jessica had been left in front of the television all day when he got back from work. 

Even during the move, Noah acted like an arrogant idiot.  For thousands of miles across the country, his mother had pulled a trailer with his motorcycle
on it
.  Then suddenly, the morning before they planned to arrive
in
Palmetto
,
Noah
wanted to arrive in style
and insisted on riding his motorcycle into town
.  David scoffed at the thought that anyone would believe he’d ridden three thousand miles
on that clunker bike, but appearances meant a lot to Noah.

2

Theresa had often described her mother as a hard woman to love, usually after a third or fourth glass of wine.  David remembered her differently, as a woman with strict rules, but generally kind.  He was old enough to remember the last time they had been to her house, but
he didn’t have the luxury of being
embarrassed by the amount of time that had passed since they’d spoken.

There was a lot of tension between his mother and his grandmother, a nuance that seemed to completely escape Noah who barely acknowledged his grandmother’s presence before he proceeded to raid her fridge.  If
grandma
was annoyed, you wouldn’t know it.  She fawned on Jessica like she’d finally seen the pivot around which the world turned.

For the first time in a long time, David was grateful.  He knew he had made the right decision.  That was, until he discovered that his grandmother did not believe in clothes
dryers.  Jessica was tired from the drive, but she refused to go to sleep that night.  David tried to make this move as easy as possible for her, but she was pretty wound up and worried that her mother might not be able to find them here.

The second time he was grateful in a long time was for the pretty girl at the Laundromat.  He had already noticed that people in this town were a little slower moving, a little more relaxed.  He noticed her right away reading a book with her long hair tied back and looking perfectly comfortable in her own skin.  He envied that kind of ease.    He recognized her as the girl he saw assisting another woman crossing the road as they drove through town the previous day.  It wasn’t really the girl he noticed as much as the older woman, who he recognized immediately from the summer years before.

When Andy responded so calmly to Jessica’s outburst about her mother and then distracted her with the game
so David could finish their laundry, he almost felt like he could feel a ray of sunshine through the clouds.  She was very kind and it didn’t hurt that she really was very pretty too.  In another life, he might have asked her on a date.

That summer turned out to be one of the best he’d ever had.  Andy started coming by the house for cooking lessons from his grandmother,
which he initially thought serendipitous until he realized that she had orchestrated the visits to try and get close to Noah. 

By all outward appearances, Noah probably did look pretty attractive to girls.  He was young, single
,
in shape
and as far as anyone knew unencumbered
.  In this new town, Noah perfected the bad boy image that David knew wasn’t an image at all. 

Noah brought over a handful of different girls in those first weeks
, but their grandmother had strict rules about girls not going into the bedrooms
. 
Noah started spending more and more time out of the house and away from the rules, but also away from Jessica. 
One early morning when Noah crept back to the house after being gone all night, David was waiting for him.

“How’s it going
?”
David
asked
from the darkness of the porch just off the kitchen. 

Noah was startled.  “What the
hell are you doing out here
?”

“Waiting for you.”
David said in a deep tone.

“Hey, you don’t have to wait up for me.” Noah joked.  “I’m doing just fine.”

“Are you doing just fine?” David stood up to his full height and got
very close to Noah.

Noah stood there, staring at David for a few moments before responding “There’s no reason why we both have to give up having a life.”

David found it hard to believe that he shared a gene pool with a tool like Noah some days.  Like it or not, they were brothers.  He knew as well as Noah did that when trouble came calling, David would always back him up and bail him out. 

“It’s always all about you, isn’t it?
” he accused. “
Well, it isn’t about you anymore.  It’s about that little girl who’s sleeping in there and who’s basically an orphan thanks to you.  She deserves a little stability.  She deserves to have someone who is there when she goes to sleep and there when she wakes up and for all the hours in between.”

Clearly Noah was not keen on the gravity of the conversation.  “That’s what she’s got you for.” 
he
explained “And I’ll be there for all the other girls who need someone to be there when they go to sleep.
Deal?”

“You’re an idiot.”

“No, I’m just having fun.”

“Do you think those girls would like you so much if they really knew you?  Go on and tell them all about your little trouble obeying the law.  Tell them you have a
daughter
.”

“You want me to?  Why don’t I start with that cute little
twinkie
that keeps coming over here?  She sounds like a pretty forgiving type… maybe the kind of girl that wants to help a guy like me see the light, get on the right path. You said she was smart, right?  Hell, she’s probably figured out that Jessica’s not your daughter anyway.”

“She’s smart all right.  Too smart to fall for the crap you shovel.”  David realized at that moment that he had cleaned up his language considerably since he started taking car
e of Jessica because there were a lot more descriptive words he wanted to use.

“Girls just
wanna
have fun,
too
.  You used to know what that was like.”