Touching Down(26)

Charlie spilled some ice cream down her planet jammies. Of course. Because the kid couldn’t keep an article of clothing clean for longer than ten minutes. When Grant noticed, he picked up a napkin and reached over to wipe it up. For a minute, he stalled, like he wasn’t sure if it was okay, but then he pushed past it and wiped the ice cream smear off of Charlie’s jammie top.

She didn’t seem to notice. She seemed as at ease with him as she was with me.

“Well, thank you for your loyalty. As difficult as it must have been for you,” he teased.

Charlie shrugged in a don’t-mention-it type of way. “You know, in the first game you played with the Storm, the camera zoomed in real close to your hands to show how you’d managed to hang onto a ball most players would have fumbled, and that was when Mom showed me I have the same kind of pinkies as you.”

Grant’s forehead creased. “Pinkies?”

“Pinkies. As in your little finger.” Charlie lifted one of her pinkies in the air.

Grant studied it a moment before lifting his in front of hers. He’d probably never even noticed how his pinkies were crooked, both of them bowing in toward his ring fingers. But I had. I’d memorized everything there was to know about that man.

Like he was seeing his pinkies for the first time, his gaze went back and forth between his and Charlie’s.

“Neat, right?”

As Grant continued to stare at Charlie’s fingers, he nodded. “Very neat.”

While she got back to the game and the ice cream, he kept staring at Charlie. I could tell he wanted to touch her, to pull her to him or pull her under his arm, but he didn’t.

“I’m sorry.” His throat bobbed.

Charlie shrugged. “I like my pinkies. I don’t mind that they’re crooked.”

Grant’s hand brushed across his mouth, warring with a smile as much as he was with tears from the looks of it. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here before.”

Charlie turned her head toward him, twisting around so she was angled toward him. “It’s okay. Mom explained to me how sometimes families can’t always be together, but that doesn’t mean you don’t love each other.”

I had to step back into the kitchen and lean into the wall for support. She remembered. I’d told her that years ago, when she first asked me about where her daddy was. She remembered. Families can’t always be together, but they can always love each other.

Their love is always with us, a part of us, wherever we go.

“That’s true.” Grant’s voice was thick with emotion. Charlie was really giving his tough guy exterior a walloping. “I wasn’t here, but I loved you and your mom every single day.”

The spoon scraping sounds came to a pause.

“You still love me?” Charlie asked.

Grant was silent for a moment. “Very much.”

“And Mommy?” she asked next, as innocently as she’d asked her previous question. She was immune to the double-edge of love’s sword, oblivious to Grant’s and my history. To her, we were a family.

Grant’s voice drifted into the kitchen, surrounding me. “Very much.”





“WHAT HAVE YOU been feeding this kid?” Grant whispered as I pulled back the blankets so he could slide Charlie into bed. “I’ve dealt with defensive lineman daintier than this.”

“I feed her monster-sized sundaes every night, of course. And she gets the giant gene from her dad’s side.” I stepped back to give him room to set her down.

Charlie had crashed hard sometime after eleven, once she’d ridden out the high from her sugar rush. She and Grant had been in the middle of a debate about who the best football player of all time was, and he’d been in the middle of backing up his choice when she’d passed out. Her body smashed up against his, her head lolling onto his shoulder, snoring and everything.

It had been too precious of a moment, and I’d grabbed my phone to snap a quick photo. The first photo of Charlie with her dad. I compared it to what some fathers had as their first photo with their child, infant in hand, seconds old, and a fresh surge of guilt and remorse settled into my veins.

I hadn’t just denied Grant a relationship with his daughter—I’d denied Charlie a relationship with her father.

Yes, I’d told her who her father was, and yes, I’d told her that he loved her very much and that one day, we might all be together, but that wasn’t a drop in the ocean of memories and experiences children who grew up with fathers had.

Not a drop.

I’d made a choice as a scared seventeen-year-old who didn’t want to get her older boyfriend in trouble and be the potential reason for resentment and disappointment. If I could do it all again, I wasn’t sure if I’d make the same decision or a different one. Neither choice would have been an easy one.