Page 50 of This Time Around (The Can’t Have Hearts Club #3)

T he smell of antiseptic hung over the room like a sticky net as Jack stood looking at his father from the end of a hospital bed.

This was his first time visiting his father’s home, and he rested his hands on Paige’s shoulders, not sure if he was trying to lend his daughter strength or trying to bolster his own.

“You sure you want to be here?” he whispered to her.

His little girl nodded and looked up at him. “He’s your dad and you’re my dad,” she whispered. “So we should all be here.”

That all made sense in a weird way. The hospice nurse had told them it was fine to wake his father, but Jack wasn’t ready yet.

Ten feet away between a brown refrigerator and an overgrown asparagus fern hovered his dad’s wife, Barbara.

She was a mousy woman only a few years older than Jack who looked at them with wary eyes that made him think of a cat that had its tail stepped on too many times.

The thought of cats made Jack wonder what Allie was up to and how she was getting along.

He missed her a helluva lot more than he’d expected to, which pissed him off.

She’d lied to him, dammit. Shouldn’t he be over her by now?

He’d had a tight feeling in his chest all week, and he knew it had little to do with his decision to visit his father.

Jack cleared his throat too loudly. Just like he expected, his dad’s eyes fluttered open. He stared at Jack for a good five or six seconds while Jack stood rigid with his hands on Paige’s shoulders.

“Son.”

There was no tenderness in the word, but something about it made Jack’s spine feel rubbery. He kept his posture erect and nodded. “Yes.”

He wasn’t willing to call the guy Dad. Not now. Not after this many years and this many missed opportunities for connection. The old man had had plenty of chances to reach out, to prove himself as a father.

He’d never taken one of them.

But standing here now, staring at the withered man under a tatty cotton blanket, Jack felt some of the anger seep from his pores. He didn’t have to like the guy, but he could at least acknowledge the DNA that linked them.

“This is my daughter, Paige,” Jack said slowly. “Your granddaughter. She’s ten.”

For once, Paige didn’t rush forward with handshakes or hugs. Jack wondered if she sensed her father’s trepidation, or if the presence of tubes and wires held her back.

“Hello,” Paige said softly. “I’m sorry you’re sick.”

The man laughed, a good two or three seconds of joviality before a racking cough seized him. Barbara jumped from behind the fern, but the old man waved her off.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Jack’s father grumbled. “Sick, yeah. Dying, if you want to get right down to it. That’s okay, though. Probably deserve it.”

Jack tightened his hold on Paige’s shoulders, but said nothing. His daughter glanced up at him with wide, silvery eyes, and Jack felt his heart crack down the middle. His father had the same damn eyes. He didn’t have to look at his dad now to know that.

“So,” the old man said. “Looks like you went and had a kid of your own despite having a total fuckup for a father.”

He felt Paige flinch under his palms, and Jack held her tighter. Barbara frowned in the corner, but didn’t say anything. Jack gritted his teeth. Then he cleared his throat again and squeezed his daughter’s shoulders.

“Paige is a straight-A student,” he said. “She’s also the goalie for her soccer team. She plays the violin and won an award for?—”

“So what?”

Anger flared hot and sour in Jack’s chest. He’d never wanted to punch his father as much as he did right then, and he’d wanted to punch the guy plenty. He opened his mouth to tell the old man to go fuck himself, but he didn’t get the words out.

“I didn’t mean that like it sounded,” the old man muttered. “Good for you, kid. You’re smart. Just like your old man.”

“Thank you,” Paige said, and the simple, sweet sincerity of her response cooled Jack’s temper from inferno to red hot.

The old man coughed again. “All I meant,” he continued, “is why do you give a shit what I think? You’ve obviously showed the whole world you’re educated and successful and a better dad than I ever was. Why do you feel like you’ve gotta prove anything to me?”

Jack stared at him. He didn’t know what to say. “I don’t?—”

“Look, kid—I was a shitty father. ’Scuse me, young lady. What was your name again?”

“Paige.”

“Paige,” he repeated, nodding. “Nice name. Sorry about the cursing. I do that too much. I also smoke too much. And drink too much. Probably how I ended up like this.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “It’s all right to do shitty things as long as you say you’re sorry.”

The old man dissolved into another laughing-coughing fit, and Jack thought about chiding his daughter for cursing. Either that or hugging her for doing a damn better job than he was at knowing how to respond to his father.

“That’s right,” Jack’s father said, nodding with what looked like newfound respect. His gaze drifted from Paige to Jack and held there. “I am sorry, by the way. For everything.”

Jack swallowed hard. He wanted to hang on tight to the anger that had been his security blanket for so many years, but what was the point?

“Thank you,” he said tightly. “I am a good father.” Why the hell did he say that? He wanted to grab the words out of the air and stuff them back down his throat, but Paige stood grinning at him.

“You’re okay and all,” she said. “But I still think Ryan Reynolds might be a cooler dad.”

Over in the corner, Barbara smiled. Jack’s father gave a bitter-sounding chuckle that may have been another cough. Then his gaze swung back to his son, and those silver-blue eyes locked with Jack’s for the space of several breaths.

“I would have screwed you up, you know.”

Jack blinked. “What do you mean?”

“I was a shitty person back then,” the old man said. “Well, I’m still a shitty person, but I was shittier. If I’d stuck around, if you’d been raised with me in your life? You would have turned into a prick just like me.”

“I doubt that very much.” The words came out soft, not icy, and Jack wondered how he’d meant them to sound.

He also wondered if there was a sliver of truth to what his father said. “It still would have been good to know you,” Jack said. “To have some contact with you, at least.”

“It wouldn’t have. Trust me on that.” Another cough racked the old man’s body, and Barbara hustled forward to adjust the pillows. He stopped coughing and looked at Jack again. “Look, me walking out? It was the best thing I could have done for you.”

Jack didn’t know what to say. Part of him wanted to stay angry.

He had more than thirty years of fury built up inside him, and he wanted to let it out somehow.

For so many years, he’d dreamed of telling his father off.

He’d scripted an impassioned speech where he told his dad exactly what he thought about his failures as father and a human.

But right now, he couldn’t remember a damn word of it.

He was still deciding what to say when Paige stepped forward. Jack stood frozen, hands cupping the space where her shoulders had been as his little girl walked to the edge of the bed with halting steps.

The old man turned to look at her. Jack held his breath, ready to step forward if his father said anything awful.

But the old man said nothing. Just watched as Paige pulled a chair from the dining room table and dragged it next to the bed. Three pairs of adult eyes watched as the girl seated herself, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at her grandfather.

“How old was my dad when you saw him the last time?” she asked.

“Six-and-a-half,” the old man answered with no hesitation. “It was August twelfth. Summer break.”

Paige nodded, seeming to digest this information. Jack’s hands felt useless and floppy, so he put them behind his back and stood like a marine at military rest.

At the head of the bed, Paige spoke again. “Tell me about him.”

“Who?” The old man frowned, but Jack saw something soften in his eyes.

“Tell me about my dad,” Paige said with no trace of impatience. “I want to know what my dad was like when he was a kid.”

The old man seemed to hesitate. Jack held his breath again. Over in the corner, Barbara looked like she was doing the same.

Paige unfolded her hands and lifted one, resting it on top of the old man’s gnarled one. All of them stared—Jack, Barbara, Jack’s father. Then the old man looked up and met his granddaughter’s eyes.

“I remember this one time when your dad was five,” he said. “I wasn’t around much by then, but I wanted to spend time with him. Do some bonding, you know?”

Paige nodded. “Yeah.”

“Anyway, we decided to hitchhike to Vegas. Just me and your dad, a couple guys seeing the west together. Man stuff.”

“That sounds fun.” Paige watched her grandfather’s face with rapt attention, her hand still on his.

“We had us a time!” The old man chuckled, and the spark in his eyes stirred Jack’s memory.

Something warm and comforting in the archives of his childhood.

“Sleeping under the stars, eating beef jerky for dinner and telling ghost stories. We caught rides with truckers who let your dad blow the horn at pretty girls.”

Jack stood frozen. He’d forgotten the jerky. Forgotten the horn. Forgotten everything but being abandoned. Not just in the car, but after that.

“So then what happened?” Paige asked.

The old man looked up and met Jack’s eyes. Neither blinked. Neither said a word.

Jack’s dad looked away first. He took a heavy breath and lifted his gaze to his granddaughter’s. “I screwed everything up when I?—”

“A lot of adventures,” Jack interrupted, stepping forward to put his hand on Paige’s shoulder. He looked at his father and gave a small nod. “Tell her about the jukebox, Pop.”

On the car ride home, Jack couldn’t stop stealing glimpses at his daughter in the rearview mirror. He didn’t know whether to be more impressed by her bravery, her empathy, or her conversational skills.

Seeming to sense his gaze on her, Paige met his eyes in the mirror. “What?”

“You.” Jack smiled and directed his gaze back on the road. “You did good in there, kid.”

“Grandma says I’m charming.”

Jack laughed. “That you are.” He signaled right and got into the slow lane to let traffic by. “Thank you, by the way.”

“For what?”

“For teaching me something important in there.”

“You mean how to do the armpit fart noise? I learned that from this girl in my class who went to summer camp.”

He laughed again and shook his head. “Yeah, I think your grandpa was pretty impressed.”

“I could tell.”

“I actually meant the other thing,” he said. “The fact that you talked to him in the first place. That you didn’t just stand there with your thumb up your butt like I did.”

“Ew,” she said with a giggle. “Well, you guys were being really boring. I thought someone needed to talk.”

“You’re right. And I appreciate that it was you. That you’re able to find the good in people instead of getting hung up on the worst in them.”

“Yeah.” Paige fell silent again, and Jack glanced in the mirror to see she’d gone back to gazing out the window.

“I’ve been reading my bird book,” she said.

“Oh?” The subject change threw him a little, but it was a welcome diversion. Birds seemed like an easier topic than cancer or death or forgiveness.

“Want to hear about the albatross?” Paige asked.

She was still staring out the window, and Jack couldn’t read her expression at all. Was she thinking of Allie, or just choosing a bird at random?

“Sure,” he said carefully. “Tell me about the albatross.”

“Well,” she began as Jack merged off the freeway toward downtown.

“There’s lots of different kinds. The snowy albatross and the black-footed albatross and the waved albatross.

The royal albatross is the biggest one. When a baby albatross starts flying, it takes off and goes around the world a bunch of times all by itself without ever touching the ground. ”

“Really?” Jack found himself fascinated, and he wondered if Wade had known any of this when he’d given Allie her nickname. Allie Ross the albatross, the bird who’d rather fly alone.

“Yeah,” she said. “They do that for, like, five years, all by themselves. Just catching stuff in the ocean and making these big circles all the way around the world. But you know what’s cool?”

“What’s that?” He glanced in the mirror again, trying to get a read on her.

She met his eyes and smiled. “When the royal albatross goes back to where it was born, it spends a long time finding the one albatross it likes best of all.”

“They mate for life?”

Paige frowned. “What’s that?”

“Like only one other albatross for the rest of its life.”

“Oh. Yeah, they do that. Anyway, when they’re trying to find their husband or wife, they meet a bunch of different albatrosses. They flap their wings and make weird noises. Then they go off with one other albatross and they practice making a nest to see if they really like each other.”

“And then they lay eggs?”

“Nope,” Paige said. “Then they leave each other.”

Jack blinked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean they take off. In opposite directions. The girl bird goes one way and the boy bird goes the other, and they spend a whole year flying by themselves around the world.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, but you know what’s cool? They come back to the same place.

Always. And they land within a few hours of the other albatross, even though they’ve been away for a year and they went to all different places.

But they come back and they make a nest and they have babies and then they do it all over again. But they always come back.”

A tightness constricted his chest. He kept his eyes off the mirror, not wanting to her to see how undone he felt in that moment. Not wanting to believe this was anything other than a simple story about birds.

“That’s amazing,” Jack said at last.

“It is.” Paige was quiet a moment, and Jack glanced at her again. She fiddled with the end of her braid, twisting and untwisting the rubber band, not looking at him. “I also learned some stuff about woodpeckers.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” She looked up then, meeting his gaze in the mirror. A slow smile spread over her face. “I think I know what kind Allie’s got.”

“What kind?”

“I think it’s called a northern flicker. It’s got red right here by its eye and speckles on its body and these black feathers here like a necklace.”

Jack gripped the steering wheel tighter, feeling his heart starting to thrum in his ears. “That’s good. That you can identify the kind of bird. Nice work.”

“Uh-huh.” She gave him a smile he swore looked just like Allie’s Cheshire cat smile. “And I think I know what to do about it.”