Chapter 59

59

Two weeks blaze by like a brushfire, leaving the ashes of memory and regret behind an inferno of renewed feelings.

We’ve made love twice, thrice, awkwardly each time. We’re amateurs at best, trying desperately to fumble correctly under the sheets. You’d think intimacy would be much more like riding a bike than ice-skating. It’s not. We’ve barely gained our footing.

Fire and ice. They don’t belong together but we keep attempting to recreate the spectacle. The sheets are crumpled like gift-wrapping, wadded up at the foot of the bed, and present themselves as incriminating evidence that she and I have forgotten how to sleep next to one another as well. But yet, we keep trying. It has been so long since we stopped.

She only comes home on the weekends, Jamie Jr., and only for a handful of hours at a time. “She has school during the week,” her mother tries to reason, “and, of course, her boyfriend.”

The first time she walks through the front door she sees me sitting on the couch, her mother’s legs draped over mine. We are remembering, the two of us, of a weekend trip we once took through the heart of Kansas. “I still remember how many windmills we counted,” she tells me, “One hundred and one.”

We’re laughing, which must have been an awkward sound to Jamie. A voice, not her father’s, reminding her mother of a time not so forgotten when she was honestly happy.

And then she sees me, the stranger from the bus stop, the wanderer she shared a cigarette with. I am an intruder, sipping coffee from her mother’s favorite coffee mug. But she has not heard the stories nor does she know our past. She’s never seen a picture of her mother and I together and been told that the tree that stands directly behind us was the one she used to climb.

To her I’m all but alarming; to me she’s all but my daughter.

Jamie quickly moves her legs from my lap when Jr. enters the room, introducing me in an off pitch sort of way.

“Jamie. Hi…uh…you’re home. I want you to meet my dear old friend, Richard.”

Her daughter and I respond in unison.

We have already met.

The sudden silence makes me beg for some sort of noise, a cough maybe, or Jamie beginning to sneeze. Maybe I should tell a joke, break the ice, yet this reunion has gone so horribly wrong that I fear comedy would merely insult the attendees.

And then it happens, a break in the silence. We are interrupted, suddenly, by a familiar cry.

Enter stage left: A completely blind twenty-three year old cat named Meatball.

“Well look at that,” I finally manage to say, making sure to look both Jamies in the eye. “The gang’s all here.”

And with that, after a collective sigh of relief, the Jamies and I begin to laugh out loud.