I sat straighter.
He didn’t miss it.
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“I…does that…I don’t know, um…does that mean—?”
He put me out of my current misery by adding to it.
“That, when me and Jess and Jace fell in love with Celeste and acted like it, she lost her shit and eventually said it was either her or my daughter, and I picked my daughter, and that’s why she’s not around? Yeah. That’s what it means.”
“She…gave you an ultimatum…about your daughter?”
“It wasn’t laid out like that. It was laid out like we spoil her. Or something. When, okay, maybe there was some of that, but it wasn’t a lot. It wasn’t unhealthy. Though, we’d done it unhealthy, what we gave to Grace. She was spoiled rotten. In the end, putrid with it. I thought she’d have her tantrum and get her shit together. She didn’t. She left. Seein’ as I’m good at finding things, I found her. When I did, she communicated that, unless things changed to her specifications, this being we sent Celeste away to attend school, she would decline to return. I declined to pack my daughter off to school because her mother is a bitch. That was five years ago. Celeste was eleven. The boys were twenty-two. Grace hasn’t been back since. No calls. No cards. She could always hold a mean grudge, but this shit is something else.”
It truly was.
Something else.
“And Celeste was young, but not so young she didn’t sense why her mother was gone,” I remarked, carefully concealing (I hoped) the revulsion I felt for his ex in my tone.
“No love there. Not Celeste. She’s all about love. I mean Grace. She was never that kind of mom where she got into mom things. I didn’t think that was weird. Not every mom is gonna be supermom from start to finish. She got in her groove though. She adored the boys.”
At least there was that.
“She didn’t want to be pregnant, not the first time, and the fact we made twins didn’t help. Absolutely she didn’t want it the second. But she was sure it would be a boy, so she thought, after we got through the bottles and diapers and potty training, and we got him to school, she’d have her life back. Like she did with the boys. Not that she did bottles or diapers or any of that shit. It made me sad for her. She missed out.”
She missed out.
My heart squeezed.
“She’d also have someone else to kiss her ass, like we all did. Even with the ultrasound telling us it was a girl, Grace refused to believe it. Said it was an error. Said we’d see when he was here. I thought she was scared of havin’ a kid she didn’t know how to raise, since we were through a lot of it with the boys. Celeste came out, shit went south immediately.”
I kind of wanted him to stop talking again.
Though, the pistachio velvet couch was explained.
“Although I appreciate you sharing this, Bohannan, I’m not certain why you are.”
He didn’t hesitate in giving it to me.
“She needs you and she needs that bad. So, I’m sharing this with you because my girl has been hurtin’ for some kind of good woman to be in her life and show her the way. And she’s been hurtin’ for that since birth. And what happened today means she’s decided it’s you. She was gone for maybe five minutes before she was back. Five minutes more, you’re at our door. We don’t know you from boo. But you’re at our goddamned door because my daughter needed you. Now, if you mean to stay and be that woman, I’m down with that. If you don’t. If your situation resolves itself and you’re out of here. You leave my daughter out of it.”
And him being unimpressed with my diatribe the day we met, disallowing Celeste to stay with me and help unpack, was explained.
“I have two girls.”
“I know you do.”
“I would never harm Celeste.”
“I don’t think you get it.”
“I think I do.”
“You’ve been around her what? Three times?”
“I knew the instant I saw her because she’s me. My mom wasn’t into mom things either. She wanted an abortion, and I know that because she told me, I lost track of how many times. My dad did the right thing and married her, then he did the usual thing and left. He came back, around the time I hit the cover of People magazine. They both love me and are oh-so-proud of me, when neither of them has any clue if I like asparagus or have even tried it in all my fifty-three years.”
Bohannan retreated to silence.
“I did not lie. I like it here. I liked it here before I met Celeste. My life is my own. I can’t say I don’t have commitments. I have two daughters. I have things I do. But when I say I won’t harm Celeste, even if that means I won’t be here every second of every day until I die, that means I will move mountains not to harm Celeste.”