Single Dad's Surprise (Wilder Brothers #1) Read online

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s like that with mommies and kids. You and your mom are playing a constant game of charades, even when she’s not right here. Your hearts are always acting out your goodbyes for each other a million times a day so that neither of your hearts is ever lonely. You and mom are always saying goodbye, even when you’re not.”

  Poppy seemed to understand that analogy a little bit better than a non-answer about why her mom kept abandoning her on a rolling basis.

  “You ready for me to make dinner? I asked.

  “No, I just want to be alone in my room for a little while.”

  “Okay, kiddo.” I gave her and her bear a big kiss. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

  When I left the room, I bumped right into Annika, who was still standing at the door listening.

  “Sorry,” I said as I stood there, gawking at how thin her T-shirt was and how I could see the color gradation of her nipples beneath it. I had a hard time taking my eyes off of her and fighting with myself to keep from touching her.

  “What you said to Poppy was really nice,” she said. “You didn’t have to make her mother sound so special, and you did, in order to make it better for Poppy.”

  “I’m not sure if that actually made anything better,” I said. “I don’t really think anything is going to fix it.”

  “I think that all of the things you do make it a little bit better for Poppy; it’s just hard to see sometimes.”

  “Thanks,” I said. This time I had a really difficult time calming myself down. Even after I had left the hallway and gone back into my bedroom, I couldn’t stop thinking about Annika.

  Dinner tonight was soup and sandwiches because that was all I had the energy to cook. The three of us sat silently at the table and ate. Poppy dipped the corners of her grilled cheese sandwich into her soup and watched as Annika followed suit. There was still plenty of animosity between them, but they both seemed too tired to think about it. I also thought they were fascinated with the commonality they shared for eating grilled cheese. It was slightly amusing after such an emotionally draining day that a simple thing like dunking the corners of their sandwich into their soup would prove to be such an interesting thing to think about. It was too bad that Poppy’s image of Annika had been so tarnished by Maleah. Even before her surprise visit here, the idea of Maleah in little Poppy’s mind had taken over everything else.

  “Do you think she’ll call tonight?” Poppy asked. “She usually calls, but she might not tonight.”

  “What makes you think she wouldn’t call?” I asked.

  “Because Mom is mad now. She’s mad that I interrupted her work, and she’s mad about Annika being here.”

  “She’s not mad at you, Poppy,” Annika said as she started to clear the dishes from the table.

  Poppy looked up at her, and I could see that she was torn. It was difficult for her to understand that she could love her mother and still like Annika.

  “She’s mad at you,” Poppy shot back.

  “That’s fine,” Annika smiled. It was a kind and sympathetic smile, not one meant to be callous or sarcastic, but one meant to be understanding and compassionate. “I’m a grown-up, so I can handle it. Maybe one day it won’t be like that anymore.”

  “You’re not going to be around long enough for it to matter,” Poppy said.

  I was so exhausted from correcting her, and I just wanted to do whatever it took to put an end to the situation, but I didn’t know what that should be. Shouting at Poppy or scolding her didn’t work. It just made her act out further. Sending Annika away wasn’t the answer because I knew now more than ever that I needed her, and so did Poppy. The only thing I could think of to do was to just let everyone go to bed, to get up and try to focus while I went to work tomorrow, and to wait for it all to wash over.

  Maleah would be leaving on her tour tonight, and that meant Poppy would hear from her even less. Normally that meant more acting out and bad behavior, but maybe this time, with Annika here, it wouldn’t be quite as bad. Even if she didn’t know it yet, Annika filled a space that Poppy needed.

  Annika didn’t say anything in response to Poppy’s last comment. She simply finished clearing the table, which I reminded her again that she didn’t need to do.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You made dinner. I’ll clean up. Besides, I think nannies usually do some of the household stuff, too, don’t they?”

  “Is Annika your girlfriend?” Poppy looked up and asked me bluntly. “Because Mom says that she is.”

  “No,” I answered. “Annika is not my girlfriend.”

  After I said it, I wondered why it felt so weird to say. She had only been here for a couple of days, and in that time, things had not been any easier as I had hoped. In fact, they had actually been much harder already. So I wasn’t sure why I felt so comfortable having her here as if it were completely natural that I was making dinner and she was clearing the table. I needed to make sure that I woke up in the morning with a more focused perspective on things. I needed to focus on work and getting things back up to speed, not be distracted by Annika’s thin T-shirts. I wondered if she knew how thin they were or if I was just letting my imagination fill in the gaps within the space between the fabric of her clothes and the skin on her body.

  After dinner, we all went to bed. Everyone had enough of today and needed sleep and quiet before tackling Tuesday in the morning.

  “Goodnight,” Annika said to both of us as she went upstairs.

  I answered her back, and Poppy ignored her, which, of course, was no surprise.

  When Poppy and I walked upstairs, hand in hand, with her bear dangling from the fingers of her other hand, she seemed even quieter than before. After she got ready for bed, I tucked her in and read her a story like always. She had been right; Maleah never called her, and I was surprised that she hadn’t said anything about it. I knew it was on her mind, but she just looked tired and sad. I thought about trying to come up with something reassuring to say to her, but her eyes closed even before the story had ended, and she drifted off to sleep with her favorite bear in her hands.

  It was cute the way she slept with it, tucked right up by her face every time as if she needed to feel its worn fur in order to be able to sleep. Maleah said that she was too old to be dragging around a raggedy teddy bear that looked like it was covered in grime and had been outside all night on the city streets. It wasn’t even that bad looking; to me, it just looked loved. Poppy cherished everything that her mother had ever given her, even if it was just a paper coaster from a bar that Maleah had been at during her tour with the picture of a mermaid on it and the lingering ring of a cocktail stain. Maleah normally didn’t remember to bring her anything. Even something she had just set her drink on became a treasure for Poppy, who created an entire story in her head about how her mother had searched out that exact coaster for her since she knew how much she loved mermaids.

  But the bear was something different than anything Maleah could ever give to Poppy, and I thought that was what made Maleah hate it so much and constantly tell Poppy that she was too old to have a bear. The bear—fondly named just “bear”—was the one thing that was always with her. And it just happened to be something that I had given to Poppy.

  Chapter Seven (Annika)

  The next day went by fairly uneventfully, thank God. I couldn’t have dealt with another altercation with Maleah. I did a fairly good job of standing my ground with her yesterday, but I really wasn’t ready to do it again anytime soon.

  I slept well last night and woke up feeling refreshed. When I had come downstairs, Jake had already gotten Poppy ready for school, and after he left for work, she sat there quietly and ate her cereal without saying a word. It was actually a nice change from all the drama yesterday.

  The day was pretty smooth. She didn’t do anything at school which required intervention, and Jake was able to actually get some work done at the recording studio. When I picked up Poppy from school, she rode silently ho
me in the backseat of the car and then went straight up to her room once we got there to do her homework. I checked in on her a couple of times and was pleasantly surprised to see that she was, indeed, sitting at her desk and doing schoolwork.

  “Do you need any help with that?” I asked.

  “No.”

  Her one-worded answer and continued silent treatment made me a little weary that she was knee-deep in plotting something that would completely blow up in my face once Jake got home, but it ended up being fine, and nothing came out of it except for a nice, peaceful day. Even during dinner, Jake noticed that Poppy was quieter than usual and asked her if she was okay, which she replied that she was. Fine, had been her one-word answer. Obviously, things weren’t fine with her, but there was nothing glaringly obvious, and it was a much less stressful day for everyone, so both Jake and I went through the motions of the rest of the evening and just let Poppy be.

  It wasn’t until after her bath that I noticed something was wrong.

  Jake was on a work call, so he didn’t hear it, I didn’t think. Plus, it was very soft.

  As I was walking out of my room and headed down toward the kitchen to make a cup of tea to bring up to bed with me, I heard a quiet, muffled crying and knew at once that it was Poppy. I walked over to her room, where her bedroom door was cracked open only slightly, and stood outside for just enough time to hear her trying to cover up the small sobs that she couldn’t push down anymore. I also heard her mumbling a few sad and lonely words to her bear. I couldn’t make out exactly what she said to it, only that it had something to do with being all alone in the world.

  None of this is her fault, I reminded myself. And I knew exactly how it felt to be without a mom. She might not have wanted me to come in, but I think she needed me to. When I pushed open the bedroom door, Poppy was sitting in the corner of her room next to her dollhouse with her bear in her arms. Her hands were folded crisscross around him, and her chin was resting on the top of his head. Her knees were drawn up to her chest, and her face was wet with tears. Poppy wasn’t doing this for attention, not this time. She was quietly sitting on her own, suffering with the one person she knew she could count on to always be there for her…Bear.

  I didn’t say anything to her as she glanced up at me while I walked across the bedroom toward her. The look on her face wasn’t really a glare, but it wasn’t anything welcoming, either. It was more just the look of helpless sadness that had reached the point of being too much to endure to be angry.

  When I got to where she was sitting, I sat down, too. I sat next to her with my back leaned up against the wall as we both stared out in the same direction into her bedroom. It really was a magical room, with its pink glow cast from the hanging fairy lights and its plethora of toys that looked like they could get up and start playing all by themselves at any moment.

  “Get out of my room,” Poppy said. She was too tired to say it any louder or more vehemently than in a regular talking voice, even though I knew she wished she could shout at me.

  I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say yet, but I also didn’t leave.

  “I want you to just leave me alone,” she said in my silence.

  I stayed anyway, despite her protests.

  “When I was little, I didn’t have a mom,” I started to say as I continued to just stare straight ahead out in front of us. “I missed her all the time, every minute of every day. I didn’t even really know her, but I felt a hole in my heart where I thought she should be. My dad tried to understand; he was always trying to find a way to keep me from being unhappy. But he never really understood that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t give me the only thing that I wanted and needed—my mom. Sometimes I felt like he tried too hard, you know? Like it made it worse that he was putting so much effort into trying to fix something that he could never mend. It made me mad and sad at the same time. And it caused me to do a lot of things that I shouldn’t have done.”

  I paused and waited.

  “What kinds of things did you do?” she asked after a few long minutes had passed in which I wasn’t sure if she had even been listening or if she was just ignoring me completely and plotting her next ways to enact awful punishments on me for existing in her space.

  “I broke things at school sometimes because I was so angry. Sometimes they were my own things, like pencils or even once I broke my phone. Other times they belonged to my classmates, and once I even broke the teacher’s stapler after trying to use it to staple a boy’s shoes together.”

  Poppy laughed. “Did it work?”

  “Did what work?”

  “Stapling the boy’s shoes together.”

  “Oh,” I laughed along with her. “No, it didn’t work at all. I ended up getting into a lot of trouble for a lot of things, a lot of the time. It felt good to get the attention, for a while anyway. But then it always ended up feeling bad in the end. What I really wanted was to have my mom’s attention, but since she wasn’t even alive, that was obviously an impossible task.”

  “Your mom was dead?” Poppy asked with a look of horror on her face as she clutched her bear to her chest even tighter than before.

  “Yeah,” I answered. “But yours isn’t. I know you think that your parents don’t love you sometimes as much as you want them to, but I can tell you for a fact that they do. Your dad and your mom, and nothing is going to change that—not me being here, not all the times that you act out in school. No matter what you do, they will always both love you in their own way. You can’t make that any more or any less by the things you choose to do. What you can do, though, is make things easier on all of you, including yourself. I know it doesn’t feel good for you when you act out to get your mom to come back, and I know that plan didn’t go exactly as you thought it would yesterday.”

  Poppy started to look as though she would get defensive again, but her tired eyes seemed to be winning out over her desire to argue. “Sometimes, I worry that I will forget about her,” she said as a big yawn stretched across her face. “Sometimes she’s gone for so long at a time, that I have to squeeze my eyes together really tight to see her face in my head. I used to remember how she would hold me while she would read me stories before bed, but it’s been so long since she’s done that, that I forgot. Dad reads me stories now, and it’s not that I don’t like it when he does it; it’s just not the same.”

  “I understand that,” I said. “Sometimes I worry that I’ll forget what my mom looked like, too. But you know what? You never really do. I promise.”

  Poppy looked as though she could barely keep her eyes open.

  “Come on,” I said with an outstretched hand as I stood up. “Time for bed.”

  She hesitated but then gave me her hand and got up to walk across the room. She lay down and let me tuck her in. I turned to see Jake standing at the door when his shadow caught my eye, and he looked at me and smiled. By the time I had turned back around to Poppy, she was already fast asleep with the bear tucked tightly in her arm. I wondered if he had been standing there and had heard that whole thing. I pulled Poppy’s blanket up around her and tucked the top of it underneath her hand that was holding the bear. Then I walked out to talk to Jake. But when I stepped out of the bedroom, he was already gone.

  I went downstairs to make the cup of tea that I had been heading down to get before I heard Poppy, and I didn’t see Jake anywhere downstairs. When I walked back up to my room, I looked down the hall toward his bedroom and saw that there was no light coming out from beneath his door. Maybe that meant he had felt content enough tonight to go to sleep early. I hoped so. He was trying, and I thought Poppy knew that; I believed the two of them were both just doing the best that they could.

  I wanted to hate Maleah for how she treated both Poppy and Jake, but the thought dawned on me that maybe she was just doing the best that she could do—which obviously wasn’t much. If I had been Maleah and had her life, with a sweet, beautiful daughter whose biggest flaw was that she despe
rately wanted to spend time with me, and a husband as unbelievably handsome and successful as Jake, I would do everything I could to hold onto it. I sipped my tea and looked out the window at the nighttime cityscape as I thought about how very different people were.

  Chapter Eight (Jake)

  It was one of the most touching things I had seen in a while. Watching Annika with Poppy, even after all of the hell that Poppy had put her through, she still seemed to be the calmest and kindest force in Poppy’s life right now. I had listened outside of Poppy’s bedroom door last night and heard Annika tell Poppy about her own mother. The part that amazed me was that Poppy had actually listened to her. I think the two of them had a lot more in common than any of us realized.

  “So, how’s the new nanny working out?” Lucie asked.

  Lucie had covered for me when I had to run out of work in response to Annika’s 9-1-1 call the other day. I had texted her later in the evening to let her know that I had extinguished another Maleah firestorm in my driveway.

  “It’s been a bit bumpy, not going to lie,” I said. “But I think that you’re right, I think Poppy will come around and that it will be a good thing in the end. Just as long as Annika doesn’t run, kicking and screaming from the house before then.”

  Lucie laughed. “It can’t be that bad.”

  “Trust me,” I nodded as I sipped my coffee. “It is.”

  “And what about you?” she asked.

  “What about me?”

  “How are you and the nanny getting along?” Lucie eyed me over the top of her coffee cup, and I knew what she was insinuating.

  “She’s my nanny, Lucie,” I responded as I rolled my eyes at her. I felt like I reacted a bit too aloof, though, because the way Lucie responded with a drawn-out “uh-huh” made me feel like she could sense what I was trying not to acknowledge.

  The truth was that I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Annika for days. It wasn’t just one thing that lingered in my mind; it was everything. The way that Annika’s body looked when I caught a glimpse of all of her bare skin, the way that she talked to me instead of shouted like Maleah always did, and the way that she would sit down on the floor right next to Poppy and give her time to think without pressing her.