TUESDAY NIGHT, Charlie comes over for dinner, and afterward I clean up while she and Rusty play Go Fish with the deep-sea deck. When I’m done, I lean against the doorway into the living room and just watch them for a while: Rusty constantly trying to get one over on Charlie, Charlie having none of it.
They finish that game. Rusty wins. They play another one, I tell Rusty it’s bedtime, and she negotiates for one more game before she has to go to sleep.
I swear, she’s gonna work for the UN when she grows up.
Finally, she comes down in her pajamas — narwhals leaping through rainbows, a gift from Violet — to say goodnight.
“You brushed your teeth?” I ask, and she nods. “Washed your face?”
She nods again.
“Tell Charlie goodnight, then,” I say, standing.
“I want Charlie to read to me,” she says.
I raise both my eyebrows and look over at Charlie. Rusty’s never requested a bedtime book from anyone but me, but Charlie looks at me and shrugs.
“You have to ask Charlie,” I say.
“Charlie, will you read to me?”
“Sure,” she says. “You’ll have to fill in the backstory, though.”
“That’s okay,” Rusty says, bouncing on her toes. “Good night, Dad.”
“Good night, sweetheart,” I say, giving her a quick kiss before she’s gone like a flash, Charlie alighting the stairs behind her.
“Okay,” I hear Rusty say, slightly breathless. “So Sophia is a princess but she thinks that being a princess is stupid, her parents just want her to marry a prince so instead she goes and finds a dragon and asks if she can work for her…”
And then they’re gone. I sit back on the couch, suddenly unsure what to do for the next fifteen minutes.
THURSDAY WE HAVE another sex appointment. This one’s even shorter than the last, and we don’t even make it to the couch. Charlie answers the door in a towel, somehow wearing even less than the last time I came over, and within minutes we’re kneeling on the floor and I’ve bent her over the couch while I fuck her hard and fast and deep and she begs me to do it harder, faster, shouting into the couch cushions when she comes.
I can’t get enough of her. I feel like an addict, unable to think about anything but my next fix. Even as I’m going soft inside her, my cock slipping out, I kiss the back of her neck, her shoulder, one hand cupping her breast. I pinch a nipple and she makes a soft noise, her back arching, the perfect globes of her ass against my hips.
I love how responsive she is, how she tells me what she wants, how her body moves under mine, and even though I should be going already I slide my hand between her legs again, her clit between my fingers. I stroke her until she comes again, moaning, bucking backward into me and then when she finishes, I kiss her hard and deep.
“You’re gonna spoil me,” she says, her voice dreamy.
“I’m okay with it,” I tell her.
FRIDAY MORNING, Crystal calls. I’m already at work, and I seriously consider not picking it up. I’m going to see her in a few hours when she picks Rusty up for the weekend, I can talk to her then.
But one of us has to be the reasonable, level-headed adult, so I answer.
“Listen, Daniel,” she says. “Can you do me a favor and bring Rusty over at three?”
“No,” I say, managing to keep my voice reasonable.
“Bruce has dinner with the board tonight, and I need to have Rusty over here on the early side so I can get her cleaned up and dressed and everything,” she says with the air of someone explaining something very basic to someone very stupid. “So I really need you to just bring her to—”
“For starters, she’s got school,” I say, already on my feet, pacing back and forth. “And for—”
“It’s May,” Crystal says.
“School goes through mid-June,” I remind Crystal. I’m honestly not sure she knows when Rusty has school.
“Then they’re not doing anything,” she says, like it’s obvious. “Everyone just screws around for the last month anyway.”
I take a deep breath, step out of my office and into the main brewery. We just started our Mountain Hollow Brown yesterday, so it smells like fresh, strange bread right now, and I breathe that scent deep.
“I’m not pulling her out of school early, and I’m not bringing her to your house,” I say, struggling to maintain calm.
Crystal snorts derisively.
“It’s just second grade,” she says. “It’s not important.”
“How would you know?” I ask, patience fraying quickly.
“Because it’s second grade.”
“When was the last time you helped her with her homework?” I ask. “How the hell would you know anything about whether second grade is important?”
“I mean, maybe high school is important,” she says. “Jesus, Daniel, can you do me a favor once?”
I don’t believe in violence, but if Crystal were here, I might strangle her right now.
“No,” I say curtly. “Pick her up at six at my house. See you in a few hours.”
She says something else, but I hang up. If I talk to her anymore I might say something I regret, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she were secretly recording our phone calls.
I’m not pulling Rusty out of school — which she loves — for Crystal’s bullshit. I have no idea what Crystal says about me when Rusty’s with her, but her whole life, I’ve been careful not to say anything bad about Crystal, because no matter what, Crystal’s her mom and Rusty loves her to death.
I worry that someday she won’t. Rusty’s a perceptive, precocious kid, and I worry that it’ll be sooner and not later that she starts asking questions about why she only sees Mom once a month, or why I don’t have any baby pictures of her. Sometimes I lie awake at night, practicing my answers to those questions. I never get them right.
I stuff my phone in my pocket, and head out back of the brewery. It’s a little outside town, on a rural road, so it’s surrounded in the front by farmland and the back by forest.
For a moment I just stand in the gravel parking lot, fuming at Crystal.
Then I throw rocks at the trees until I feel better.
CRYSTAL FINALLY SHOWS up at 6:30, half an hour after we agreed. When she knocks on my door, looking impatient, I don’t ask why the hell she’s late if she was in such a damn hurry to begin with.
Rusty practically bounces into her mom’s arms. She pats Crystal’s belly and whispers hello to her little sister while Crystal gives me a triumphant look that I can’t interpret.
I try to tell Crystal everything that Rusty’s been doing lately: that she wears long-sleeved pajamas because she kicks all her blankets off; that she doesn’t like to sleep without Astrid, her stuffed wombat; that we’re reading Apprenticed to Dragons and she’s been helping me cook and can tell different pine trees apart thanks to her uncle Levi and sometimes pretends to be Jump Girl and leaps off the back of the couch, onto the cushions she’s piled up.
“Great!” is all Crystal says. “Rusty, want to go to the waterpark this weekend?”
“YEAH!” shrieks Rusty, jumping up and down. I’m pretty sure that Crystal didn’t listen to a word I said.
I get the booster seat out of my car and put it into Crystal’s, since she doesn’t have one of her own and I definitely don’t trust her to install it. While I do that, I can hear her telling Rusty about all the fun they’re going to have this weekend, all the presents that Rusty has at her house, how they’ve got a gallon of ice cream in the freezer.
When it’s time for them to leave, my mom and I give Rusty hugs and kisses, promise to call, and then we stand in the driveway and watch Crystal drive away. Rusty waves all the way down the driveway, until she’s out of sight. My mom puts her arm around me and hugs me to her side.
On one hand, I hate watching Rusty drive away. I’ll miss her every minute she’s gone. The house will feel weird and empty without her.
On the other hand, it’s really nice to get a break once in a while. Particularly this weekend.
“Daniel, I have a confession to make,” my mom says, still side-hugging me, both of us still facing the driveway where Crystal’s car disappeared.
“Is it that you hate Crystal and wish I’d impregnated someone better?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says.
I just put my arm around her and pat her shoulder. She says more or less the same thing to me every time Crystal takes Rusty for a visitation weekend, and I can’t say I disagree.
We stand there for a bit, just my mom and me, still facing the driveway.
“And you’re staying at Charlie’s this weekend?” she asks.
“Right,” I say, suddenly standing up straighter. It doesn’t matter that I’m a grown man with a child. Admitting — however tacitly — to my mom that I have sex is… weird.
“Tell her I said hello,” she says, disengaging with a final back pat. “And don’t come back without calling first.”
“Sure,” I say, turning and following her toward the house so I can get my stuff and leave.
Then I stop in the driveway, my mom still making her way to the house.
“Wait,” I call. “Why?”
