Page 70 of Goodbye Paradise
It was selfish, but I wanted to keep doing it, anyway.
I sat there awhile, afraid to go into the house and pretend that everything was normal. I had no idea what excuses Caleb made for me.
Eventually I heard footsteps on the stairs, and I looked up at the doorway. But it wasn’t Caleb who came in. It was Daniel. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” I looked at my hands.
“Come downstairs to the workshop for a second. There’s something I want to show you.” He turned around then.
It was tempting to just sit here forever, and not face him. But I was a well-behaved person to the core. So I followed Daniel downstairs and into the workshop.
“Months ago,” Daniel said, flipping on the overhead lights. “Maggie asked me to build you two some twin beds.”
My stomach clenched even as Daniel pointed to a bed in the corner. Twin sized.
“I built the pieces right away. That one is finished, as you can see.”
It was beautiful, too, with a sturdy maple headboard in an unfussy design.
“…I started the second one,” he continued, pointing at some rails in another corner. “But I didn’t think you’d want twin beds. And I didn’t want to out the two of you. So I’ve just been changing the subject every time she asks me how long it takes to build two freaking beds.”
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. He was lying to his wife for me.
Daniel shook his head. “You don’t have to apologize to me. I grew up outside of San Francisco, Josh. There is nothing that scares me about a couple of gay guys. My best friend from high school is married to a dude. There are pictures of them in the dining room. From that fishing trip?”
I knew those pictures. But I’d never understood who I was looking at in them. “But Maggie…” I let the sentence die.
“Well. Maggiedidn’tgrow up outside of San Francisco. You know exactly where she grew up. And you know exactly what kind of bullshit they fed her.”
“She’d hate me.”
Daniel shrugged. “I don’t think so. See, Maggie is a great girl. And she loves you with all her heart. It might be a little bit of a surprise to her. She’s got no experience with this. But that doesn’t mean she can’t get used to the idea.”
I shivered. Even if I thought there was an eighty percent chance she’d be okay with it, that still wasn’t enough. Because if Maggie ever told me that she regretted asking me to care for her child…
That’s the sort of thing I didn’t know if I could get over.
“I don’t want to tell her,” I said.
Daniel’s face fell. “But how does this end?” he asked.
I had no earthly idea.
“It’s your secret to tell,” Daniel promised me. “But I think you’d feel better if you got it out in the open.”
Maybe he was right. But I was too scared.
Twenty-Two
The next fewdays were crazy.
Maggie and Daniel bought Miriam a Greyhound bus ticket. “I would have flown her out here,” Maggie said, “but she has no ID, so she can’t get on a plane.” Instead, they put her on a bus and wired her money for food. She was set to arrive three days after she’d phoned.
Meanwhile, Operation Apartment Renovation kicked into high gear.
“We can sleep out there even if there’s no plumbing in the kitchen,” Caleb pointed out the morning after Miriam’s fateful call.
“True. But we might as well just push through and finish it,” Daniel argued. “What if we both took the afternoon off to install the appliances?”
