Page 297 of The Parkers' Handsome Holiday
“Do I have to go to school today?” Ethan whined.
“No, buddy,” I said, still trying to calm myself down. To think things through. I wouldn’t take him to the doctor, not unless things got worse. I knew that there was no reason to, and I knew that the doctor wasn’t going to tell me anything that I didn’t know already. But I still couldn’t bring myself to leave Ethan with Dad and go off to work.
“Why don’t you go back to sleep for a little while?” I suggested to Ethan.
“Okay,” he sighed, snuggling into the blankets. I tucked him in, trying not to think about how small he was, about how easy it would be for me to lose him.
No, I wasn’t going to think about that. He was just a little sick. That was all.
I headed out into the living room and went to get the sick kit. The little bell to put on the bedside table, the jolly little glass with its bright balloons. It was a stab in the heart to see each of those things. This wasn’t the set-up that we had used with Beth when she was sick and bedridden. No, she’d had her own bell and her own glass and her own everything. But this was a sick kit that she had put together for Ethan during the first cold that he’d had when he was old enough to be out of a crib.
Every piece of it had her touch all over it, and I suddenly found myself aching with the wish that she were still there. It was, of course, an ache that never really went away, but two years after her death, I wasn’t a slave to the feeling like I had originally been. Now, though, the lack of her by my side hit me hard.
If Beth were still there, she would get me off to work. She would promise to watch our darling son for the day. She would be there, steady as a rock, patiently reminding me that everything was going to be okay.
For a moment, I closed my eyes, overcome again with the loss. But the moment I closed my eyes, the image of her changed and shifted, until somehow it was Bailey that I could imagine there by my side, helping me out, unflappable and kind as ever.
I shook my head to clear it and brought the sick kit into Ethan’s room. “All you have to do is ring and I’ll be here,” I said, when his sleepy eyes found me. He nodded his understanding but didn’t say anything.
I smoothed a hand over his forehead and left again, careful not to close the door behind me so that I would hear him if he did end up ringing the bell. Then, I went into the living room and gave the front desk a call.
I supposed that I could have called Bailey directly. That maybe I should have called her directly. After all, she was my boss. But I still hadn’t told her about Ethan, and I knew that she, unlike Kayla, would likely ask questions that I wasn’t prepared to answer. I didn’t want to have to lie to her.
“Hey Kayla,” I said, when the other woman picked up the phone, “I just wanted to let you know that I’m not going to make it in today. But I’ll be there tomorrow instead of taking my day off as usual. There shouldn’t be anything on my plate at the moment that’s too pressing anyway. I got most of the big projects done before the holiday rush started.”
“No problem,” Kayla said. “I’ll pass it on. Hope everything’s okay?”
“It’s fine,” I said shortly. Most of the people at the mountain knew about Ethan, having seen him up there before. But I didn’t want to tell Kayla that the reason I couldn’t be there that day was him. I didn’t want her passing that message on to Bailey.
Belatedly, I wondered if I should have just mentioned car trouble or something like that. Too late now, anyway. We hung up, and I had to fight to resist the urge to go in and check on Ethan again. If I checked on him every ten minutes for the whole day, he would never have a chance to get the rest that he needed.
Instead, I headed into the kitchen. I had already made breakfast, but I wasn’t hungry now, still too worried about Ethan to have any sort of appetite. I put the food in containers and into the fridge, trying to let the routine of it all soothe my nerves.
I was startled when there was a knock at the door. Frowning, I went to answer it, wondering if it was someone from the resort come to see what was going on. But who would do that? And anyway, it hadn’t been long enough since I had gotten off the phone with Kayla. No one could have gotten over there that quickly.
I pulled open the door and was surprised to see Dad there. “What’s up?” I asked him.
He raised an eyebrow at me. “I was going to ask you the same question,” he said. “Today isn’t your day off. I saw your truck still parked in the driveway and wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
“Yeah, Ethan’s just not feeling well,” I admitted.
Dad frowned. “Don’t you have work today, though?” he asked.
“I called in,” I told him.
Dad’s frown deepened, and I could see slight disappointment in the way that he looked at me. “You should have called me,” he said. “This is the busiest time of the year; I’m sure they could use you.”
“I got most of the major works projects done before the holiday season hit,” I protested. “It’s really not a problem. I’ll make up the extra hours tomorrow. Assuming that Ethan is better then.” If not, well, the mountain could do without me for a couple days at a time. Sure, it was the busy season. But a lot of the problems we might have would be routine things like blown lightbulbs and plugged jets in the hot tubs. Those were things that Bailey was capable of handling now. That was the whole point of her spending a day shadowing me, wasn’t it?
Dad shook his head. “You know you can’t just blow off your responsibilities to the mountain,” he chided.
“I’m not,” I said, an edge to my voice. “Dad, I just want to make sure that he’s okay.” I paused. “Look, I hope you’re not taking this as a personal insult, because it’s not. You know that I trust you with Ethan. Hell, you’re with him half the afternoons already. I just want to make sure that if he gets worse, or if he needs to go to a doctor, then I’m here to make that decision.”
Hanging in the air between us, I knew, was ‘unlike when Beth got sick’. Dad and I might not be close, but one drunken night, after Ethan had gone to bed, I had confessed that I felt like everything with Beth was my fault. Dad, of course, had assured me that it wasn’t. That there was nothing that I could have done, that there was no way of knowing how things were going to end up. That you couldn’t predict the future or plan for all possibilities.
That you couldn’t beat yourself up over things when your partner was lost.
Of course, everything that he said just felt like empty platitudes. The kind of thing that a father kind of had to say to his son. It read like a fucking movie script, to be honest. I had never talked to Dad about any of that again. But I knew he knew exactly what I was thinking at the moment.
