Page 52 of The Wrong Track

Charlene’s eyes widened. “Oh. Well, yes.” She sat on the cold couch and very carefully, I put the baby into her arms. Ella looked up at her and I watched Tobin’s mom smile. “She has your eyes,” she told me. “Your hair too, I’ll bet.”

I hoped she looked like me. I hoped she got everything from me, because as bad as that was for her, the other half of her gene pool was worse.

“Tobin takes after his father,” she commented. That statement made her get a funny expression, but she kept talking. “All those Whitaker men have the same look about them.”

“I don’t know,” I answered, studying her face. “I’ve always thought he looks like you.”

“Really?” She smiled, and I nodded. That was it: they had the same smile, the same dimple in their chins. That expression changed Charlene for me from sour and scary to a person who was warm and approachable, just like her son was.

“I want you to know that I’m leaving soon,” I told her, thinking that would make her smile more. “Ella and I are moving. I’m not going to stay here with your son forever and, like, and…” I trailed off. I wasn’t going to stay here and ruin his career because I had a criminal history and three kilos of drugs that Kilian had left behind, I wasn’t going to stay and taint his name by associating it with mine. I wasn’t going to keep living off him and not giving him a dime now that he didn’t really need my help anymore and I wasn’t going to pay him in any other way.

I swallowed, considering it. I could, after all. I could touch him, blow him, sleep with him. He deserved something, and it was what I knew I could do. But he probably wouldn’t want that from me. He knew how my body had been used before.

To my surprise, Charlene lost her smile at my words. “He’ll miss this baby,” she said. “But it was good for him to be with her and get the experience. I think he’d be a good father and maybe now, he’ll believe me.”

“He’ll be an amazing father. Any kid will be lucky to have him in her life.” I almost added that any woman would, too, but I’d already heard from Monica that his mom had hated Lulu. I didn’t want to jog Charlene’s memory and stir that up again, just in case Lulu did have a chance with him. I glanced down the hallway toward our bedrooms, wondering what was taking him so long. Was he struggling to put on stretch pants? Did men wear those, and were women offended?

But when Tobin came out, he wore shorts and a t-shirt that showed off a lot more skin than his winter clothes. It was hardly offensive, though. He was actually stunning to look at and I got the urge to touch him, to run my hands over the blonde hair on his arms and up to his shoulders to feel the muscle, to splay my fingers over the abs under his t-shirt, to reach beneath the waist of those shorts.

Christ. I shook it off and unbuttoned the coat to hand it to him. “Nah. It’s springtime,” he reminded me, but he didn’t say a word about the sweatshirt (his) or long-sleeved T (also his) that I’d been wearing underneath that coat. “Mom, are you ready?”

She seemed reluctant to give the baby back to me. “Watch, Tobin.” She stuck out her tongue, and to my surprise, Ella did it back. Charlene laughed and the baby gurgled, smiling.

“Is she really mirroring you?” Tobin sat down and stuck out his tongue and then they both did that for a while, talking excitedly and laughing. I took a picture of the three of them with his phone, which was already full of hundreds of Ella, of me and Ella, of him and Ella, of the three of us together. He liked to document.

But then they were going to be late to yoga, so Charlene very reluctantly handed the baby over to me. They left after Tobin kissed both her tiny fists and then her forehead. “Are you going to be all right?” he asked me, and he looked very concerned. “That was a lot to talk about.”

“I’m great,” I said. No. “We’ll be totally fine.” I was going to try hard to make that true. We stood at the window and I waved her hand and he blew kisses back to her. I watched the car move down the street in the direction of the mean dog house.

“What are we going to do?” I asked Ella, but she didn’t seem to have many ideas beyond spit bubbles. I used Tobin’s computer for a while, looking for a place to move. I was thinking more and more about New Mexico and I considered various locations out of the mountains and in the west and south. I had Monica’s plan printed out and I filled in some information: town names, possible apartment rentals, daycares, jobs. She had a calculation I could do for how much I’d need to make to pay X amount of rent and X amount in childcare, but while I was in the middle of that math, Ella got testy. I didn’t have time to look up my sister, which was always on the list of things that I wanted to do. I carefully closed all the windows about possible locations.

As we were dusting shelves and singing together, which she enjoyed despite my lack of skill, someone knocked on Tobin’s front door. I froze; we were totally visible through the picture window but I’d missed anyone walking in from the street or driveway. “Yes?”

“Remy? I’m Tobin’s cousin, Alex,” a voice called. “I brought over something for you guys to use, a jogging stroller. Tobin said he wanted to try it out with your baby.”

I hesitated. “Oh, thank you. You can leave it there.”

“Ok. Sure.” He sounded a little surprised and I knew it was rude not to come to the door for him. It was Tobin’s cousin, after all.

I reached for the deadbolt, hesitated for another moment, and then opened it.

Well, maybe the Whitaker men did have the same look about them as Charlene had said, and it was a very nice look. This cousin smiled while looking at us out of the same blue-grey eyes that Tobin had.

“It’s nice to meet you,” he told me. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“What have you heard?”

One of his eyebrows raised. “Just things about the baby, mostly.” He bent to look at her and she blinked at the sunshine. “She’s beautiful. My wife and I have two daughters and a son. And it turns out, none of us are very interested in running, but Tobin sent out a family request for a light jogging stroller and we have one.” He smiled at me again and when he did that, I didn’t see him as a threat anymore.

He showed me where she was supposed to sit and how the giant thing folded and unfolded, and he chatted about Ella and about how Tobin was doing. But he didn’t ask anything specific about me except how I liked working for Annie, and I said fine. This cousin seemed to believe that I would be around for a while because he mentioned his son’s birthday party coming up and hoped we would be there.

“I already invited Tobin. Now that Lulu’s out of the picture, we’re hoping to see him more,” he mentioned, grimacing. Apparently Monica had been right and everyone in the family really hadn’t liked Lulu.

When he left, I studied the jogging stroller. It looked brand new, like they hadn’t run with it at all. And I hadn’t run in four years, so I was in the same boat as that family. If I took out that stroller, I’d be doing it as a beginner, worse off than when I’d joined the terrible team that my middle school had fielded.

“What do you think?” I asked Ella. “Should I try to run?” She seemed ambivalent and I felt the same way. I didn’t even know if I could do it again, if it was physically possible. Once you quit, it was so hard to restart. My former coach had been one of the top milers in the country but after she tore some ligaments, she’d never gone back.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if I have this in me.” My answer was another spit bubble. But we weren’t doing anything else that day, not with Tobin gone. I went and found the shoes that he’d bought, that error he’d made when he’d ordered size seven ladies’ shoes instead of size twelve men’s. “He seems to think I can,” I mentioned to her as I tied them on and she watched, reclined on a pillow. “Wasn’t that what these shoes were for? They weren’t really a mistake, like how Lulu keeps driving by. ‘Oops! I’m here again,’” I mimicked her, and Ella was amused.