Page 105 of Dirty Boss

I readthe email three times, and still I couldn’t believe it.

“Deena!” I screeched when she picked up my call. “One of your clients just emailed me through the website you set up!”

“Which one?” she asked.

“Brian Hull.”

“Oh yeah, he needs your help, big time,” she said, and we both laughed.

I layon the grass and watched the leaves of a nearby tree flutter in the warm breeze. To my left, Deena licked a drip from her ice cream cone before it reached her fingers, then used the pinky finger of the cone-holding hand to turn the page of her book. I closed my eyes as a child screeched and laughed on the other side of the park, my palm resting lightly on my stomach.

A notification poppedup on my phone. The payment from Brian Hull had come through. A minute later, an email came through from him. He’d written an email testimonial and attached before-and-after photos of his new look, giving me permission to add them to my website.

Three days later, one of Brian’s coworkers sent me an inquiry, requesting more information about my services.

It washard to fall asleep after a late shift at the restaurant. Exhaustion made me loopy, but my brain wouldn’t shut off. I stared at the wall in my bedroom, curled on my side, knowing that every minute that passed was one less minute I’d get to sleep before my opening shift at Carmine’s. The dreaded clopen.

In the stillness of the night, while my mind raced, there was a flutter. I frowned, unmoving, wondering if I’d imagined it.

And then it happened again. I put my hand to my belly and the flutters stopped, but tears had already sprung in my eyes.

“Hello, baby,” I whispered.

It wastwilight when I got home from my day shift, which meant the days were getting shorter. As I pushed open my apartment door, the baby somersaulted inside me. It was still a foreign feeling, the movement of a separate being within me, but I’d come to rely on the movements to mark the passing of the days.

But the days were indeed passing, and I still hadn’t done what I knew needed to be done. The longer I left it, the harder it was to think of the right words, to brace myself for the conversation I owed to Vaughn.

I’d become braver these past months. Without the weight of my shame and hurt, life away from the people of my past was hard but worthwhile. My emergency fund was growing, my belief in myself with it.

If I could survive the gauntlet of this pregnancy on my own, I could tell Vaughn about the baby. I wasn’t the broken, resentfulwoman that I’d been when we met. I faced my problems head-on—for the most part. I could look at myself in the mirror and be proud of how far I’d come, be comfortable in the life and future that had opened up before me. Some days, I was terrified of that future—terrified I’d made one too many mistakes, and I’d be paying for them soon.

But mostly, I believed in my own abilities. I wasn’t bested by laundry or bills or a difficult customer. I had bigger things to worry about now—and bigger things to look forward to.

But some of my old cowardice still remained, because I found myself unable to pick up my phone to send him a message.

Instead, I found a piece of paper and I began to write.

FORTY-ONE

VAUGHN

I pulledmy gloves off and brushed a smudge of dirt off my thigh. Glancing over the tops of the townhouses lining the street, I paused to take in the sunset. Clouds drifted across the sky in soft brushes of white, their undersides limned with fire. The sky was awash with color, deepening to a dark purple above my head.

I’d watched the sunset from up here every day this week, my face pointed toward the west, my skin goosepimpling in the cooling night breeze. As far as retirement went, this wasn’t a bad way to start.

Charlotte would be going to her first day of first grade on Monday. She was at her mother’s place now, as she had been for most of the summer. We were due to go back to mediation in a couple of weeks, and I was intending to prove to Tiffany and the mediator that I was serious about setting work aside for the sake of my daughter.

No more late nights. No more handing Charlotte off to the nanny because I had to get a project over the line. I would make sure that for the rest of Charlotte’s life, she knew that I was there for her.

Funny how a few months of existential panic and all-out misery changed a man’s point of view.

Not for the first time, I wished Alba were beside me so I could thank her for making me see things clearly. If she hadn’t walked away from me, I wouldn’t have felt the pain I needed to clear my head. I would’ve kept on working, kept on giving all my time to reach some mythical success that didn’t really exist—all to prove to a dead man that I’d succeeded despite his best efforts to ruin our family for the duration of my childhood while he chased his growing ego.

But I was a father now. I wouldn’t let Charlotte grow up with the same feeling of abandonment and instability. If that meant burning my business to the ground so I could make more time for her, then that’s what I was prepared to do.

If it meant growing old by myself, because the best relationship of my life was the price to pay for that lesson—well, that hurt, but I’d accepted that I had to pay it. I’d lost Alba, but I wasn’t losing my daughter.

As the light dwindled to the soft gray of twilight, I cleaned up my workspace with the small brush and dustpan I’d left here for that purpose. A car rolled down the street below. A door slammed. Someone called out to their child down the street.