“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 some 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.