Chapter Thirteen
“So, what have you told her about me?” Hana asked. It was Wednesday, the night before Mika’s gallery opening. Thomas and Penny were planning on meeting Hana for the first time. Mika had chosen Lardo, a hip sandwich restaurant on Hawthorne that wouldn’t hurt her bank account too much.
Mika smirked, scanning the crowded restaurant for a free table. “Oh, you know, the usual, how you had a crush on our freshman English teacher and would talk to her endlessly about Smallville and how Kristin Kreuk”—the doe-eyed female lead, aka Lana Lang—“carried the show.”
Hana’s mouth quirked into a smile. “Ah, Mrs. Sampson. I barely kept myself from breaking into song whenever I spoke to her. I wonder what she’s up to now.”
A family of four cleared their table, and Mika darted to claim it. They sat down to wait for Thomas and Penny before ordering.
“What else did you tell her about me?” Hana drummed her fingers against the table.
Mika glanced at the neon sign on the wall they sat under. It said: pig out. “You know, the usual. Since high school and through college, we’ve been friends, and that you were there for her birth. She’s probably going to want to know about it.” Mika removed a napkin from the dispenser and started shredding it. “I’m sure she’s going to ask all about us and that time of our lives. So just downplay what kind of students we were, okay? How much we partied, how many times we skipped school.”
“Mika,” Hana sighed, a sympathetic look in her eye.
“I want her to be proud of where she came from. I want to be someone she looks up to.” I want to be the person I was before but better, Mika thought. Maybe this was her chance at redemption. Absolution. A way to go back in time and make things right. It was a twisted logic, but there it was—her chance to gain back what she had lost.
“You don’t want her to know you nearly pooped pushing her out?” Hana said drily.
“Oh my god, you promised we’d never talk about that.”
Hana shrugged.
“Love your face,” Mika said.
“Love your face too,” Hana answered back. “Even though it’s a lying, wrong face.”
“Please don’t make me feel worse.” She felt bad enough already lying to Penny, but it was better than the truth. She’d promised to always protect Penny. This was Mika’s way.
“Sorry,” Hana said. “I just wish you could see how great you are.”
Mika opened her mouth to answer, but the bells over the door jingled. Thomas and Penny stood at the entrance. “That’s them,” Mika said, sticking her hand in the air and waving the two down.
The father and daughter smiled at the same time.
Hana whistled low. “Hot dad alert.”
“Hana,” Mika said, cheeks flaming as Thomas and Penny inched closer.
“What?” Hana touched her chest. “Even though I’m a lesbian, I can totally objectively appreciate handsome men.”
“Hi.” Thomas smiled warmly at Mika. He stuck out a hand for Hana to shake. “Thomas.” Introductions went on from there, and they found their seats, Mika and Hana sitting on one side and Thomas and Penny on the other.
“What’s good here?” Thomas asked.
“Definitely the Dirty Bastard Fries,” Hana said. “They’re hand-cut and cooked in bacon fat, then tossed in fried herbs and parmesan.”
Thomas took everyone’s order and moved to the counter to place it. When he came back, they made small talk for a while. Mostly around Hana, her work as an ASL interpreter for bands. Penny was beaming. So impressed and impressionable, Mika thought. It made her think of how she was with Marcus, what a neophyte she’d been, how much she’d wanted his approval, she’d been like a cat twining itself around his legs—it still made her stomach hurt, her desperation. Now, they stuffed themselves on fries and pork sandwiches. Thomas wiped his mouth and balled up his napkin. “I can’t eat anymore,” he declared, rubbing his flat belly. His T-shirt rode up, revealing the thinnest strip of skin. Mika found a spot on the wall to focus on.
Hana leaned forward, elbow on the table, chin in her hand, and gazed at Penny. “So?” she said.
“So,” Penny parroted back.
“What do you want to know?” Hana asked.
Penny blushed at Hana’s directness. “You were there the day I was born.”
“Oh yeah, I was totally in the splash zone,” said Hana.
Mika grimaced at the visual and reevaluated her choice in best friends.
Penny twiddled her thumbs. “Will you tell me . . . Will you tell me about the day I was born?” She looked to Hana, to Mika, asking them both.
Mika sat back. The food in her stomach soured. It was hard to remember that day. Harder still to talk about it. About how the pregnancy tore her life in half. How when Penny was born, Mika had been dizzy with love, then heartbreak. How she’d sunk like a stone after. It was painful, letting that curled ribbon of time flatten.
“Penny,” Thomas said softly. “Maybe we should save this conversation for another day.”
Penny deflated. “Sure, right. I totally understand.” But it was clear she didn’t.
Under the table, Hana squeezed Mika’s knee reassuringly. “It was raining, I think,” Mika’s best friend said carefully.
“It was,” Mika confirmed, her voice light, faint. She’d gone to her ob-gyn the day before and had been miserable. I just want her out, she’d said, flushed and crying. I just want this all to be over. I want my life back. It felt as if Penny were clinging to Mika, knowing they’d soon be torn apart.
“Mika had an epidural,” Hana added. She nudged Mika. “Remember how the nurse suggested it was too early for an epidural, and maybe you should try breathing?”
A ghost of a smile appeared on Mika’s face. “She was offering me snowballs. I wanted a grenade.”
“It was pretty boring after that. We slept for a while,” Hana said. Mika remembered Hana at the end of her hospital bed, body slumped down in a chair.
“Hana slept,” Mika qualified. “I tossed and turned, couldn’t get comfortable.” She had cried. From being exhausted, from the pain, from the emotional gutting.
“Then, early in the morning, Mika started pushing,” Hana said. In between bearing down, Mika had said, I don’t want to hold her. Then changed her mind. I want to hold her, don’t let them take her before I get to hold her. “Mika held you first, but I held you right after,” Hana chimed in. “Your face was all red and scrunched up.”
“Sounds beautiful.” Penny laughed.
“It was, it really was,” Mika said, and that was the truth. Her gaze fluttered to Thomas. A half-smile tilted the corner of his mouth, same as Penny’s.
“We were right outside, in the hospital waiting room,” Thomas interjected. And Mika found a certain distant comfort knowing Penny had changed hands to her adopted parents. There wasn’t a point where she hadn’t been loved and looked after.
“I know,” Penny said. “Mom wrote to me about it in her letter.” The letter that Caroline had written for Penny’s sixteenth birthday. The letter that launched Penny’s search for her birth mother.
“She did?” Thomas’s eyebrows darted in. Ah, Mika remembered, Penny wouldn’t let Thomas read the last words Caroline had written to her daughter.
Penny waved a hand at her father, dismissing him. “Changing subjects now. I’m dying to see your gallery space,” she said to Mika, her dark eyes intense. “Can we go tomorrow? Give me a tour before everybody else gets to see it?”
Oh, Mika thought. “Oh!” Mika said. Leif had sent the address last night. Had said she could get inside anytime the next day. She’d cleared her calendar to check out the space, whip it into shape, but she hadn’t expected company. She glanced at Hana. Amusement tilted the corners of her friend’s mouth. “Sure!” she agreed, backed into a corner. She would come up with an excuse later.
“I hate to cut this short.” Hana pushed away from the table. “But I’ve got a roller derby game.”
“Roller derby?” Penny echoed.
“You guys want to come? It’s violent and bloodthirsty, might be up your alley,” Hana said, and Penny lit up like a Christmas tree. “There’s open skate afterward.”
Penny gripped the table. “Yes, yes, so much, yes.”
* * *
Thomas, Penny, and Mika sat in the stands and watched Hana skate into the rink twenty minutes later. Thomas eyed the women decked in short shorts, tank tops, skates, helmets, and protective eyewear. “We don’t have roller derby in Ohio,” he murmured.
“What’s Hana doing?” Penny asked.
Mika sat back in the bleachers. “She’s the jammer, so she’ll start behind her team,” Mika began, explaining how points were scored when one jammer lapped a member of the opposing team. For an hour and a half, they rooted Hana on, wincing when someone elbowed her and booing when the ref called a track cut, penalty. By the time Hana’s team, Asian Invasion, defeated their rivals, Fresh Meat, Penny was bouncing in her seat. Hana called Penny down to the rink, and Penny leaped up to join her for open skate.
“Want to watch from the beer garden?” Mika asked, pointing to the rink’s end, where there was an open area with picnic benches and a bar.
Thomas rubbed his knees. “Should I be worried about this? Do I need to have my insurance card ready?” In the rink, Hana was outfitting Penny with a helmet and knee pads.
“No,” Mika said. “She’ll be fine. Hana will just show her some moves and introduce her to some of the girls.”
Soon enough, they were settled in the beer garden, a frosty IPA in front of Thomas, a glass of hard cider in front of Mika, watching as a girl with full arm tattoos and safety pins in her ears showed Penny how to block.
Thomas wiped at the condensation gathering on the outside of his glass with his thumbs. “You know, I had reservations about this trip.”
“You don’t say?” Mika teased him with a smile. She sipped her drink.
Thomas’s gaze grew serious. “I’m sorry. I’ve been a grouch. It’s been a bad . . . Shit, I don’t know, I guess it’s been a bad few years. I thought Penny was doing okay with everything. It’s been just us two for so long. She never even asked about you. It shocked the hell out of me when she announced she’d found you and was planning to visit.” He rubbed his chest. “I don’t think I’ve adjusted. Plus, there is this whole letter Caroline wrote to her. She won’t let me read it. I’m trying to respect her wishes, but damn, it feels like all Penny does lately is keep secrets from me.” Thomas stared into his drink.
The corner of Mika’s mouth twitched uncertainly. “So, Penny is keeping secrets and trying to establish herself outside of you. Sounds an awful lot like a teenage girl to me.” She placed a hand to her chest. “I speak from experience.”
If anything, this made Thomas broodier. His brows knit together more tightly. “Well, shit, I don’t like any of that.”
“She’s a good girl. A good person, your daughter.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I used to think Caroline was the best thing that ever happened to me, but then Penny came along, and I felt guilty because she . . . well, because she is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Mika said nothing. Though she thought, Same.
“She’s growing up, I guess, that’s all,” said Thomas.
“She is. But she’s making good choices too. Like how she handled everything with that boyfriend . . .” Mika trailed off at Thomas’s confused expression.
“What boyfriend?”
“Shit.” Mika chewed her cheek. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Please don’t tell her I told you.”
Thomas crossed his finger over his heart. “I won’t say a word.”
Mika tried to remember their phone conversation about him. “Jack or James, I think his name was.”
“Jack,” Thomas confirmed. “She talks about him sometimes.”
“Well, I guess they were together, but she broke it off with him.” Mika leaned forward and whispered. “Because he kept wanting to hang out in rooms with mattresses.”
Thomas’s lip curled, and so did his fist. “That motherfucker.”
Mika placed a hand over his, then pulled back. Heat spread up her neck. “Calm down, and leave his mother out of it. Penny has a good head on her shoulders.” I want someone who thinks I’m beautiful because of my mind, Penny had said after she’d broken up with him.
Thomas flexed his fingers and relaxed. “Well, okay then.” He gulped down his drink. A half-laugh rattled out of him. “I’m not used to this. It’s hard to share her.”
“I can imagine,” Mika said, the slightest edge to her tone. She’d shared Penny from the beginning.
“Right. Sorry.” Thomas gave Mika an embarrassed smile. He was wearing a hoodie today, dartmouth rowing etched across it. He looked younger than his forty-six years.
“You mind if I ask you a question?”
Mika finished her beer. “Go ahead.”
“Do you regret it?” Thomas asked.
Mika tilted her head. “Regret what?”
“Penny,” he said after a second. “Giving her away, I mean.”
Mika stilled. Surrender. It’s the act of giving yourself over to forces greater than you, Mrs. Pearson had said. “It was the right decision at the right time, and even now . . . I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to raise Penny. She is exactly who she should be.” Mika paused, then said, “But yes. There’s always some regrets, aren’t there?”
Thomas’s eyes clouded in thought, then he said, “That’s all part of the universal experience of having a child.”
At Thomas’s alluding to Mika being Penny’s parent, warmth spread in her chest. Just then, Penny skated up. Her face was flushed, her eyes shining. Her hands held a T-shirt from the gift shop. “I’m totally buying this.” She held it up in front of her. Emblazoned across the chest was these will rockurface off in old English.
Thomas laughed, then quickly sobered. “No. Absolutely not. Try again.”
Penny pouted. “But—”
Another thing I missed, Mika thought. She may have been able to choose who raised her daughter but not what clothes she wore, or what toys she played with, or what bedding she slept under. Over the years, she’d pause in kids’ departments, running her hands over baby booties or toddler swimsuits or graphic tees, and she’d think about what Penny might be wearing. So many things she missed. So many things she lost.
Mika popped up. “C’mon, I’ll help you pick something else out.”
Time for a do-over.