“I’ve never wanted anything more.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Pacino
“What is this?” I ask, walking into the living room with Zep while Misty and Bernie sit on the couch with beads and strings in front of them. “Are we joining them for arts and crafts?”
“It’s for Phoebe,” Bernie says, pushing her glasses up with the back of her hand.
I frown. “Why?”
“Because she had Bernie earlier today,” Zep says, “and she told Bernie a story so sad that Misty balled her eyes until I promised to go out and get this stuff for her.”
Sitting on the recliner, I lean forward with my elbows on my knees. “What story?”
There’s no way she told Bernie about what happened to her as a kid. Not unless something was happening to Bernie, and if that was the case, Zep would have called me to help dispose of a body.
“When she was little, after her mom died, she was living with her grandma,” Bernie says.
She sticks out her tongue as she focuses on sliding a bead onto the string, and I can’t help but smile. I know why Phoebe doesn’t want children, but she’d be a damn good mother. She does so good with Bernie.
I also understand the pain she wants to avoid. If I ever had kids, I know I’d wish I could introduce them to my mom, too. But daughters usually look to their moms for support when they have babies, and that’s not an option for Phoebe.
“And she wanted to be friends with a popular girl named Brenda,” Bernie says. “Brenda was having a birthday party, and everyone in class was going. She talked about it for weeks.”
She reaches for a bead across the table and studies it for a moment. There’s a lot of thought and effort going into this, and I appreciate Misty and Bernie so much.
“Well, the invitations went out, and everyone in class got one. Except Phoebe.”
My heart drops. I just see young Phoebe hoping to get asked to a birthday party only to be rejected. No one sees the beauty that is her.
“But she’d already had her grandma buy a present for Brenda, so on the day of the party, she walked with it to the park to wait until dark to go home,” Bernie says.
“She opened the present and made her own bracelet. Then she went home and told her grandma that she and Brenda made them together because she didn’t want to tell her she’d been excluded,” Misty says, wiping her eyes. “Isn’t that just so sad?”
Poor Phoebe. Sitting at a park by herself and making herself a friendship bracelet is kind of sad.
“Misty cries about everything right now,” Zep whispers to me. “But that story does tug at the heartstrings.”
“We’re making Phoebe friendship bracelets to have,” Bernie says. “That way, she knows she has friends now.”
I know without a doubt that Phoebe told Bernie this because Bernie was getting bullied at school. Zep made sure the girl’s parents understood it needed to stop, and as far as I’ve heard, ithas. And he would have told us because we’d be with him as he beat the shit out of the girl’s dad.
“Can I make one for her, too?” I ask.
Bernie beams and nods. “Yes! She’ll love a bracelet from you. She likes you a lot. And I know you like her, too. Like,likelike her. And I told her that, too,” she says, a proud smile on her face.
Laughing, I nod and reach for the supplies. “Yes, I do. And I think she already knew, but thanks for making sure she did, Bernie.”
After an hour, I head to the bakery to follow Phoebe to Zep’s house. I can’t wait to see the surprise she’ll get as she shows up with a surprise of her own.
She parks in Misty and Zep’s driveway, and I climb off my bike to walk over and meet her before she opens the back door of her SUV. “Hold on a second.”
“What’s wrong?”
Kissing her, I press her against the vehicle, completely captivated by her inability to see how special she is. There have been so many things in her life that could have knocked her down, and she could have thrown in the towel. But she doesn’t.
Phoebe wants to belong, and I hope she really sees today that she does. She has a place here in this family, and we love her just the way she is.
