Lake - Manning Page 5

  My dad folded his hands on his desk like he was the president about to address the nation. “I suspect he’s to blame for many of the choices you’ve made.”

  “He is,” I said. “And I’m not ashamed of that.”

  Dad ignored me, turning his attention to Manning. “What do you expect me to say to this?” he asked him. “I’ve treated you like a son for a long time now.”

  “And you have no idea what that’s meant to me,” Manning said, gesturing to the bar cart. “We’ve consumed some pretty great fucking liquor in here. Had meaningful discussions. Made plans for the future. I’m man enough to admit having you in my life is important.” I glanced up when he paused to find Manning looking down at me. “I’ve missed that the past few years, but it’s the result of the distance you’ve put between you and your daughter.”

  “Me?” he asked, calling our attention back. “Lake is the one who left, who never looked back, and who removed this family from her life as if we were some kind of tumor.”

  Although there was some truth to his words, he had to know, on some level, everything I’d done had come from a place of hurt. No little girl wants to be estranged from her dad, but sometimes, it’s best.

  I stood to be next to Manning. “He wants to be part of this family,” I said. “He’s helped me realize I want that, too. Again. I never stopped wanting it, but I let anger, and then pride, get in the way.”

  Silence stretched between us as I waited for my dad to admit he’d done the same. He straightened some papers to the side of his desk, glancing at his computer screen as if he were reading from a script. “What are you going to say to your sister? How do you expect her to take this news?”

  “Don’t change the subject,” Manning said. “It was easy for me to come here today, but it wasn’t for Lake. She’s gotten nothing but silence from you in years, yet she came anyway. She deserves your attention.”

  I had to stop myself from turning to Manning with an open mouth. I’d never really heard anyone speak to my father that way. In fact, Manning was perhaps the only person I’d ever seen stand up to Dad—though, in the past, it’d usually been in defense of Tiffany, not me.

  To my surprise, Dad leaned back in his chair and glided a hand in front of himself. “Then say what you have to say, Lake.”

  What did I have to say? I had expected my dad to do most of the talking—or screaming, if I was honest. I was tempted to chug my Pinot, but instead, I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry it’s been so long,” I said, and it was true. To see how my parents’ appearances alone had changed was jarring. They were getting older, and so was I. That wasn’t time I could get back. He didn’t respond, and I wasn’t sure if that made continuing easier or harder. “I thought you knew how I felt about Manning back then,” I said. “I thought you wanted him to marry Tiffany simply because it would hurt me.”

  “You thought correctly,” he said with a firm nod. “Not that I wanted to hurt you, of course. But as my daughter, I knew what was best for you, and I knew you better than you thought I did. I saw in your eyes what you were willing to give up for a man much older than you. One who could never, in my eyes, be worthy of you.”

  Hearing the truth both saddened and angered me. He’d had no right to decide my future like that. To put Manning in that box, when there was no man worthier, more deserving, of my love. I opened my mouth to tell him so, but Manning took my free hand. He shook his head at me. “Let him speak.”

  “I had a feeling,” my dad continued, his eyes conspicuously on our laced fingers, “if Manning left town, you would follow. If Manning waited until you’d turned eighteen, then he would’ve gone to school with you, and your studies would’ve suffered. The only thing that could keep you away from him was your sister.”

  Since enough time had passed, I was able to see the logic of an overprotective father. I had no doubt Manning would do anything to keep his future children safe. And, it was true—I’d been a sixteen-year-old girl blinded by my adoration of a man. Even understanding all that, the truth of the matter still hurt. I glanced into my wineglass, shaking my head. “But Manning and I lost years together.”

  Dad set his elbows on his desk and opened his hands. “I won’t apologize for my actions. I did what I thought needed to be done, and I would do it again.” Finally, he lifted his eyes to look at Manning. “You may not believe me, Lake, but Manning knows this is true—I only ever wanted the best for you.”

  I’d had years to come to terms with those truths. I already knew them. I hadn’t quite made peace with them, but they didn’t shock me. It was a small vindication, having my suspicions confirmed, but not much more. “I believe you,” I said, “but I don’t know how to forgive you for that—or for casting me aside so easily.”

  Dad turned his head, looking at his bar cart against one wall, but seemingly lost in a thought. “I understand.”

  My heart squeezed in my chest. It wasn’t as if I’d expected him to beg for forgiveness or even apologize for his behavior. A small part of me had, however, hoped he’d want this reconciliation at least a little bit. Without meaning to, I clutched Manning’s hand.

  “I’m going to marry her,” Manning said.

  That snapped both my and my dad’s attention back to Manning. “Excuse me?” Dad asked.

  “I came to let you know, and to ask for your blessing,” Manning continued.

  “My blessing?” Dad asked, sounding uncharacteristically surprised. “How come?”

  “Because I respect you, and because your opinion means more to me than anyone’s outside of Lake’s and Henry’s. We’re going to marry with or without your approval, but it would mean a lot to me—and to Lake, I think—if you were there.”

  Dad sniffed. “What makes you think I’d even consider that? That I would do that to Tiffany?”

  “I might let you shame me into feeling bad if I thought your concern for Tiffany was genuine,” I said.

  “It is,” Dad said to me. “Apparently you think I’m something of a monster, but I’m not. Your sister is my first born, my blood. Regardless of how you see things, I love her. She’s been through a lot. All of which you’ve missed.”

  “But I have been there every step of the way,” Manning interjected. “I know you care about Tiffany. You know I care. You said I was a good husband to her. Am I wrong to say after all you and I have been through, that you trust my judgment?”

  After a tense moment, my dad nodded for Manning to continue. “You’re not wrong.”

  “Sir, I love Lake. I have for longer than I’d like to admit, but hiding it from her and you and even myself only did everyone in the family a disservice.” He squeezed my hand. “I’m trying to do the honorable thing by bringing this to light.”

  My heart pounded. This was a moment sixteen years in the making—our ‘coming out’ in a sense. We’d been inseparable for years, but we might as well have been sixteen and twenty-three again, standing before my menacing father and asking his permission to love each other. I was thankful not to be that girl now, because she wouldn’t have walked out of this room with Manning—but I would, no matter my dad’s response. “I feel the same,” I said. “It has always been Manning for me.”

  “And Lake for me,” Manning echoed. “Like you, I’ve only ever tried to do the best by her, to love and protect her—and now I can do it with every fiber of my being. Without worrying about what anyone else says or thinks.”

  My dad worked his jaw side to side as his eyes clouded. Though I feared his reaction, it wasn’t enough to get me to back down. Not with Manning at my side.

  And my father certainly didn’t intimidate Manning. “She’s my only concern,” Manning continued, “my only priority, and I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to worry about her anymore. She’s safe and happy and cared for.”

  My dad had clenched his mouth shut, his lips a bloodless line. Anger darkened his face. I couldn’t understand how any of what Manning had professed could upset him. I opened my mouth to defend Man
ning’s love for me, and mine for him, with a ferocity my father had never seen. But I stopped when I saw the tears in his eyes.

  He set his elbow on the desk and hid his face with one hand. Was he crying? “Go,” he said after a moment. “Leave.”

  I’d read the emotion on his face as anger because sadness was so unfamiliar there. I was too surprised to do anything other than let Manning pull me out of the study. Once we were alone in the hallway, I looked up at him. “What just happened in there?”

  “He cracked a little—and that’s good. Believe me.”

  “I don’t even know what that was.”

  “Regret. Pain. You’re his daughter, Lake. Of course he worries about you with an intensity neither of us will understand until we have our own children.” He glanced at the door behind me. “All I did was relieve him of a worry that has weighed on his shoulders for years.”

  I couldn’t help getting choked up, mostly because my emotions were all over the place. Even though I was touched, my pride was still wounded. “If that’s true, then why’d he kick us out?”

  “It’s probably hard for him to let you see him that way.” Manning reached for my Pinot, so I handed it over, even though he rarely drank wine. Maybe he’d been more nervous than I’d thought. “I’ve learned a lot from your dad,” he said after a sip, “including the fact that I hide my vulnerabilities from the people I love the same way he does.”

  “You don’t do that with me anymore,” I said. Manning would never be able to help being protective of me and our life, but now we made decisions together that affected us, including the one to be here today. He’d come a long way from the days of keeping me in the dark with the misguided intentions of protecting me.

  “Like I said, I’ve learned from him,” Manning said. “Shutting down his emotions helps nothing and only hurts the people he loves.”

  “That doesn’t explain why he told us to go,” I said, still stung by the rejection. “Is he angry?”

  “If I had to guess . . .” The corner of Manning’s lips quirked, and after a moment, he chuckled. “I’d say yes—only because angry is your dad’s default emotion. But I’m sure it’s more that he didn’t want you to see his concern and regret. That’s the way he’s programmed. I think we got through to him, though.”

  “You did,” I said, raising my hand to touch Manning’s cheek. “I’ve never seen him back down to anyone but you.”

  “Because I’m more like him than I sometimes want you to realize.” He focused his full attention on me, and demanded the same from me, so I noticed as his eyes subtly set with determination. “But I promise, the mistakes he’s made, the ones my dad’s made, and even my own, too, will only serve as lessons to me. They’ll shape the father I become for the better.”

  My stomach fluttered the way it always did at the thought of Manning as a father. This time, though, the butterflies were more severe. Because I knew Manning could already be a father. We’d ceremoniously thrown away my birth control after our marriage talk and had already started the process of turning the idea of a family into reality.

  I curled my fingers a little into Manning’s cheek. “Then I don’t regret a thing,” I said. “If any of our heartache will make us better parents, I have nothing but gratitude for it.”

  “Same.” He winked. “But enough with the difficult lessons. I’m ready to put what I’ve learned into practice.”

  So was I. A small part of me wanted to get pregnant quickly, before one of us realized we’d gotten the order of things all wrong. We’d only been at it weeks—but I couldn’t help hoping that was all it would take.

  6

  Even after years away, I moved seamlessly around the kitchen with my mom. She handed me the turkey roast from the oven that she’d made many times throughout my childhood, then complimented my tamales, even though they were a completely untraditional dish for my family.

  As I washed my hands, I watched Manning in the backyard through the window over the sink. A cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, he squatted to fix an uneven patio chair. When he and I had first moved in together, I’d been able to coax him away from his pack-a-day habit with baked goods, blowjobs, and backrubs. After that, I rarely saw him with a cigarette. But he’d lit up between every meal yesterday, on the drive down today, and now—had he been smoking the entire half hour he’d been in the backyard?

  “Always needs to keep his hands busy, that one,” Mom said as she moved pots and pans into the sink. “Especially when he’s nervous.”

  Manning had been smoking and moving around non-stop the past few days. Confronting my family might have been his idea, but that didn’t mean it was easy for him. “You can tell?” I asked.

  “Sure. He’s spent a lot of time around here. I wouldn’t say he’s easy to read all the time, but he has his moods.” She smiled a little at me. “Wouldn’t you be nervous in his position?”

  Manning hadn’t seen much of Tiffany since their divorce, although they spoke now and then. I never stayed in the room for their conversations, but according to him, they didn’t cover much more than formalities. Manning didn’t like hiding our relationship from the people he cared about any more than I did.

  Manning moved from a patio chair to what looked like a busted wall sconce. I was still standing at the window when the front door opened and the telltale click of heels crossed the foyer. It happened so quickly that I didn’t have time to call for Manning or even my mother, who had disappeared into the pantry.

  I seized the nearest bottle of wine and was already pouring myself a refill as Tiffany walked in. She stopped when she saw me, and I froze mid-pour. Just the island sat between us. Her hair, long and curled, covered the shoulders of a burgundy shrug, and she held a pie tin in her hand. She glanced at my blueberry pie on the countertop and then at me. “You’re spilling wine.”

  “Shit.” I set down the bottle and ripped off a paper towel to mop up the overflow.

  “I didn’t know you’d be here tonight,” she said. Her short black dress and high heels wouldn’t normally have been out of the ordinary, except that as far as she knew, it was plain old dinner with the family—and Manning and his date.

  “Well, I am,” I mumbled, glancing over my shoulder at Manning, who’d left me high and dry when this had been his idea. I willed him to look up and come inside, but he continued to tinker with the lighting fixture.

  Tiffany followed my gaze. This wasn’t exactly how I wanted her to find out—I’d assumed Manning would be at my side when she showed up. Even my mother was taking an unusually long time in the pantry. Or maybe, to make things extra uncomfortable, time had slowed down only for Tiffany and me.

  Her eyes darted from the window back to my face. “You’re here with him?” she asked.

  It’d been years since I’d shown up at Manning's home in Big Bear and stayed for good. Even longer since he and Tiffany had decided to end their marriage. But I supposed there was really no amount of time that would make this conversation any less awkward, so I took a steeling breath and raised my overfilled wineglass before I said, “Yes, I’m Manning’s, well, date—for lack of a better word.”

  She gagged like a cat with a fur ball stuck in its throat. “Oh my God.”

  “Yep.” I slurped Pinot off the top. “I didn’t know the best way to tell you, just that I wanted to do it in person.” After setting the glass down, I patted the corners of my mouth with the towel. “I know it’s shocking, but believe me, neither of us wants to hurt you.”

  “You’re dating my ex-husband,” Tiffany pointed out, her voice pitching.

  “You have every right to be angry and hurt,” I said, opening the cupboard under the sink to toss the paper towel in the trash, “but you have to admit that some part of you knew this could happen.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “A long time—but then, you knew that.”

  I held my breath in anticipation of my sister’s wrath. So much time had passed, and so many confusin
g emotions and memories still tinged the air between us with tension. When Tiffany had asked Manning to the fair all those years ago, could she have ever imagined things would end up this way? Could I? And if so, would either of us have changed anything? Because I knew I was in the wrong, and that the insecurity that lived in my sister often caused her to lash out, I wanted to go to her. Hug her. Be her little sister again. Remind her that I loved her despite everything, even as I knowingly hurt her. But this moment wasn’t about me—it was about what she needed.

  “Manning and I want to be a part of this family,” I continued when she didn’t respond. “We want to stay for dinner and hear about your life—and share ours as well.” Again, I looked out the window. After the struggle it’d taken to get me to the house, Manning wouldn’t want to leave, but in that moment, I wasn’t sure I had any right to force my presence on Tiffany.

  Her face scrunched as if she’d bitten into a lemon. “It’s weird,” she said. “And kind of gross. I wouldn’t want somebody else’s sloppy seconds, especially my sister’s, but it’s your life.”

  I blinked at her a few times, trying to process her words. Weird? Gross? Sloppy seconds? I had to stop myself from laughing. That response didn’t faze me at all. I’d never seen Manning as sloppy seconds, only as the man I loved. “You’re not angry?” I asked.

  Tiffany set her pie down. I fought myself from checking if she’d also brought Manning’s favorite flavor. She twisted her lips as if considering whether she should be angry. It was unlike her to deny an opportunity to overreact, which made me wonder if she’d matured at some point over the past decade, or if I’d stumbled into some kind of alternate universe. The latter seemed more likely.

  “I’m not angry,” she decided, lightly flipping some hair over her shoulder. “I mean, I’ve suspected this since the divorce. I know you told me at the viewing party you hadn’t seen him, but I wasn’t sure if I could believe you.”

  “It was the truth,” I said. “Nothing happened until after.”