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“You’re welcome.”
Through an awkward span of silence, Marnie picked up her bag and stood, her face a mixture of pain and jealousy and sadness under a thin veneer of manners.
“Well, I should—”
Priscilla took her hand. “We can go to see Mama. Want to eat pie with us?”
I opened my mouth but didn’t speak as I moved to scoop Priscilla up again. “I’m sure Marnie was already going somewhere.”
Priscilla pouted.
I met Marnie’s eyes, scrambling to find words. “I … I’m sorry.”
She tried to smile, backing in the direction she’d been going. “It’s okay. Bye, Cilla.”
Priscilla’s hand shot in the air, and she wiggled it back and forth. “Bye, lady!”
Our gazes connected again, and a thousand words passed between us. And just as her chin flexed, she turned and hurried away.
So I walked in the other direction, shaken and bruised as Priscilla sang a song about ladybugs that she made up on the spot.
My worlds had collided. And, as usual, Marnie had taken the full force of the blow.
“Daddy,” Priscilla said around her butterscotch, “we can get Mommy a flower?”
“A flower, huh?”
She nodded emphatically. “Mommy loves flowers. Yellow ones.” Lello was her pronunciation.
“Good idea. Mariel’s has good flowers. Wanna go there?”
“‘Kay!”
I trotted us across the street, stepping through the sliding doors of Mariel’s grocery store. It didn’t seem big when you walked in, but it just kept on going as you walked through the store, with enough fare to fill your cart with whatever you might need. But in the front was a stand of flowers, ironically enough, supplied by Blum’s farm.
“Sebastian,” Brian Buchanan said from the apples. “And how are you, Priscilla?”
“Good!” She wiggled so I’d let her down, instructing her to stay by the flowers and not to touch anything. I figured I had at least a twenty percent chance she’d listen.
“How are things?” he asked. “Just got the new signs from Poppy, and I can barely keep the Keep It Local t-shirts on the front table.”
“That’s promising.”
He nodded, smiling. “I hope we don’t have to do this without you, Sebastian. Think the vote will come before you leave?”
My gaze snapped to Priscilla—she knew nothing about me leaving. She had her nose literally inside a yellow rose, completely unaware of us.
“If all goes to plan.” Because I wouldn’t be leaving at all, if said plan worked out.
“Africa,” he said with a wistful smile, shaking his head. “How much soccer did you play?”
“All of it. Those kids ran circles around me.”
“As kids will do. You looking forward to going back?”
There was no way to answer him without opening up a conversation that I didn’t have the time for, not to mention one I didn’t need to have casually in Mariel’s. “It’s an experience, that’s for sure. I’ve never lived on the kind of spectrum that would swing from a sort of … transcendent highs to the most desperate of lows. To be out there, untethered from my life, alone in a place so wild and isolated. You learn a lot about yourself. And not all of it is good. But I’ve never felt such a high as I did watching the villages and its people thrive. Never learned so much as I did from them.”
“I can’t even imagine,” he answered earnestly. “Guess it’s sorta like what you’re doing here, but on steroids.”
We chuckled together, but the statement struck me. Because it really was the same at its core, though the risk and reward were marginal in comparison. Then again, when you factored in the unknown risk and reward of being a father, I wondered how they would hold up.
“Daddy, we can get this ones?”
I looked over to find her trying to extricate an armful of sunflowers from their container.
“Whoa, hang on, Cilla—I’d better go,” I said to Brian, already on a track for Priscilla.
“Good luck,” he called, amused as he pushed his cart away.
I got to her just in time to stop the container of water from dumping all over her and the tiled floor.
“How about we just get her one?” I suggested, fitting the two dozen or so back in their home.
“Five.”
“Three.”
“Five.”
“Six?”
“Five,” she said with a hardass look on her face and her arms folded.
With a laugh, I grabbed a plastic sleeve. “All right. Pick out five.”
So she did with a discerning hand, passing them to me one by one as I wondered how my life could have been what it was then and what it was now, the difference so stark and sharp, I couldn’t fathom in that moment that both could exist.
I couldn’t fathom how I could ever leave the life I had, no matter how long I thought about it.
The way I saw it, there was only one thing to do, and the look on my little girl’s face only confirmed it.
And with that, I had a letter of resignation to write.
