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“Did you know Jade was back?” I asked.
“Yeah, I didn’t know if I should tell you,” he said, sounding guilty.
We’d finished the app thanks to his help. The project was now ready for the market, and I was beginning to talk to possible buyers. Mac said he wanted to keep working with me and I wanted him to stay too. We worked well together but our friendship was not quite where it had been before. We’d gone out a few times, I’d been to the house where he lived, but we weren’t completely comfortable with one another.
Drug abuse and money could do devastating things to a friendship. Neither of us seemed to know how to move past it. I could hardly blame Mac for not telling me about Jade considering how badly things had gone between us.
“How long has she been back?”
“A few weeks; she’s been staying with me.”
“I see.”
“She wanted me to talk to you, but I said she had to do it herself.”
Mac had been over to my apartment a few times. He knew Zoë and always had conversations with her, bringing her gifts.
“Why is she back?”
“I think she’s got a job at a photography studio, as an assistant. She says she wants to stay clean. Maybe seeing Zoë will help give her a purpose.”
I wasn’t about to let Jade use Zoë like a therapy prop. This was a little girl we were talking about, not a yoga mat. Jade was not reliable, she would let Zoë down, I knew it. I’d never known Jade to do a single thing she said. She was the queen of broken promises, of no-shows and grand exits.
“Didn’t she steal money from someone before she left?” I seemed to remember something.
“Oh, that business,” Mac was dismissive. “Just a misunderstanding.”
“Didn’t the guy go to the police, lay charges?”
“He retracted them later.”
So typical of Jade, I thought. She thought she could make problems disappear, but they were all around her.
But when I told Nikki about it, she seemed thoughtful.
“You think I should let them meet?”
“Zoë is smarter than you think,” Nikki said. “Tell her the truth. Or a version of the truth. That her mother is sick and unable to look after her, but that she loves her and wants to meet her.”
Nikki knew how to do this kind of thing.
How to talk about stuff, especially the difficult things.
“She talks about her mom, you know.” She looked at me, cautiously. “She wonders about her and if you tell her the truth.”
“I’ve never lied to her!”
“I know,” she touched my arm, gently. “But she also knows you want to protect her.” Then she said, “Let her take Zoë for a few hours, I can go with them, to keep an eye on things.”
Reluctantly, I agreed to that.
On Saturday morning, Jade met us in the park and after an awkward exchange, I let Zoë and Nikki go off with her. I’d explained to Zoë about Jade being her mother and wanting to get to know her, but that she would still live with me and that this would never change.
I had lunch with Simone, and she took me to a new Sri Lankan restaurant where the choices on the menu were all fish curry, more fish curry, and another kind of fish curry. I was seriously unimpressed. While Simone went on and on about the coconut milk flavor and the mouthfeel, all I could think about, was the cold leftover pizza that was still in my fridge.
“You should be more adventurous,” Simone scolded me. “You have a young girlfriend you know, if you act like an old fart, you will scare her away.”
I rolled my eyes and took another bite of my flatbread.
