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One Can Only Hope
Hope
I rolled to a stop at the red light, my attention drawn to the park across the street. I huffed out a laugh at the old man jogging. Smiling and shirtless, he tugged his beanie down over his ears, then pulled his voluminous shorts up around the ancient, sweat-stained girdle that supported his military posture. He threw his wrinkly knees high with every step across the grass.
I shook my head. Only in Milltown.
He tossed a friendly wave to a young woman pushing a rather aggressive stroller with a toddler hanging off her back.
My eyebrows rose. That was some determination to exercise.
I glanced down at the box of donuts on the seat beside me then to the soft rounding of my tummy. I shrugged. At thirty-eight, I was finally beginning to fill out. Besides, if I showed up at Lucky’s in the morning without Tim Horton’s, Minty might not open the door.
Accelerating through the intersection, I thought about Lucky. He stood by me through the years when the others drifted away.
A tomboy, most of my friends were boys until the sudden appearance of my breasts short-circuited their adolescent brains. Those that stuck around only did so until they earned a girlfriend who quickly put a stop to them spending time with me.
Lucky never looked at me differently. Other than my parents, he was the one constant in my life. He’d recently found ‘the one’ and for the first time, I had to share him.
I didn’t know if I believed in ‘the one’ anymore, but Lucky and Minty made a convincing argument.
Minty and I got off to a rocky start. Like the rest of the women Lucky dated over the years, Minty viewed me as competition. But I bought her off with cookies and continued to ply her with donuts. Over time, she learned I was no threat.
Despite the fact that my daughter was in fact his.
It was a drunken fluke spurred by the fear that I would never find ‘the one’. The first glass of cherry brandy warmed me all the way through. The second released the filter on my fears. The third dropped my inhibitions as well as my panties once I convinced Lucky to test my theory that we might have chemistry.
We did not which surprised me.
God did not shortchange Lucky in the looks department, and you could bounce a quarter off his abs. In addition, he was kind, loyal, and funny. He taught at an inner-city school and played electric guitar in a rock band.
And he loved me. What more could I possibly want?
Was it really that great a leap to believe the one I’d been waiting for might be the one who’d been there all along?
The next morning, the edges dulled by alcohol the night before sharpened to points as we woke up equal parts horrified and hysterical with laughter. We decided never to talk about it again. Lucky spat into his palm, made me do the same, and we shook on it.
Two weeks later, I showed up on his doorstep with my heart in my throat and a positive pregnancy test in my hand.
In true Lucky fashion, he never faltered.
Custody, family dinners, Christmas, Easter, birthdays, outings, we shared it all. We made a family, and we were life partners in almost every sense of the word.
Until Minty.
I pulled into Lucky’s driveway and bent to extract our daughter from her car seat. She dipped her chin and looked at me from beneath her tiny brow. “Mine mama.”
“Yes, Tweetie,” I agreed. “I am most definitely your mama. And you’re my baby.”
“Tweetie,” she replied, her finger to her chest. “I, Tweetie.”
“Yes,” I agreed again. “You’re Tweetie and I’m Mama.”
“Mine mama,” she reiterated, pulling my face to hers. Locking our gazes, she pressed her nose to mine and whispered, “Mine mama.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. I’d often wondered if the routine Lucky and I took for granted was difficult for her. Though she’d never known anything different, it had to be tiring to go back and forth between two homes, to be constantly separated from either mom or dad, rarely having them at the same time.
Was I projecting? I cried a river when my parents separated in my teens. I shook off the unhelpful thoughts. It was better to focus on problems I could solve.
