Читать книгу Mourn The Living - Henry Perez - Страница 10

In the two days since he’d left Boston, Chapa had formed a mental checklist of all the things he and Nikki were going to do. He had figured out how to cram a year’s worth of bonding into a single week. But now things had become a bit more complicated.

Just past Hammond, Indiana, a few traffic-heavy miles shy of the Illinois border, Chapa pulled over at a rest stop. While Nikki stretched her legs and used the bathroom, Chapa made a call. Erin Sinclair had never met Nikki. The six months that she and Chapa had been dating coincided with his time away from his child.

“How soon will you two be here? I can’t wait.”

“It might be a little longer than I had planned.”

He explained about Chakowski and his new assignment, worried that she might think he was a jerk for splitting some of the time he had planed to spend with Nikki.

“What if I take some vacation time?” Erin asked without hesitation or prompting. “That way Nikki can spend a few hours at my house each day and do her homework.”

Chapa had thought about asking her for help, but dismissed it as being too much to ask. That’s just how Erin was, though. Generous, kind, and nothing like Carla. One of these days maybe Chapa would even get around to telling Erin how he felt about her.

“You truly are wonderful,” he said.

“How wonderful?”

“Really, really wonderful.”

“Thank you, Mr. Articulate. So you write for a living, huh?”

Chapa laughed. Erin had a way of making him do that. Their relationship was an easy one. Short on conflict, full of good times.

“Mike is so looking forward to meeting her,” Erin said. “This will give him someone to play with during the day, despite their age difference.”

Chapa had wondered about how Nikki would get along with Erin’s five-year-old son. Neither child had grown up with siblings, or a father around the house.

While he fought to block out the roar of passing semis and listened to Erin lay out her plans for the next few days, Chapa watched a small girl, just a couple of years younger than his own, struggling to do a cartwheel in the grass along the side of the rest stop. The child’s father was too busy doing something on his handheld to notice how determined the girl was to get just one right. He didn’t see her smile like she owned the world every time she came close to completing a circle and landing on her feet. Or the way she kept looking at him to see if he was watching her.

Having grown up without a father, Chapa knew how much a flash of approval from a parent, or the lack of it, could mean to a child, and couldn’t understand how this man could be so detached from his daughter. Chapa never wanted to be that guy, but a part of him wondered if Nikki already thought he was.