I take the phone from him and draw a deep breath. “Okay.”
Annie wakes up with me at three in the morning, and as I sip coffee at the kitchen table and read yesterday’s newspaper, she eats Rice Krispies and drinks a glass of orange juice while staring at me.
“So Mr. Keyes said yes?” she asks. “He’s gonna go with you?”
“Yes,” I say. I clear my throat. “He’ll be here at four.”
“Good,” she says. “Mr. Keyes is really nice. Don’t you think?”
I nod and look down at my coffee. “Yes, he is,” I say carefully.
“He’s good at fixing things.”
I give her a funny look. “Well, obviously. He’s a handyman.”
She laughs. “No, I mean, like, he fixes people and stuff. Like he likes to help people.”
I smile. “Yeah, I guess he does.”
Annie doesn’t say anything for a second. “So, like, you know he likes you, right? You can see it, the way he looks at you.”
I can feel a flush creeping up my neck. I’m not ready to discuss this with Annie. “Like your dad looks at Sunshine?” I make a lame attempt at a joke.
Annie makes a face. “No, not like that.”
I laugh. I’m about to say something else in protest, but Annie beats me to it.
“Dad looks at Sunshine like he’s scared, I think,” she says.
“Scared?”
She thinks for a minute. “Scared of being alone,” she says. “But Gavin looks at you different.”
“What do you mean?” I ask softly. I realize I really want to hear her answer.
She shrugs and looks back down at her cereal. “I don’t know. Like he just wants to be around you. Like he thinks you’re great. Like he wants to do stuff to make your life good.”
I’m silent for a minute. I don’t know what to say. “Does that bother you?” is what I finally settle on.
Annie looks surprised. “No. Why would it?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. It’s been hard for you, watching your dad move on so quickly. I guess I just want you to know that I’m not going anywhere. You’re my number one priority. Now and always.”
I look closely at her as I say this. I want her to know I really mean it.
She looks embarrassed. “I know,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t, like, go out on a date with Mr. Keyes.”
I laugh. “Honey, he hasn’t asked me on a date.”
“Yet,” she says. She pauses. “For real, he probably hasn’t ’cause you act like you don’t like him. But you can’t, like, be alone forever.”
My thoughts from last night come flooding back in. “I’m not alone,” I say softly. “I have you. And Mamie. And now Alain.”
“Mom, I’m not going to be here forever,” she says solemnly. “I’m going to go off to college and stuff in, like, a few years. Alain’s probably going to go back to Paris, right? And Mamie’s going to die someday.”
I draw in a sharp breath. I hadn’t known how to broach the subject with Annie. “Yes, she will. But I’m hoping we’ll get a little more time with her first.” I pause. “Are you okay with that? With the idea that we’ll probably lose her soon?”
She shrugs. “I’ll just miss her a lot, you know?”
“Me too.”
We’re silent for a long time. My heart aches for my daughter, who has already had to experience too much loss.
“I don’t want you to be alone, Mom,” Annie says after a while. “No one should be alone.”
I nod, blinking back tears that I didn’t expect.
“Just find Jacob, okay?” she says softly. “You have to find him.”
“I know. I want to find him too. I promise, I’ll do my very best.”
Annie nods solemnly and stands up to pour her milk out in the sink and to put her bowl and juice glass in the dishwasher. “I’m gonna go back to bed. I just wanted to get up and say good luck,” she says. She walks toward the door of the kitchen and pauses. “Mom?” she says.
“Yes, honey?”
“The way Mr. Keyes looks at you . . .” She trails off and looks down. “I think maybe it’s kinda how Jacob Levy used to look at Mamie.”
When Gavin picks me up at four in his Jeep Wrangler, he has a cup of gas station coffee waiting for me.
“I know you’re used to getting up before dawn,” he says as he waits for me to buckle my seat belt. He hands me the coffee cup and says, “But I had to stop for coffee, because in my world, I’d still be sleeping right now.”