the fact and sifted through the questions it brought up.
I didn’t know how much to say—what to explain. The sordid details of my family’s derailment hung in the air, suspended like strands of spiderweb. I feared his reaction were he to know the truth. Would he find me too sullied? Too broken? Too complicated? If he knew all the facts, would he step back to a safe distance and become polite-Scott again? Friendly-Scott, who smiled when we crossed in the hall and greeted me when we passed in the street but didn’t initiate Sausenburg hikes?
I braced myself for the worst and started to fill in some of the blanks that resonated like voids in the stillness around us. “Her dad was—not a kind man. He left my life when I was much younger and I didn’t hear from him again until . . . until his lawyer told me he had died and left something in his will for me.”
“Shayla?”
“A cuckoo clock.”
He turned his head to look at me.
“And Shayla. He’d designated me as her legal guardian should anything happen to him.”
“Wow.” Scott looked over at the mound of dead leaves Shayla was trying to shape into a rectangle. “And you took her in right away?”
“Look at me, Scott. Do I look like I suffer from any Mother Teresa delusions?” He glanced at my hellooo face and cracked a smile. “No, I didn’t take her in right away. I’m way too convoluted for anything that simple. I tried every trick in the book to talk myself out of it and finally gave in because it was the only right thing to do. And because I fell in love with her a little bit, with the Heidi mountains and the sunshine and all.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“The bottom line is—I took her in and haven’t looked back.”
“And coming to Germany was . . . ?”
“A new beginning. For both of us.”
“Her dad must have trusted you.”
I laughed out loud before I could stop myself. But I could tell from Scott’s expression that it hadn’t been a very humorous sound—again.
“No, Scott, he didn’t really trust me.”
“So . . . who was he to you?”
“You know, that’s probably a question best left for another day.” Shayla, bored with the bed idea, kicked the pile of leaves and giggled as they rained down around her, a dull-brown waterfall. “But she’s mine now—and we’re here. And I don’t think I’d change anything about that part of the story.”
“You think she’ll ever call you Mom?”
“When she’s ready.”
He stood, shoving his hands into his pockets and turning to look out over the valley. “You must have gotten a lot of questions around BFA with her calling you Shelby and all.”
I shook my head. “Actually, I haven’t gotten many. I think Bev and Gus did a pretty good job of telling people I was a single mom and leaving it at that.”
“But . . . she calls you Shelby,” he repeated.
“And if people ask, I’m happy to tell them it’s an arrangement that works well for us. Period. Some of them seem to think it’s weird, and that’s okay. Any more details would require more explanations than I’m willing to give right now.”
“What do the students call you?”
“Miss. Mrs. It depends. Half of them think I’m divorced.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“Sure. I know what the truth is, and when Shayla understands it, we’ll be able to make it a little more public.”
“Sounds wise.”
“I try.”
“You’re a good mom.”
“Yeah? You’re a good hiking coach.”
“Sorry you came?”
“Ask me tomorrow when my calf muscles are screaming for mercy.”
“Make sure you stretch them before bed and first thing in the morning.”
I looked at him in fake exasperation. “Don’t go all basketball coach on me. I need a friend, not a tyrant.”
“Well, you’ve got that,” he said, sitting beside me again and pulling me in for a quick squeeze.
“The friend part or the—”
“The friend part, Shelby.”
“Well, good, ’cause the tyrant part reminds me of that time in fourth grade when Miss Nicholson sent me to the principal’s office because I’d drawn a picture of her backside with flowers growing out of it and—”
“You’re not going to start the talking thing again, are you?”
I bit my tongue and counted to twenty. That squeeze had done weird things to me. I didn’t like it. The side effects, that is. The squeeze itself, I didn’t mind.
I pushed off the wall and walked over to put Shayla’s hat back on her head. It had fallen sideways onto her shoulder,