Here's to Us by Elin Hilderbrand

Author:Elin Hilderbrand
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction / Contemporary Women
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

As JP drove her home, Angie said, “I have to ask. What did my father tell you about me?”

JP pushed his Blues Brothers sunglasses up into his bushy hair and stared out the windshield. “I guess the question is, What didn’t he tell me about you?” JP said. “He told me you were smart, and tough, and a crackerjack chef. He told me you could drink every man he knew under the table. And he told me you were the finest surprise of his life.”

“Surprise?” Angie said.

“He said…” Here, JP paused and ran a hand over his beard. “First of all, you have to take into account our circumstances. Most of our talks took place driving out to Great Point before the sun rose. We got reflective. It was something about the sun just coming up and the mist lifting, the sound of the waves hitting the sand and the cries of the gulls. If you were going to talk—and Deacon was a talker—you were going to say stuff that mattered.”

“Yeah, but what did he mean by ‘surprise’?” Angie asked.

“He was telling me about the first time he held you as a baby,” JP said. “I guess he’d sort of gone along with the whole adoption thing for Belinda’s sake, but he wasn’t really a part of the mission of finding you and bringing you home. So Belinda plops you in his arms and says, ‘Here’s your daughter,’ and Deacon said he looked down to see this dark-skinned baby who had nothing whatsoever to do with him.”

“Great,” Angie said. “You are failing miserably in your attempt to make me feel better, I hope you know.”

“Just wait,” JP said. “So I guess you grabbed his finger with your little baby hand, and you didn’t let go. You had this relentless grip, apparently, and Deacon told me he felt something pass between you and him. Like you were choosing him, or accepting him, and he said to himself, If you’re not letting me go, Buddy, then I’m not letting you go.”

Angie blinked tears. “He never told me that story,” Angie said. “He never talked about when I was a baby.”

“He said that every single day after that, it got better. He said when you were five or six, he taught you how to crack an egg. And you loved it so much that you insisted on choosing the egg from the carton, and you would say, ‘I do it myself.’”

Angie laughed and wiped her eyes. She could see young Deacon so clearly in that instant: his dark, shaggy hair, the exact green-brown of his eyes, his three-day scruff, his inked-up arms, his smile, with the one tooth that overlapped his front tooth just a little. She could hear his voice: Okay, Buddy. Do it yourself.

JP said, “And then, by the time you grew up, he said, the two of you were best friends. He said, ‘I would never have guessed that my daughter could be a friend of mine. But, man, there were some days when she was the only person I could handle.

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