moonshine

Lena shrugged without looking up. "I guess."

He was about to stand when a kid appeared at their table like he'd been launched from a cannon, all forward momentum and zero awareness of personal space. Small, maybe Lena's age, with a gap-toothed smile and trainers that lit up when he moved.

"Hi," the kid said, looking directly at Lena. "I like your shirt. Is that a dolphin?"

Lena blinked at him, startled out of whatever private world she'd been occupying. "It's a whale."

"Oh." The kid considered this seriously. "Whales are cool too. I'm Jude."

"Lena."

Pope watched his daughter's face do something it hadn't done in weeks, soften, just slightly, into something that might become a smile if given enough time.

The kid, Jude, was still talking, something about a documentary he'd watched about orcas, and Lena was listening in that intent way she had when something actually interested her.

"Jude, baby, you can't just—" You appeared behind the kid, slightly out of breath, holding a tray with two drinks and a bag of food. You looked at Pope first, apologetic, then at Jude. "I'm so sorry, he just took off."

"It's fine," Pope said, because it was. Lena was talking now, explaining the difference between toothed whales and baleen whales with the kind of authority she usually reserved for correcting him about things he'd gotten wrong.

You looked at your son, then at Lena, then back at Pope with an expression he recognized because he'd worn it himself a hundred times: the calculation of whether this was a safe situation or one that required extraction.

He kept his hands visible on the table, his posture open. Non-threatening. He'd learned how to do that too.

"They're both seven," you said after a moment, like that explained something. Maybe it did.

"Yeah."

"Jude doesn't usually—" You stopped, recalibrated. "He's pretty shy, actually. This is new."

Pope glanced at Jude, who was now sitting in the booth next to Lena without having been invited, pointing at something on her tray. "Doesn't look shy."

"He isn't when he's talking about animals." You were still standing there with your tray, caught between sitting down and leaving, and Pope realized with something close to panic that you were waiting for permission. 

He wasn't good at this. The social calculus of normal interactions, the unspoken rules that everyone else seemed to know instinctively.

"You can sit," he said, then immediately wondered if that sounded like an order. "I mean, if you want. They're—" He gestured at the kids, who were now deep in conversation about whether dolphins were better than whales.

You sat across from him, setting your tray down carefully. "I'm sorry, really. We can go if—"

"It's fine," Pope said again, and meant it. Lena looked happier than she had in days, which was worth the discomfort of small talk with a stranger. He could do small talk. Probably. "She doesn't usually talk to people either."

You smiled at that, something genuine breaking through the apologetic politeness. "The animal thing?"

"The everything thing." He watched Lena steal one of Jude's fries without asking, watched Jude not even notice. "She's been—it's been a rough year."

He didn't know why he said that. He didn't talk about Lena with strangers, didn't talk about the custody arrangement or Smurf or the way Lena looked at him sometimes like she was waiting for him to disappoint her. But you just nodded, like you understood something about rough years.

"Jude's dad left when he was four," you said quietly, unwrapping your burger without looking at it. "So I get it. The rough year thing."

Pope didn't know what to say to that. He settled for nodding, reaching for his coffee even though it had gone cold twenty minutes ago. The silence stretched between you, not quite comfortable but not hostile either.

The kids were laughing now, Jude doing an impression of a whale breaching that involved standing on the booth seat until you told him to sit down.

"Do you live around here?" you asked, and Pope recognized it for what it was: the careful question that determined whether this was a one-time thing or something that might happen again.

"Yeah. Oceanside."

"Us too." You were watching Jude the way Pope watched Lena, with that constant low-level vigilance that came with being the only thing standing between a kid and the world. "We're over on Pacific."

"We're on Hill."

Another silence. Pope was running out of things to say, which was fine because he'd never had many to begin with. But then Lena looked up at him, her face more animated than it had been in weeks, and said, "Dad, can Jude come over sometime? I want to show him my whale book."

Dad. She'd been calling him Pope for the last few months, ever since the last fight with Baz and Smurf, and hearing her say Dad did something to his chest that he didn't have words for.

"Uh," he said, looking at you. "Maybe. If—"

"Can we, Mom?" Jude was looking at you with those big hopeful eyes that probably worked on you every single time. "Please?"

You were looking at Pope, doing that same calculation from earlier, and he tried to look like someone who could be trusted with your kid. He wasn't sure he succeeded. He wasn't sure he could be trusted with his own kid most days.

"Maybe we could exchange numbers," you said finally. "Set something up."

Pope pulled out his phone, old and cracked across the screen, and you did the same. The exchange was quick, efficient, both of you typing with the speed of people who'd learned to do everything one-handed while managing a child with the other. 

When you stood to leave, Jude hugged Lena goodbye like they'd known each other for years instead of twenty minutes, and Lena hugged him back.

"It was nice to meet you," you said, and Pope nodded because he didn't trust himself to say anything that wouldn't sound wrong.

He watched you leave, Jude's hand in yours, the kid talking a mile a minute about whales and dolphins and could they really go to Lena's house, and then Lena was looking at him with something in her face he hadn't seen in a long time.

"She was nice," Lena said.

"Yeah," Pope agreed.

"Are you going to text her?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

Lena picked up another fry, studying it like it held answers. "You should. Jude was cool."

Pope looked at his phone, at your name and number saved in his contacts, and thought about all the ways he could fuck this up. There were a lot of them. He was good at fucking things up, especially things that involved people trusting him with something important.

But Lena was still looking at him, waiting, and he found himself nodding.

"Yeah," he said. "Okay."

Six months later, Pope was learning that sunscreen was a negotiation.

"I already put some on," Jude said, squirming away from Pope's hands with the kind of full-body resistance that only seven-year-olds could manage.

"That was an hour ago." Pope caught him gently by the shoulder, squeezing a line of sunscreen onto his palm. "You'll burn."

"I don't burn."

"Everyone burns." Pope started with Jude's shoulders, methodical, making sure to get the spots that always got missed—the tops of the ears, the back of the neck, the line where his swim trunks sat.

Jude submitted to this with dramatic sighs, but he didn't pull away. That was progress. In the beginning, he'd flinched every time Pope reached for him, like he was expecting something other than gentleness.

"My dad never made me wear sunscreen," Jude said, and Pope's hands stilled for just a second before continuing.

"Yeah, well." Pope rubbed sunscreen into Jude's face, careful around his eyes. "I'm not your dad."

It came out wrong, harsher than he meant, and he saw Jude's face do something complicated before settling into careful blankness. Pope knew that look. He'd seen it on Lena's face enough times.

"I mean—" Pope sat back on his heels, meeting Jude's eyes. "I just mean I'm going to make you wear it anyway. Because you'll burn, and then you'll be miserable, and then your mom will be pissed at me."

Jude considered this. "She wouldn't be that mad."

"She'd be a little mad."

"Maybe a little." Jude grinned, gap-toothed and bright, and took off running toward the water where Lena was already waist-deep, diving under waves. Pope watched him go, then looked up to find you watching him from your towel, sunglasses pushed up into your hair.

"You're good at that," you said.

"At what?"

"The dad thing."

Pope didn't know what to do with that, so he just shrugged and lay back on his towel, closing his eyes against the sun. He felt you move closer, your hand finding his, and he laced his fingers through yours without opening his eyes. This was still new enough to feel like something he might break if he thought about it too hard.

Cut to a few days later; The car was a '67 Impala that Pope had picked up for almost nothing because the engine was shot and the previous owner didn't have the patience to fix it. Pope had patience. He had nothing but patience when it came to things that made sense, things that had rules and logic and predictable outcomes.

"Hand me the three-eighths," he said, and felt the weight of the socket wrench placed carefully in his palm.

"This one?" Jude's voice came from somewhere near Pope's left shoulder.

"Yeah, that's it." Pope fitted it onto the bolt, feeling the satisfying click of metal on metal. "Good job."

He'd been under the car for the better part of an hour, Jude sitting cross-legged next to the toolbox, handing him whatever he asked for with the kind of serious concentration that made Pope's chest hurt in a way he was starting to recognize as affection. 

The kid was good at this—patient, careful, asking questions that actually made sense instead of just asking for the sake of noise.

"What's that part do?" Jude asked, pointing at something Pope couldn't see from his current angle.

"That's the oil pan. Holds the oil that keeps the engine from seizing up."

"What happens if it seizes up?"

"Engine's fucked." Pope caught himself. "I mean, it's broken. You'd have to replace the whole thing."

"You can say fucked," Jude said matter-of-factly. "Mom says it all the time when she's cooking."

Pope slid out from under the car to look at Jude, who was grinning at him with that same mischievous expression that meant he knew exactly what he was doing. "I don't think your mom wants me teaching you to swear."

"You're not teaching me. I already know them." Jude started counting on his fingers. "Fuck, shit, damn, ass, bitch—"

"Okay, okay." Pope held up a hand, fighting back a smile. "I get it. You're very educated."

"Mom says education is important."

"She's right." Pope slid back under the car, reaching for the next bolt. "Hand me the half-inch."

They worked in comfortable silence for a while, the only sounds the clink of tools and the distant noise of traffic on the PCH. Pope was tightening the last bolt when Jude spoke again, his voice smaller than before.

"Do you think my dad's ever going to come back?"

Pope's hands stilled. He stared at the underside of the car, at the maze of metal and rubber and fluid lines, and wished desperately that this was a question with a mechanical answer. Something he could fix with the right tool and enough patience.

"I don't know," he said finally, because lying to kids never worked. They always knew.

"Mom says he's not."

"Your mom's probably right."

Another silence, longer this time. Pope slid out from under the car, sitting up and wiping his hands on a rag that was already more oil than cloth. Jude was looking at the toolbox, his face carefully neutral in that way that meant he was trying not to cry.

"You know it's not about you, right?" Pope said. "Him leaving. That's about him, not you."

"That's what Mom says."

"She's right about that too." Pope set down the rag, trying to figure out how to say the next part. "My mom—she wasn't great at the mom thing. And for a long time I thought that was because I wasn't good enough, or I'd done something wrong. But it wasn't. It was just—she was fucked up. And that wasn't my fault."

Jude looked at him, really looked at him, with eyes that were too old for seven. "Is that why Lena's sad sometimes?"

Pope felt something crack open in his chest. "Yeah. Probably."

"But you're still here."

"Yeah."

"That's good." Jude stood up, brushing off his shorts. "Can I try starting it?"

The subject change was so abrupt that Pope almost laughed. But he just nodded, standing and offering Jude his hand to pull him up. "Yeah, come on."

They climbed into the front seat, Jude bouncing with excitement, and Pope guided his hand to the key in the ignition. "Turn it slow," he said, his hand over Jude's, and together they turned the key.

The engine caught on the first try, rumbling to life with a sound that Pope felt in his bones. Jude's face split into a grin so wide it looked like it might break his face in half, and he threw his arms around Pope's neck without warning.

Pope froze for just a second, he was still learning how to do this, the casual physical affection that came so easily to everyone else, and then he hugged Jude back, careful and sure.

"We fixed it!" Jude squealed into his shoulder.

"Yeah," Pope said. "We did."

The Lego set was some kind of spaceship that had approximately eight thousand pieces and instructions that might as well have been in another language. 

Pope sat on your living room floor, legs spread, the instruction booklet propped against his knee, while Jude sorted pieces by color in a way that Pope recognized from his own childhood.

"I think this one goes here," Jude said, holding up a small grey piece.

Pope checked the instructions. "Yeah, that's right. Good eye."

They'd been at this for over an hour, and Pope's back was starting to hurt from sitting on the floor, but Jude showed no signs of slowing down. Lena had gotten bored twenty minutes in and was now on the couch with you, both of you reading, and Pope could feel you watching him occasionally, though you were trying to be subtle about it.

"Pope?" Jude said, not looking up from the pieces he was sorting.

"Yeah?"

"Are you going to marry mom?"

Pope's hands stilled on the piece he was holding. From the couch, he heard you make a small noise that might have been a laugh or might have been something else entirely.

"Jude," you said, your voice carefully neutral. "That's not—"

"I'm just asking!" Jude retorted, still not looking up. "Because if you are, that would be okay. I think."

Pope looked at you, found you looking back with an expression he couldn't quite read. There was amusement there, and embarrassment, and something else underneath that made his pulse kick up in his throat.

"I don't know," Pope said honestly, looking back at Jude. "We haven't really talked about it."

"But you like her, right?"

"Yeah. I like her."

"And you like me?"

"Yeah," Pope said, and found that it was easier to say than he'd expected. "I like you too."

Jude nodded, satisfied, and went back to sorting pieces. "Okay. Just checking."

Pope caught your eye again, saw you smiling at him with something soft in your face, and felt that same crack in his chest widen a little further. He was learning that this was what it felt like—not the dramatic, overwhelming thing he'd expected, but something quieter. Something that built itself piece by piece, like a Lego spaceship, until one day you looked up and realized you'd made something whole.

"This piece?" Jude held up another small gray piece, and Pope checked the instructions.

"Yeah," he said. "That's the one."

They worked in silence for a while longer, the spaceship slowly taking shape between them, and Pope thought about all the ways he'd expected to fail at this. 

He'd been so sure he would—that he'd say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing or just be wrong in some fundamental way that would make you realize he wasn't worth the risk. 

But Jude's small hands were steady as he placed each piece, and you were still watching from the couch with that soft expression, and Lena was curled up next to you like she belonged there.

Maybe he was still fucking it up. Probably he was. But for right now, sitting on your living room floor with Jude's shoulder pressed against his arm and the smell of your coffee drifting over from the couch, it felt like maybe he was fucking it up a little less than usual.

"We're almost done with this section," Jude said, pointing at the instructions. "Then we get to do the wings."