Maybe Tonight by Kim Golden Read Free Book Online Page A

speak to your father?” Laney asked as they walked, hand in hand, along the gravel path to the beach. It was one of those winter days when the sky felt vast and brilliantly blue and crisp with ice crystals.
    Mads shook his head no. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his father and his memories of him were always too blurry. “He calls my grandmother sometimes, but he never reaches out to me.”
    “Do you know where he is?” They stopped now and took in the view. Øresund was frozen over for the first time in years and the snow-dusted beach looked like a sugary confection just waiting to be devoured.
    “He’s probably in Christianhavn,” Mads said grimly. “That’s where he was last time I heard. Drinking away whatever money my grandmother or the state gives him.”
    “I just wondered…if we should tell him that he’s going to be a grandfather,” Laney ventured. She took a careful step forward, testing the icy sand. “I’ve been trying to decide if I should contact my father too.”
    It was one of the things that bound them–they were orphans of sorts. Both of them lost their mothers–Mads mother had died in a horrible car crash, Laney’s lost her battle with breast cancer. Both of them had also been abandoned by their fathers. He could still remember the night when Laney told him about how her father turned his back on her. They’d been watching a film–it was Susanne Bier’s first American film,
Things We Lost in the Fire
, and Laney had been quiet all day. He’d tried to get her to tell him what was wrong but she’d only flashed him irritated looks before she returned to pretending she was interested in the film.
    It wasn’t until the scene when Halle Berry rails at Benicio del Toro and blames him for her husband’s death that she curled into Mads’s shoulder and whispered in his ear how her father left her, how he’d always made her feel unloved and unwanted. And Mads had confessed to her how his father could not resist alcohol, how he’d made sporadic appearances in Mads’s life, with promises as fragile as dew drops on a spider’s web. Promises Mads learned at an early age to have no faith in—they were just words…and words sometimes meant nothing.
    “I don’t know, elskede,” he confessed. “I don’t know if I trust him in our daughter’s life.”
    “Will she hate us though? We’re making this decision about her grandfathers. Maybe she’ll resent us when she’s older.”
    He pulled Laney closer to him. He needed to feel her warmth, needed to feel that stability she brought to him. His chin rested atop her head and he breathed in her scent and the crisp air and reminded himself he could be a father without being as awful about it as his had been.
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    The last time he saw his father, he was sixteen years old. His mother was hooked to life support at Bispebjerg Hospital, and Mads was only allowed to see her for fifteen minutes every day. No one would come out and say it but he knew she would not survive much longer. He’d overheard enough of the doctor’s whispers to his grandparents, that she was not responding to any treatment, that the machines were the only thing keeping her alive.
    Mads shut his ears to them. He didn’t want to hear what they had to say. He sat by his mother’s bedside and held her hand, ignoring how lifeless it felt in his. Sometimes he imagined she squeezed his fingers to reassure him, but he knew it wasn’t possible. Sometimes he reached up to touch her cheek or brush her pale hair from her damp forehead. And he talked to her, thinking if nothing else, she would know he loved her, he wished she would wake up, he wanted her to know that he was there waiting for her to come back.
    Just then he was murmuring to his mother of what had happened in school, the new girl who was darker than everyone else, who was being bullied and how he’d stood up to the gang who always bothered her. His grandfather Henrik pressed his hand to Mads’s