He went around to the passenger side of the truck and pulled out the stuffed animal he’d picked up while he was shopping.
The fact that his sister Katie had joined him at the mall said how much he wanted to do the right thing.
The last time he’d gone shopping with Katie was when she wanted to get her prom dress and knew that their mother wouldn’t let her buy the kind of dress she wanted, so he’d gone with her to the mall.
He was still recovering from the indignity of that shopping trip so when he’d decided to pick up a toy for Ciela, he’d called his sister to help.
She had been a fan of stuffed animals from childhood.
He’d been the action figure kind of kid.
So Katie had more of a chance to pick out what a little girl might like.
Looking at the stuffed animal in his hands, he had a moment to second guess his pick.
A moment, but that’s all he’d give himself.
He’d promised to show up before six o’clock.
He wasn’t going to fail.
It wasn’t just that he found Noelle attractive, he could still hear Ciela’s screams in his ears.
He’d heard them in his sleep and that had kept him up and exhausted since that day.
He’d seen shadows under Noelle’s eyes, too.
If Ciela’s screams were haunting him, he knew that they were probably worse for Noelle, as her mother.
It wasn’t hard to find Noelle at the playground, she was helping her daughter walk across a kind of balance beam over a pit filled with foam pieces.
For a moment, he felt old when his memories popped up in his head of when he’d sprained his elbow trying to swing across the monkey bars at their neighborhood park and losing his grip when a bee stung his hand.
The moment he’d take one hand away from the bars, wincing in pain, his other hand slipped and he’d gone down like a sack of potatoes onto the hard-packed dirt under the apparatus.
The fall had knocked the air out of him and made him a laughing stock for a few days until someone bigger and stronger than he was went down the metal slide and burned the backs of his legs to the point where he had to spend a week lying down on his belly to let the skin heal.
At the end of the balance beam, Noelle had Ciela switch hands and started walking back.
He didn’t walk up as the little girl was walking back on the large wooden beam.
The last thing he wanted to do was scare her so she’d fall.
Ending up in a cast or even if it was just a sling sounded like a crappy way to smooth things over.
So he waited in the shadow of a large cottonwood tree until Noelle saw him.
She gestured for him to wait a minute and he nodded in complete agreement.
She was Ciela’s mom.
She’d know best.
At the end of the balance beam, Noelle swept her daughter up into her arms and spun her around and around.
Ciela lifted her arms, excited.
When Noelle set Ciela back down to the ground, the little girl ran over to a bench where Patricia, Noelle’s mom, was waiting with bottles of water.