Fathers

Charlie

Part One

By Simon

I’m happy that Bella’s coming to live with me.

I mean I guess I probably am.

Of course I am, she’s my daughter.

It’s just that I haven’t really seen her much the last few years since Renee moved out and took her away. That was sixteen years ago or thereabouts, but I loved her then and I love her now. It’s just that I don’t know too much about raising kids and I know even less about raising a teenaged daughter who doesn’t want to be here and probably doesn’t want to know me.

Yeah, pretty awkward, all right. But she’ll be here tomorrow and so I’ve cleaned up the house a bit and made sure that the sheets on her old bed are clean and all that kind of thing. It’s not like we never see each other; we do. She spends a few weeks with me every summer and so she has her own room here in the house and her own things up there and knows her way around town a little. She even has some friends so she won’t be all alone, at least I hope so, anyway. Jacob and the rest of the kids over at La Push, they’ll help her when she gets here. Jacob practically split his face with a grin when I told them she was moving in with me and, unless I miss my guess, he has a little case of puppy love going on there. Well, good—that should make her feel welcomed and he’s as good a kid as they come.

I signed her up over at the high school and so she’s all set there. When they got her grades from Phoenix faxed over they seemed pretty impressed and put her in all those advanced classes so that’s good, too. She’ll be getting involved in school and she should manage just fine. She’s a smart girl, at least most of the time and as long as she doesn’t pull her mopey, droopy act she should make friends fast. I know she’s going to miss her mom, but I found an old computer for her; they can e-mail as much as they want and even talk on the phone. She’ll be fine.

 

* * *
 

Man, Bella can cook like nobody’s business and thank the Lord for that! I’m the first to admit that my cooking skills begin and end with take out or TV dinners and that gets tired pretty fast. But Bella? She even cooks things like lasagna, stuff that takes a while to put together and then leaves enough so that I can heat it up for a couple of days; great stuff, too. And the house is looking a lot better than it did before she got here; the floors are always clean and the rugs get vacuumed. She even took down those old curtains last week and washed them for the first time in I don’t know how long.

She seems okay with school, I guess, but she doesn’t really talk about it too much. She doesn’t talk much about the kids she’s meeting and I hope the fact that I’m the local law isn’t having anything to do with that. It shouldn’t. I mean I’m pretty fair to the kids in town; I know I try to be and most of them are good kids, not troublemakers. I guess it’s a little like being a preacher’s kid for her, something she had nothing to do with but has to just deal with it.

Nothing much I can do about it, though, not if we want a pace to live and keep food on the table.

I’m glad she’s here.

I asked her last night if she’s making any friends and she didn’t really answer but she asked me some questions about the Cullens. They’ve got five teenagers in the school so I guess that they’re pretty hard to miss—all of them are damn good looking and I’ve heard that every single one of them is a straight A student. They never get in trouble, never make any waves, never have a hair out of place. ‘The Perfect Cullens’. That’s what I’ve heard them called but they seem like good kids and I’ve seen what Dr. Cullen has done to improve the hospital since he’s been here. He’s a real asset to Forks and if he and his wife want to make a hobby out of taking in strays and raising them, well that’s their business.

So one night at dinner she asks me what I know about the kids and it just struck me wrong, like she was looking for me to spill some kind of dirt about them and I set her straight about that. She could do a lot worse.

Of course, she could also do better to my way of thinking. All she has to do is crook her finger and Jake will be all over her like a puppy dog and be about as dangerous, too.

The Cullen kids? I don’t know—good kids and smart, you can tell that by just looking at them but there’s something sort of stuck up about them all, the way they all stay together and don’t seem to have any outside friends other than their family. ‘The way most of them seem to have hooked up with each other—man, I know they’re adopted but that’s sort of incestuous if you ask me. And they all seem to have an attitude behind those perfect Cullen manners, like they know something you don’t. I don’t get that from the doctor and his wife is as nice as they come but the kids…Ah, hell. They’re still young. They probably just have to grow up some more.

 

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