Sonya’ Siren Song

It was late summer, on a Friday afternoon, after a long week, as I turned into my driveway, and there was Sonya, playing a solo game of basketball with the hoop over the garage door. The weather was still warm, and she was wearing a pair of denim shorts and a pink sleeveless top, and as she jumped gracefully into the air to take a shot, I thought, She moves just like her mother.

She put the ball straight through the hoop, caught it on its first bounce off the concrete, and then turned to face me, smiling happily and dribbling the ball on the spot, as I put the car into Park and switched off the engine. “Hey, Leon,” she said, as I got out. She always called me by my first name.

“Hi,” I answered, as I shut the car door.

“Did’ya have a good day?” she asked.

“Yeah, it was good. Productive, too,” I replied.

“Well, I’ve been productive, too. Dinner’s in the oven,” she said, “It’ll be ready in about half an hour.”

“Sounds good,” I said, catching the ball as she tossed it to me, “What are we having tonight?”

“Lamb roast,” she said, with just a hint of pride in her voice.

“You’re too good to me,” I said, with a smile.

“No, I’m not,” she said quickly, with a little shake of her head, “You look after me, so I try to look after you, too.”

“And you do a good job,” I said.

Her smile widened a little, and she added, “Well, I am the lady of the house, these days.”

She walked ahead of me towards the back door, and I couldn’t help noticing how grown up she was looking lately. Then I caught myself looking at the sway of her hips in those little blue shorts, and I told myself, Don’t look down there. She’s your daughter, or at least, she may as well be.

We went inside, and Sonya made me some coffee, and as I sat at the table and drank it, I watched her buzzing around the kitchen, preparing for dinner, and I thought, She looks so confident, so poised.

That was the word: “poised”. Her mother, Joanne, was many things, but if you had to come up with one word to sum up everything she was, to define her, that was the word. Joanne had poise.

Sonya asked me if my coffee was okay, and went on with what she was doing, and as I watched her moving around, once again, it occurred to me how grown up she was becoming.

Sonya, I thought to myself. It always seemed such a grown-up name for a little girl. It was a name that seemed like it should have belonged to a sophisticated woman of the world, not a skinny, pig-tailed little streak of activity, who always had a smile on her face. Then again, I guess even sophisticated women of the world have to start somewhere. Lately, it was almost as though Sonya was finally growing into her name.

Yes, things were good now, but it wasn’t always this way.

I had moved in with Joanne, Sonya’s mother, when she was 26, and I was 32. Sonya had been eight years old then, being born when her mother was just 18, and fathered by a total loser called Jeremy, who promptly disappeared off the face of the earth when he found out Joanne was pregnant with his child. Sonya had never met her father, and then when I came along, she had been the only child of a single mother all her life, so the adjustment wasn’t easy in the beginning. I got a lot of attitude, and a lot of, “You’re not my father!” and, “You can’t make me do that!” for the first couple of years, but over time, things got better.

A big turning point was when Sonya was about ten. She was always afraid of thunderstorms, and whenever there was a storm at night, she would come into our bedroom and climb in between Joanne and me. In the mornings, she would always be asleep, cuddled up to Joanne in the bed, but one night, during a big storm, she came into our room as usual, and in the morning, she was cuddled up to me, sound asleep.
“I think you’ve won her heart,” Joanne said, smiling at me in the bed.

Things were a lot better from then on, and I found the best way to work things out was to give Sonya her own space, and to try to be the father figure, but not necessarily the father, if that makes sense, and we had a pretty happy family.

Joanne and I tried to have more kids, but after three years of trying, the doctor told me I could never father a child of my own, and in his words, I “only shoot blanks.” Still, we had Sonya, and we were happy.

I must have asked Joanne to marry me at least a dozen times over the years, but she would always say something like, “Why do you want to risk ruining a great relationship by getting married?” or “We’re really happy the way we are. There’s plenty of time for that later on. Let’s just leave it for now.” She probably had her reasons, but then Joanne was very much her own person.

I finally got her to come round, after nearly seven years together, and she let me slip an engagement ring on her finger. Then, within months, she was gone.

Toxaemia, was the cause, the doctors said, brought on by an infected cyst, and aside from the grief, I just couldn’t understand how, in this day and age, medical science couldn’t save her, but just like that, my beautiful, smart, funny, witty, intelligent Joanne was gone forever, and at nearly forty, I was left with a fifteen-year-old girl, on the very verge of womanhood herself, to bring up on my own.

Now, a little over a year later, Sonya was sixteen and a half years old, and was definitely growing into the beautiful Young woman she was to become. She was about five feet, five inches tall, with a slim build that had only developed some womanly curves over the past few months. She had wavy, ash blonde hair, growing to just past her shoulders, blue-grey eyes, a pretty face, and a fair to medium complexion. Her breasts were still fairly small, but pert, rounded and well-shaped, and her bottom was cute, round, and getting more perfect by the month. Her shapely legs were starting fill out as well, so in a couple of years, she was probably going to be a stunner, but then, so was her mother. We had one solitary picture of her father, the “sperm donor,” as Sonya referred to him, that her mother had kept to show her what he looked like, but really about the only resemblance was in the shape of her head, and when she had certain expressions on her face, you could see Jeremy’s eyes.

Sonya was a remarkable girl, really. Although I tried to help around the house, my work sometimes involved long hours, so in addition to keeping the house in order, she still kept her school work on track, and managed to find time for a social life, and she kept herself fit with regular basketball.

After I had lost Joanne, a lawyer friend of mine had told me that, theoretically at least, if Jeremy ever came back on the scene, he could have been given custody of Sonya after her mother’s death, but this possibility seemed as remote as me becoming King of Denmark, and as Sonya herself had said, she would be eighteen years old in three years time, and legally an adult, so we decided it wasn’t an issue, and we left things the way they were.