Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 78466 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78466 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Anyway, it was Sunday night, which is “get ready for the new week” day in our house. It’s chore day, which means that I plan meals for the week, make an all-encompassing master grocery list, balance the checkbook, and make deposits onto the cards my kids, with their weekly allowance for food and other things, carry. My husband does all the ironing—a holdover from his time in the military—mows the lawn, consults the whiteboard in the kitchen where everyone writes down whatever needs looking at around the house, and my kids clean. Then we all clean, and then whoever wants to get out of the house the worst goes with me to the store, and by the time we get home, it’s time for dinner. What’s nice now is that it’s warm enough for Sam to start using his grill again, and driving up into our driveway, parking the car, and seeing him out on the deck with whichever kid stayed with him, smelling whatever is cooking, is one of my favorite things in the world.
This last week, my son went shopping with me and my daughter stayed with her father because they were hanging her barn door in her bathroom. Hannah decided that she’d prefer it if her door slid open instead of opening out. Sam agreed, based on space, and it’s been their pet project. But instead of coming home to happy people, he was talking and accenting it with his long grill tongs and she was leaning on the railing, arms crossed, flushed, trying not to raise her voice. If it had been her brother, she’d be shrieking, but she was not allowed to yell at either me or Sam if she wanted to not be grounded for eternity.
“It’s not your fault,” she insisted, staring holes in her father. “And you walking around, being miserable, feeling guilty, taking it out on us because we love you is total dog poop, Dad.”
She wanted to say shit. I saw her bite off the word before she said it, but I also saw how fast her tears came and how fast she spun around to face away from him so he couldn’t see her cry. Hands down on the railing, her back trembled as she stood there.
“What did you do to your daughter?” I called over to my husband as Kola and I started unloading the back of the minivan.
He rounded on me, and I got the same tong pointing. “You stay out of this! I told her I didn’t want to talk about it just like I told you yesterday that I didn’t want to talk about it, but no one in this house can leave anything alone!”
“That’s because what you call leaving something alone actually means burying things and repressing things, and if you never talk things out, they fester and rot.”
“Isn’t festering the same as rotting?” my son asked me, ever logical.
“Festering happens first,” I educated him.
He thought about that a second. “Okay.”
It was weird to be looking up at him suddenly, and I was still getting used to the spike that he’d taken recently.
“I don’t repress things!”
Kola tried really hard not to laugh, but it burst out of him and then he choked it back and ending up doubling over in a coughing fit.
“Oh dear God, you’re going to turn to stone right there!” Hannah shrieked through her sobs before bolting into the house.
Holding cat litter, I looked at Sam as Kola tried to pull air into his lungs.
“So you’re saying I’ve been kind of an ass lately.”
I smiled at him as he growled loudly and went charging into the house after his daughter. He stopped in the kitchen first to get something. Minutes later, as Kola and I carried in groceries, we could hear them running around upstairs, her shrieking in delight as they did something they hadn’t done in a bit, and he chased her. When she scurried downstairs, with him hot on her heels, I saw the tongs then and heard the snapping. I would have run too.
An hour and a half later we were all sitting around the table in the backyard, having finished dinner, the cat sitting on the railing of the patio talking to the birds, the dog on the steps surveying his domain, which was huge for a Chihuahua, and Kola, Hannah, and I all looking at Sam, waiting on him to talk.
He’d changed over the years, and whereas he was still the six-four, hard-muscled man I’d lusted after at first sight, now there were laugh lines in the corner of his slate-blue eyes, and some new streaks of silver in his thick chestnut-brown hair that had always held highlights worth a small fortune if they’d come from a bottle instead of nature. Now, head forward in his palm, waiting, I had the urge to slip around the table and tackle him to the ground. He was still as mouth-wateringly gorgeous, and the fact that he was irritated was adorable.