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)
Kola made a face that only a fifteen-year-old could, sort of pained, like he didn’t want to narc, and maybe even a bit embarrassed.
“Oh God, what happened?” I asked, waiting to hear whatever horror had transpired.
He winced.
“It’s a signed first edition,” Hannah chimed in from where she was making avocado toast. “I mean, he can probably take it for show and tell but”––she grimaced––“I don’t think he should be flipping the pages a lot or using a highlighter in it.”
“Seriously?” I asked my son.
He shrugged. “I think Uncle Aaron doesn’t get the whole a-paperback-you-stuff-in-your-backpack thing. They maybe didn’t have anything like that at all the private schools he went to.”
“I would suspect not.”
“So I need a copy, and it’s too late to order it and have it get here by tomorrow.”
But I loved ordering things online. “Fine. We’ll go down to––”
“Where are you going?” Sam asked as he walked into the kitchen in tan chinos and an ivory tee and Converse sneakers on his feet.
“You look adorable,” I sighed, smiling at him.
“Well, adorable was what I was going for,” he informed me, crossing the room to give me a kiss and take the coffee cup out of my hand. Lately Sam had been abandoning his whole black-coffee deal and been liking the half-and-half I put in mine. “Now what’s going on?”
“Kola needs a copy of The Great Gatsby for school, and I need Beloved and The Color Purple,” Hannah explained to him.
“And Kleenex,” Sam assured her before turning back to me. “Jesus, those books are gonna gut you.”
“They will?”
He nodded enthusiastically before looking at me. “No worries, I’ll take them to a bookstore. I have to run by the office and talk to Jones for a minute. He thinks there’s a problem with some information we got on some marshals who were missing.”
“Is everything okay?”
“It all happened a while back, so whatever it is is old news, but he needed to speak with me in an official capacity, so I have to go do that.”
“Great. Then I’ll get everything ready for the barbecue, and you can start making burgers and chicken when you get back.”
He scowled at me.
“What?”
“You said Dane and Aja and their kids. How is that a lot of food?”
“And Dylan and Chris and their kids.”
“That’s still––”
“And Fallon and Shane and their two kids and––”
“Wait, how did––”
“And your folks and your cousin Levi and his wife and their three––”
“Just––” He put up his hand to stop me. “How many people will be here?”
“Twenty-five,” I told him. “Plus us.”
He groaned and grabbed his keys off the hook in the kitchen. “Then I better get more burgers and that marinated pork your brother likes and a crapton more chicken.”
I smiled up at the man I loved. He grumbled, but he loved the fact that he was a grill master and everyone told him so. Inside, I knew, he loved the praise.
He bent again to kiss me, but I slipped my hand around the back of his neck so he couldn’t pull away too fast and made sure he understood that my craving for him never waned.
When I finally let him go, he took a quick gulp of air, as if I’d taken all his. “You kiss a man like that and he’s gonna get ideas,” he assured me, one golden eyebrow lifted for my benefit.
I waggled both mine for him.
“People,” Hannah said loudly, clapping her hands. “We need to focus on getting out of here, not making out.”
Sam grunted, kissed me again, and then announced that the train was leaving the station. The kids scrambled after him, Hannah giving me a kiss goodbye, then Kola, and they were gone.
I meant to pick up the house, but I got distracted because the TV was on in the living room and The Fugitive was on. That was one of those, like Jaws, that I always got sucked into. But finally I got outside to wipe down the picnic table and chairs. The weather was nice, not nearly as hot as it had been, and the hose was still out from when I watered the flowers in the back—some dragon’s breath and coleus that had gotten huge—and was snaked around the deck. Sam was always on me to roll it up, but sometimes I forgot, and mostly, it wasn’t a thing. I didn’t care about it a lot, and so it wasn’t something I did by rote like emptying the dishwasher. So it was my fault I wasn’t watching where I was going.
I swear it was like a spiderweb, because one second I was walking and the next I was flying through the air, my foot having seemingly stuck in one place while the rest of me kept moving. I fell over the end of the stairs, which hurt, but I was more winded than anything else. I realized then that my foot had gone through a loose plank and I was caught. People always talk about freak accidents, and now I knew what the hell they meant.