Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 82186 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 411(@200wpm)___ 329(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82186 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 411(@200wpm)___ 329(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
“We could get him new lures,” she suggested.
“Do we know what he does and doesn’t have?”
“Oh!” she announced suddenly. “I know. I’m going to get him some cufflinks and start making him wear shirts that need them.”
I wasn’t about to tell her how horrible that idea was, so instead we wrapped up our sad little unsuccessful buying trip and headed for home.
“I wish he was more like you,” Hannah said, sighing dramatically as we picked up some snacks from the Cuban bakery. “You love small things, like your favorite candles or fancy pens or a new bracelet.”
I turned to my daughter. “No more bracelets. That last one was really pretty, but when I found out where you got it, I nearly passed out.”
She shrugged. “It was one bracelet, and you love it, so I say oh well.”
I did love the chunky silver bead, garnet, and Moroccan red-banded agate bracelet, but it was not something I would have ever gotten myself. I went in for small purchases, except for clothes and shoes. I was picky about those.
Once we got home, I found Gale playing basketball outside with the boys. He was happy to stop and sit and have a beer with snacks inside, standing around the kitchen table. It was fun to watch him enjoy the kids, listen to them, and when it was time to tie jute with sun charms on them for the candles, he sat down and did that as well.
I pulled him aside around five and suggested he forget about going to the lake.
“Really?” he asked me. “Are you sure?”
“It’s fairly obvious that you’d rather stay here, and we’re enjoying having you.”
His exhale was long. “Thank you. That’d be…good for me.”
“Excellent,” I announced, smiling at him.
We had sandwiches for dinner, it was too hot to have anything else, and he was in awe of the strawberry pies that I put down on the counter.
“What?”
He gestured at them. “I just—as you can imagine, I don’t get homemade anything often.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say you can’t have homemade if you have no home, but I couldn’t see how that could possibly be helpful for him to hear.
Hannah had her coven over to look at the candles she’d poured, and they were excited and thrilled to meet Gale and tell him all about their plans for Litha. When the boys asked Gale to play Monopoly with them, I could tell he was touched, and then worried when Hannah shook her head.
“You don’t want me to play?”
“Oh no, I do,” she assured him. “You’re just going to have to deal with the weird pieces, because we agreed to not play it normally anymore at home.”
He turned to me.
“You’ll see.”
I snorted out a laugh from the couch when I heard him ask, twenty minutes later, “What the hell is that?”
“It’s a bridge you can rent,” Jake explained, “to put over several properties so you don’t hit them, but it goes back up for auction every four turns.”
“What?”
“And if you don’t win the bidding war,” Harper told him in his most sinister voice, “it could be curtains for you, kid, no questions asked.”
“But,” Hannah began brightly, “you can invest in a slide and pay someone else to put it on their property. Then you can sweep them off, right onto yours.”
“Do they still have to pay for landing on the property you’re putting the slide on?”
“Without question,” Kola assured him. “That’s just good business.”
“Jory, this is a little intense,” he called over to me.
“That’s nothing,” I replied, chuckling. “When Aaron Sutter plays, there are city taxes and bribes to the planning commissioner. It gets a little cutthroat.”
“Let me understand. Aaron Sutter, the billionaire real estate mogul, plays Monopoly at your house?”
“Why wouldn’t he?” Hannah asked. “He loves to play Monopoly and to settle Catan and of course Risk.”
“Of course,” Gale agreed, nodding, shooting me a look.
He was very funny.
Over dessert, the kids had questions for him.
“How does it work in the winter in the snow on your bike?” Hannah was interested.
“Or now with the cicadas?” Jake shivered.
“What do you do for the holidays?” Harper inquired.
“What happens if you get sick or hurt or something?” Kola was always so practical.
He was good about answering them all, mine as well, when he told me he had a brother in Atlanta but that was all as far as family went.
“And you were never tempted to get married or have your own family?” I asked later as we sat together on the couch, both of us with cups of tea in hand, the kids all upstairs after Harper left for home.
He shook his head. “I love the traveling and meeting new people, and I do, often, put myself in positions that if there were others counting on me that honestly, I wouldn’t do. It’s hard to justify hanging off the side of a mountain to get a great shot of a nearly extinct leopard when you have people at home wanting to see your face for dinner.”