Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 88290 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 441(@200wpm)___ 353(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88290 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 441(@200wpm)___ 353(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
“Oh no,” Hannah said, smiling, getting up and walking around the table to reach me, she bent over to hug me. “It’s okay. I will always be your baby.”
“What’s happening?” Kola asked his sister.
“Pa is making that face where he sees his life flashing by and us having kids and moving to Alaska or something, because now that we’re adults, we’re of course going to leave him.”
“Why are we moving to Alaska?”
“Ohmygod, it was just as example,” she snapped at him.
“Am I moving or you?”
She growled then.
He was laughing as he leaned sideways to give me a kiss on the cheek. “It’s okay, Pa, even though we’re grown-ups, we’ll never fly too far away, and we’ll always need you. Like I, for one, would like you to make a dentist appointment for me, because I didn’t see one, at all, the whole time I was gone.”
I turned my head slowly to look at him as Hannah gave me a final squeeze before returning to her seat. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I think I might have a cavity too.”
“Kola!”
“Do you have any idea what kind of hassle it would be for me to find a qualified dentist in Palo Alto?” he asked me. “I just figured I’d wait.”
“I will do that tomorrow.”
“My mother thinks I need to have my eyes checked,” Harper told me. “But I told her it’s not necessary. Being able to see everything close and far away at the same time seems a lot to expect.”
“Oh dear God,” I groaned. “You’re lucky your mother loves you.”
“Well, yeah,” he agreed, looking at me, confused, the sarcasm completely lost on him.
“Look how much the forty-ounce steak is,” Sam pointed out to me on the menu.
“That doesn’t matter. You are not allowed to eat forty ounces of meat,” I assured him. “Not even sixteen ounces. Think much smaller. I suggest the surf and turf, and get some sides. I understand the macaroni and––”
“Okay, I could do that with mac and cheese and potatoes.”
“Have you lost your mind?” Kola asked his father. “No, sir. Pick a vegetable.”
“Potatoes are vegetables,” he replied haughtily.
“You know what I mean,” Kola insisted.
“I’m sorry, do you know who you’re talking to?”
“Yes,” Kola assured him. “A man I need to stick around, so two starches is not happening. I see Brussels sprouts or asparagus in your future.”
He glanced at his son, who was glaring at him, then to his daughter, who had her arms crossed, waiting, and then at me.
“We all love you, and all that butter is no good,” I told him. “You can ditch the mac and have one of the yummy-sounding potato dishes along with a veggie if you’d prefer,” I let him know. “But we’re keeping you, and you cheat and eat terribly enough during the week. While I can see you, that’s not going to happen.”
“I don’t cheat.”
I laughed at him.
“Jory!” He was indignant.
“Oh, Dad, you were having that gooey cheese carne asada burrito when I came by your office on Friday, and you told me not to tell Pa.”
“Great,” he growled at his daughter.
She shook her head at him in judgement.
“Oh come on,” she said, gesturing at me. “Pa knows exactly what you eat when you’re not home, which is why it was funny.”
He turned to look at me. “Is that true?”
“Of course.”
“How?”
“You’re a creature of habit.”
He had to think a second. “Is that right?”
“I think it’s lovely that your children and your husband worry about you,” Regina said, smiling. “That shows so much love.”
“You won’t like it when it happens to you,” Sam volleyed back.
I gasped. Hannah gasped. Jake and Harper gasped.
“Oooh,” Kola snickered. “You just talked back to your mother.”
Thomas’s eyes were wide as he stared at his son in amazement. It was like he was stunned Regina was allowing him to live and surprised that a lightning bolt hadn’t come through the ceiling. I had been expecting it myself.
“God,” Sam groaned.
The way she leaned forward, narrowing her eyes as she pinned him with her gaze, would have scared me to death. “I will have you know that my children, including you, don’t have to worry about me because my cholesterol is far under what it should be for a woman my age,” Regina announced haughtily. “I’ll bet you I’m in much better shape than you.”
And while the cholesterol part was probably true, Sam too was in great shape. He just didn’t need to eat so much red meat, and I had been cutting it slowly from his diet. Nothing stupid like him eating poorly was going to take him from me.
The sweet waitress had to deliver food to a quiet table, and it had to be unnerving. I assured her that everything was amazing, and she looked a bit better.
“And we’re ready to order dinner,” I told her.
Sam ended up splitting a steak with his father, and between the two of them, they both had nine ounces and one side of mac and split two veggie sides. I smiled at my husband when he was done ordering as he grumbled something under his breath. Regina got up and hugged him. Sam of course had a new horror then, because the man at the next table over who had not checked out his daughter did, in fact, check out his mother.