Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 75003 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 375(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75003 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 375(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
“Definitely.”
She flipped the canvas, holding it against her front.
And there the two of us were.
Well, no.
Three.
Because I was standing behind her in the picture. And both our hands were on her rounded belly.
“You’re pregnant?” I asked, gaze shooting up to her face, finding her already watching me, trying to gauge my reaction.
“Yes,” she said, fucking beaming at me.
Suddenly, I saw it.
The ‘glow’ people were always talking about. And I was suddenly confused how I’d missed it over the past two weeks.
“I know we meant to wait until we actually made this part official,” she said, waving her engagement ring hand at me.
“Who the fuck cares about timelines?” I said as I crossed the small space toward her, framing her face in my hands. “We’re gonna have a baby.”
“We are,” she said, a single tear slipping from the corner of her eye. “And I just know he or she is going to be as kind and generous as their daddy.”
Daddy.
Fuck.
That made my heart unexpectedly skip.
“And as loving and lively as their mom,” I said, leaning down to steal her lips.
Jade - 7 years
“Whoa, slow down there, speed racer,” I said, holding the baby I was wearing in a wrap closer as William’s motorized scooter buzzed past us on the path, nearly ramming into me in the process.
“Oh, that thing don’t go that fast,” William said from his position beside me as my five-year-old came to a stomach-dropping stop on his scooter.
“That thing is not meant to be a toy,” I said, shaking my head as my son backed it up with that obnoxiously loud beep-beep-beep that seemed more appropriate on a delivery truck than someone’s mobility scooter.
“Anything with a motor is a toy to a boy his age,” William said with a shrug as he lowered himself heavily down onto one of our multicolored wrought iron chairs.
“He could break it.” Or his head. Though, to be fair, driving a scooter that maxed out at four miles per hour was probably the least dangerous thing I’d caught that wild child of a boy doing that week.
“So Levee gets a new one for me,” William said. And it was still refreshing to me how when he spoke of Levee now, it wasn’t with the thinly veiled hatred it used to be.
A lot of that hate, it turned out, stemmed from some ridiculous idea that Levee’s dad had stolen a very valuable baseball card from William and his father. Which, to their mind, meant that their whole lives were stunted because they couldn’t sell it and move up in life.
The thing was, though, when we’d been cleaning out William’s apartment to move into the guest house on our new property, we’d found the stupid card sitting against the wall behind the console table that didn’t seem like it had been moved in fifty years.
In the end, the dog poker picture in his living room had been worth more than the baseball card. But William had surprised both me and Levee by using his windfall to work on himself. Going to orthopedic doctors, physical therapy, and back specialists. Until, eventually, he got his pain cut down to just occasional flares when he’d overdone it.
That was when he’d gone from the electric wheelchair to the motorized scooter, saying it gave him more freedom to go out and shop, thanks to the baskets on it.
It was amazing what a lack of pain, a change in environment, and some independence could do for a grumpy old man’s demeanor.
Sure, he still teased Levee. But it was in that way that older generations did. Not meant to be malicious.
And, incredibly, William had been a pretty good grand uncle to our kids. No, he was never going to be babysitting them for us. Because the stubborn old guy would still occasionally say things that I—and society at large—would find inappropriate, if not outright offensive, and it was important to me that either Levee or I were around to explain to the kids why it was wrong.
But, still, he wasn’t mean and snapping at them. If anything, he was the one reminding me to let the kids be kids, to stop being a helicopter. To let them learn for themselves that bugs taste nasty and the laws of physics did, in fact, apply to them, no matter how much they wanted to believe they could fly.
“That one is you, just shrunk,” William said, nodding his chin toward our second child. A pretty little dark-haired girl in a rainbow dress, just standing there staring at the swarm of butterflies on the milkweed I’d planted a few years before.
“Thank you,” I said, because I knew it was a compliment. And I had to admit that our little girl was an artistic, empathetic, soft soul. Though I did think that came from both Levee and I, not just me.