Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
“That tracks,” he noted.
“And, well, she was done with being freaked and about to buy a ticket out here to hunt me down to make sure I was okay. I talked her down from that. Though, she’s planning to come out soon.”
“That’ll be good, right?” he asked.
“Yeah, I just…” she let that trail.
“You just what?”
“Well, first, I have some probably punk kids who are playing tricks on me. Second, I live in a famous haunted cabin. But most of all, she didn’t want me to come out here because being out here was being out from under her watchful eye. However, I told her I needed space to get my head together about all that went down, and I haven’t really set to work on that,” she admitted.
“This is your best girl?” he asked.
She nodded.
“So she’ll get it, yeah?”
Her white teeth came out to bite the side of her lower lip, and he could feel that bite all over his flesh, so he stopped looking at her mouth and switched to her eyes.
They were so stunning, it wasn’t a whole lot safer, but it was safer.
“Yeah,” she finally said.
“So, you okay now?”
She nodded.
“Right, then let’s go in and finish dinner so we can eat cake.”
That made her smile, and it might not have been as carefree as the earlier ones, but it wasn’t weighed down like all the ones he’d had before.
So he’d take it.
THIRTEEN
Doesn’t Add Up
Riggs
Riggs sat in his couch, sipping a beer and watching Nadia and Ledger on their knees on the floor on opposite sides of the coffee table.
They were playing some card game Nadia taught his boy where you tossed cards one on top of the other and smacked any duplicates. If your hand got there first, you got the whole pile. But if one or the other threw down a jack, then you laid down a line of three cards, and the winner of the entire pile was the highest end card.
Ledger was competitive, and to an untrained eye, Nadia was too.
But Riggs was good at ferreting out a tell, so he caught her occasional brief hesitations that allowed Ledger to clap his hand on the cards before she got there.
This meant the three decks Riggs had dug out so they could play were mostly in his son’s hand.
They both laid down the final turn of four cards, which was all Nadia had left, before Ledger threw up his hands and shouted, “I win! Again!”
Nadia collapsed onto a hip and reached for her beer, muttering a fake gripe of, “Lightning Quick Ledger, fastest hand in the West,” before she threw back a drag.
“You said it,” Ledger crowed, shuffling the cards in his hands and asking, “Go again?”
“Buddy,” Riggs said low.
It was late. He had school in the morning.
His kid looked at him and his shoulders slumped.
He hated seeing that just as much as he hated stopping the fun, for both of them.
And he didn’t have time to deeply contemplate that Angelica wasn’t the card-game-playing-with-her-son type of mom. She was the park-your-kid-in-front-of-the-television—either with a show on, or a game controller in their hand—so-she-could-do-her-own-thing type of mom.
Angelica loved her son, kept him fed and clothed, made sure he got his schoolwork done and didn’t miss a parent-teacher conference or a football or baseball game.
But that night, Nadia’s teacher came out, and Riggs knew it wasn’t fair to compare, because it was only one night, she didn’t have a job, loads of laundry to do or any shit like that, but she was all about conversation and engagement and keeping his son’s mind active at the same time subtly challenging it.
She’d be an excellent mother.
And that was something Riggs just wasn’t going to contemplate, deeply or otherwise.
“If you’re jazzed, you can read for a while,” he told his son quietly.
Nadia took her feet and made it easy, saying, “Great night, Ledger. I had fun, even though you trounced me three times. But thanks for having me over, and I demand a rematch on taco night.”
“Thanks for the cake,” Ledge replied on a victorious grin. “It was awesome. And you’re on because you’re easy to beat.”
She did a fake eye roll before she said, “My pleasure.”
Ledger moved to the stairs and Riggs called, “Be up in a sec, buddy.”
“’Kay, Dad.”
He looked to Nadia when she hooked a thumb to the door and asked, “Should I go? Or I can tackle the dishes while you guys sort that out.”
“You touch the dishes, I spank your ass.”
Her head jerked, and that look he sometimes caught in her eye, this one saying she wouldn’t mind that, he also wasn’t going to contemplate.
“And don’t go, unless you want to.” He indicated her nearly full beer with his head as he pushed out of the couch. “At least until you finish that.”
As answer, she lifted it and took a sip.