Chapter Ten #2
“No, I didn’t do anything, honey,” I said and turned the car down a gravelly road like the little red arrow on my phone told me to. “Adriana used interrogation as a figure of speech, just to say that her mom is eager to get to know me and ask me lots of questions about myself.”
“Oh. Gotcha.” She made a quiet repetitive popping sound with her lips, clearly still mulling over my words. After a few moments, she said, “Figure of speech jar.”
“What the flip is that?” Addie asked, having learned her lesson—and having lost close to thirty bucks to Skye’s pet iguana fund. Thankfully those things required so much care equipment, it would take a lot of f-bombs and a few more years to cover the cost.
“Whenever you say something that you don’t mean, you put a dollar in the figure of speech jar. FOS jar if you will.”
“Are you just trying to scam me out of my goddamn hard-earned money?” Adriana turned in her seat to look at Skye, who erupted in giggles.
“Swear jar,” she gasped through her laughter.
“Oh my god,” Adriana groaned in a melodramatic tone but pulled her wallet out. She held a bill up in the air between two fingers. “Do you have change for a five?”
“No,” Skye scoffed.
“Fine, this will tide me over the whole afternoon.” Addie cleared her throat. “Shit, shit, shit, shit.”
Skye’s laughter screeched through the car as she snatched the money from Adriana’s hand.
Part of me wondered if I should intervene before the swearing got out of hand, but the more dominant part reached for the phone on my dashboard and pressed record on a voice memo.
A few more shits and one very loud Buttface!
turned the car into a cacophony of profanity and laughter.
And when Addie whipped out Holy Schnitzel, By Merlin’s Beard, and Cowabunga, Dude, Skye was reduced to a wheezing, sniffling mess.
I’d never heard her laugh like that. It immediately made me hate our afternoon plans because I would have gladly spent a few more hours driving down country roads, window rolled down, sun on my skin, listening to the two of them cuss each other out.
Even if it meant the pet iguana was inching closer by the minute.
Instead, I parked the car in front of a beautiful old farmhouse in need of a little TLC. It had dark blue window shutters and the perfect wraparound porch. It was a little dated, but close to what I envisioned for myself and Skye. Large with a little country charm, and lots of greenery around.
Skye spotted the horse stables just behind the farmhouse and was out of her seat and running off without a second thought, leaving the car door ajar. How that girl had survived twelve years in the city, I had no idea.
“Any last advice?” I asked.
“Uhm…don’t bring up their parents?”
“Parents?”
“It’s a whole thing.” Addie shrugged.
“Got it.”
“Wait, what about your parents? I should know that.”
“Rose and Benjamin. Florida retirement community. Happily married for forty-five years. Bowling on Tuesdays and dance nights on Fridays. My dad’s seventy years old and still gets up early every day to go surfing.”
“Damn. Good for him.” She raised her hand in a small wave. Her friend had stepped onto the porch. She was slender with dark shoulder-length hair and tawny olive skin, and I recognized her from the saloon, and from the day Addie and Skye had taken pictures with her in costume.
“Do you keep in touch with your parents?” Addie asked, still on topic.
“Yeah, I call them every week. Skye gets on the call, too. We see each other a few times a year for birthdays or holidays. We’re going to go see them for Thanksgiving this year.”
“Okay. My family has brunch every Sunday, my mom, her husband, Duncan, and Renee.”
“Renee? The park director?”
“Also my godmother.”
“Good to know.” I popped the car door open before it started to look weird that we weren’t coming out. “Come on. We’ll be fine.”
“Knock on wood.”
Esra greeted both of us with hugs and big smiles.
“It’s so nice to officially meet you. Noah’s around back turning the grill into a science project.
You can’t just set a fire and put meat on it.
I mean, I’m pretty sure that’s how cavemen survived, but evolution isn’t good enough for him.
” She mocked her boyfriend but based on her free laughter, it seemed to be all in good humor.
“Don’t get between a man and his grill.” Addie grinned. “Can’t cook for shit but you call it a barbecue and suddenly they’re Michelin chefs.”
“To be fair, he usually does the cooking, too,” Esra said as she led us around the side of the house.
“Where’s Skye?” For a brief moment it surprised me that she knew my daughter’s name without having been formally introduced, but of course she did.
If not from the Annie Lou character pictures, she would have heard about the girl turning Bravetown into her own personal playground.
“She saw the stables and took off,” I said.
“Oh, there’s no horses yet.”
As if on cue, Skye came sulking our way, arms crossed in front of her chest. She quickly forgot that attitude when she spotted Esra, and recognition flickered across her face. “I know you.”
“Esra, this is Skye,” Addie said. “Skye, that’s my best friend, Esra. She was just telling us how there are no horses yet.”
“So you’re getting horses?” She perked up, her usual shyness around strangers quickly evaporating, whether it was because of the prospective horses or the fact that she knew Esra as Annie Lou.
“Yep, in fact, my boyfriend, Noah, already has three. They still live in the Bravetown stables until we get all the repairs on this place done.”
“Can you teach me how to ride when it’s done?” Skye asked, absolutely no qualms about imposing herself on anyone.
“I can’t—but Noah probably can,” Esra replied and gestured for us to take seats around a weathered picnic table that was decked out in mismatched plates and cutlery, with salads and vegetable sticks and dips covering almost every inch of surface.
“I can do what?” Noah shut the lid on the charcoal grill a few feet away and came over, holding barbecue tongs in one hand and curling the other around the curve of his girlfriend’s shoulder.
My daughter’s big blue eyes went even bigger at the sight of the young man.
Esra may have played Bravetown’s damsel in distress, but Noah played Ace Ryder, the notorious bank robber and star of the stunt show.
He seemed a little older than the girls, but probably still about a decade younger than me.
“You can teach Skye how to ride a horse when the ranch is up and running,” Esra said.
“One hundred percent, but I can also teach you at the park if you don’t want to wait that long.”
Skye nodded eagerly.
“Sorry to interrupt.” Addie opened up her enormous leather tote and handed me a Tupperware box. “Put these on for Skye?”
I’d asked her if she knew the best place to buy veggie barbecue alternatives—since Wild Fields only had two tiny supermarkets—and she’d told me to leave it to her, she’d find something. I hadn’t expected that something to be homemade. She was spoiling us.
I followed Noah to the grill and carefully placed the vegetable patties a few inches away from the meats. Skye had been vegetarian for as long as I’d known her. Apparently, she’d figured out the animal-meat correlation as a little kid and had since adjusted her diet.
“So you’re planning for this to be a working ranch again?” I asked, glancing up at the fixed-up roof and the large skylight he’d installed there.
“Therapy ranch. Esra and her brother are working with me on this.” Noah nodded and flipped the burgers. “Horses are great for all kinds of therapy.”
“I’ve looked into it before actually.”
“For your daughter?” Noah asked without preamble.
“Yeah.” The ease of talking openly like that was novel, but I welcomed it.
People usually tiptoed around me and Skye, too worried about offending the great Brooks Monroe if they said the wrong thing.
“I wanted to get Skye some exercise away from her tablet, but most sports teams are too loud and fast for her. But the ranches I found were mostly in-patient.”
“Well, this place won’t be up and running for another two or three years, and me and my horse are still a good six months away from being officially certified for therapy, but my offer stands. Happy to give her riding lessons.”
“Thank you. I’ll take you up on that.”
“I can do evenings, after the show at the park is done.”
“Sounds good. I’ll talk it through with Skye.
” I glanced over at the girls, who were busy turning plates and vegetables into portraits.
If I’d suggested that, I would have earned myself a Da-ad.
But with Adriana and Esra, Skye was giggling and cutting tomato slices into shapes for lips.
She had her school friends online, but it was nice to see her have fun in person, with other people.
This place was good for her. I couldn’t wait for her to have a proper home here, too.
“You said three years? Are you fixing the house up yourself?”
“Mostly.” Noah hooked the tongs onto the grill, to point up at the house. “Had someone come and do the roof, but I turned the attic into a bedroom. Sanded down the floors, stained and waxed them, put up drywall. All that.”
“Teach yourself?”
“Honestly, a mix of YouTube tutorials and Elliot at the hardware store talking me through it step-by-step and telling me what to buy. Some trial and error. I’ll get someone to fix some pipes and the heating before winter, and hire experts to make the place accessible.
We’ll get someone in to fit the downstairs bathroom for wheelchairs, get ramps, that sort of thing. After that, it’s mostly cosmetics.”
“Have you thought about a sensory room?”
“We’d have the perfect space for it in the basement, but we’d have to add an emergency exit, so we need to get the building’s foundations assessed first.”