Chapter 8 Now
Happy Alex is back, and I couldn’t be happier.
He’s whistling in the kitchen—translation: a good cooking day—and when I showed up at the house a half hour ago, he hugged me in his Alex way, smooshed against his chest, his hand cupping my neck; then he handed me a plate of bucatini carbonara that smelled phenomenal and somehow tasted even better.
Alex’s cheery whistle carries from the open kitchen window out to the backyard, where I’m hanging with Mia, sprawled on a lawn chair, my toes grazing cool pool water.
Mia floats on her back in her beloved inflatable pool, wearing an oversized pair of white sunglasses and her favorite yellow polka-dot swimsuit.
The air bubble she trapped inside her swimsuit at her belly looks the way mine feels, stuffed with Alex’s delicious pasta.
I sigh contentedly. Then I steal a final surreptitious lick of my now-clean plate.
“I saw that,” Mia says.
Not so surreptitious, then.
“Those celebrity sunglasses have to go,” I tell her. “I never know where you’re looking.”
Mia lifts two fingers and points them toward her eyes, then me. I laugh, which makes Mia laugh, too.
“I don’t always lick my plate,” I explain. “Just, you know, in private. When the food is fantastic. So basically I do it a lot at your house.”
Mia nods sagely. “Same. I always want to lick my lunch containers at school, on Dad days. But I don’t, because Mommy and Daddy said it’s not nice manners in public.” She sighs. “Such a waste.”
Another laugh jumps out of me. “I hear ya, kid.”
“So you liked it?” she asks.
I smile. “Loved it.”
“Dad!” Mia yells toward the kitchen. “Thea loves the bucatini!”
“Excellent!” Alex says from inside. “Because I do, too. Fucking finally,” he adds quietly, but not quietly enough for Mia to miss it.
She grins. Then she yells, “I heard that!”
I hear Alex’s groan through the kitchen window and watch his head drop back in defeat. He disappears out of sight, then a minute later walks out onto the back stoop and down the steps, three cake pops in hand. They’re Christmas colors—red and green icing, dusted with white sprinkles.
He hands us each one.
“Thank you,” we both tell him.
Alex sighs as he peers down at Mia. “I miss the days when I paid for my swears with a penny in a jar.”
“I don’t.” She gives her cake pop a lick.
He laughs. “That much is obvious.”
Mia says to me, “Give it a lick! Daddy and I made them!”
“You don’t have to lick it,” Alex tells me. “You can just bite into it like a normal person.”
“Who wants to be normal?” I lick my cake pop and smile up at Alex, squinting against the sun. “Mmm.”
Mia asks me, “What do you think?”
“I think,” I tell her, “this icing is superb.”
“That’s the part I made,” she says proudly. “What’s ‘superb’ mean?”
“It’s a synonym for excellent.”
She beams. “Got it! So like really good.”
“Exactly.”
“More words, Thea Thesaurus,” she says.
This is a game we play. I frown, pretending to think deeply. “Synonyms for superb, okay.” I tap my chin. “Horrendous. Atrocious.”
She shrieks. “No, Thea! Those aren’t cinnamons! They’re Entenmann’s!”
The day Mia stops calling synonyms “cinnamons” and antonyms “Entenmann’s” will devastate me.
Alex shakes his head. “Ted, come on. Much better examples would be substandard, inferior—”
“Daaad!” Mia hollers. “Noooo!”
“What?” he gives her exaggerated deer-in-the-headlights eyes.
Mia slaps her hand to her forehead.
I frown and scratch my head. “Okay, okay, I’ve got it now. Despicable. Dreadful—”
“Thea!” Mia yells, brandishing her cake pop like a sword. “For real life now. More cinnamons!”
“For real life,” I tell her, leaning in, elbows on my knees. “More synonyms for superb are: exquisite, outstanding, splendid.”
Mia licks her cake pop and smiles. “Thank you.” She turns toward Alex. “Daddy, lick your splendid cake pop, too!”
Alex lifts the cake pop, holding it up to the light, as if appraising it. He tips it side to side, brings it to his mouth, then bites off half of it.
Mia boos. I hiss.
Alex grins, then says around his mouthful, “So, how is Holidays in July Day treating you two?”
“Superb!” Mia says.
“Good,” he says to her. He bites into his cake pop again and turns toward me. “How about you, Ted?”
I lift my clean plate in one hand, cake pop in the other, and sigh. “As you can see, I’m having a terrible time. Lackluster meal. Horrendous dessert. Abysmal company.”
Mia nails me with a full icy stream from her water blaster.
I squeak. “Mia! I was just using antonyms again!”
She laughs around her cake pop, a golf ball tucked inside her cheek. “I know those were Entenmann’s,” she says. “I just wanted to get you anyway.”
“You did, did you?” I reach into the pool and tickle her toes. Mia shrieks and kicks her legs, dousing me with pool water. I’m three times as wet as I was before the water blaster.
“Very effective revenge tactic,” Alex muses.
I wipe water from my face. “It was actually quite refreshing.”
A soft laugh leaves him as he peers back at Mia, who’s lounging against the side of her little pool, hand patting her air bubble belly. She finally takes a small bite of her cake pop and says, “Wow. This is outstanding.”
“Mia approved,” I tell Alex.
He smiles at her, then turns my way. “And what’s your verdict, Ted?”
I bite into my cake pop, too. Pillow soft, sweet vanilla cake. Rich, buttery icing that’s only slightly, perfectly sweeter. An obscene moan leaks out of me.
“Thea approved, too!” Mia says.
Alex’s gaze dips to my mouth, then darts away. He clears his throat. “Great.” He turns toward Mia. “Think we should bring some to The Bookshop for the party tonight?”
Mia shoots her arms up into the air. “Yes!”
“Good. Because I made a sh—” He catches himself. “Shoot ton of these, also in Hanukkah and Kwanza colors, and they’re taking up my entire freezer right now.”
I poke his toe with mine. “Alex, I told you that you weren’t allowed to make them! Coming up with a mess-free dessert idea was help enough.”
“True.” He gently tugs a corkscrew curl of my hair, then steps back. “But I couldn’t say no when Fern reached out.”
“Ugh.” I scrub a hand across my forehead. “I get it. She’s impossible to say no to.”
“Actually,” he says, “she offered me a ridiculous amount of money to make them. While also reminding me of how much she’d invested in me leading up to my first cookbook’s launch.”
“So she guilt-tripped you. Great.”
“Nah. I only said yes because of the money. I found the guilt trip amusing, though. And I reminded her that the profit she’s made from my subsequent cookbook’s preorder campaigns, run exclusively through her store, have more than paid back her investment.”
I squeak. Just the thought of talking to my boss like that makes me feel like I’m about to throw up. “You didn’t.”
“I did. You know me, Ted. I have no problem saying no if I don’t want to do something.”
“Truth!” Mia yells.
“Okay, smarty-pants,” Alex says to her.
I sigh. “Well, I’m glad she paid you, but money or not, I’m still pi”—I stop myself, mindful of Mia—“perturbed that she bothered you in the first place.”
“Perturbed,” Mia says. She frowns. “That sounds like superb. But I don’t think it means superb.”
“Perturbed,” Alex tells her, “means annoyed.”
“Very annoyed,” I add.
Mia frowns thoughtfully. Then she turns toward me, sliding her sunglasses down her nose. “Why are you perturbed?”
“Because I asked someone not to do something and they did it anyway.”
Mia turns toward Alex. “Dad, when you make me go to bed at seven, I am perturbed.”
“Which,” Alex says, “leaves you well slept and well spoken. An all-around win.”
Mia rolls her eyes as she sticks the cake pop in her mouth and slides her sunglasses back up her nose.
I say to Alex, “I’m serious. I am perturbed. I told Fern you were on deadline for your next cookbook and didn’t need anything else on your plate.”
Alex has even more than a cookbook deadline on his plate, but that’s something he’s asked me to keep private, so I couldn’t tell Fern.
Had I told her everything—that Alex has been testing recipes both for his cookbook and a menu revamp at his restaurant, while gradually easing into cooking again at the restaurant after stepping back four years ago to prioritize his mental health and his family; that he’s not just juggling work-life balance in single-parenting and restaurant hours but also with the fear that he’ll be unable to maintain that balance—she probably would have listened to me.
I wish that my asking her to leave him be after he gave us the cake pop idea would have been reason enough.
Alex shrugs. “I can make cake pops in my sleep. It wasn’t a big deal. Plus, Mia had a blast dying the icing.”
I glare darkly at the cake pop. “I’m going to go throttle my boss.”
Alex tips his head. “Throttle, huh?”
“Well.” I wave the cake pop around. “Figuratively. And politely.”
Fern, The Bookshop’s owner, is the sweetest, gentlest woman on the planet on the surface, and beneath that a deeply stubborn, doggedly independent, set-in-her-ways business owner.
That, paired with my still-in-recovery people-pleasing tendencies, means pushing back, holding my ground, and telling it to her straight are Herculean challenges for me.
“You haven’t talked to her about your proposal yet, have you?” he asks.
I devote my attention to my cake pop, its sprinkles sparkling in the sun. “I’m still strategizing. These topics have to be approached tactfully.”
Alex scrapes the last bite of his cake pop off its stick into his mouth and sighs.
“I did bring up vacation days, though!” I tell him.
He leans in and takes my empty plate resting in the grass beside me.
I’m washed in his familiar spicy scent, riveted by his profile—strong nose, dark lashes, lush mouth parted.
He glances at me, and it’s even worse now, as I’m pinned by his piercing gaze, the striking contrast of his deep-blue eyes, his suntanned skin, his soft white tee and threadbare jeans draped over his hard, warm body.