Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
“ M om?” Kelli turned at the sound of her son’s voice, which had been changing a lot in the past several months.
“Hey,” she said as brightly as she could. She’d just gotten out of the shower and gotten dressed after the pool party, and Parker still wore his swim trunks. “What’s up?”
He came into the suite where she and Daphne slept, and he glanced around. “Your room is huge,” he said with a smile.
“I told you it was.” She nodded toward the couch in the sitting area. “You could totally sleep there if the bunk room is bothering you.”
“No, it’s fine,” he said as he came toward her.
Kelli had put Daphne down for her afternoon nap, and she expected her to sleep for quite a long time after all the fun they’d had in the pool. She sank onto the bed and propped up all of her pillows to sit up against them.
Parker surprised her by doing what he’d done as a little boy—climbing onto the bed and over to her. She brought him right into her side, tears almost coming to her eyes at this sweet moment that she had lost. She hadn’t even realized it until now.
“You tired?” she asked.
“A little,” he said. “The bathrooms are all being used.”
“You can shower here,” she said.
“Maybe I will.” But he didn’t get up to get his clothes or to get in the shower.
Kelli wasn’t sure what she should say. Parker would be fifteen come spring, and Kelli honestly felt like she was simply muddling through every day the best way she knew how—which wasn’t at all.
“Are you guys going to put a movie on this afternoon?” she asked, because the silence made her uncomfortable somehow.
“I think so,” he said. “Not sure what.”
“Well, no horror, okay?”
“Liam and Billie don’t like horror,” Parker said. “So we won’t watch anything too scary.”
“Good,” Kelli said.
He lifted his phone in front of his face, started looking at something. Kelli told herself over and over that she didn’t need to ask him another question, that they could just sit together. It quickly became one of the harder things that she’d ever had to do, and she really wished there were as many books on raising teens as there were on raising babies.
At the very least, infants couldn’t roll their eyes and scoff and make her feel two inches tall and dumber than a post. Yes, teenagers had a real knack for such things.
“Ian says the bathroom upstairs is free,” Parker said a few minutes later. “Think I’m gonna go shower up there.”
“All right,” she said as brightly as she could.
He scooted to the edge of the bed and turned back to her, catching her watching him. “There’s only two days of school next week, and I don’t think any of the others are going,” he said. “Could I maybe stay here too?”
“Oh,” she said. “I hadn’t heard that.”
Well, she knew there were only two days of school next week before the Christmas holidays, but she hadn’t heard that Billie, Jamie, Grace, and Ian would not be attending. Parker didn’t get the greatest grades in the world, but he wasn’t a bad student either, and he never got in trouble at school.
Kelli and Daphne had been staying at the manor, while Shad had been getting Parker to school and then going to work on Diamond Island. Her husband still had to work this week, but that didn’t mean Parker had to go to school.
“Do you have enough clothes?” she asked.
He blinked, as if clean clothes were the last thing on his mind.
Kelli smiled. “I suppose this place has a laundry room, and we can wash anything you need.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“All right,” she said. “Let me talk to Eloise and see what’s going on. If no one else is going, you can stay here too.”
His face lit up with a smile, making him the most handsome boy in the world. Kelli’s motherly heartstrings chimed at her as he turned and said, “Thanks, Mom.” He came around the bed and hugged her, and Kelli wanted to freeze time in that moment forever.
“If you don’t like the movie?—”
“I know,” Parker said, a hint of that frustration coming into his voice. “I can leave, I can say you need me, I know what to do.”
“Okay,” she said. “Well, I think I’m going to stay here and take a nap with Daphne.” She smiled at her son, glad that he seemed happy to be here. As far as she knew, he didn’t spend a bunch of time at school with Grace or Jamie. Billie and Liam were older than him, and truth be told, Jamie was a grade ahead of him as well.
He left the suite, and as the click of the door signaled its closing, Kelli murmured, “He could be a lot more unpleasant than he is.”
She tried to sleep for fifteen or twenty minutes, and when her nap didn’t take, Kelli got up and checked on her baby girl in the portable crib. Daphne snoozed like the dead, and Kelli eased out of the suite. She went downstairs to the living room, where plenty of activity was still happening.
Julia slid a tray of crispy rice cereal treats onto the dining room table in the kitchen. It already held half-eaten bags of potato chips, leftover cinnamon rolls from that morning, and an assortment of bagged candy. Through the windows, Kelli could see several people still at the pool, mostly adults, as the kids had decided they wanted to come in, shower, and watch a movie in the theater room.
“I’ve got a batch of peanut butter chocolate chip coming up,” Julia said.
Kelli smiled at her. “These look great,” she said. “I’m kind of a crispy treat purist.”
Julia laughed as she went back into the kitchen to make another pan of sticky treats.
Maddy sat at the bar with Tessa, and they talked about something going on at the library. Kelli’s first inclination was to go out to the pool. Her childhood friends still lingered out there—Alice, Kristen, AJ, and Robin. She wasn’t sure where Eloise had gone, but she knew AJ and Jean had taken their kids inside, cleaned them up, and put them down for naps too.
Kelli told herself that she enjoyed meeting new people and getting to know them, and just because she had a baby didn’t mean she couldn’t converse with people who didn’t.
So she found herself migrating over to the island where Maddy and Tessa sat.
“Hey,” she said. “Is this seat open?”
She slid onto it as Maddy grinned at her and said, “Absolutely.”
Tessa now sat in the middle, and instead of turning toward Maddy and boxing Kelli out, she sat straight so that Kelli could participate in the conversation too.
“We were just talking about a new library program I’m hoping to start next summer,” Tessa said.
Kelli smiled at her. “That’s great,” she said. “If you have flyers and things, let me know. I can put them at Whole Soul.”
“Oh, I’d love that,” Tessa said. “Thank you.”
Her phone chimed, and all three of them looked at it.
“It’s probably Dave,” Julia said in almost a singsong voice.
Tessa slapped her palm over the phone, but Kelli had already seen that it totally was Dave.
“It is,” Maddy said.
“Stop it,” Tessa said, her voice somewhat cross.
“What’s going on with you and Dave?” Kelli asked, and that brought every eye to her. “You don’t have to tell me,” she added quickly. “I mean, I get it. It’s none of my business.”
“Of course, it’s your business,” Maddy said. “Tessa’s just dragging her feet a little bit.”
Kelli looked at Tessa, into her deep, dark eyes, and she found a soul sister. Tessa didn’t jump into things with both feet the way some other people did. Kelli never had either.
“It’s okay to drag your feet a little bit,” she said.
“We’ve only been dating a few months,” Tessa said. “As I’ve told Julia and Maddy many times .”
“Is it serious?” Kelli asked.
“He wants it to be,” Maddy said.
“And you’re unsure,” Kelli filled in for Tessa.
“I’m not unsure , exactly,” Tessa said. “I just—he runs a very busy business on Diamond Island. It’s not like we see each other every day. And I don’t know…” She rolled one shoulder and then stretched her neck forward and then back. “I feel like we’re still getting to know each other.”
She didn’t say what Dave had done to try to advance their relationship, and Kelli certainly wasn’t going to ask. Robin might, and obviously Maddy and Julia had, but Kelli simply patted Tessa’s hand that covered the phone.
“At least he’s employed, right?”
A beat of silence followed, and then all of them started to laugh, including Kelli. After the fight with AJ, the tension in the house, and all of the flickering lights, then the problems in the tension-filled night, where none of them were sure if the power would come on, stay off, or cause the whole manor to burn to the ground, laughing was such a welcome release.
“He’s employed,” Tessa said through her giggles. “And he’s not like my last boyfriend, who wouldn’t leave his business behind. He does. He takes time off. He sees me when he can.”
“And if you were living together,” Maddy said. “You’d see him even more.”
Tessa threw her a sharp look. “Not all of us live together before we get married, Maddy.”
“She’s just saying,” Julia said as she came over to the counter and poured a massive amount of crispy rice cereal into a big bowl of melted marshmallows and peanut butter. “That Ryan likes him, and your son’s opinion means a lot to you. You guys had a great Thanksgiving together, and I can see why Dave wants to take it to the next level.”
“Yeah, and he’s losing his apartment,” Tessa said. “Let’s not forget that.”
Kelli simply let them bicker back and forth because she could see Tessa’s side as well. Maybe Dave did want to move in with Tessa simply because it was convenient, and he was losing his lease at his condo.
“I just don’t want to feel like I’m being used,” Tessa said. “I’m not his landlord. I’m his girlfriend.”
“And you have a really great beach bungalow,” Julia said. “Even I’m jealous of it. I would love to move in with you if I could.”
They laughed again, and Kelli turned her attention to Julia as she stirred and stirred to get everything coated. “What about you and Liam? Are there wedding bells in the future for you?”
Julia answered by pouring out the now-coated cereal into a pan. “I can admit we’ve started talking about marriage.” She reached for the bag of chocolate chips and sprinkled them on top.
Maddy gasped. “You have not told us that, Julia.”
Julia grinned at them. “Maybe we just started talking about it this week.” She gave Maddy a pointed look. “And I don’t have to tell you everything the moment it happens.”
“She’s not wrong about that,” Tessa muttered.
Maddy scoffed, her blue eyes wide as she looked over to Tessa and then back to Julia. “I don’t make you guys tell me things the moment they happen,” she said. She glanced over her shoulder toward the sliding glass door, then looked back at her friends. “I’m not like some of the other ladies here. Love them, but…I don’t do that.”
Kelli enjoyed sitting there with them. They reminded her a lot of the relationships she had with Alice, Robin, Eloise, and AJ.
“Ooh, marshmallow treats,” AJ said as if summoned by Kelli’s thoughts. She took the last barstool at the island and gave Kelli a side hug. “No nap for you either, huh?”
“Not today,” Kelli said. “But Daphne was out like a light.”
AJ grinned and took the super-soft peanut butter chocolate chip crispy treat Julia extended toward her. “Thanks.”
She took a bite and then looked around. “I interrupted something, didn’t I?”
“No,” Kelli said in a bright voice. “I’ll sum it up for you: Dave wants to be serious with Tessa by moving in together. She’s not sure about it, doesn’t want to feel used, like her beach bungalow is just a rental for her boyfriend because it’s convenient for him. Julia and Tessa think Maddy sometimes wants them to tell her things too soon.”
“Which is totally not true,” Maddy grumbled.
“And Julia and Liam just barely started talking about getting married this past week.”
AJ pulled in a breath. “Wow,” she said, her wide-eyed gaze landing on Julia. “Just…wow.”
“What does that mean?” Julia asked.. “Is there something about Liam I need to know?”
“No,” AJ shook her head. “No, no, absolutely not.” She looked over to Kelli. “I mean, unless maybe we should tell her about that time he snuck into the school and spraypainted the bulldog…”
Kelli burst out laughing—actually tipped her head back and laughed and laughed and laughed. AJ joined her, but none of the other women did, as they hadn’t grown up in Five Island Cove the way AJ and Kelli had.
“Well, now I’ve got to hear it,” Julia said.
AJ nodded. “You totally do. This is a classic Liam story.”
“Who’s telling Liam stories?” Aaron asked as he came in. He glanced around at all the women and picked up a bag of chips. “You know what? I’m just gonna let this one slide.” He grinned at them all and went right back outside, though he probably had plenty of Liam-stories about the man, as Liam worked on the police force with Aaron.
That caused them all to laugh again, and then Kelli said, “Okay, but for real, Liam was a little bit of a prankster in high school…”