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A few moments later, the front door closed behind her.
Dad smiled into his mug. “Well, that was nice and domestic.”
I twitched my shoulders. “With our schedules, breakfast is usually when we manage to see each other.”
“Do you have good reason to worry about her tonight? Is something going on?”
“No. Not for a while.” Our nuisance arsonist had been quiet this week, leading some in the department to speculate that they’d left the island. I wasn’t so sure. “I just don’t like it when she closes. Last time that happened, Troy Lincoln got pushy with her. If I hadn’t been there…” If I hadn’t been there, stepping in and playing boyfriend, I likely wouldn’t be here with her as her actual boyfriend now. But that wasn’t why I intended to be there tonight. As she’d said, Ed would be there. But… “I’d just rather be safe than sorry.”
“Fair enough. So, water heater replacement today?”
“Among other things. I appreciate you coming over to help. I haven’t gotten as far on renovations as I’d intended.”
“New relationships tend to suck up a lot of free time. But I’ll warn you, your mama isn’t gonna be put off too much longer. It’s taken Drew and me both to keep her from just coming over here to check the place out.”
“I appreciate that, too. I just wanted to get it in better shape before she saw it, so she didn’t worry I took on too much.”
“Oh, she’ll worry about that no matter what.”
“I had to shift my list around some. I originally expected to be knocking out walls first.”
Dad went brows-up. “Oh?”
“I wasn’t going to leave it a duplex. But then Caroline needed a place and…” I shrugged. “Here we are.”
“It’s a good thing you’ve done there, son. Above and beyond dating her. Giving all of them a place to go to get the hell out of that house and away from Hector.”
“How’s he been since then?” There’d been nothing from him since that one tantrum at the tavern. Rios and his friends had backed off a bit, at least from watching Caroline. The fact that she was usually with me when she wasn’t at work had a lot to do with that.
“More irritable than usual. But still showing up and doing the job, so Ace has no reason to get rid of him. A good personality isn’t required to be a good mechanic, and he doesn’t deal directly with the public.”
“I expect he’s now having to do a lot for himself that Caroline and her siblings used to handle.”
“Probably.”
“He said anything to you about us?”
Dad shook his head. “Nah. We have a policy of just not talking unless we have to. Mostly, we don’t have to. He keeps to his jobs; I keep to mine. I’m sure he has opinions, but he hasn’t shared them with me.”
Maybe he truly had recognized the futility of trying to control his adult children. If he wanted to be all bitter about it, that was his choice, and I couldn’t give a shit. Just so long as he continued to steer clear of Caroline and her siblings. That would be one less worry.
“You ready to do this thing?”
He tipped back the last of his coffee. “Let’s do it.”
After verifying that Rios and Gabi were already gone for the day, I shut off the water and electricity to the house and turned on all the faucets to run out the contents of the water heater. Then I attached a hose to the base of the heater and ran it all the way out the back door. While the last of the water drained, Dad and I worked on hauling in the new one I’d picked up at the hardware store yesterday.
As we unhooked the wiring and plumbing connections, I glanced over at my dad, who’d been happily married for nearly thirty years. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“How did you know Mom was the one?”
His wrench didn’t falter, though his gaze flicked up to mine. “Well, we’d been dating for maybe three months at the time. It was late spring, and I’d stopped by to pick her up for a date. I was early.”
So that was clearly a lifelong habit of his.
“She wasn’t quite ready yet. Said she needed to pull the laundry in before we left. I followed her outside. The sun was shining down through the trees, and it hit her hair just so while I watched her gather all these sheets that were billowing in the breeze, putting them into a basket. That moment just struck me right in the chest, and all I could think was, ‘Yeah, I want this for the rest of my life.’”
