Seven
Sunday, the 20thof December
“Jacob,you can’t use that word!”
Ian had been on his way outside to get the map he’d left in his snowmobile’s storage bag after their short ride today, but his parental radar pinged and he veered toward the dining room. Judging by the tone of Maddie’s voice, the Scrabble game she’d texted him they were playing was going south, and he could hear laughter, so he knew his kids weren’t alone.
“It’s in the Scrabble dictionary,” Jacob argued. “And that P is on a triple letter score, so I’m not taking it back.
As he stepped into the room, Ian was running through all the horrifying words he could think of that had a P somewhere in them—there were a lot, actually—and praying his son wasn’t offending their hosts. But Rosie, Andy and Josh looked more amused than offended.
“Rosie, I’ve heard you’ve got a wicked way with a wooden spoon,” Ian said as he stepped up to the table, scanning for the word in question. “Feel free to give this one a whack if he gets out of line.”
“I’m an adult now,” Jacob reminded himagain. “Only I get to say who hits me with kitchen utensils.”
“Trust me,” Josh said. “You never outgrow getting whacked with that spoon. Just ask my brothers.”
Rosie snorted. “You’ve probably felt that spoon across your knuckles more than the rest combined.”
“I live here. That’s what you might call a statistical probability.”
Ian finally spotted the word that Maddie had called into question. “Penis, Jacob? Really?”
“It’s in the dictionary,” he mumbled.
“Don’t worry about it,” Rosie said. “It takes more than a little penis to offend me.”
Josh choked in an effort not to spit his coffee across the Scrabble board, and then they all laughed while watching Rosie’s forehead crinkle, as though she was replaying the sentence in her head.
Then she joined in the laughter. “I stand by it.”
“So how many points does your penis get you, Jacob?” Ian asked, and they laughed harder when his son blushed.
“I’m starting to get a little uncomfortable with the number of times the people in this room have said penis,” Jacob said.
Maddie smirked and took her turn, laying T, N and Y tiles perpendicular from the I in Jacob’s word. “Tiny.”
“You did that on purpose,” Jacob said, glaring at his sister while the rest of them snickered.
“Hey, I drew the tiles I drew.” Maddie gave her word total to Josh, who was keeping score, and then smiled at her brother. “I might have sacrificed a few points, though, in going for such atinyword.”
“Just don’t get out of hand,” Ian warned in his stern dad voice, earning him an eye roll from each of his kids.
“When the whole family goes camping, the women make cocktails and play a dirty-word version of Scrabble,” Josh said. “I’m told Rosie won last year, even though they won’t tell us what words she played, so you might want to be more worried about her offending your kids than the other way around.”
“I like it here,” Jacob declared. “We’re going to come back, right?”
The casually thrown out there question should have pleased Ian—obviously he wanted his kids to like the place he’d taken them for vacation—but it paralyzed him. He wanted to come back, of course. He wanted to come back every single weekend and hell, the weekdays too, for that matter.
But he knew Jacob wanted to come back next year—to make it an annual trip, even if it wasn’t for the holidays—and Ian tried to wrap his mind around what that would look like.
Not seeing Nola for an entire year and then walking through the front door to find her smiling at him? Then leaving her again? One week together every winter was certainly no way to live. And how would it feel to walk through the front door andnotfind her there smiling at him because she’d found a nice guy who didn’t live two states away?
He realized everybody was staring at him, probably wondering why he was refusing to agree he’d like to come back, and he chuckled to mask the pain his rampaging imagination had dragged up. “Sorry. I was trying to figure out how Maddie could make a word off that P. Of course we’ll come back.”
“Nola’s downstairs, doing laundry in the basement,” Rosie said, giving him a look that implied she had an idea of where his thoughts had gone.
“No, I’m done.” Nola spoke from behind him and Ian was afraid everybody in the room could see his reaction to hearing her voice.
