”What’s this?” she says, pointing to the preserved family height chart.
”It shows how other kids who used to live here have grown up over the years,” Keanna says. She runs her finger down the markings. “The rest of the room has been painted a few times, but they never covered up this trim. That is so cool.”
”You go like this,” I say, showing Harper how to stand with her back against the wall. “You stand very straight and then you would mark how tall you are.”
I measure her height with my hand and she steps away. I keep my hand on the wall. “Looks like you’re about as tall as someone named Lily was in nineteen ninety-three.”
She grins. I’m not sure she understands just how long ago that was, but she definitely feels how special this home is, with its traditions and love literally marked into the walls.
“I want to do it!” she says. “Daddy, do you have a marker?”
”No, but I’ll go get one.” I ruffle her hair.
Maybe I’ll take a picture of Harper’s first height marking on the wall and send it to Mr. McCartney at his retirement home.
I think he would like that.
Chapter 19
Keanna
The piercing loud wail of a smoke detector blares through the living room, making my ears cringe. Good. I press the test button to turn off the noise and then climb down from the step ladder. Even though our house inspector said the wiring in this house was safe, I had brand new smoke detectors installed in every single room. You’re supposed to test them every six months, but I waited three weeks, okay? That’s long enough to test them again when you’re as freaked out about house fires as I am.
Our new house is looking really good. We have furniture in all the rooms and our kitchen is slowly getting stocked up again. Every few days, it never fails that we’ll discover another household item that we haven’t bought yet. Yesterday it was duct tape. Today it’s aluminum foil. You get so used to all the stuff that’s in your house that it’s wild when you suddenly realize it’s not there anymore. But we’re getting there.
Home decor is the last area I’m working on in our house. I preferred to spend our money buying more clothing for all three of us since we only had a few outfits each. The weather is getting colder soon, and we all need winter coats and maybe even a matching set of Christmas pajamas.
My bosses (aka-my parents and in-laws) are fine with me taking a sort of leave of absence from work. I go in a couple times a week to process any paperwork or invoices that need updating, but mostly I’ve been here at the new house, making it into a home.
Morgan stops by sometimes on her lunch break to play with Harper and hang out. Today, I order us tacos for lunch and Morgan picks them up on her way over.
“Things are looking so great around here,” she says, admiring the new curtains in the living room. ”I loved your last house but this one is so cool. There’s so much character.”
”I know, right?” I stop taking tacos out of the bag to admire the place one more time. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. “I love everything about this house. Even that stupid spot of new drywall on my bedroom ceiling that I need to repaint.”
An Amazon delivery arrives and I rush to grab the boxes. The first one is the cute new frame I ordered that fits Harper’s drawing perfectly. I thought this would be a really fun way to showcase her art and keep the memory of that first time we drove by the house and saw that it matched her blue crayon house.
I press her drawing into the frame and slide the backing on. There are hammers and nails in the kitchen since we’ve done quite a lot of hammering into the walls lately. I find a perfect spot by the front door, and soon her framed drawing of our house has a permanent place on the wall.
I’m still waiting on a few more decor items from Amazon, so I open our laptop on the kitchen island, click on a new browsing tab and check on my orders. The speakers chime with the sound of a new email on another tab. I click over on habit only to realize it’s logged into Jett’s email.
The title of the email gets the best of me.
Invitation to race next weekend
I can’t help myself. I click it.
I read the whole thing.
It’s from another nonprofit organization that wants him to come to Florida to race for another charity race. They offer to pay all his expenses. This doesn’t seem to be associated with Team Loco though, which is fine because Jett’s not technically on that team anymore and he can choose to race anywhere.
I also can’t help it when my finger moves the mouse to the delete button. I click it. The email disappears.
He’ll never even know it existed.
”Mommy?”
I nearly jump out of my skin and slam the laptop closed. Harper stands there, holding the TV remote. “I can’t get TV to work.”
