Reed shook his head. “No! You’ll hurt Dad again!”
The lines in her face deepened. The empty beer bottle slipped from her hand. She closed her eyes. “I can’t do this anymore. Lord knows I’ve tried, but I can’t.” Her eyes clicked open then, and she reached out and cupped Reed’s cheek. The smile she gave him was the saddest thing he’d ever seen, like she was growing old before his eyes. And then she pulled Reed into her arms and held him there for the longest time before standing and disappearing down the hall. When she returned half an hour later, it was with a suitcase that she tugged straight through their battered screen door.
Reed never saw her again.
Chapter 10
BAILEY
I sit on the vinyl bench, feeling threadbare after four hours of sleep, staring at the storm of children swirling like a hurricane in front of me. Ocean Island. No ocean, though. And no island. Just thirty thousand square feet of children’s play equipment spreading out in front of me in a brilliant eyesore of neon green and stinging blue.
With a laugh, my son Noah peels from a nearby cluster of kids and races toward me. He slides to a stop a foot away and stands there, bouncing in place in front of my husband Ethan and me, electric with energy. His cheeks are tinged pink, the corners of his lips stained blue with remnants of the frosting from the cupcake he inhaled only minutes earlier.
“Mama, Mama! Luke said they have a ball pit! Can you believe it?”
“Come here,” I say, licking my thumb before dabbing his lips. “Look at you. You’re a mess.”
“Hey, stop it!” he protests as Ethan chuckles.
“Never!” I pull him tighter and tickle him. Noah wriggles and attempts to break free, giggling as my fingers dance over his ribs. I release him and he straightens with a smile, his eyes sparkling.
“You’re so silly, Mama.”
“You’ll never know how much I love you, Little Man,” I say.
He shakes his head firmly, his smile growing wider. “Nuh-uh, you’ll never know how much I love you!”
I tap his nose with my fingertip. “Nope, you’ll never know how much I loveyou.”
You’ll never know is a game we play, usually at bedtime, to see who can say it last before I slip from his room. Noah won’t go to sleep until I let him win.
He giggles and says, “Okay, I gotta go. Luke is waiting.”
“Oh, is he now?” I follow his gaze toward a massive tub of red, blue, and yellow balls. Kids leap from the edges with spirited shrieks. A girl with butter-yellow hair plunges down a curving slide and slides face first into the tub like it’s full of water. Noah’s cousin stands next to it, clad in a pair of denim overalls, frantically waving his hands at Noah like a mini aircraft marshaller. Luke is five years old as of today, one year older than Noah. I can’t help but smile.
“Can I go in the balls?” Noah asks.
“Of course you can go, buddy,” Ethan says, biting back a laugh. “You can do whatever you want in here. You don’t need our permission.”
Noah’s eyebrows climb a full inch, nearly disappearing beneath his straw-blond curls. “Weally?”
“Yes,weally,” Ethan says. “Go on. Have fun.”
With a cry of delight, Noah spins on his heel and races for Luke, weaving through the sea of children with reckless abandon.
“Anything he wants, huh?” I cock my head and study my husband. Freshly thirty, Ethan carries the look of someone five years his junior. He still has the round cheeks of a teenager and the same thick, acorn-colored bangs as when I originally met him, but his eyes are those of a man’s—slightly hooded with the beginnings of crow’s feet. Eyes that, when combined with his dimpled smile, illuminate his features like a sunrise. It was his smile that drew me to him in the firstplace, and I’ve never grown tired of seeing it since. Seven years married now, and I couldn’t love him more.
“You baby him too much, Bay,” he says. “We need to let him off the leash from time to time.”
“The last time we did, he wound up with a chipped tooth, remember?” I recall the incident, Ethan running next to Noah on his Strider balance bike one minute, guiding him by the back of the seat, letting go the next. Noah, wheeling for the curb in a lazy arc, looking my way with a shout, “Look at me, Mama!” before flipping over the handlebars and skidding across the cement face first. We were in the ER twenty minutes later.
Ethan smirks. “Okay, point taken. But nothing’s going to happen here.”
“Famous last words.”
He leans back and props his head against the wall, a dimple flashing as he watches Noah leap into the balls. “We did good, didn’t we?”
“So good,” I say, forgetting my exhaustion for a moment. Ethan’s right. Our son is perfect in every way—the best thing we’ve done by a mile. And I’m thankful when he points it out. Ethan lives every day with gratitude. It’s one of the things I love about him most. And he’s also a wonderful father. Ethan’s job as a part-time shift manager at Petey’s, the corner grocery store four blocks from our house, allows him to spend most of his time hanging out and playing with our son. Which, in turn, has allowed me to pursue my career. He’s the yin to my yang—my perfect match.
