My hand continues to stroke the wall. “Better doing this than thinking about tomorrow.”
Am I excited about leaving here and starting a new life at the college thatIchose? Yes, but that doesn’t make me any less nervous about the prospect.
“It’s off,” I say louder when I finally find the overlapping section.
“It’s not off. It’s fine.”
I shake my head, turning back to the wallpaper draped over the queen-sized bed to see if we have enough left to change out the panel completely. “I can't leave it. It's going to drive me insane every time I look at it.”
Olivia laughs as she places her hands on my shoulders and turns me around. “Stop. Look at it. It's beautiful.” She drops her head on my shoulder, and I swear I can hear her hum in contentment. Ever since Olivia hit her third trimester, she's been the calmest I've ever seen her. It's almost unsettling.
“I can’t. That stripe is off.”
“Well,that stripeis going behind the crib, so no one is going to see it.”
“But you know what I’m talking about. So you can see it.”
When she doesn’t answer, I turn and grab another roll.
“If I don't fix it now, when Baby Wilson becomes a teenager, he's going to see those stripes and roll his eyes.”
My Aunt Honey can't do anything right. All she had to do was follow a line and she couldn't even do that.
I shake my head, pushing away the negative self-talk.
With another roll half unwrapped, I turn, nearly bumping into Olivia. She doesn't flinch. she just licks her lips, trying to hide her smirk. “Wow, you really think our son is going to have an attitude with you when he's thirteen?”
I shrug. “He's your child. I'm sure he'll have no problem telling me how it is.”
She snorts, pulling me in for a hug and stopping me on my wallpaper warpath. “Thank you for doing this, Honey. It's perfect, and I don't want you to do anything else to fix it.”
Perfect?
“It's uneven,” I point out.
“That’s part of the charm. Not everything in life has to be perfect, you know?”
She nudges me on the side.
Maybe.
“You’ve done an amazing job. If I left Mike to do it, our son would be off to college before it was on the wall.”
“I heard that,” Mike says from his office down the hall.
Olivia and I exchange looks.
“But you're not denying it,” she says.
Silence.
Our grins grow.
“Right, my feet are done for the day, and so are yours. Take a seat,” she says, motioning to the end of the bed as she waddles over to the rocking chair her parents bought them. I'm seated on the mattress before she's managed to slowly ease herself into the chair.
When she finally sits down, she rolls her shoulders and leans back. “That’s so much better,” she says with a contented sigh.
I swallow, a soft sense of pride filling my chest. I’ve known her since preschool. She’s always been confident and quietly determined about what she wants, and now she’s about to step into one of the biggest changes of her life.
