I reach for Benjamin to free her arms instead, wanting to tip her chin up so I can kiss her good morning. “What time did you wake up?”
“About an hour ago,” Autumn says, pouring more pancake batter into the pan. If I can figure out how to lock her down, I could wake up to a scene like this every morning and vice versa. I’d love to get the chance to cook for her and our children.
“How’d you sleep?” I ask.
“Not great,” she says with a shrug.
“Oh.” I glance away. She probably needed her sisters’ comfort more than she did mine. What was I thinking, dragging her into the sewing room? “Sorry.”
She tugs my pajama top to get my attention. “Because of my dad. Not because of you.”
“Oh,” I say again, my tone lifted. I slept fucking amazingly with her in my arms, despite the floor being hard beneath the pallet.
“Here,” she says, loading a paper plate with more pancakes and sliced fruit than I can eat, drizzling them with maple syrup. “For you and Benny to share.”
Impulsively, I lean in and peck her lips, making her breath hitch with surprise. I take the plate and settle on the living room carpet, beside Josephine and Sebastian. Leaning back against the couch, I arrange Benjamin to sit between my knees and hand him half a banana.
“Auntie LaLa says we can go see Grandpa today,” Ivy’s six-year-old little sister, Daphne, says, speaking of Shayla. As the biological children of Eden and Martin, Daphne and her twin, Amelia, don’t share blood with the Fischers—only Ivythrough Lainey, thus, through Shayla. But they’re still considered part of the family, with Sherman and Miranda being their honorary third set of grandparents.
“Can Josie come too?” Ivy and Lainey ask at the same time.
“We’ll have to run home to change, but yes, we can all go when your grandma says he’s ready for visitors,” I answer. “Just for a few minutes, though, since he needs his rest.”
My little girl says to her friends, “Yay! Can you come over first? We can make cards for Grandpa so he gets better real fast.”
Autumn, who’d been carrying her own plate over to join us, stops in her tracks. Our eyes meet as the girls discuss what they want to draw, deciding they’d rather make a poster and glue all their pictures to it with their names so they can hang it in Sherman’s hospital room.
“When did Josephine start calling Sherman ‘Grandpa’?” I ask Autumn under my breath when she lowers herself onto the carpet beside me.
Eden, who has been sitting on the couch while finishing her breakfast, leans forward. Dropping her voice, she says, “I overheard her and Brady talking. He said that since you two are probably getting married—his words, not mine—she has to call Sherman ‘Grandpa’ and Miranda ‘Grandma’, but told her that he doesn’t want her to call him ‘Uncle Brady’. She’s been teasing him and calling him ‘Uncle Brady’ ever since, which the rest think is hilarious.”
“Oh geez, this is bad,” Autumn says, and Eden gives her a sympathetic nod. “We’ll need to talk to her when we get home. I mean, you—you—need to talk to her when you get home.”
I’m helpless against the smile tugging up the corners of my lips. “You said ‘we’ first.”
Autumn stuffs half a pancake in her mouth, studiously lookingaway.
The separation feels wrong when Autumn and Brady bound away from my SUV and across the street when I pull into my driveway after breakfast. Josephine waves to her friends, who have just arrived at their home three doors down, and then races to shower and change before gathering her art supplies to lay them out on the kitchen table. She carefully tapes some of her sketchbook papers together to make a giant poster, then impatiently waits by the front door.
Autumn and Brady arrive first, freshly showered. It pleases me that Autumn didn’t bring my hoodie with her to return it. With so many kids between them to get ready, Shayla and Eden arrive with their broods much later, bearing leftovers from yesterday for an early lunch. After dozing on the couch, Autumn keeps flicking her gaze my way while the kids carefully draw “GET WELL SOON GRANDPA” in the center of the poster in big blocky letters with a rainbow of colorful markers. They take quite a while to arrange all of their pictures so the collage isjust rightbefore gluing them down, then practice their cursive lettering when writing their names.
“Did you have that talk with her?” Autumn asks me when I sit on the coffee table, facing her. I wait so long to answer that she frowns.
“No,” I say slowly. “I didn’t.”
“Why not?” she asks with the wrinkle of her nose.
I nod to the side, take her hand, and pull her down the hallway, past the closed nursery door, where Benjamin and Sebastian are taking a longer-than-usual nap. They hadn’t gotten much sleep last night. Inside my bedroom, I close and lock the door, then push Autumn’s back up against it.
I stroke her cheek with my thumb. “You know why, Angel.” I kiss her, tasting the mint on her tongue when she parts her lips for me.
But then she taps my chest and twists her head. “It’s going to hurt more the longer you let her go on calling him ‘Grandpa’. You need to stop her. Now.”
Pressing my finger to her chin, I turn her face back to mine and lean close. “No.”
“But he’s not?—”
I don’t want her to say it, so I crush her lips with mine. When she opens her mouth wider, deepening the kiss, I lift the hem of her sundress—a vibrant yellow version this time—then tug her lacy thong down until it falls to her ankles.
