“Parked out front. Didn’t wanna interrupt your flow.”
They took turns shooting for a few more minutes before Victor threw up the white flag in surrender, and they made their way to sit on the back porch steps. His bones creaked as they settled in next to each other.
Without words, together, they watched pink and lavender stripes float across the late morning horizon.
“What a pretty morning,” he remarked.
“Indeed.”
“How’s Claire?”
Rowan shifted to cross her arms over her knees and balanced her forehead against them. The outward display felt a little moody, brooding even. But she was feeling moody, brooding.
“She’s fine, I guess.”
“You guess?” He chuckled. “That’s it?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t really want to add anything else.
“I guess I never thought I’d see you bring someone home, here. That was new for me.”
She turned her face toward him, still resting her forehead on her arms, to look at his face.
“I didn’t mean for that to happen… like that.”
“I thought it was, well, I don’t know, chivalrous of you to sleep on the couch. Is chivalrous the right way to describe it?”
“That’s right, Dad,” she added, smiling softly at his subtle way of trying to understand who she was and letting her know it was okay. She was met by sincere and intense conviction in his eyes.
“I want to get it right.”
She leaned into his side and laid her head against his shoulder. She blinked hard to remove the sting from her eyes. “I know.”
She felt an arm wrap around her shoulders and had to blink again.
“You know, I am so proud of you, and the person you’ve become. I don’t know if I tell you that enough.”
“I don’t think I’ve given you enough of a chance. But I know you are. I love you, Dad.”
“Love you too, kiddo.”
He squeezed her shoulder. When she was sure she had fully blinked the sting from her eyes, she leaned back up and noticed a cluster of wildflowers sprouting up around the steps. Each flower had tufts of white petals sticking out from around a lemon gold center.
White aster.
Her mind shifted back to Juniper. She picked one and mindlessly twiddled it between her fingers.
“You have a lot on your mind?” He asked, interrupting her tunnel vision on the flower, and by extension, Juniper.
She sighed out a slight laugh. “It’s that easy to tell?”
“Well, I have known you for a long, long time.”
Sharing their emotions like this wasn’t typically their style. She wondered if it could be now. Occasionally she thought about what it would have been like to have a mom growing up, if she would have felt any differently about her identity orsought out a different kind of guidance. But she had only ever known life with her dad, and for the most part, that was all she had needed. He made sure of that. And Juniper’s mom had stepped up. That was a little complicated in her younger years when Juniper’s father was still around. In her teenage years though, she may have called her Auntie, but Anita was her mom too.
She turned back to look at him. “I actually think I have feelings for someone else.”
“For someone else?”
