I chuckled as I kicked the recliner down and stood up.
For sleeping in a recliner, my body was surprisingly cooperative.
My back and knees popped after I stood, though.
“You make a lot of noise when you stand,” Wendy mused. “Are your joints okay?”
I grinned. “Part of getting old, unfortunately.”
“I don’t ever want to get old then,” she said. “Now, tell me why you brought tacos and didn’t save me any.”
I chuckled. “I guess we could go out for some more. But imagine that it’d be easier to wait for lunch. I could go get some donuts…”
“I’m not super big on donuts right now,” she said. “But biscuits? Today I love biscuits.”
This kid…
“I like biscuits, too. But I have no clue how to make them.”
Her eyes gleamed. “Coco has a recipe.”
So that was how “Coco” found us, covered in flour, making a mess of her kitchen.
“Whoa.” Constance blinked as she came into the room to see the mess we’d made. “I sure hope that we get something delicious out of this mess.”
“Coco,” Wendy said. “We pulled out the cookbook. There’s no way this won’t be delicious.”
Her lips tipped up at the corners. “What’d you make?”
“Biscuits and gravy. I wanted gravy. Odin wanted biscuits and jelly. So we made it all, but we put it all separate because that would be gross if we combined it.”
She snorted out a laugh as she walked to the oven to peer inside. “Looks good. Are y’all about to broil them?”
“We are,” Wendy said. “We have thirty seconds left.”
Constance took over, finishing up on the biscuits while I tackled cleaning up.
By the time they were out and cool enough to eat, I had most of the cleaning taken care of.
“You’ll have to change your clothes for school, baby,” Constance told her daughter. “I don’t think the flour-covered overalls are going to fly.”
Wendy looked down at herself and frowned. “I think it’d probably be okay.”
She took the entire bowl of gravy and several biscuits to the table.
She shoved every biscuit she had into the bowl and shoved them down with a spoon.
I watched her for a long moment before I said, “Are you sure she’s five?”
She smiled. “She’s almost six.”
I looked over at her. “Really?”
“Yeah.” She smiled sadly. “And her dad, Mackey, was smart as hell. Genius level smart. Paired with my normal intelligence, she’s definitely had a leg up. Her speech has always impressed everyone. She can hold a conversation with an adult and be understood. Paired with her smarts at school, and she’s always been one step ahead in class.”
“How’s her math skills?” I asked. “Did they consider moving her up a grade?”
“Two.” She shrugged. “But I wouldn’t let them. For the first year here, and her first year in school in general, I wanted her to just be normal, so to speak. Coming into a brand-new school in a brand-new town is hard on anyone. Let alone skipping grades and going in with second graders instead of kindergarteners.”
