Only once her car, still in the same spot where I’d left her, was nothing more than a speck in my rearview mirror, did I ease my foot off the accelerator.“You can sit up now.”
Mabel lifted her head and glanced at me.“It washer,wasn’t it?”
I nodded.“Yeah.”
Growling, my daughter glanced out her window.“I want to meet her.Deal with her.Tell her to leave me—leaveus—alone.”
“I’m handling it, honey.This isn’t your battle.”
She rounded on me.“No.It’s not.It’sourbattle.Because we’re a team.You’ve tried to reason with her.Now let me try.Maybe after meeting me, she’ll let it go.”
“And if she doesn’t?If she presses the issue?If she pushes to understand why we’re only thirteen years apart?”
“We’ll tackle that when it happens.But I want to try, Dad.”
“Do you want me to turn around?”
“No.I need time to come up with what I want to say.Tomorrow.She’ll be at the farmers market.Because it’s the first of the year, and everyone goes—that’s what Damon said.Everyone but their family, because they are opening the winery and tasting room.So let’s go there and find her.”
Pride filled my chest at just how damn strong my kid was.I nodded.“Okay.Tomorrow we’ll go find The Island Mouth.”
Determination coasted across her young features.“And hopefully shut it for good.”
“You’re sure you want to do this?”I asked Mabel, miraculously finding a parking space on the side of the road not too far from the market in the big open meadow across from the grocery store.
“Yes,” she said without any inflection.
“You hate crowds.”
“Yes.But I hate letting bad people win more.”She opened her door and hopped out.
I’d never questioned my daughter’s bravery before, but this was next level.
I climbed out from behind the steering wheel, checked for oncoming cars, and met her in front of the grill.The roadside was lined with vehicles and people, so much so that traffic had to slow down to a crawl just to make it through the now-single lane.
We carefully crossed the road, then dipped down into the dry ditch and back up the other side, following the throng into the circle of tents and booths that made up the market.
A few people waved at me, most of them kids from the school, and I gave them a friendly hello and wave back, making sure to address them by name to show them that I remembered them.
“Just use our code word if you need me to get us out of here,” I said to her quietly.
“Why is our code word ‘Spinosaurus’?”she asked, giving me some serious, annoyed teenage side-eye.
“Because it’s a word that we’ll probably never use in regular conversation.If we’d chosen something like ‘pineapple’ or ‘huckleberry jam,’ we could end up using those in conversation.”I snorted with amusement and elbowed her ribs playfully.
All she did was roll her eyes.
“Come on, kiddo.Let’s check out some … stuff.”
We wandered around the enormous space, which was full of people and vendors.A Caribbean band, complete with a steel drum, played in the center on a raised stage, but the music wasn’t so loud that you had to yell at each other to be heard.Various smells from some of the food vendors wafted toward us, making my belly rumble.Savory sausages, cinnamon buns, fries and gravy, and even though I couldn’t smell it, I zeroed in almost instantly on the snow cones.I was a sucker for a snow cone, always had been.
“That’s a lot of spoons,” Mabel murmured, deviating from our path to step closer to one of the vendor tables.
Yeah, that was a lot of spoons.
An older Indian man stood behind a table, his hands clasped at his back, and a small smile on his wrinkled face as he watched Mabel approach his table covered in hand-carved spoons.
“That’s a lot of spoons,” Mabel said again, directly to the man this time.
