“I like that family.”
My heart warmed at her words.“Yeah, kiddo.Me too.Me too.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Naomi
ItwasSaturdayevening,and like we did every May after the opening day of the tasting room, we celebrated with a big family pizza party.
We always invited the staff too, held it in the tasting room and on the patio, and cranked the tunes.
“So, Damon,” Tom asked, biting into a piece of vegetarian pesto pizza.“How was your day yesterday with Mabel?”
Everyone went quiet and turned to my nephew.His cheeks pinked up a little, but they faded just as quickly, and he shrugged and sipped from his can of flavored sparkling water.“Fine.”
“I’ve been so consumed with opening day that I totally forgot to ask yesterday,” Gabrielle said, swirling her index finger around the rim of her glass of rosé.“I did notice that you finished your schoolwork faster than normal.”
“She helped me with some math,” Damon murmured, tossing his head so his floppy, brown hair bobbed over his forehead.I really didn’t understand the current hairstyles of today’s teenage boys.I’d seen a meme a few months ago that depicted a male deer rummaging around in the dense low brush, only to pop his head up, and his antlers were full of leaves and twigs.It said that was what boys’ hairstyles currently resembled.It wasn’t wrong.
My son was guilty of it too; despite his numerous cowlicks, his hair was poker-straight.He didn’t get the volume, or curl and flip at the front the way Damon did.
“Then you went birdwatching?”Maverick asked, amusement dancing in his blue eyes.
Damon nodded.“Yeah.”
“Did you see many birds?”Danica asked.“Besides robins and sea gulls?”
“She says we did.”His nose wrinkled in a cute way, and he did another hair flip.“We were walking through the trees over there,” he pointed southeast to indicate the copse of madronas, alders, and oaks near the edge of the property just past my cottage, “and she stopped and studied something on a tree.Then she turned to me and asked if I ever just paused and marveled at the complexity of lichen.”
“Lichen?”Maverick asked with a serious upward inflection to his tone.
Damon nodded again, one eyebrow trying to escape his forehead.“Yeah.She went on to explain how it’s a phenomenon of nature.A symbiotic relationship between a fungus and algae, and that it can grow just millimeters a year.She pointed at a piece on the tree and asked me how old I thought it was.”
My cousins and I all exchanged looks and smirked.
“What did you say?”Jagger asked.“Now I’m invested.I need to know how old this lichen was.”
Raina swatted his chest playfully.
Damon gave us all a bit of a helpless look.“Well, I didn’t want to look like a total idiot.So I said that yeah, I do think about lichen, but maybe not as much as I should.And I guessed that the piece she was pointing at was maybe twenty years old.”
Tom, Maverick, and Jagger chuckled.
“Good answer, good answer,” Maverick said.“Non-committal, but not a lie.”He scratched his chin.“Maybe I should start thinking about lichen more.It is a pretty cool part of nature.”
Gabrielle rolled her eyes.
“But you also birdwatched?”I asked him.
He nodded.“Yeah.Shereallylikes birds.Knows the Latin names for every single one we saw.”
It was plain as day to see that despite how awkward I was sure their little outing together was, Damon was smitten with Mabel.He was impressed with her intelligence and passion for birds.I knew my nephew well enough to tell that he probably went home after they parted ways and Googled the heck out of lichen, and probably the birds they saw too.
“You’re not boyfriend and girlfriend, are you?”Maverick asked.
Damon shook his head.“She said we’re too young for that.”
Gabrielle smiled and also seemed relieved.
