“And I’m Richard Davis.” He extended his hand. “Trey is our grandson, and Aspen is our granddaughter-in-law. And these beautiful little girls are our great-granddaughters.”
“Nice to meet you,” Kiersten said.
“We’re about to have a tea party with Grammy here.” Aspen gestured at the teapot and macarons the little girls had spread across the picnic blanket.
“As long as you help me up once I sit down,” Margaret said. “Getting up is harder than it looks when you’re eighty-one years old.”
“Of course, Grammy. You know we will.” Aspen turned to Kiersten with an adorable shrug. “Grammy issuper popularon the ’Gram.”
Kiersten blinked, suddenly feeling stupid. Was Aspen talking about Instagram? Or some entirely new form of Substack, Slack, Signal, Bluesky, WhatsApp, Discord, Snapchat, or Threads? Sometimes she wished people could go back to sending postcards and clipping articles from the newspaper, like her grandmother did. “Well, I don’t want to keep you from your tea party,” she said, manufacturing a smile.
“We’resuperglad you’re here,” Aspen said, radiating warmth. “And we’d love to get to know you and your boys. And your husband too. Come say hi when you get back. We’re always home. Stop by anytime.”
Kiersten nodded. “I’ll do that.”
“Nice to meet you,” Trey called out without looking up from his phone.
Kiersten gave a cheery goodbye wave as she retreated through the border of hydrangeas marking the property line.
She hauled herself into the driver’s seat of her minivan, and her smile evaporated when a rolled-up sock flew through the air and bounced off the back of her head. One of the boys had chucked it at Matthew, who as the oldest brother had claimed the right to sit in the front passenger seat.
She tossed the sock behind her as her mind replayed the conversation she’d just had with her new neighbors. She wasn’t entirely sure about Trey, the husband. He reminded her of Garrett’s boss, the secretary of agriculture, who she’d met at her one and only Washington cocktail party, a man who constantly scanned the room, looking for someone more important to talk with.
But Aspen and the old couple seemed lovely.
She cast an envious glance at her neighbor as she left the cul-de-sac and began her interminable rush hour journey toward the Mystic Hills baseball complex in Pennsylvania, where she would spend the weekend with hundreds of other baseball-obsessed parents and kids.
What would it be like, to drop out of everything? To be home all the time manifesting abundance in a cotton apron while your children played harmoniously in the backyard?
A Nerf bullet whizzed past her ear. She swore under her breath and yelled, “Knock. It. Off.”
She glanced in the rearview mirror. The back of the minivan looked like a homeless encampment. Each boy sat huddled under a blanket to block out the light, watching movies or, far more likely, inappropriate YouTube videos on their iPads.
When she looked away, one last Nerf bullet sailed toward the front of the car. She sighed. How many times had she told them not to fire weapons inside a moving vehicle?
Normally at this point, she’d stop the car and threaten to turn around and go homeright this instantif they didn’t stop.
But that only worked if her passengers actually wanted to reach their destination. If she threatened to turn the car around now, everyone would cheer.
Why was she always driving to places no one wanted to go?
Was Aspen Davis right? Could her family really travel a completely different road?
Chapter Nine
Piper
Late Saturday afternoon, Piper collapsed onto her sofa after surviving the second of six performances ofSpongeBob: The Musical.
She’d been a green room monitor for today’s matinee performance, and the sardines wouldnotstop talking. She’d aggressively blinked the lights in the classroom where everyone collected “backstage” between scenes, and tried to restore order.
Then a member of the sea anemone chorus lost one of her tap shoes right before the big number with Squidward. They found it in the prop bag about thirty seconds before she had to go onstage.
Piper had witnessed coups and international incidents that were less stressful than one afternoon as a children’s theater volunteer. She didn’t know how the directors and producers not only survived but rose to the occasion and volunteered to put on a new show again year after year.
She’d changed into sweatpants and settled onto the sofa with a cup of tea, preparing to enter the safe and peaceful world of theGreat British Baking Show. She personally did not enjoy baking, but she loved visiting a place where tragedy consisted of a Victoria sponge with a soggy bottom.
But it took her a full five minutes to find the show using their incredibly complicated television / remote control system. Was it onBritBox? Hulu? Or Netflix? And why did they have both Disney+andParamount+? And what exactly was Pluto? And Roku? Did they need that too?
