“I don’t know,” Ulli said, with surprising honesty. “But it’s good when I can be a hero rescuing a brainless tourist trying to drown himself.”
I laughed, and he did too. We kind of harmonized in a weird way, which only made us laugh louder. I loved that sound. Until I heard it echoing in my nightmares.
CHAPTER 16
Baby Lessons
SAM
“Okay one more time,” Conrad said. “Big money!”
Archie pressed his dad’s watch. “Go!”
I shook out the handle, then flipped the toggle. I would have gotten the thing done in under seven seconds if something didn’t catch at the bottom.
“Damn it!” I exclaimed.
“You’re running out of time!” Archie yelled.
I bent over and released the bottom of the stroller, but it took me several tries, costing me precious seconds.
“You got it!” Conrad yelled. Finally I got it loose and the thing snapped back into place.
“Yeah, baby!” Archie exclaimed.
“Time!” I yelled, holding my hands in the air.
Archie pulled his dad’s wrist over and winced. “Oooh. Thirty-seven seconds.”
“Damn!” I exclaimed. Then I realized I’d been swearing in front of Conrad’s kid this whole time. “I mean, shoot galore.”
“Shoot ga-what?” Archie screwed up his face.
Conrad snorted.
“I don’t know any non-swears,” I confessed.
Archie folded his arms, looking more like the teenager he was growing into. “First of all, everyone swears at school. But when we can’t, there’s crap, dang, shucks, darn, fudge, fudge nuggets, fudge your mothe?—”
“O-kay,” Conrad said. “Let’s take a break.”
Now I was the one laughing.
It was a couple of weeks after the park date. I hadn’t seen Ellie much since then, since she’d started working on another big job, and was busy with some friend things on the weekend. The silver lining to this though was we started texting after Henry’s bedtime. It began with her sending photos of Henry to me at the end of the day—just our baby doing Henry things like eating blocks and grinning with his face covered in mushy bananas. Then I’d tell her a funny story about something that happened at work, like Brett’s dad falling asleep in the middle of a presentation delivered by a muffler manufacturer.
“It should be studied, honestly,” I told her. “It was quite literally the loudest presentation we’ve ever had.”
She’d sent laughing emojis to that and it felt so good I started giving her a daily update of the strangely hilarious things that went on atAutoScore.
Then we started talking about friend things, like what books we were reading or shows we’d been into lately. Things we’d talked about that first weekend but were catching up on now, like our conversation that night had never stopped, save the sexy stuff, which I had to fight myself not to think about.
Ellie was so easy to talk to that sometimes it felt like being friends could be possible. She asked for opinions on the full menu plan she’d written out for the next month, asking if I thought it looked balanced enough for Henry. I told her I trusted her judgement, but she said she wanted a ‘professional opinion’ on it. It took me a minute to realize she meant me: I told her I’d worked in a kitchen every summer as a teen. It was so cute and thoughtful of her.
Then the next night she’d stuck a skull emoji on a joke I made, and said something so funny back I’d laughed out loud, and suddenly I was worse off than I was before.
Since Ellie hadn’t had time to hang out, I’d taken Henry out on my own a few times, usually picking him up from Mrs. Oxford’s place to give her a break too.
But reading could only teach you so much about parenting, and I still didn’t know how to handle any curveballs. Each time I took Henry out in the stroller I said ten different prayers he wouldn’t need something I couldn’t handle.
