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Logan
Icheck the time again and hear my mother chuckle. She’s moving around the kitchen with ease, pulling the biscuits out of the oven as she orders Campbell to get the butter out of the fridge.
“You wouldn’t be so nervous if you’d gone to church with us this morning,” she chides.
“I’m not nervous.”
Campbell laughs. “You have on two different color socks.”
I immediately look down to see that my socks actually match, and he bursts out laughing. Before Sailor left Friday night, she agreed to come to Sunday lunch at my parents’ house today. Now, she’s fifteen minutes late.
We aren’t one of those couples that spend every waking moment together. I don’t know how this is supposed to work. This is all so new to both of us. Do I call and check on her? Make sure she’s still coming?
“Look who I found outside,” Dad says, leading Sailor into the kitchen.
She’s holding a pecan pie, and my concern that she was going to back out dissipates when she smiles over at me. My mom takes the pie from her and gives her a warm hug.
“My son was having a conniption,” she says.
“Oh? Am I late?” Sailor asks innocently, arching an eyebrow at me. “Pretty sure you told me one o’clock, right, Campbell?”
He joins in on her teasing. “Definitely one o’clock.”
At least they’re getting along. I would rather see that than him slamming doors and sulking in his bedroom. Besides, according to him, all of his football buddies think she’s “hot” and would kill to have her as a stepmom. I suppose that helped smooth things over.
“You look gorgeous,” I whisper as I lean down to kiss her cheek.
“Those extra fifteen minutes I spent getting ready were totally worth it,” she replies with a grin.
We sit down to eat, and I can’t recall a time when lunch with my parents was more comfortable. Jo used to always come, and we would spend the day bickering about some trivial thing, whether one of the cheerleaders was gossiping about her or if I was flirting with someone. Vice versa.
There was rarely this easy conversation, this laughter. If Jo wasn’t the center of attention, she made sure somehow that it found its way to her.
With Sailor, she doesn’t need that. The focus is on Campbell and school starting. How he’s officially going to school and not having a tutor. How he’ll walk the halls at the same high school we attended. How even though he shrugs it off that it’s no big deal, it really is.
The spotlight isn’t on her. It isn’t on me. Christ, that feels so fucking right to have my son the center of attention. To know that walking away from my career — the thing I worked so hard for all those years — was, without a doubt, the right thing to do.
Maybe if things had been different, if I had been with Sailor and not Jo, I wouldn’t have had to make that decision. I wouldn’t have had to give up the career I loved just to be a good father to Campbell.
But life is full of what-ifs. And the majority of the time, we never know the answer to those. The one thing I know, right here and now, is that I’m not going live with a what-if when it comes to Sailor anymore.
