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“Thanks, Lisa,” Aidan said with regret. “We’ll have to tell Emma together.”
“I dread that the most. She will be upset, and so will I. How do you think we should do this? How do I tell my little girl I’m leaving her?” Lisa asked, biting her lip and turning away.
With a loud clatter, Emma arrived at the bottom of the stairs. “Oops! My dump truck fell. Just fell. Like that.” She flipped her hands open and shrugged her tiny shoulders in a show of disbelief.
“Emma, you’re going to put your dump truck in the toy box, aren’t you?” Lisa asked, a forced smile forming on her lips. She glanced anxiously at Aidan, who gave a barely perceptible shake of his head.
“Yep. When are we going to the grocery store?” Emma asked. “We need more peanut butter. And I want more cheese but no yogurt. Yogurt is yucky,” she said as she wandered into the kitchen, chatting all the way.
“When will we tell her?” Lisa murmured.
“I’m not sure,” Aidan said.
“I will miss her so much,” Lisa said with a catch in her voice.
“And she’ll miss you.”
Lisa nodded as she smoothed her cheeks, removing the remnants of tears.
They followed Emma to the kitchen. She crouched in the middle of the room, focused on arranging several of her trucks and her tractor. “I’m building a house today. That’s why I got to dig a giant hole in the ground.” She looked over her shoulder at them, then walked to Lisa. “Why are you crying?”
“I’m not.”
Emma planted her hands on her hips. “You are, too.”
Lisa ruffled the red curls forming a halo around Emma’s head. “We have to get ready to go shopping.”
“What are we buying?” Emma asked, smiling up at Lisa. “I love to shop.”
“Spoken like a woman,” Aidan said to lighten the moment. How was he going to tell Emma that Lisa would be leaving them? And who could come to help him on such short notice?
Grace sprang immediately to mind, but he shied away from the idea. She would likely feel he was using her, further reinforcing her feelings of being left out of the decisions being made.
Lisa gathered the grocery list and her car keys. “Let’s get your jacket and we’ll head out. Where did you leave it, Emma?” she asked.
Emma swung around. Her lips pursed in thought, she turned all the way around one more time and pointed to the back of a chair in the dining room. “There it is.”
“Then get it on. I need to speak to your dad for a minute, so you wait in the hall for me, okay?”
“Sure.” Emma ran for her jacket. Pulling it on, she rushed for the door leading to the garage. “We’ll play dump trucks when I get back,” she said, dropping the one she held in the toy box behind her.
With Emma out of the room, Aidan turned to Lisa. “We have to tell Emma as soon as possible. We need to give her time to adjust to your leaving.”
Lisa’s eyes swam with tears. “Maybe I could wait and take another job. That way it would be easier on everyone. My biggest concern back in Spartanburg is my mother. She doesn’t seem to be doing as well as the doctors suggested she would. It’s all such a worry,” she said, glancing furtively toward where Emma was playing.
Aidan wanted Lisa to change her plans and stay longer. He wanted that more than anything, and for a few minutes, he considered calling her new employer to negotiate a different start date for Lisa.
With less pressure, he would have a better chance of finding someone with Lisa’s skills. All sorts of scenarios went thought his mind at once. Lisa had the right to take a new job. So he had to find a solution as soon as possible. Otherwise, Emma would be even more unhappy and he’d find himself working from home indefinitely.
