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“I feel better about everything between us now,” she said, taking a plate stacked with pancakes from him. “I’ll probably gain ten pounds, but it’s a small price to pay.”
“You’d look good with some extra flesh on your bones.”
“Ah, I think not,” she replied, laughing. “It’s too difficult to get it off.”
“Violet’s crying,” he said, moving toward the back of the house. He returned in five minutes with a hungry baby.
As she watched him move around his kitchen, confidently caring for his daughter, waves of love washed over Ava.
“Being with you is one hundred percent different than being married to Alex.”
“How’s that?”
She’d known right from the start that Alex was looking for a mother for his kids when they met. “He as much said, ‘I have to be with someone who will allow me to put my children first.’”
“Did he put them first?”
“Pretty much. It was more me putting them first because he didn’t do any physical care of them. But I was okay with it because he was a great father in other aspects. The only trouble came later, when he decided he didn’t want to have more children. I wanted a baby so badly. We didn’t have time to argue about it, but I was so unhappy. He died obviously never resolving it.”
“You can have a baby right away if you want,” Leon said. “I love Violet so much and I’ll love a baby with the woman I love, too. I get where Alex might have been coming from. If you didn’t love Violet, we probably wouldn’t be together.”
He held Violet, feeding her while Ava ate. Then she took the baby so Leon could eat.
“I like the way we do things,” he said. “I can’t wait to live together now.”
“We’ll make it happen.”
The winter rains started early that year, and everyone at Station #34 breathed a sigh of relief. Hopefully, it would help prevent more fires from getting out of control.
The next week after Ava and Leon made the semi-commitment to each other, he found someone to sublet his apartment fully furnished minus the baby furniture and Grandma Saint’s kitchen table and hutch. His friend Matt lived in Oceanside and wanted to come back to the old neighborhood, so the place was perfect for him.
“Francine told me you never called her after your date,” Matt said. “Do you intend on calling her? If you’re not interested, I’m going to ask her to go out with me again.”
“Matt, I’m moving into Ava’s house. Why would I do that if I was interested in Francine Walker? Go for it.”
“Why’d you take her out?”
“I didn’t actually take her out, Matt. We ran into each other at Wild Pancake and went for a walk later. I kissed her once. If she made it sound like it was more than that, she’s mistaken. You won’t have any trouble from me, okay?”
“Got it,” Matt replied.
So the potential problem of Francine Walker and the apartment overlooking the park were resolved in one maneuver with the help of Matt.
Chapter 9
Christmas lurked right around the corner.
“What are you going to do about a tree?” Roberta asked, looking around Ava’s minimally decorated house with a frown. “There’s no sign of Christmas in this house.”
She’d stopped by one Monday morning with a car full of food from Sunday dinner the night before just as he’d arrived home from work. Ava and Violet were still in bed, a sign that they’d been up a good part of the night.
“She’s feeling sad about Alex. This is the second anniversary of his death,” Leon tried to explain. “She’s not really feeling it this year.”
“Son, you have a baby now. She might not know what’s going on, but in a couple of years when you take her to see Santa and the elf takes a picture of him with Violet on his lap, she’ll want to look through photo albums of prior Christmas pictures. You need to have something from her first Christmas. Trust me on this. Kids don’t let you get away with anything.”
He thought he and his brothers had let her get away with a lot, but didn’t want to spoil the moment, so he let it go. “What should I do?”
“You’re an adult now. You have a kid. Make Christmas for your family. If you want me to do it, I’ll come in here like a bull in a china shop, and trust me, she won’t appreciate it.”
