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She hated how her voice came out shaky but that’s what her nerves were doing. Jangling all over the place.
“Then we’re going to open the door,” Ian said, making like a mime and grabbing a fake doorknob, twisting it and swinging an invisible door wide.
“Okay? Then what?”
“And then…”
The dramatic pause was very dramatic and she was glad she was in Daddy’s lap. It was hard for anything to be too scary when her papa was being silly and when her daddy was holding her.
Ian put his hands out and made his eyes real big, looked around to see if anyone else was watching, but that was ridiculous.
“Papa!” she cried, not being able to stand the tension.
“Then we’re going to close it.”
And he mimed slamming the door shut.
He was so weird sometimes.
“We’re going to go downstairs, open the door and then close it?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
She knew she wasn’t the smartest and she’d definitely missed out on a lot of school but she didn’t usually find herself feeling quite so bewildered.
“Is that scary?”
“No.”
“Well, there you go. The day after that…” Ian sprung up from the bed and then walked across the room, bending his knees further as he went so it looked like he was going down a set of stairs. He was such a nut. “We’re going to go downstairs.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We’re going to open the door.”
More miming. This was getting absurd. But also hilarious.
“Yeah?”
Maybe she wasn’t giggling, but beneath her, Daddy was shaking with silent laughter.
“We’re going to take one step out…”
“Okay?”
“And then we’re going to come back inside and then shut the door.”
Ah.
“And the next day?” she asked, knowing exactly what he was going to say but wanting to make him do it anyway because it was funny. And good sport that he was, her papa did. Repeated the whole thing but with two steps outside.
“What about the day after that?” Daddy asked when Ian was finished. Her poor papa was starting to look a little flushed, probably from all those weird stair lunge-squat thingers he was doing.
“You know goddamn well,” he muttered at Hudson before flopping back down on the bed. “So what do you think? Does that sound like a plan? A better plan than your idiot papa being all ‘Hey, let’s run a marathon?’”
“You’re not an idiot,” she told him in her sternest voice. “But could I make one tiny change to your plan?”
