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“You have fun and be nice to the other kids.”
They both rolled their eyes. “Mom already gave us a speech.”
I was sure she did.
“Then I hope you have an absolute blast and you have so much fun and I want to know every single thing when you come back.” I gave them huge hugs again and then headed back to the guest house.
* * *
The restof my weekend was spent cleaning the shit out of my house, packing for my trip, and making sure Mark had everything he could need while I was gone.
“You do know I am a grown man?” he said when I was showing him where I kept some of the cleaning products.
“Yes, and when was the last time you cleaned your own toilets?” I asked.
That shut him up.
Once I had him all up to date on everything, I gave him the lists and the map of the grocery store.
“This is too much,” he said. “I know where things are at the grocery store.” He still took the map and the list and promised he would not call me unless it was an absolute emergency.
“Good man,” I said, giving his shoulder a squeeze.
“And you have a good time with Joy and Sydney. I’m always telling you that you need to take more time off.”
“I know, and I don’t listen to you,” I said.
“You have to force yourself to take time off because one day you’ll wake up and you’re almost forty and you can’t remember the last time you took a day off.”
That was a good point. I didn’t want to wake up and realize that I’d worked my life away. Since my job was so entwined with my life, it was easy to blur those boundaries.
Sunday afternoon I loaded up my car and went to downtown Arrowbridge to grab Joy and Sydney. As usual, Syd was bringing twice as much crap as Joy and I were.
“What could you possibly have in here?” I asked, hefting one of her bags into the trunk of my car. I was a control freak when it came to driving so I’d insisted that I be in charge of that part of our trip.
“You know I like to be prepared for things,” Sydney said.
“I know, I’m the same way, but this is a whole other level,” I said, finally getting the bag into my car with another heave that strained my back.
While I was dealing with Syd’s bags, Joy went to the café next to the bookstore and grabbed us all iced coffees and pastries for the road.
Joy was a great navigator and had looked up and marked where we could take pit stops, and had made out our schedule for the week. I was more than happy to let her be in charge of that.
“We good to go?” I asked as Sydney shut my trunk.
“Yes,” she said, panting.
The three of us piled into the car and fought about what we were going to listen to until I put on a random nostalgia playlist and we headed out.
Chapter Six
Our first stopwas for dinner at diner that gave the impression it was a hole-in-the-wall, but actually had been featured in shows and in articles and had won a bunch of awards.
We gorged ourselves on plates of fried chicken and fried pickles and french fries smothered in gravy and cheese. It took us a little bit of time to get up from the table and go back to the car after we’d finished.
We didn’t make it to the cottage until later that night and we were all pretty tired from the drive.
“I can’t wait to see what it looks like in the morning,” Joy said as I got the keys out of the lockbox attached to the front porch.
