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“Yeah! You’re so welcome. You got your leftovers, right?” He holds up his own small pizza box.
I gesture toward my car. “Rae has them.”
“Great. Those will be great tomorrow.”
“Yeah.” It feels like time to say goodbye now, so I dip my head in a slight nod. “Well, it’s getting close to her bedtime, so….”
He copies my nod. “Got it. Night, Liv. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Goodnight. I hope your visit goes okay.”
“You and me both.”
He backs away toward his car, which is an empty parking spot away from mine. He waits for me to get safely into my seat before he turns away.
I look back to make sure Rae is still buckled up in her booster seat. I chuckle when I see she has fallen asleep with her colorful menu in her lap; she wanted to take it home as a reminder of her‘really, really fun pizza trip.’I make sure not to jostle it or her as I check her seatbelt. She’s good, so I buckle myself in, too.
As I get us on the road, I sigh, tired but now decidedly happy that I accepted this dinner invitation.
*
I tell Rae about the art plan on Sunday morning after I wake her up. As I expected, she nearly explodes with excitement.
I don’t know if I should try to explain Landon’s grandma’s situation to her or not—I hadn’t thought to ask him that—so I just say, “She’s very special to Landon, so let’s make her something from the heart, okay?”
She nods in sudden seriousness. “Okay. I’m going to make her something extra-extra-heartful.” Then she perks up into a smile. “It’ll be like when I make stuff for you!”
Sometimes I wish she wasn’t so tiny, because it makes it hard to give her big hugs.
After I give her one that isn’t too tight, I say, “You little sweetie. I love you.”
“I love you, too, big sweetie!”
I snort and tickle her neck for a quick second, causing her to shriek out a giggle. “Start thinking about what you want to make for her. I’ll fix us breakfast.”
“Okay! I need some paper! I need to write down my ideas!”
And, boy, does she end up with a lot of them. After we eat, we look over each thing she listed in her cute, little-kid handwriting: a card, a hand-drawn picture of Landon and his grandma, a hand-paintedpicture of Landon and his grandma, a very pretty poem (a poem on paper she’ll color and decorate, apparently), a popsicle-stick coaster (an option she had for the first-grade trip but didn’t choose, and if she does it this time,‘it willnotbe in Christmas colors!’), or a bookmark.
“These all sound great, Rae,” I say. “Is there one you like the best? Or two? I bet we could do two if you wanted.”
She squints at the list. “Hmm….”
While she contemplates it, I clean up our breakfast dishes. Then I lay out the useless flyers and circulars I got in the mail yesterday so Rae can do her artwork on the kitchen table without making a big mess.
She finally tells me she wants to make both the card and the coaster, so I get her box of glitter and whatnot off the top of the fridge (I learned the hard way that, as much as I love her, I can’t leave her unsupervised with those things). She brings her crayons and markers into the kitchen, and then we realize we have glue but no popsicle sticks. Since they shouldn’t cost much at all, I agree with her that a trip to the store is in order.
When we come back, there’s a folded piece of paper taped to our door. Amused, I wonder what Landon has said this time; I bet it’s nothing more than a fun, joking reference to our brief mention of notes last night.
Rae doesn’t even know he wrote the first note we found and she’s too distracted to care much about this one, so she just says, “Ooh, they must want us to have a good day again!” Then she’s back to thinking aloud about what to write in Landon’s grandma’s card.
Like I did last time, I let her through the door while I open the note…and as I read it, my smile falls away in actual disappointment. This isn’t even from Landon. It’s from Wyatt, and it says he stopped by to see what day and time we’re going out this coming weekend.
I completely forgot I said I’d go on a date with him.
“Shit,” I grumble.
I don’t want to go. He’s not ugly appearance-wise, but he smokes cigarettes and talks and acts like a teenage douchebag, plus I don’t like how he looks at me. I can’t believe I was so desperate for car help that—
