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Owen scooted out of the booth and Frankie followed. She kissed her mother on the cheek and said goodbye to Caitlin. She ran off to Jenny who called her over for a treat.
“I’m going to catch up with Jenny for a bit. If there’s something you need you can always call me,” Tara said to him.
“Oh, so now you’ll pick up the phone, then?”
“Owen!” Caitlin said with her eyes rounded in shock.
He shrugged. “Just sayin’. I tried calling her a thousand times after she bailed on me, and she hung up on me the last time I called her months ago.”
Tara made a move to get out of the booth and give him hell, but Caitlin held Tara by the arm and said, “Not here. You guys obviously need to talk. But not here with Frankie standing at the bar.”
“I know,” Tara said.
“I’m sorry. I’ll try and stop with the cheap shots,” he said and meant it. If he wanted to have Frankie here with him in Winter Peaks, he needed to make this work with Tara.
“Good,” both Caitlin and Tara said.
He could see Tara becoming friends with his sister-in-law. Caitlin had moved to Winter Peaks after she’d stopped working as a beat cop in Austin, Texas. She had been burned-out and suffering from panic attacks, but the change of scenery had done wonders for Caitlin’s health. He hoped that Winter Peaks would be a positive change in Tara and Frankie’s lives as well.
“Why don’t I pick up Frankie this afternoon at your house and take her to the big house for dinner? It would give you guys some time to talk. Shall I come by around three?” Caitlin asked.
“Thanks, Cait. That would be awesome,” Owen said.
Owen walked over to Jenny who handed Frankie a milkshake at the bar. “Thanks, Jenn.”
“No, problem.”
“Thank you,” Frankie said before slurping milkshake through her straw.
“Just like her mother, this one…” Jenny said with a loving smile, nodding her head at Frankie. “I remember Tara sneaking downstairs into the kitchen whenever her mother was around… I found her multiple times in the morning, still sleeping on the floor with a chocolate milkshake in her hand.”
It pained Owen how he had missed the signs about Gloria neglecting parenting. Of course he knew that Gloria would sometimes leave her seventeen-year-old daughter for weeks on end. At the time, as a seventeen-year-old boy, he only saw the positive side of not having a parent around all the time. He’d spent days loving on Tara in the apartment upstairs while Gloria was away for work.
And the times that he’d seen Gloria, she would find a way to argue about absolutely nothing and anything. He often wondered about Tara’s father, but the few times he’d tried to bring up her father Tara always had cut him short saying she didn’t want to talk about him.
“Are you ready to head out?” he asked his daughter.
Frankie nodded while still slurping her milkshake. She would probably finish the thing before stepping even one foot outside. He smiled as he ruffled her curls. He wondered where Frankie’s curls came from, as both Tara and him didn’t have curly hair.
She did look exactly like him, though—a young, female version of him with curly hair. Frankie wiped the tip of her nose after she caught him staring.
“What’s wrong?”
He shook his head smiling. “Nothing. I was just thinking about how much you look like me.”
“Did you have curls when you were younger?” Frankie asked.
“No. I was actually thinking about the same thing.”
“I’m going to kiss Mommy one more time.”
“That’s okay, sweetheart,” he said as he watched Frankie go back to Tara and smacking a big one on her mother’s cheek.
“She got the curls from her grandfather.” Jenny’s eyes rounded like she couldn’t believe she’d actually said it out loud.
She’d probably meant Tara’s father since Frank Mills’ hair wasn’t curly at all. He wasn’t aware that Jenny knew Tara’s father.
“Did you know him?”
