“You will someday.”
He rolls his eyes and heads upstairs. “I’m sorry for Kennedy’s cool reception today, by the way.”
“No, she was great. I imagine it was hard for her to have another woman in her house.”
His lips twitch.
“She is the woman of the house, you know,” I say. “You might see her as a kid, and sheisa child by all definitions. But in her mind, she’s a woman, and this is her house.”
“Are you telling me I’m worrying too much?”
I think about it. “No, I think you’re right to worry. I think it’s great that you worry, actually.”
He scoffs like he’s embarrassed at being caught for being nice. It makes me laugh.
“I’m just saying maybe you don’t totally understand her,” I say. “So some of what she does looks like it’s coming out of left field when maybe it’s not.”
“Yeah, well, left field would be better than outer space.”
My smile grows.
I’m sure I was a handful for my mom when she was a single mother. Although we could get on the same page, she was still my mother, and I was still a bratty teenager. We buttedheads. Even so, she could come at our issues from a place of understanding.
We get to the top of the stairs and stop. There is a door to the left, one in front of us, and a hallway to the right. Pictures adorn the walls—most of Kennedy at various stages of her life. A little table sits next to the hallway with an oddly shaped vase on it.
“Were you this way with your dad?” he asks. “Did you fight him all the time? Make everything hard?”
My smile slips. “No.”
“Then what did he do differently because I’d like that kind of relationship with my hell-raiser.”
“Well,” I say, my thoughts going to a man I’ve not thought about in a while. “I guess the biggest reason we didn’t fight was that he wasn’t there.”
Chase furrows a brow.
“It’s hard to fight with someone who doesn’t know you exist,” I say.
He regrips the handles of my bags, studying me with a quiet intensity. I’m unsure if he wants me to elaborate—if he wants the messy details, or if he’s trying to determine how to get out of this conversation.
Probably the latter.
“Think of it that way,” I say, giving him an exit. “You might fight with her right now. But she’ll grow up and appreciate that she had a dad who cared enough about her to stick around.”
His lips twist into a semblance of a smile. “Right.” He tips his head toward the lone door on the left. “That’s my room. The one in front of you is a closet. Extra blankets, board games, candles because I swear every time Kennedy has an extra dollar to her name, she buys another damn candle.”
“Yeah, well, I relate.”
“Of course you do,” he mumbles, heading down the hallway. “The door on the right is Ken’s. The one at the end is the bathroom. You can get situated there. And this is your room.”
He pauses by the door on the left and flicks the handle.
We step inside the small but gracious bedroom. It smells faintly of cinnamon and has a window that overlooks the driveway. A small bed is covered with a blue-and-white quilt that looks like it was plucked out of an Amish store.
A wooden rocking chair sits in the corner, and a large dressing table with an oval mirror rounds out the furniture. The only other item of interest is an accordion door in the corner segregating the tiniest closet known to man and the rest of the room.
Chase places my bags on the floor next to the chair.
“This is the cutest little guest room,” I say, checking out a picture of a baby Kennedy on the table.
