“I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders and picked up her milkshake again.
“You’re in super big trouble, that’s what. This is the last time I ask you nicely. Got it?”
She slid back to her seat. I could feel her struggling not to roll her eyes. “Okay.Got it.”
“I love you Abs. I love you more than the whole world. I know you can do this.”
“I love you too, Mom.”
I asked her about her day yesterday and we laughed about the incident in the lunchroom. Maybe that made me a bad mom, but I still couldn’t believe it happened.
It was an hour and a half before we got back home and Emma’s car was nowhere to be seen. I shut the car off and jumped out of my seat, racing inside and checking my phone for a missed text at the same time.
I found Ben sitting at the island going over Blake’s homework with him. Lucy was at the craft table coloring andJacewas sitting on Ben’s knee eating a banana.
“Hey,” he greeted me easily, as if he had done this a hundred times before.
“Hey.”
“Ben!” Abby screamed and ran over to give him a hug. “Will you help me with my homework? Mommy says I have to start doing it. And you do Blake’s for him.Can you do mine too?”
“Get it out, kiddo. But you have to write all of the answers so your teacher doesn’t know it was me.” He looked up at me and winked.
“Where’s Emma?” My mind spun with conflicted feelings. Should I be upset that Ben was here?Alone with my kids?Or did I trust him enough to leave him unsupervised and in charge?
“She had to go. She called and said a bunch of things really quickly. What I got out of it was that you told her you’d be gone an hour? And it was longer than that? She asked if I could hang out until you got home. I’ve only been here… maybe twenty-minutes? I put chicken fingers in the oven. The kids were getting hungry. Is that okay?”
And just like that my spinning thoughts slammed to a stop.
I trusted Ben.
I trusted him completely.
“That’s great,” I told him.
“You’re okay?” he asked next. “Abby?”
“We’re fine. We just went for a little drive and had a little talk.”
He nodded like my answer mattered to him. “If the kids eat the nuggets, I could order us Thai food.”
“That sounds good.”
“Are you sure you’re okay? You look a little jarred.” I watched him twitch as if he wanted to walk over to me, but he had too many kids around him.
I smiled at that. I smiled because it relaxed me to see that my children trusted him and that he seemed to genuinely like them too.
“I’m good, Ben. I’m really good.”
It wasn’t until after dinner, when I sent the kids to the living room to watch a little bit of TV before bed that Ben and I had another opportunity to talk.
He stayed after dinner and helped clean up the cartons of Thai and what little dishes there were to do. He filled my dishwasher while I wiped down the table and then he filled up the water on my Keurig for tomorrow.
“That will save me some aggravation in the morning,” I told him gratefully. I leaned back against the sink and smiled at him. He moved to stand next to me.
“We should do this again.” His low voice was barely louder than a whisper.
I tilted my head so that I could look up at him, “Dinner?”
