“How much of this clean-up can wait until tomorrow?” Liam asked, looking around the quickly-emptying room. He’d agreed to come in with me in the morning to get some things packed up for summer so I didn’t have to be here all evening. Apparently, he had something planned to celebrate Josie and my last day of school, though he refused to share any details.
“Most of it,” I told him. “I just want to get the games put away.”
He and Josie got started on that while I said goodbye to the remaining students and their parents. Out of the corner of my eye, they kept whispering to each other, and Josie looked positively giddy. I wondered if maybe she had weaseled his plans out of him.
While we finished up, I considered whether I should mention the project to Josie now that the other kids were gone. It obviously wasn’t for a grade, being the last day of school. My intention with asking the kids to express—either through words or artwork—their favorite day of the school year had simply been to get to reflect on some of the things they’d learned and done over the last ten months, and remind them of how far they’d come.
But it was really unlike Josie to not do an assignment. I should probably check in with her about it, make sure there was nothing wrong.
Before I could call her over, Liam came up behind me, sliding his arms around my waist. “Ready?”
“I’d be more ready if I knew where we were going.”
He scoffed. “Where’s the fun in that?”
The three of us held hands on our wait out to the parking lot, Josie in the middle, and I wondered if it was normal to feel so happy about such a small thing.
Josie was oddly quiet on the drive—she usually talked a mile a minute after school—but every time I looked at her in the mirror, she still had that adorable grin on her face, so I wasn’t too worried. Liam filled the silence, telling us about how Puck had spent his morning being a hyper puppy menace, making us both laugh.
I didn’t realize where we were going until Liam turned into the parking lot. “Zilker Gardens?” I asked, looking around.
“Surprise!” Josie called from the back.
I turned to give her a mock glare. “You knew where we were going and you didn’t tell me?”
She laughed, already unbuckling her seat belt, practically bouncing in her chair as she reached for the door handle. She seemed way too excited for an afternoon of looking at flowers and something started to thrum in my chest, some hint of anticipation that I didn’t quite understand.
It only grew as Liam took my hand, leading me towards the gardens. None of us talked much until we got down to the gazebo near the rose garden. There, Liam stopped, taking the backpack off his shoulder. He pulled out a blanket and a folder, handing the latter to Josie while he spread the blanket on the ground.
He looked at me, eyes bright, face soft. “Sit down, Gracie. We have something for you.”
Heart pounding now, I took a seat on the blanket as Liam knelt in front of me. “Josie girl?”
She stepped in front of me, hands clutching the paper folder so hard her knuckles were turning white. “I wanted to give you my end of the year project,” she said, voice oddly squeaky. “Sorry I didn’t have it in class today.”
I nodded to tell her it was okay—my throat too dry to make words. Her hands shook as she removed a few stapled pieces of paper from the folder. “I couldn’t decide on my favorite day, so I did a couple.” She handed me the project and I grinned at the cover. It was plastered in so many glittery star and heart stickers I could hardly see the pink construction paper background.
I’d assumed Josie would choose the written option for her project, as into books and writing as she was. But instead, I saw a drawing on the first page—three somewhat lumpy, misshapen people standing in what was clearly a library. “That’s us,” she said softly. “Me and you and Daddy. When you showed me your Pan tattoo.”
I tried to swallow past the lump in my throat. “That was a pretty good day.”
“I was so scared to start a new school,” she said, a little shake in her voice that made me want to pull her into a hug. “But once I met you and we started talking about books, I knew I was going to have an okay year.”
It took everything in me not to burst into tears. “I’m so glad you felt that way about my class, sweetie.”
“Turn the page,” she said eagerly.
The next picture made me laugh—a photograph of the two of us at one of her dad’s games, cheering our heads off. Then the three of us ice skating at Rockefeller Center in New York—the Sting’s last game against Liam’s old team happened to fall over Josie’s Christmas break, and he’d brought us both. The two of them had showed me around to all of their favorite Manhattan haunts. It had been one of the best weekends of my life.
There was a photograph of the day we’d gone to pick up Puck from the shelter—he’d licked Josie’s face right when the camera had gone off and she was laughing in the shot. Field day, with Josie and Liam running a three-legged race while I cheered in the background.
The images were a mix of photographs and children’s drawings, some a little misshapen, but I had no trouble making out the scenes. Just like Josie, they had been some of my best days too. And in every single drawing she did, it was the three of us. Liam, Josie and me.
“The last one is my favorite,” she said, before I turned the final page. “It’s about today.”
I looked up at Liam and saw that his eyes were wet with tears even as he smiled at me. “Turn the page, Gracie,” he whispered.
It was a picture of us here, surrounded by flowers, the three of us hugging. Underneath, Josie had written six words. “The day we became a family.”
