Why? Was he serious? Had he been zoned out the entire time we sat at the table with Miss Pearl talking about Sal’s achievements? “Do you know who she is?”
“Your cousin.”
“No, ding-dong—”
The laugh that cut out of him was loud and abrupt, and it made me laugh. Standing there so close together, his body heat against the side of mine, for some reason, only made me laugh more.
“I’m sorry. I spend way too much time with the boys. No. I mean, yes, she’s my cousin. But she’s like the best female soccer player in the world, and I’m not just saying that because she’s family. They have huge posters of her plastered all over Germany. When you watch anything with women’s soccer, they’re going to have her on there in some way. She’s the kind of person, when you have a daughter, you tell herbe like Sal. Shit, I tell Josh all the time to be like her. She’s one of the best people I’ve ever met. I get why my mom loves her. It makes sense.”
His elbowed bumped my upper arm by accident. “She’s married to that famous soccer guy, isn’t she?”
“Yes.” I shot him a look. “He was here almost all day with her.”
He stopped what he was doing and turned that big upper body to face me. I wasn’t going to admire how impressive it was. Nope. “You’re fucking with me,” he scoffed.
“No. Did you see the guy with the hat sitting with her parents and some of my family? The tall one? The only other white—Caucasian—man that wasn’t chasing after little kids?”
He nodded.
“That was him.”
“What’s his name again?” he asked.
Blasphemy. I wasn’t even a big soccer fan but still. “I’m going to tell you the same thing I tell Josh: when you ask a really stupid question, you’re not getting an answer.”
That had my neighbor bursting out with another laugh that made me think I didn’t know him at all. Not even a little bit. God, he really did have a great laugh.
For a married man.
A married man, I repeated to myself.
The look he gave me over his shoulder as he handed me a plate, still chuckling, made my stomach warm. “You shouldn’t sell yourself short. There’re some people who you’ll never make happy no matter what you do,” he said to me so evenly, I glanced up at him. It sounded like he’d learned that from experience.
“Buttercup, I’m hungry,” came Louie’s sleepy voice from somewhere close behind us.
He was standing right where the vinyl flooring of the kitchen met the carpeted flooring of the living room. “Give me a second to finish these dishes, but what do you want? Cereal or leftovers?”
“Chicken nuggets.”
I crossed my eyes and faced forward again. “Cereal or leftovers, Goo. We don’t have chicken nuggets.”
“Okay. Cereal.” Silence. Then he added, “Please.”
“Give me a few minutes, all right?”
Louie agreed and disappeared.
Dallas’s elbow hit me again as he rinsed off the second to last dish. “Why does he call you Buttercup?”
I laughed, remembering exactly why. “My brother used to call me that, but when Louie was still really little, my best friend used to babysit the boys, and they’d watch cartoons together. There’s this one we used to watch when we were probably thirteen calledThe Powerpuff Girls, and she’d take those DVDs over for them to watch. It’s these three little girls with superpowers, right? One of them is named Blossom, she was the nice, levelheaded one, and he said that was my best friend, Vanessa. And there’s another one named Buttercup. She has dark hair, and she’s the most aggressive of the bunch. She’s the loudmouth, tough one, and for some reason or another, Louie just insisted that was me. He’s been calling me Buttercup ever since.”
“But why did your brother call you that?”
I shot him a look out of the corner of my eye. “I used to watchThe Princess Brideall the time and used to say I was going to marry someone just like Westley someday.”
He made a choking sound.
“Shut up,” I muttered before I could help myself.
