June hurried through the rest of her evening, finishing up at the diner before hurrying home to get Benjamin bathed and in bed. All the while though, she couldn’t stop thinking about how good it had felt to really sing again.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Oh, no, no,no!” Cadence exclaimed as her malfunctioning dishwasher spewed another gush of water… right onto her kitchen floor. “Please stop doing that!”
The dishwasher let out some more water in response. She supposed that it would have been more surprising if the dishwasher has listened.
At least this disaster had waited until Isabelle was at school. The only thing that could have made this whole ordeal worse would have been fighting a six-year-old who, Cadence could only assume, would see this as an opportunity to go swimming indoors.
“Okay,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “Okay. Come on, Cadence. You can do this. You’re a strong, capable woman.”
And yeah, she was… but she was a strong, capable woman who had never dealt with the water supply in this house. That had always been Tyler’s job.
For a moment, even the thought made her feel so overwhelmed that tears threatened to prick at the corner of her eyes. She and Tyler had had years to figure out their strategy for dividing and conquering household tasks. GivenTyler’s expertise, he’d been the obvious choice when it came to handyman tasks.
She was regretting that now. She should have learned from him while she had the chance.
Except… she had learned something, hadn’t she? She thought back to the last time this dishwasher had caused her problems, although that incident had been entirely man-made…
There had never been a resolution to the mystery of “who put the dish soap in the dishwasher?” Tyler maintained that Cadence had been the one to make the slip, and Cadence had retorted that just because she had been six months pregnant with Isabelle and maybe atouchabsentminded didn’t mean that she had been the culprit.
But the whodunnit had proven less important than the resulting deluge of soap suds across their kitchen floor. Cadence, emotional during her pregnancy, had been overwhelmed by the mess, nearly driven to tears. Just to make her laugh, Tyler had gotten down in the suds and slipped and slid around. Once he’d eased her safely to the floor, as her round belly had kept her off balance in those days, she too had played around in the suds.
A ghost of a smile passed over her face as she thought back to that day, although it quickly faded into melancholy, as so often happened when she thought back to happier times with her husband. When had that happiness started to fade?
She shook off the lingering memory, keeping only the one piece of information she needed: what Tyler had done to switch off the water. She quicky rummaged for the knob and turned it as tightly as she could and…
Thank goodness. The water stopped spurting onto her kitchen floor.
She went to go find her mop, relieved that at least there wasn’tmorewater churning in at every second. She would call a plumber and ask them to check on the dishwasher, or maybeshe would ask Eleanor if Garrett thought he could take a shot at fixing it.
She could do this. Shecould.
And if she shed a few tears while she mopped up the floors… Well, nobody needed to know. There was water everywhere, after all.
Besides, the thing that truly mattered was composing herself by the time she picked up Isabelle. She wanted to do everything in her power to make sure that Izzy never questioned that both her parents were there for her. She didn’t want to do anything that would add to her daughter’s pain during this extremely difficult time.
By the time she got to Izzy’s summer school, Cadence had her game face fixed firmly in place. She was even a few minutes early, so when she got there, the kids were still occupied in their afternoon “beat the heat” activity, in which a large tarp had been sprayed with a hose to make a super-sized slip ‘n slide. They had a bunch of those ball-shaped sponges, which they were using to fling splashes at each other.
Cadence smiled and found a spot in the shade to sit and wait. She didn’t mind Izzy getting a few extra minutes of playtime, and she always kept a spare outfit for her daughter in the car. It wasn’t always for water-related mishaps, but with a little kid, you could never be too prepared.
From where she was playing out in the sun, Izzy gave her mother a huge, two-handed wave… right up until one of her classmates snuck up behind her and squeezed the sponge ball over her head. Izzy shrieked in joy and began to chase the other girl, who gave her own thrilled cry as she bolted away.
“Mrs. Meadows, hello!”
Cadence tried not to cringe at the address. Though she had no plans to change her name back to her maiden name, since it was the name she shared with her daughter, being calledMrs.these days reminded her of what she was in the slow process of losing.
But Miss Elsa Priestly, Izzy’s summer school teacher, was of that older generation who always, always,alwaysused proper titles. Miss Priestly also came from a generation of fierce woman who treated never having been married as a badge of honor, as it had been expected of every woman at that time. Despite never being officially wed, however, Miss Priestly had a partner with whom she’d been together for over a decade. The older couple could often be seen moving around town, hand-in-hand. It was extremely sweet.
“Miss Priestly,” Cadence said warmly. “How good to see you! How are you holding up? These hooligans wearing you out?”
Miss Priestly had taught at Magnolia Shore Elementary School when Cadence was a student. Now, decades later, the woman was semi-retired and only worked during the summers, something she claimed “kept her sharp.”
The woman patted her hair which, as usual, had not a single strand out of place.
“Oh, these youngsters haven’t gotten the best of me in forty years of teaching, Mrs. Meadows. They sure aren’t going to catch up with me now.”
“You really can call me Cadence,” the younger woman offered, even though she knew it was likely pointless. “You knew me when I was… what? Younger than Isabelle?”
