“Hey Daddy, can we get a?—”
“Time to go, kiddo!” he said brightly as the shopkeeper waved merrily.
Eloise’s musings on what she would name the kitten they definitely were not adopting any time soon continued all the way to his office where, fortunately, he had stashed the new volume about a group of schoolkids who went on adventures through time. It was a little below Eloise’s reading level, but she still liked it.
Thank goodness for that, as he could hardly keep up with everything she read. He was forever searching for something new to provide for her.
She’d gotten that from her mom. Shannon had been a big reader too.
“Oh!” Eloise called suddenly, startling him away from his thoughts. “That’s Maddie from my class!”
He looked up to see his daughter waving frantically. On the other side of his small front-facing window was another little girl with curly, dark pigtails waving just as energetically back. The girl’s mother gave him a more restrained wave. He immediately recognized this as parent code for,Sorry about the interruption but, you know, kids.
He waved the pair inside.
“Maddie! Hi!” Eloise said, immediately casting aside her book to bounce excitedly. “Daddy, this is Maddie! She’s from my class.”
“So you said,” he chuckled, tugging lightly on her ponytail before extending a hand to the girl’s mother. “Hi, I’m Anthony Whitaker. Eloise’s dad.”
“Susie,” the woman said. “It’s really nice to meet you. Maddie has beenveryexcited about her new classmate recently.”
“Yeah, Eloise is really cool,” Maddie said in that unselfconscious way that kids had.
“You know,” Susie said, glancing around, “if you need an hour or so to work, we were just about to go grab a smoothie. We’d love to have Eloise join us, if that’s okay with you. We’re only going down the street, so we could be right back here really fast, if you needed us.”
“Oh, of course,” Anthony said as the girls squealed in delight. He and Susie exchanged all the relevant details, and then he watched as the trio headed out, the girls skipping arm in arm.
An hour later, he’d gotten most of his work done. The three returned, the girls wearing the unmistakable expressions of children about to ask for something.
Indeed, he’d no sooner gotten out his greeting than Maddie, out of the corner of her mouth but far less subtle than she clearly thought herself to be, muttered, “Ask him!” to her mom.
Susie, clearly struggling to hide her amusement, smiled at him. “The girls had a great time, and they were hoping to have a sleepover. It’s absolutely okay with us if it’s okay with you.”
Anthony turned to Eloise, whose eyes were shining with hope.
“Please, Daddy? Please, please, please?”
“Eloise can borrow my pajamas, Mr., uh, Eloise’s dad,” Maddie said, her pleading interrupted only by the flicker of doubt when she couldn’t remember his name. “And we have extra toothbrushes.”
Anthony felt his smile grow, although there was a twinge beneath his happiness at seeing his daughter make friends in their new town. Of course he wanted Eloise to be happy, and he was more than open to letting her spend the night with a family that was clearly very kind and lived nearby.
But he did feel a little flicker of sadness about her growing up, getting bigger… classic parent stuff. It was the strangest conflict, always loving to see how they developed into their own people and knowing that the childhood years were all too fleeting.
“You can,” he agreed, then raised his voice a touch to be overheard over the girls’ raucous cheering. “But El, please make sure you use your best manners.”
His daughter paused in her celebrating to shoot him a look that said,Duh. “Of course I’m going to use my manners,” she told him, every inch the derisive tween who thought she was being babied.
The two parents exchanged another amused look of mutual understanding at that. At ten, Eloise was sometimes still very much a little kid, sometimes acting as though she was fully grown. He assumed that Maddie was the same.
With a little more fanfare, the girls thanked him, celebrated a bit more, and then headed out. Anthony watched through the front window as Susie guided them to stop at a crosswalk, then led them across the street and out of sight.
He glanced down at the work that he’d just started to pack up. His evening was suddenly wide open, something that was an extreme rarity ever since he’d become a single parent. Gosh, the house would be so quiet.
No, he told himself, mentally rallying. He wasn’t going to sit home alone and think about how quiet things were. He was going to go out, go explore! He was pretty certain that Magnolia Shore, Massachusetts, population about six thousand, wasn’t going to offer much of a nightlife to speak of, but, hey. It beat sitting home alone.
Diana swung by Cadence’s house just before nine in the evening to pick her up so they could head to Anchor Bistro, where June would once again be gracing the stage as part of the restaurant’s open mic night.
Diana knew she was probably a touch biased, but she thought June was the kind of amazing singer who belonged on stages far larger than the little one at Anchor Bistro. Every time that she heard June perform, Diana was blown out of the water with her friend’s talent. She was careful, however, to avoid saying anything that would make June feel pressured. June had only recently returned to the stage after years focusing on being a single parent to her son, Benjamin, after they had tragically lost Benjamin’s father and June’s husband, Keith. Diana knew that June had been anxious about returning to her dream of singing, but was now having a great time performing for those in town.
