“Oh, darn it.”
“I know. I’m disappointed too.” He winked at her.
She sighed. “No one is ever the monster I want them to be.”
Out of the mouths of babes. People could be monsters. Just rarely fun ones. But Cam was being a good guy.
Why, he wasn’t sure.
“Cowboys can have monstrous pride, baby girl.”
“I don’t even know what that means.” She stood, took her book back from him, and said, “I’m gonna go upstairs and read. I love you, Daddy. I’m glad you’re home.”
“I love you too, baby girl. I’m glad to be home.”
Rachel stared at him. “Can I sit in your lap?”
Cam came through the back door as she spoke, and Cam shook his head. “No, he’s just been out of surgery, like seventeenseconds. He’s not supposed to pick anything up for twenty-four hours. So you can sit in his lap if he feels up to it tomorrow night.”
Bekka shot Cam a glare. “You don’t have to be mean. She’s just a little girl.”
“Hey, it’s okay guys. I’ll let you go play for a little while.”
Bekka rolled her eyes and stood up. “Come on, Rachel, I’ll get you set up at the TV or something.” She shot Mitch a glare. “I don’t play anymore. You can’t just send me off to play.”
He didn’t answer because he didn’t have anything to say. He didn’t even know if eleven-year-olds were supposed to play. He thought he did when he was eleven. But then he hadn’t had to worry about paying bills or his two younger sisters or any of the things that Bekka had to worry about.
Cam walked over to him, face serious, “I’m sorry, that was out of line.”
Suddenly he was so fucking tired. He couldn’t even move, much less make words or try to make anybody feel better.
For fuck’s sake, wasn’t he the one who was supposed to be able to sit here and be quiet? “No worries. They’re all just stressed out.”
Hopefully that was good enough.
“If you want to close your eyes, you can. They said it was probably more comfortable for you to sit up and sleep tonight in the recliner.” Cam handed him an ice pack to put on the back of his neck where they’d drilled for oil. “I wasn’t sure what you want to eat. I figured nothing too spicy and nothing too hard to eat, so you didn’t have to bend your neck.”
“Yeah, I think there’s probably some chicken noodle soup in a can in there somewhere. The girls all like ramen. We could just make three packets of ramen noodles and split it between them.”
“Oh, I was thinking like a burrito. I know how to do that.”
“Since when?”
“Since I was on my own, and I didn’t have Mom to cook for me, and I didn’t want to starve, and I didn’t have enough money to eat out for every single meal. Yeah, that was when.”
He didn’t laugh, because laughing would jostle things, and jostling things hurt.
And he wasn’t in a hurting space, so Mitch sort of almost smiled. “I can see that.”
“So did you ever learn how to cook, or do you just feed them everything out of a can?”
He almost snarled. In fact, he was going to almost snarl and possibly get up in Cam’s face when he saw the teasing little grin. Motherfucker. “I’ll have you know that I can make spaghetti and meatballs. I can make grape jelly meatballs. Swedish ones. Hot honey. Basically, if it involves meatballs, I can make it.”
“Meatballs?”
“For two years the only thing Rachel would eat was meatballs. So we ate a lot of meatballs. Let me tell you, when you pull out the bag of frozen meatballs, Sarah just goes to her room and cries.”
Cam pursed his lips. “That explains a lot about the deep freezer in the laundry room.”
