Page 67 of Rigid

She looked embarrassed. “Pretty as F, U, C, K.”

“Oh.” I gazed down at the floor and nodded. “Yeah, she’s awfully pretty, that’s for sure.”

“Why?” she asked.

I let out a long sigh.

She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “If you like her enough to make her the first girl you’ve ever introduced to me, I’d like her just because you liked her that much. If she’s that important to you, she’s important to me, too.”

I nodded, and then looked at her. “Thanks, Ed.”

“But I like her anyway. She’s cool.”

“Cool?”

“Yeah. Uhhm. Did you see that dress, mister?” she asked excitedly. “And she drives a Bug. Did P-Nut know that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Does he know her?”

I didn’t want to tell her how, and hoped she didn’t ask. “Yeah.”

“How’d you meet?”

“We met at the Crab Shack on Harbor Drive. Cholo and Lex introduced me to her. She works with Lex.”

“Have you been seeing her for a while?”

I started the nodding again. “Yeah.”

“Well, I like her. A lot.”

The last thing in the world I wanted to do was hurt her, but I was beginning to look at the direction of the conversation we were having as playful and inaccurate. I needed to say what it was I came to, but doing it wasn’t as easy as I had hoped.

I sat up, looked right at her, and sighed. “I want her to move in with us. What would you think about that?”

Her eyes went wide, but not drastically. She seemed far more excited than anything. Seeing her excitement was reassuring.

“Really?”

I couldn’t recall the last time I had cried. If I had to guess, I would say it was the day Ed was born, and although it may have qualified as crying, it was more like a leaky eye. Tears simply ran down my face when I saw her.

But. For whatever reason, I was on the cusp of breaking down in tears. With swollen eyes, I looked at her and nodded.

“Yeah.”

She scooted in a circle until she was facing me, and then pulled her legs onto the bed and sat beside me cross-legged. “Uhhm. Like permanently? Like you and her would be together? I mean, you’d be officially together?”

My mouth had gone dry, and responding verbally wasn’t an option. As I fought back the tears, I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth and nodded.

She rested her hand on my thigh and smiled. “I think I’d like that.”

I couldn’t continue beating around the bush. I needed to simply tell Eddie the truth. Anything short of that was a lie.

I was many things, but a lair wasn’t one of them.

I’d raised Eddie the way I was raised. There were two things on earth: right, and wrong. Two colors, black and white. My world had zero shades of gray. Things were either on the left side of the line or on the right.