“It’s okay,” Grayson said cheerfully.
“So I was thinking,” Matt said, “that when she gets out of the shower, we’d all hang out together a little while, then go get a burger. You and me and your mom. After that, if it’s okay with your mom, you and I can go hunt some frogs, because dude, you have to hunt frogs at night. And when we catch a couple—”
“Yeah!”
“—and put them in a box, then maybe you and the dogs can go to bed so I can talk to your mom and tell her how sorry I am, just like I’m telling you I’m sorry. What do you think?”
“You could get Mom some ice cream,” Grayson suggested. “She always smiles when she eats ice cream.”
“Ice cream?” Matt asked, surprised. Most women he knew avoided ice cream like the plague, lest it go straight to their thighs. Rebecca said she never touched the stuff, and barely touched the cup he had bought her at Amy’s that afternoon.
“Mom really likes it. She eats it every day. Sometimes twice. And she has tons of buckets of it. But you have to ask first.”
“Wait—back up,” Matt said, confused. “Your mom has tons of buckets of ice cream?”
“Come on, I’ll show you,” Grayson said, jumping up from his seat and running for the back door. Curious, Matt got up and followed him into the kitchen, where one of those big, industrial-size refrigerators dominated one wall. Using two hands, Grayson yanked open the freezer side of it.
Matt blinked.
Inside on half of that industrial fridge was container after container of ice cream. Gallons, half gallons, pints, ice cream bars, and ice cream cups. There was chocolate, vanilla, rocky road, butter pecan, banana . . . lots of flavors with funky names, like Making Whoopie Pie and Blue Lagoonba—every conceivable flavor a man could imagine . . . but nothing else. There was not a single frozen dinner, no meat, no vegetables, no ice even. Just ice cream. “Wait,” Matt said, releasing his breath and finding his voice. “Where’s the meat?”
“That one,” Grayson said, pointing to a small chest freezer next to the dishwasher.
Astounded, Matt turned and looked at the freezer again. “I think you might have a good idea here, sport,” he said, scratching his head as he gaped at the freezer, and wondered how in the hell someone as near perfect as Rebecca Lear could hide so much ice cream. In her house and in her body.
Which was one of the reasons he was looking at her so intently when she came walking out on the porch, wearing a blue-green slip of a dress that hugged her body. On her feet were matching sandals; her hair was brushed back into a soft, silky tail that fell down her back. She wore just a touch of turquoise jewelry, enough to bring out the pale blue of her eyes. Rebecca looked, as always, absolutely amazing.
Apparently, ice cream was all she was eating, judging by the way she picked at the monster burger he bought her at Sam’s Corner Hamburger Hut (which was, as one might have guessed, right across the street from Sam’s Corner Grocery and Sam’s Corner Video). Matt and Rebecca sat across from each other, listening and laughing at Grayson’s amazingly long and convoluted story of a Yu-Gi-Oh! card that he and Taylor had stolen back and forth, which apparently ended with a badly torn card and two kids in the preschool administrator’s office.
At the end of Grayson’s earnestly told tale, Rebecca looked sheepishly at Matt. “He’s having some anger management issues,” she confided in him.
“Anger management?” Matt snorted. “He’s getting picked on and he’s taking care of it, aren’t you, Gray?”
“I’m going to pound his face in!” Grayson declared, to which Matt gave him a thumbs-up. “And then I’m going to get on the top of the school and jump on him, and then I’m going to kick him and put dog poop in his face, and—”
“Grayson,” Rebecca said calmly. “Remember what we talked about—dog poop does not belong in anyone’s face.”
Okay, so maybe the kid needed to turn it down a notch, but the bottom line was, he was a boy, and boys figured out their problems with their fists. Grayson would grow out of it; all boys did. But anger management? Sounded like more mumbo-jumbo crap, and if there was one thing Matt wished for Rebecca, it was that she would get that stuff out of her lovely head.
They returned to Rebecca’s lake house just as the sun was beginning to set, and Rebecca obliged Matt’s request for a pail, a flashlight, and a barbeque fork (although she objected to the fork, but not as loudly as she objected to Matt’s attempt to explain its purpose), and away they went, two guys out to do a little frog giggin’.