“Next time she’s with me, I’ll try one more time. See what I can do. That doesn’t go well, I gotta ask you, baby, if you’ll step in,” he’d said.
I didn’t feel I was at a place with Ash where I could do this. We’d had together time and we’d done some bonding making dinner weeks before, but we weren’t close and in all the time I’d spent with Mickey’s family since we officially got together, we didn’t get any closer. This was mostly because whenever I was over, she had dinner with us but then would disappear in her room and I’d only get a, “Later, Amy!” shouted back when Mickey shouted that I was leaving.
This in itself was alarming. She hadn’t shared with me in any open way or even in girl code that she liked me with her father. But still, in the beginning, even if she didn’t make it plain, she’d communicated that to me.
Also in the beginning, even before Mickey and I got together officially, Aisling seemed to settle in to the shifting Donovan family unit, a unit that included me. We’d been connecting, gradually, but that had been the path we were on.
Now there was nothing.
But I didn’t care. If the father-daughter talk didn’t go well, I was going in.
Thus I’d replied, “Whatever you need.”
Mickey didn’t hide his relief, which told me precisely how concerned he was about the situation.
However, that conversation happened last night.
Right then, I had other things on my mind.
Things that included the fact that I’d just gotten my kids back and now I was introducing Mickey into the mix.
The way the current mix was didn’t seem volatile and after the last few years, my mother’s antennae to something like that was tuned to extremes.
But outside of Conrad showing and being a jerk, the kids had decided their own custody schedule, and since our hostile conversation, Conrad hadn’t said a thing. They’d even both brought clothes to keep at my place because they were at Cliff Blue as often as they were with Conrad and Martine.
I liked floating on those calm seas. I didn’t want to rock that boat.
I kept telling myself that Mickey was a good guy and there was nothing even in my wildest conjuring he was likely to do to make my kids not accept him.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t worried.
I fought down the urge to phone Mickey, call dinner off and reschedule in six months as I finished pulling the chicken, mixed it with the barbeque sauce and put it into the oven to keep warm.
I turned to take in my house and heard soft music playing. It wasn’t my choice of dinner music, it was rock ‘n’ roll, but the John Mellencamp type of rock ‘n’ roll that wouldn’t put you to sleep and sounded good turned down (though, that didn’t mean it didn’t sound better turned up).
I also saw the bar was set. I’d contacted the furniture company and the dining room table was coming, but it wasn’t going to arrive until later that week, so we were eating at the bar. Pippa had done as I’d asked and even filled my pretty new pitcher with ice water.
The candles were lit. The lighting was a shade up from romantic.
All was perfect.
Except I should have bought flowers.
“I should have bought flowers,” I mumbled.
“Not sure, but since your dude is a dude, he probably doesn’t give a crap if you bought flowers,” Auden, sliding on the stool opposite me, told me.
He was right.
I smiled at him, lifting a hand to tuck my hair behind my ear.
It was then I realized I’d forgotten to put earrings in.
“Shit! I forgot earrings!” I cried, this exclamation being far more dramatic than the situation warranted.
“According to the microwave you have two minutes to accomplish that mission, Mom,” Pippa teased. “Since your jewelry isn’t in Calcutta, thinking you can pull that off.”
I gave her a look that was half smile, half glare as she grinned at me then I moved, saying, “I’ll be right back.”
Auden got in on the act, calling to my back, “We’ll try to survive without you.”
I hoped they’d have to wait years before they had to do that.
I hurried down the hall but I’d nabbed my phone before I left the kitchen in the unlikely event Mickey called me, told me he had 24-hour pneumonia, but not to worry, Florence Nightingale had resurrected to care for him personally, though, alas, he could not come to dinner with me and my children.
This didn’t happen.
But after the third pair of earrings I put on (the first, diamond studs, they were big thus too flashy and too expensive; the second, long hoops that nearly reached my shoulders that Alyssa had talked me into buying, they were too disco; the last, a fall of beads and tiny gold leaves, just right), my phone rang.
I looked down at it on my bathroom counter and my neck muscles got tight when I saw it was Conrad.
Considering he might know what tonight was for Pippa, Auden, Mickey and me, and if he did the odds that he was calling was to ruin it for me were high, I didn’t answer.