“You think she likes your cousin and your brother more?”
I scoffed. “I know she does. My brother was awesome. She always said he was her treasure. Her miracle. It’s fine. I was the accident baby that almost killed her.” Now that I thought about it, maybe she did have a good reason for me not being her favorite. Huh.
“But your cousin? The one that was here today? You think she likes her more?”
“Yes.” Of course she did.
“Why?”
Why? Was he serious? Had he been zoned out the entire time we sat at the table with Miss Pearl talking about Sal’s achievements? “Do you know who she is?”
“Your cousin.”
“No, ding-dong—”
The laugh that cut out of him was loud and abrupt, and it made me laugh. Standing there so close together, his body heat against the side of mine, for some reason, only made me laugh more.
“I’m sorry. I spend way too much time with the boys. No. I mean, yes, she’s my cousin. But she’s like the best female soccer player in the world, and I’m not just saying that because she’s family. They have huge posters of her plastered all over Germany. When you watch anything with women’s soccer, they’re going to have her on there in some way. She’s the kind of person, when you have a daughter, you tell her be like Sal. Shit, I tell Josh all the time to be like her. She’s one of the best people I’ve ever met. I get why my mom loves her. It makes sense.”
His elbowed bumped my upper arm by accident. “She’s married to that famous soccer guy, isn’t she?”
“Yes.” I shot him a look. “He was here almost all day with her.”
He stopped what he was doing and turned that big upper body to face me. I wasn’t going to admire how impressive it was. Nope. “You’re fucking with me,” he scoffed.
“No. Did you see the guy with the hat sitting with her parents and some of my family? The tall one? The only other white—Caucasian—man that wasn’t chasing after little kids?”
He nodded.
“That was him.”
“What’s his name again?” he asked.
Blasphemy. I wasn’t even a big soccer fan but still. “I’m going to tell you the same thing I tell Josh: when you ask a really stupid question, you’re not getting an answer.”
That had my neighbor bursting out with another laugh that made me think I didn’t know him at all. Not even a little bit. God, he really did have a great laugh.
For a married man.
A married man, I repeated to myself.
The look he gave me over his shoulder as he handed me a plate, still chuckling, made my stomach warm. “You shouldn’t sell yourself short. There’re some people who you’ll never make happy no matter what you do,” he said to me so evenly, I glanced up at him. It sounded like he’d learned that from experience.
“Buttercup, I’m hungry,” came Louie’s sleepy voice from somewhere close behind us.
He was standing right where the vinyl flooring of the kitchen met the carpeted flooring of the living room. “Give me a second to finish these dishes, but what do you want? Cereal or leftovers?”
“Chicken nuggets.”
I crossed my eyes and faced forward again. “Cereal or leftovers, Goo. We don’t have chicken nuggets.”
“Okay. Cereal.” Silence. Then he added, “Please.”
“Give me a few minutes, all right?”
Louie agreed and disappeared.
Dallas’s elbow hit me again as he rinsed off the second to last dish. “Why does he call you Buttercup?”
I laughed, remembering exactly why. “My brother used to call me that, but when Louie was still really little, my best friend used to babysit the boys, and they’d watch cartoons together. There’s this one we used to watch when we were probably thirteen called The Powerpuff Girls, and she’d take those DVDs over for them to watch. It’s these three little girls with superpowers, right? One of them is named Blossom, she was the nice, levelheaded one, and he said that was my best friend, Vanessa. And there’s another one named Buttercup. She has dark hair, and she’s the most aggressive of the bunch. She’s the loudmouth, tough one, and for some reason or another, Louie just insisted that was me. He’s been calling me Buttercup ever since.”
“But why did your brother call you that?”
I shot him a look out of the corner of my eye. “I used to watch The Princess Bride all the time and used to say I was going to marry someone just like Westley someday.”
He made a choking sound.
“Shut up,” I muttered before I could help myself.
Dallas made another sound that was something between a cough and a laugh. “How old were you?”
“How old was I what?”
“When you watched it all the time?”
I smiled at the dishes. “Twenty-nine?”
He laughed as he set the last plate on the drying rack at his side, his body turning in my direction as he raised his eyebrows, giving me this little smirk. “You remind me more of Princess Peach.”
I looked down at my shorts and tank top, and caught the ends of my multicolored brown hair courtesy of careful instruction to Ginny. “Because of my beautiful pink gown and blonde hair?”
Dallas’s mouth went flat. “She’s surrounded by men, but she’s still herself, and she’s got her shit together on Mario Kart.”
I couldn’t help but smile, taking in the sloping bone structure of his face and the way his mouth was shaped at a slant and said, “I always did think I should have been born a princess, Mr. Clean.”
The choke that came out of him made me laugh.
“Mr. Clean?” he eventually got out, all choppy and broken.
Peeking at him, I shrugged and tipped my chin toward his head.
“I have hair.”
I squinted at him and hummed, trying so hard not to laugh. “Uh-huh.”
“I shave it every two weeks,” he tried explaining.
“Okay,” I coughed out, my cheeks hurting from the effort not to laugh at how bent out of shape he was getting.
“It all grows in evenly—are you laughing at me?”
Chapter Fourteen
“Lou, you wanna go with me and see if Miss Pearl and Mr. Dallas want to come eat dinner with us?” I asked.
His hands paused on the remote in his hands as he seemed to mull over my proposal. “Mr. Dallas?”
“Yes.” Josh was over at his friend Kline’s house, so it was just the two of us. “Since he helped us with the backyard earlier,” I explained.
While I’d been in the middle of a shower, I came up with the idea of inviting him over for dinner as a thank-you for helping us clean up the yard hours ago. It was the least I could do. I knew he had leftovers, but that way they would last longer. He’d shown up at ten o’clock on the dot and stuck around for the next two hours, going above and beyond the neighborly and friendly call of duty.
Problem was, I didn’t want to make him feel weird. So I figured, why not invite his nana too? The nana I still didn’t understand he had.
With more grace than I figured the average five-year-old was capable of, Louie nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay, come on.” I gestured toward the door, and Mac, who was lying on the couch besides my kid, sat up, expectantly thinking he was going to get another walk. “I’m making your favorite at least, buster.”