the chance to make sure I’ve got it right.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“All right then. We’ll take a rain check. Let me know how it turns out, okay?”
“I will.”
“And congratulations on cooking a meal from scratch.”
“I’m tackling Mount Everest next!”
She laughed. “Gus says to give a kiss to Lady Shay from him.”
“Done.”
“Thanks for thinking of us! We’ll look forward to next week.”
“No problem. Bye, Bev!”
I hung up the phone and answered Shayla’s look. “They’re coming next week, honey. They have company of their own for dinner tonight.” I gave her a kiss. “That’s from Gus. I think he kinda likes you.”
She grinned and got back to important things. “Can we eat?”
I loved that girl. And it frightened the you-know-what out of me to admit it. She might have been my father’s daughter, but she reminded me of me. Another reason to be scared. “Sure. You get the usual and I’ll bring the usual.” Which, in Shay-Shell talk, meant, “You set the table and I’ll bring the food over.” Of course, I ended up doing most of the table-setting, too, as Shayla wasn’t exactly the quickest table-setter in the land, but I thought it was good for her to have little jobs around the house.
We’d gotten into so many natural routines lately that this pseudo-mother-daughter thing was starting to feel comfy, like the steam off a cup of hot chocolate—warm and sweet. And again, that scared me. It scared me so much, sometimes, that I felt a near-panic while performing some of our routines, as if I couldn’t let myself get too used to them in case my dad suddenly came back from the dead and took Shayla away from me and started calling me the names he used to hurl at me. They weren’t pretty names, and just the thought of them turned the world a little blotchy in my mind. But we stuck to our routines despite the thoughts that made me feel kooky. There were bedtime routines and Sunday routines and garbage routines and reading routines and after-school routines.
The after-school routines weren’t so much Shay-Shell affairs as Scott-Shell and then Shay-Shell. No matter what time I left the school after play rehearsals, and no matter what door I used to exit the school (I switched them up—just for the sport), he always managed to catch up with me. After our first trek to the Johnsons’ had yielded little information other than his Boy Scout history, he’d started to come prepared for conversational blitzes that went something like this:
Sound of jogging feet. “Hi, Shelby.”
“Low, Scott.” Sometimes I had to resort to kindergarten humor. I found it refreshing.
“How was rehearsal?”
“Seth actually touched Kate’s cheek without any visible seizures, so I think we’re making progress.”
“And all because I was able to inspire them.”
“Right. I’m sure that’s what did it.”
“So do you think God has a sense of humor?” He tried to get down to the serious stuff by the time we got to the halfway mark, just so I couldn’t use Gus and Bev’s house as an excuse not to answer.
“He created Meagan, didn’t he?”
“What’s your position on predestination?”
“I was predestined to eat cheesecake. You were predestined to harass cheesecake eaters.”
“Do you really not like any sports at all?”
“I like to watch them if I know someone who’s playing. If I’m expected to participate, I’d rather throw myself off a tall building and get my eyelid caught on a protruding nail. Or something more painful—like conversational whiplash from these little talks with you.”
I tried to throw in the occasional barb or two just to keep things light, but they never really seemed to hit home.
“Did you name your daughter Shayla so both your names could start with the same sound?”
I made a noise like a buzzer and declared the round over. We’d reached the front steps of the Johnsons’ house.
“Thanks for talking,” he said.
“It gave me a headache.”
“I wouldn’t have to talk so fast if you walked more slowly. Or took a longer road. Or . . . you know . . .”
“It’s not so much the speed as the topic-hopping.”
“Just trying to cover some interesting bases in the two minutes and forty seconds you allow.”
I smiled. “There’s no practice tomorrow.” Fridays were our down days, and I didn’t want him walking the sidewalks alone, carrying on a monologue.
“You could always come by the gym and have an orange with the guys.”
“I don’t do oranges. They’re too much like fruit.”
“Invitation’s open.”
“Duly noted.”
“Bye, Shelby.”
I did my best imitation of a flight attendant. “Buh-bye now.”
I’d