Midnight Sommelier - Anne Malcom Page 0,16

used to be. Taller than me.

I glanced at Jax, still waiting for the answer to my question. “Because I’m reasonably sure that Ryder is done growing. Coffee stunts your growth. So, until you are as tall as he is, you’ll have to stick to OJ, my young friend.”

I pushed his cereal bowl and orange juice across the island in front of a bar stool where he usually ate his breakfast. I’d snapped a ‘candid’ photo of him there two years ago, and the company sold out of the stools within a day. A weird flashback to when I used to think that was a pivotal moment in my life.

Jax was still standing, staring at the cereal and juice. He was likely thinking whether he could come up with some kind of valid argument to get me to change my mind. He sighed, long and dramatic, usually reserved for the underappreciated mother of eight children or some old farmer who still had to get up at dawn every day, despite his aching bones.

My heart my burst with love.

Jax climbed up on the stool and ate his breakfast.

Ryder leaned against the kitchen counter, sipping his coffee next to me, while Alexis peered out the window at the new neighbors.

My world was this room. My husband was buried in the cemetery down the street. This was my life now.

5

I had no plans on having any kind of interaction with the neighbor that Alexis had decreed “hotter than Chris Hemsworth and Idris Elba.” I had no interest in men, hot or otherwise. I planned to become a spinster with a large collection of vibrators and a healthy addiction to wine. Once the boys were grown up and unlikely to be scarred by their vibrator hoarding, wino mother.

Ten years. I had to hold it together for ten more years. That seemed like a fucking age. But thinking about the fact that after ten years I’d be completely alone in this house, it seemed far too quick. Maybe I’d have to frame Jax for some kind of crime on his eighteenth birthday. Nothing serious, just whatever would give him home detention.

Such things would be frowned upon in the ‘mom handbook,’ but fuck that. It had been burned along with my soul and all the fucks I used to give.

Hence me having wine with lunch. Or wine for lunch, since the salad I’d picked up on the way home from running errands was staring at me accusingly while I sipped my wine and stared mindlessly out the window.

I did a lot of that. Staring at the pool, at the chairs, at the garden that would’ve died a terrible death if Alexis had not worked hard to save it since I fired our gardener. Personally, I wanted it to die. Why the fuck would I want some cheerful hydrangeas screaming at me with their life while grass grew over my husband’s grave?

But then again, raising my boys in a home surrounded by dead things would ensure that the ‘terrible mother badge’ would be tattooed on my skin instead of just embroidered on all my clothes like a Scarlet letter.

So the garden stayed alive.

I did the laundry. Cleaned. Cooked dinners. All that shit, which kept me very busy considering I had paid people to do this kind of thing before David died. And the things I didn’t pay people to do, he helped me out with.

Having two boys was indeed a full-time job. Wallowing in self-pity could only be part-time.

I was engaging in my part-time job while waiting for the boys to get home from school. David’s car was done being serviced, and Ryder was picking up his brother from school. No one had any sports or drama club practice today—that was Jax’s latest flight of fancy. As much as I loved his creative soul, I really hoped he gave it up before I had to attend any kind of play put on by eighth graders.

Ryder had been kind to me on that front, only engaging in team sports until he entered high school, and then he became more interested in working out on his own and not doing any kind of extracurricular activities. I was meant to be mad at that because it hurt his chances of going to college, but selfishly I was happy that my son didn’t require me to pretend to like some kind of ball sport. I also wasn’t keen on my openly gay son joining any kind of team full of testosterone fueled