knees, Mo’s face lighting up as two big—and now familiar hands—reached for her middle, the fingers doing something that made me think he was trying to tickle her, but wasn’t too sure about it. I told my heart to close its eyes even as she laughed.
“Does she hate me and decided to stay?” I asked him as I leaned back on my free hand.
A hint of a smile crossed the side of the face closest to me. “Yeah, nah. I think you may have frightened her a bit.”
“Me?”
The side of his mouth hitched up high. “My mum can’t be the first person who doesn’t know what to do with you. I still don’t know what to do with you half the time. But she was falling asleep on the drive to the hotel after lunch. She is tired. They both are.”
I was going to take that as a compliment.
Those trying-to-tickle fingers paused as Mo raised a hand to her face and made an agitated sound. “What’s wrong, sweetheart? I’m sorry I’m late.” He peeked at his watch. “Oh, no. You’re tired. It’s almost bedtime, isn’t it?”
“She didn’t sleep much when I took her back to the office with me.”
“She stayed with you the entire afternoon?”
“Yeah. I left an hour early, but it’s one of the benefits of being the underboss.”
He looked up at me from under those thick, dark eyelashes. “I wouldn’t use the word ‘under.’ Seems to me everyone listens to you just fine.”
Mo decided right then she’d had enough and made another fussy, cranky sound. “Okay, I hear you, kiddo. It’s okay,” I told her, scooping her up. “I’m going to put her to bed. There are veggie and turkey burgers outside, and Peter is manning the grill, so you don’t have to worry that Grandpa Gus will spit on your food or anything.”
He got up right along with me, a lot more nimbly than I did and faster, and I wasn’t going to admire it. “I’d rather come along with you.”
I had a feeling that’s what he would say. Every night, he stayed late enough to put Mo to bed. I lightly patted Mo’s bottom and then ran my hand up her spine as she made a little whimpering sound against my chest, since she’d leaned totally against me, needing me to hold her up. My poor baby. “Come on then, you.”
The three of us headed up the stairs, the sound of voices and laughter from the deck making their way up the stairs as well, the same sound I had heard so many times growing up when people would come over. There were always so many voices at the house it never felt empty. It reminded me of who I was and what I had.
I started humming to Mo, then turned into her doorway—the fourth one on the floor—the one in the middle of all the bedrooms, feeling the heat of Jonah’s body directly behind me when I stopped briefly. Flicking the lamp switch on with my foot, I carried our girl in.
I glanced at him as I moved to lower Mo into her crib. “Can you turn on the sound machine? Just press the button in the center,” I asked him as I started to massage the bottom of her foot the way she liked; that usually helped put her to bed. Every other time he’d been upstairs with us, he’d been the one carrying her. For “practice.”
He did it. And I took the time to move my eyes around the pretty neat room we had all pitched in to set up for her before she’d come along. It was the most well decorated room in the entire house. With light gray walls, a crib that one of Grandpa’s friends had handed down to us for a deal of one hundred bucks, and with a white dresser she would grow into, an enormous stuffed giraffe that had also been a hand-me-down gift, and a rocking chair in the corner… I liked it. I liked it a lot more than my plain-ass room.
Jonah came to stand beside me as I kept on rubbing the tiny foot that had slowly stretched to get closer to me as she relaxed.
“Look how tired she is,” I whispered, trying to stifle a laugh. “Her mouth is already falling open.”
Jonah covered his mouth and nose to muffle his chuckle as he gazed down at Mo lying in her crib, trying her hardest to keep her eyes open even as her little