Then I realized I still had a six-year-old in the car.
To my surprise, she giggled.
“You okay, Sera?”
“Fine. Just . . . frustrated. Do you ever get frustrated?”
Ava peered out the window. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “Sometimes kids at school are mean to me and I get frustrated then.”
She plucked at the bottom of her shirt, in a gesture that must have somehow been soothing to her. My heart cracked a little.
“I'm sorry kids are mean to you.”
She gave a little shrug. I loosened my grip on the steering wheel and sighed. “Sometimes, at the end of a bad day, you just need to scream.”
A twitch of a smile appeared on her lips.
“What do you say about heading home, putting these groceries away, and getting you some apples and peanut butter in a flower?”
Her whoop of affirmation started us home and I instantly felt better. Something about Ava soothed my rattling bad days.
10
Benjamin
By the time I jogged home the next day, I couldn't help a twinge of stress.
Would Serafina have had another hard day? Would she be ready to walk out again? Although she'd seemed fine when I dropped the car keys off at her hotel room this morning, there was no telling what havoc Ava could do to a single woman without kids.
Not having Ava at the MMA Center was both a massive relief and a distraction. At least when Ava was there I could see her, talk to her. But my trainees were already more focused the last two days because I was more focused. I made progress on projects faster than I'd expected without worrying about dinner, or homework, or fending off calls from her teacher.
Maybe, with a few more days like this under my belt, I could wrap up a few things and make it home before Ava went to bed. A bedtime routine sounded like a great connecting point, even if we still had mornings.
When I slipped through the garage and into the back door, the smell of bacon and lemon filled the air. A quiet song played in the background, accompanied by a low hum that made me smile. The lights were mostly on, except those near the stairs. Ava's pink night light glowed from her door, which was open just a sliver.
I closed the door quietly. “Hello?”
“In here,” Serafina called.
Shock rendered me speechless as I advanced into the room, warmed by the jog. Cool air blew from an overhead vent while I tried to comprehend what I saw. Serafina stood on a stepstool, her hair tied away from her face. She wore a black apron and had every single cupboard in my kitchen open. Pots, pans, dishes, cups, utensils, and more littered the counters. Not to mention clusters of food I'd never seen before, and a piece of paper with two lists scrawled on it.
“Hey,” I drawled.
“Sorry for the mess.” She reached in vain for something on a top shelf with her right arm and grimaced. “Just in the middle of something.”
“Let me get that.”
“Thanks. Still just a bit sore.”
She stepped back with a little smile as I reached past her, pulling an old box of unused sprinkles from the back of a cupboard.
“Interesting,” she murmured, head tilted as I passed them to her. With a lift of my hand, I gestured to all the things scattered around.
“What's going on?”
She bit her bottom lip and looked adorably sheepish. “Sorry, yeah. I just . . . got lost down a rabbit hole. Think you can ignore this for one night and morning? I'll have it all finished tomorrow.”
“Sure. What are you doing?”
“Organizing.”
She said it brightly as if it should have been so obvious. Clearly, she'd put the $200 that I'd left to good use because I definitely hadn't bought sweet potatoes or avocados. Before I could form an opinion on how I felt about the rampant chaos in the kitchen, she broke the silence.
“You didn't seem to have any sort of system in place. I found spices in three different places. The cups were by the pantry, but the plates by the fridge, so with your permission, I thought I'd consolidate.”
She pulled her hands together in a gesture meant to show that things were a bit wild and she wanted them back to something more normal.
“I mean, it's cleaning,” she continued with a flip of her hand, “so if you do care then I can put all the dust back.”