“It’s nice. I love what you’ve done with the place. Anyway, I’m just here to get my bike and thought I’d grab some clothes,” I said.
She grinned as she eyed me. “I did notice you’re wearing the same thing you were at the cookout last night.”
I didn’t say anything, just grinned in return. Merry wagged her finger at me, and I rushed out of the room to the laundry room to grab whatever clothes I could find. I changed and went back to the living room.
“Anything I can get for you while I’m here so you don’t have to try to get up?” I asked.
“Some toast sounds good,” she said. “If you don’t mind.”
“Sure thing,” I told her and headed for the kitchen.
When I came back with a plate of several pieces of buttered toast and a small bowl of jam, she smiled at me.
“Fatherhood is agreeing with you, Darren,” she said.
Emotion swelled in my throat, and I nodded before I left and hopped on the back of my bike to head to work. I parked next to Kelly’s car and headed to the garage. It sounded crazy, but the whole compound looked different. It was like I had a completely different perspective after my night with Kelly and the morning with our daughter. I saw these things every day, yet I was seeing them new now. I could see us spending time together in the field, eating lunch with the family. I looked forward to bringing her down to the lake and watching the sunset with her.
I heard Kelly laughing before I even got to the garage. I stopped by the lockers to slip another treat into hers. It would be even more of a surprise since she got to work before me. When I stepped into the garage, I found my dad standing with Kelly at her workstation, leaning over her shoulder.
“I want that one,” he said, pointing at the screen of her phone. “And that one. That one, too.”
Kelly laughed and nodded.
“All right. I can do that,” she said.
“You can do what?” I asked.
Kelly looked up and grinned at me.
“There you are,” she said. “Your father here is putting in an order for the pictures he wants.”
“What pictures?” I asked.
“Of my granddaughter, of course,” Dad told me, looking up at me only briefly, then going back to her phone and reaching over to swipe. “And that one.”
“We’ve been going through my gallery of all the pictures I have of her from when she was born. It might take a while. We’re only on month three,” she said.
“Well, put in a couple extra orders for me, too. I have a wallet that is in need of a bunch of pictures to show off to people,” I told her.
Kelly laughed, and I leaned in to kiss her cheek. I went to the other side of the garage and started going through the stack of orders sitting on the table. Now that my personal bike was fixed and ready for the upcoming race, I planned on getting some work done on some of the commissioned projects before getting a few rounds out on the practice track.
Opening the tall metal locker against the wall, I took out a folded pair of coveralls and stepped into them, zipping them up the front. I was already borrowing Quentin’s clothes for the day. I didn’t need to bring them back to him splattered in chemicals and paint. As I took out the specs for the first project and started gathering the materials I was going to need to get started, I looked back across the garage at Dad and Kelly. They were still chatting away about the pictures, with Kelly now pointing out specific ones and telling Dad stories about them and what was going on in each one. They both smiled widely and occasionally looked at each other and laughed. I felt my heart warm. I could definitely get used to this.
36 Kelly
If I had ever allowed myself to think far enough ahead to imagine what it would be like after telling Darren about Willa, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine it being as happy and comfortable as it was, much less that it would have been as easy as it was to settle into a new routine. It was a completely different life, a new existence for both of us, yet it happened easily and naturally. Our new relationship and how we existed in it unfolded each day without any effort or stress. We were just happy, and that was something I hadn’t let myself think I could be. I’d wanted it, of course. Like anybody else, I wanted to imagine one day I would have a happy life, a family I could enjoy. But I told myself that was something I had to wait for, that would come a long time in the future.
Yet, here it was. It was just handed over to me, and I couldn’t have felt better about it. Well, maybe I could have. Darren and I got through that first week in our new routine without any conflict or awkwardness. But that included not having the talk we needed to. Both of us had acknowledged that conversation was crucial and inevitable. We couldn’t just keep going and pretending things were normal and like we could figure out our future without ever acknowledging the past. There was no way we would actually be able to build our lives together if we didn’t eventually hash out everything that had happened.
I felt that conversation hovering over us. It had to happen at some point, but there was never a moment during the week when either of us brought it up. Not that there wasn’t the opportunity. That was both the best and the worst part about it. Darren and
