“A little bit,” I said. “But I’m fine.”
“I miss Daddy.”
“I miss him, too, honeybee.”
“You wanna know what I miss the most?” Lily asked.
“What’s that?”
“I miss his coffee.”
“What?” I asked.
“The way his coffee smelled. You drink gross coffee. It’s all black and nasty. But Daddy’s coffee always smelled like flowers.”
“Flowers,” I said.
“Mhm. Like the flowers we have in our backyard.”
“I don’t think Daddy’s coffee smelled like flowers. I think his hair smelled like flowers.”
“No, Mommy. It was his coffee. I know. I tasted it.”
“You drank Daddy’s coffee?” I asked.
“It was only one time! It was still gross, but it tasted like it smelled.”
“You’re a little booger, you know that?”
She giggled and stuck her tongue out at me playfully. I laughed and shook my head as we turned onto our street. I kept my eyes on the road as my daughter started singing to herself. She was starting kindergarten in a week, and I couldn’t believe the time had flown by so quickly. She was growing so big, and her language skills exceeded most her peers. At one point I was afraid she would fall behind.
When her father died, she stopped talking altogether for several months, and I was worried she would regress in all the progress we’d made with her. Instead, when she did start talking again, she was using words I hadn’t even known she knew. It was like conversing with a teenager sometimes.
“Mommy, look!”
I shook my head as I pulled into the driveway, my eyes scanning the scene in front of me.
“Nikki!” Lily said.
I saw my best friend waving from the porch as she jumped off the side. She came running up to Lillian’s door and ripped it open, unstrapping the girl from her car seat. The two of them hugged and kissed on one another as I got out of the car. Seeing them like this always warmed my heart.
I shut the car door and listened to it heave and groan like it was protesting the fact that it was still in use.
“You really need a new car,” Nicole said.
“Maybe but I can’t afford that right now. I need to work on getting this house paid off first,” I said.
“Aunt Nikki, you wanna play tag with me and Mommy?” Lily asked.
Nicole gave me a dubious look before she planted a kiss on my daughter’s cheek.
“It’s almost dinnertime, so how about this? You go inside and get changed and then figure out what you want for dinner. Then, after dinner, we’ll run around for a bit. How does that sound?” Nicole asked.
“Yay! I’m going to go change!”
Lillian wiggled out of Nicole’s grasp before she held out her hand for my keys. I rolled my eyes and plopped them into her hand and then watched my daughter unlock the front door. From not even crawling to speaking in coherent sentences to being well beyond her years in occupational therapy, it was a miracle what Bradley and I were able to accomplish with her.
It pained me to know that he wouldn’t be here to see her off to her first day of kindergarten.