My mouth curves up faintly. “It really is.”
“Sometimes good things happen when you color outside the lines,” Derek volunteers.
I narrow my eyes at him, because I know he’s not talking about that damn pony picture.
Cassidy laughs and leans over, nudging him in the shoulder. “No,” she says. “You’re silly, Daddy. Then it looks messy.”
“What’s wrong with messy?” he teases, hovering his crayon over her picture, then pressing it to the paper and drawing the head of a flower. He grabs a green crayon and adds a stem, then he points and says, “There. See? That wasn’t inside the lines, but didn’t it make the picture prettier?”
Easily convinced, Cassidy nods her head. “Okay, I like flowers. You’re allowed to draw flowers outside the lines.”
“There you go,” he says, looking back up at me.
“That won’t work on me,” I inform him.
“Keep telling yourself that,” he says lightly. Before I can glare at him, he grabs a crayon and proceeds helping Cassidy with my picture.
Once their masterpiece is finished, Cassidy tells Derek to take the page out for her. He does, and she runs over to hand it to me. I hate knowing she is half Kayla, but she’s absolutely adorable.
“Thank you, Cassidy,” I say, looking over the picture she colored for me. “It’s beautiful. I love it.”
Picking up crayons and tossing them back into the bin like it’s part of his daily routine, Derek asks, “You girls hungry?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Cassidy answers, jumping up and down.
“I really just need to use your phone so I can call… someone. I need to get home,” I tell him.
“We’ll take you home,” he says, closing the coloring book and standing. “After we get some lunch.”
“And we gotta go to the store,” Cassidy tells me, her eyes widening with excitement as she runs to the couch and grabs a little pink purse, opening it and pulling out a five dollar bill. “I have money to spend.”
“Ah, yes. Your trick money.”
She smiles, pointing at me. “We got you good.”
Derek’s blue eyes glimmer with amusement. “We really did.” He holds his hand up, and Cassidy gives him a high five.
I cross my arms, shaking my head at him. “Terrible.”
“Evil geniuses, you mean,” he corrects me.
“Mwahahahaha,” Cassidy enthuses, liking her role as an evil genius just a little too much.
I try not to not to smile, but I can’t quite manage so I walk away, not wanting Derek to think any of this amuses me.
---
Before long, we are all piled into Derek’s truck. The cab is huge, and now that I am sober, I see Cassidy’s booster seat in the back. She chatters at me like we’re old friends as we drive away from their house and toward food. I really don’t want to eat in this town, so I was hoping we could get food on the road, once we were at least outside the city limits, but of course Derek heads right into town. It feels spiteful that he drives past the old trailer park where I used to live with Alex, but when I glance over at him he’s not even looking at me.
I guess since he lives in this town and drives these roads all the time, the landmarks hold less significance for him. When he turns onto the main road, instead of a big empty patch of land, there’s a brand new gas station. A few hundred feet down the road, the old convenience store where Derek and I stopped for slushies every now and then is shut down and boarded up. That makes me sad, for some reason I can’t quite pin down. It’s not like I thought the town would stop evolving without me here, it’s just more evidence that life here went on without me—including Derek’s life.
I’ve avoided thinking of this all morning, due to my status as an emotionally uninvolved person, but I can’t help wondering how many other women Derek has had in his life since me. How many other women got their hearts warmed by pictures Cassidy colored for them? That bastard, he even turns a kid in his favor. Even the kid who is the reason he and I couldn’t be together. It’s not responsible parenting to bring every ho he brings home into her life. I’d tell him that, but I am currently that ho, and it’s not my business. I’m going home, I’m going to pick up the pieces of my life, and move right along with it. This is only a detour. A day off. I haven’t taken one of those in a long time.
The anxiety currently running through me as I consider how long that list of women between Kayla and me must be provides all the motivation I need to get the hell away from him. I don’t want to care about this. I want to color inside the lines. I don’t need rule-breaking, boundary-pushing flowers.
Derek pulls up behind an old bar that I never went to when I lived here, given my age. I almost object, wanting to know why we’re taking to Cassidy to lunch at a bar, but then I notice the new signage. “Haury’s Bar and Grille,” it reads. Not the old tavern it was when I lived here.
“Is anything the same?” I mutter.