Audrey was still hesitating to leave.
“What?” Viv prompted.
“I just feel so bad leaving you.”
“Why? I leave you all the time.” Unlike Audrey, who rarely took a day off, Viv enjoyed the perks of being an owner and regularly left on excursions. “Go. Have fun!”
Audrey nodded just as Josh walked in from the back door. He wrapped his arms around her sister and nuzzled his face into her neck. Seeing the two of them all loved up made Viv feel like a proud parent and their relationship was her baby.
“You ready?” he asked.
“Yep.”
Viv followed the twosome out to the back parking lot, where Carly was just arriving for her shift. After several more hugs and Viv promising to do all the things, Audrey finally got on the back of the bike.
As Viv watched her sister ride off into the sunset, well the high noon sun, she felt happy for her, but also a tinge of envy. She couldn’t help it. She wanted what Audrey and Josh had.
“Josh and Audrey are perfect for each other,” Carly commented as she crossed her arms and tilted her head to the side. “But I gotta admit, if I’d had to guess which Wells sister was going to end up with the tattooed, motorcycle riding, bad boy, I would have thought it would be you.”
Viv sighed. “Girl, same.”
* * *
“Are we there yet?”
Glenn Maguire took a deep breath and exhaled. When he’d decided to drive across the country with a six-year-old, he’d imagined it would be an adventure. He was sort of right. If your idea of an adventure was stopping to pee every hour and being asked, “Are we there yet?” a million times. He really hoped the rest of the summer turned out better than the four-day road trip had.
Thankfully, he’d had the foresight to buy a portable toilet because finding family bathrooms was near impossible. Even though she was six, which she reminded him on an almost hourly basis, Bree was too old to go into the men’s bathroom with him and there was no way in hell he was going to let her go into a rest stop or gas station ladies’ room alone.
She’d just turned the big six, which she considered a milestone birthday. She’d used her new age to broker a later bedtime and negotiated the use of lip gloss which he’d originally said she needed to be seven before wearing.
She was six going on sixteen.
“Not yet,” he gave his daughter the same answer he’d given her each time she’d asked.
Before she was able to get out her follow-up question, “How much longer?”, the console lit up with his ex’s name. Well, actually it came up as Baby Mama, which Zoe had changed it to because she thought it was funny.
He hit the button to answer the call.
“Hey, Zo.”
“Mommy!” Bree screamed from the back seat.
“Hello, Pumpkin! How are you?”
“We’ve been driving forever!” Bree exclaimed.
“I know. Are you almost there?”
Wow. Now even his ex was asking him that. Glenn checked the navigation which said they would be arriving at their location in ten minutes.
“About ten minutes out.”
“Oh, good!” Zoe chirped. “I thought you would have been there by now. That’s why I was calling.”
“We should have been. A truck flipped on the highway and we went from four lanes down to one,” Glenn explained.
The accident had added a few hours onto the trip. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t come at the end of the two-thousand-mile drive from Chicago to Hope Falls.