Free Sample
Preview from chapter one
In the late afternoon, the driveway had begun to bake, heat rising from the asphalt in a wavering curtain as I closed the trunk of Kila’s ancient little sedan and turned, two overstuffed suitcases thumping at my knees. The house, with its meticulously mulched flowerbeds and not a single weed in the front walk cracks, was exactly as she’d left it at winter break. In fact, it was the same as it had been since her mother and I moved in almost twenty years ago.
Could it have been so long ago? I looked at the house, a little faded but well-loved. My stepdaughter stood on the porch; arms locked in her mother’s embrace. Kila. The little girl who used to lay in the crook of my left arm as I watched football. All grown up. Very grown up.
Kila turned as her mother released her, stood on the stoop with her keys spinning idly from one finger, waiting for me to catch up with the first load. She wore a white sleeveless T-shirt that strained over her chest and denim shorts that might have passed as underwear if you squinted. Her legs, always athletic, were even leaner now, with the addition of an elaborate, full-color Artemis tattoo curling up her right calf and thigh. No doubt there was some clever story behind it, probably something I’d never hear. She hadn’t so much as texted me about it. But I was her dad, and there are some stories grown-up girls don’t tell their daddies.
Her brown hair was still short, almost a pixie cut, and she’d traded the old black-framed glasses for contacts, which made her dark eyes seem huge and intense. She looked at me with an amused patience, like a cat watching a Roomba try to climb stairs. I made a show of grunting as I shouldered the heavier suitcase up past her.
“Kila, honey, can you get the door for your old man?” I asked.
She smirked. “Thought you were all about CrossFit now, Dad.”
She still called me Dad. It felt good. It had been her choice, always. I was Daddy when she was young. Now I was Dad. The man that contributed his sperm to her creation was just Steve.
“If I throw my back out, you’ll be carrying your own boxes, so maybe don’t heckle the help,” I said, which made her snort in a way that said “help” was exactly what she considered me.