Page 18 of Scotch: Unraveled

And he’s getting to me, too.

I mean, he’s Rory, how could he not?

We roll out of the lot onto the street and head in the direction of this new donut shopGlazed and Confused, it’s only been open for a few months but I think they’ll be around for a long time. Only a five-minute drive from my house, it’s early enough that the line isn’t long at the drive-thru. I order a large coffee with two creams and a stevia. He takes his with cream and no sugar because he’s going to eat donuts. But what kind of person drinks coffee without sweetener? Serial killers, that’s who. The Rory of ol’ didn’t drink unsweetened coffee.

I narrow my eyes at him and then at his cup and snarl, “I don’t even know who you are.”

He bursts out laughing loud enough to startle the babies who’d fallen back asleep from the car ride.

It takes us an hour and a half to reach Lexington and when we do all the good memories come pouring back. I’m surprised he remembers all the old haunts, but he drives us past several locations, pointing them out and starting every sentence with, “remember when we…”

Yeah, oh hell yeah, I remember. I remember everything about our time together. The best seven hundred and thirty days of my life until they weren’t.

We finally turn in to the parking lot of the mall and park. Rory backs that massive machine into the spot. Backs it in. Showoff. He needs one of those double strollers, something I plan to rectify once we get inside our destination, a store called Baby Central. Until then, we each carry a baby carrier inside and rent one of the mall’s double strollers. It’s big and clunky but works for the time we need it to work.

“Ready?” I ask before heading inside Baby Central. Rory peers through the glass doors and through the windows, beyond the window displays to the pandemonium inside, slowly shaking his head no. “It’s their Columbus Day sale,” I tell him. “It’s like a Black Friday event. The sales are crazy.”

“How would ya know that?” he asks.

“Commercials, duh.”

“But—”

“Rory, I work at a daycare. A daycare that accepts infants. Infants, along with children of all ages, require all kinds of things. Not to mention what we keep on hand for when a parent inevitably forgets something crucial like diapers or wipes. Can’t leave a baby marinating in their own stench all day, now can we?”

“I s’ppose not,” he answers, then sighs a resigned sort of sigh. “Right, I’m ready. Let’s do this.”

And we do.

Our first stop is in the baby clothes section to begin filling our cart with all the necessities involved with raising baby girls. It’s a clothing extravaganza. I’ve found my happy place. That being standing beside Rory with two beautiful baby girls to shop for. That’s also when we decide to split the colors. Totally my idea. In all honesty, the man looks to be one frilly dress away from total nuclear meltdown.

Because they look so much alike, in order for people who aren’t around them often enough to tell them apart, Mollie gets the colors pink, yellow, and green for her wardrobe choices. While Macie gets purple, orange, and blue.

The first thing I pick out is a puffy-sleeved layered dress with more frills and bows than should probably be legal. It comes with a matching headband, also with a big bow, available in both pink and purple. I squeal and do my own mini version of a touchdown dance.

The dress I lift from the rack is the pink one. “This will look so cute on Mollie!”

Rory doesn’t even have to speak in order to convey his disagreement on that point. He stares at the dress like I’m holding a rock of airplane sewage in my hand.

“What?” I ask, sort of pouting. Okay, really pouting. “It’s cute.”

“The lassies have a fucking Lord for a dad.” And then he yanks the hanger from my hand, hangs the dress back on the rack, rather roughly if you ask me, and begins pushing the stroller to a different section of the store. “We don’t do frills in the MacGregor house,” he grouses.

He means every word. I know he does. That doesn’t stop me from chuckling because he’s right. What kind of self-respecting biker dresses his girls in frills, ruffles and bows? Since shopping is my middle name, all I need are the parameters he wants me to stick within. We stop in front of, believe it or not, baby Harley tees, jeans and the sweetest little leather jackets.

“Badass baby chic,” I whisper, and I go wild.

From clothing we walk along the back wall of the store, the area with all the cribs, dressers, rocking chairs and all other manner of furniture one might need for a nursery. Rory splurges for two new cribs instead of one—deciding to give back the one from the center—because both his babies get new, he says. He decides that they need the matching changing table, and also purchases a dresser, a rocking chair, a table with a table lamp, and a bookshelf so he can read to them. All painted black. All slick, badass pieces.

Yes, this biker decides he’s going to read to his babies at night. Read to his babies at night? Ovaries go boom!

Once we finish with Baby Central, we load the girls back in the truck, heft all the large boxes from the roller cart we’ve rolled to stop by the bed of his truck, into said bed and I climb in the cab with the girls while he takes the cart back up to the store. There’s a light breeze out, but it’s an otherwise sunshiny, happy day.

It’s a beautiful Saturday. We’re both in a good mood and even Macie is gurgling and smiling instead of the crying she’s prone to. That’s why I convince him to stop at the closest home store.

Oh boy, don’t get me started on the home store. Rory really should’ve considered this one longer before we walked in, using the brand-new double stroller we bought at the last store. It’s not like it’s my fault the man disregarded the fact that I was an art minor in college. And okay, so I might get a little carried away when we hit the paint aisle. Butbaby nursery. Do I need to say more?

Apparently, I do.

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