Page 108 of This Time Around
“When did you start talking like a ten-year-old gangsta?”
She grinned. “Your turn, Daddy.”
Jack spun, then moved his game piece six spaces to the “get married” spot. He caught himself wincing before he had a chance to stifle the reaction. If his daughter noticed, she didn’t say anything. Just handed him a pink peg to stick in his blue plastic car.
“You have to spin for wedding cash now,” Paige ordered.
“Yes, ma’am.” Jack fumbled his new wife into the slot, feeling awkward and distracted and totally fucking useless.
The pointer landed on a black space, so Paige forked over a hundred thousand dollars and took her turn spinning. “Another action card,” she announced. She stretched across the table to grab it this time instead of waiting for him, which was probably smart. “‘Fired for sneaking your cat into work,’” she read. “‘Return your career card to its deck, shuffle the deck, and take the top two cards.’” She looked up and grinned. “Awesome, I get a new job!”
“Good,” Jack said. “I think that police officer thing was going to your head.”
“Says the guy who picked ‘Fashion Designer’ over ‘Pilot.’”
“What? I need a creative profession.”
That earned him another eye roll. “Remember what grandma said about not taking the game so literally?”
She pronounced it lit-rall-ee—three syllables instead of four, another one of Caroline’s quirks. How had his wife done that? Managed to infuse her infant daughter with linguistic idiosyncrasies through eighteen months of murmured lullabies and bedtime stories? It was a trick Jack would never understand, but there was a soft comfort in hearing his late wife’s voice tripping from their daughter’s tongue. It assured him he’d managed to do something good in choosing a mate and a life and a?—
“I think I’ll be a rocket scientist,” Paige announced. “And before you say it, I know that’s going to be hard with four kids.”
“Not if you’ve got a partner pulling his share of the weight.”
She stared at him, then shook her head. “It’s a game, Daddy.”
“Right.” Jack spun for his turn, landing on a stop sign that ordered him to choose between “Family Plan” and “Life Path.” For chrissakes, what was this? A fucking Ouija board? He hesitated.
He was still hesitating when his phone buzzed on the table beside him. It was facedown on the table, and he resisted the urge to look at it. Paige’s eyes darted to the phone and Jack watched her brow furrow. “You’re not going to answer?”
“Nope. I’m with you. Remember how we discussed staying focused on the people you’re with in real life and not blowing them off for the people on your phone?”
“Yeah. I just thought—” She stopped there, biting her lip. “I thought it might be Allie.”
“It might be,” he admitted as the phone fell silent. “But we talked about this, remember? Allie and I decided it would be best if we stopped seeing each other.”
Paige glanced at the phone again and frowned. “You both decided, or just you decided?”
He tried not to flinch. She’d asked the question without any trace of judgment, but he felt guilty anyway. He leaned back in his chair and sighed.
“Look,” he said at last. “Sometimes it just works out that one person just can’t stay with another person no matter how much they might both wish it were different. That’s just the way life works.”
His daughter stared at him, fiddling with her plastic car. She seemed not to notice she’d just dumped out her boy-and-girl twins, landing one in the path of an oncoming vehicle and the other in the middle of the ocean.
“When you were boyfriend and girlfriend with Allie before, who did the breaking up?”
Jack swallowed. “You mean sixteen years ago? You’re asking if Allie broke up with me or if I broke up with Allie?”
Paige nodded and grabbed one of the twins by the head before jamming it back into the car. “Yeah. Did you break up with her, or did she break up with you?”
“She broke up with me,” he admitted. “Sixteen years ago, I still had a lot of things to figure out.”
His daughter seemed to consider that for a moment as she stabbed the other twin into the backseat. “So did you break up with Allie this time?”
Jack hesitated. Honesty, he thought. You promised her honesty.
“Yes,” he said. “This time, I broke up with Allie.”
