Page 7 of The Chad Next Door
I know the kids are sick of peanut butter and jelly, but it’s the only thing we have until I can get to the grocery store. We’re lucky I thought to grab a loaf in the first place, and I almost got a smile out of Zelda when I told her last night that she would have to use her hand to scoop the peanut butter because, despite the dozen embroidered pictures of ducks, the house does not have any cutlery.
They were probably silver and the only thing of value to whoever sold the house to me.
As I creep into the kitchen and look at my pitiful options for breakfast—bread, peanut butter, jam—I tell myself that this is a normal post-move problem. I just don’t know if Link and Zelda will see it that way. They had a live-in nanny who often cooked for them while my sister was at work, and from what Bailey would tell me about the nanny, she was basically a gourmet chef but with kids’ food. How am I supposed to compete with that?
“We can work with this,” I say as I eye the bread with my head tilted to the side. “All we need is another angle to make it different.”
I grab a slice of bread and press it as flat as I can get it, and then I smother it in peanut butter with one hand and jam with the other. After licking my fingers clean and then washing them in the frigid sink water—haven’t figured out how to get warm water yet—I roll my flattened slice into a cute little cake roll sort of thing. I love it, but I hope Zelda and Link love it more. Especially Link, who barely touched his sandwich last night. As it’s the only food we’ve got, they’ll have to eat it so they’re not miserable when we pack up and head into town for some real groceries.
As I work on making a couple of sandwich rolls for each kid, I gaze out the window at the view. I was too busy unloading the car yesterday to really pay attention, but it is truly gorgeous up here. I feel like I’m in a rustic cabin—if that cabin were straight out of a fifties sitcom—and the wilderness beyond that window feels full of possibilities.
It also feels full of wolverines, but that’s a different problem.
I haven’t been brave enough to see if the wolverine has returned to my tiny closet, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be. I’ll just turn the living room into my bedroom, and it’ll be fine. I don’t need privacy or anything. It’s not like I’ve spent the last six years completely on my own because I was blessed with roommates who enjoyed partying over staying in so I never saw them.
Ha.
Basically, I’m exhausted from never having a moment to myself over the last few weeks, but it’s not like I would give up this chance to take care of Link and Zelda. Bailey chose me to take them if anything happened to her, and I’m taking that trust seriously.
“Aunt Hope?” Zelda blearily wanders into the front room, rubbing her eyes.
I lick off a bit of peanut butter I missed on my pinky. “Hey, kiddo. How did you sleep?”
Something snaps in her expression, like for a moment she forgot to be disgusted. “It was cold.”
Right. Because I haven’t figured out how to turn on the heater either. I have a feeling it’s related to the lack of warm water. I Googled how to turn on the heat, but by the time we got everything unloaded, I was exhausted. Plus, I have no idea where the furnace actually is, and I have a feeling the pilot light, whatever that is, isn’t lit. That seemed to be the consensus among the forums I looked at.
I don’t exactly feel like taking a match to a tank full of gas should be a thing I do.
“We’ll get the heat figured out, sweetie. Come eat some PBJ rolls.”
Though she eyes my offering warily, Zelda sits on one of the stools at the counter and picks up one of the rolls. “This is weird,” she says but takes a bite anyway.
“Good weird or bad weird?”
She thinks about that for a second. “Both.”
At least she’s eating it. Link will be the true test, but I’ve got one of his favorite granola bars as a backup, just in case. I’ve had it in my purse since the day I realized he likes them, just in case there’s an emergency food situation.
Someone whistles outside, and I know without looking that it’s Grizz. Which is absolutely not his real name. Or if it is, it’s no wonder he’s a bit grumpy because that’s the kind of name a person has no choice but to live up to. I don’tneedto look, but I still do it because I can’t get over how attractive he was up close and how much I want to know more about him.
Here are the facts I know about Grizz:
1. He is way too old for me so I shouldn’t be interested in the first place.
2. He is not as old as I thought when I only saw him from a distance—probably in his mid-thirties.
3. He is still too old for me.
4. He looks like Chris Hemsworth but, like, better? Which I didn’t think was possible.
5. He absolutely doesn’t like me.
6. That’s not a lot of things.
Moving to the window, I pretend to wash my hands so Zelda doesn’t wonder what I’m looking at, and I watch as Grizz throws a ball for his incredibly well-behaved dog. Like, that dog is basically perfect, both in manners and in appearance. He and his owner match too. In appearance, I mean, not necessarily in manners. He’s got that golden blond coloring that I’ve always secretly loved, plus he’s a decent size, not too bulky but not slender either.
I’m talking about the dog, by the way. But I guess it fits Grizz too, though I would put him more on the thick side than his dog. I mean, his shoulders are the kind that work really well for chopping wood and wrestling bears and hopefully chasing wolverines out of closets. He can probably light a pilot light in a furnace too, though the jury is out on if I’ll ever be brave enough to ask him.
