Page 80 of Ugly Duckling
Gunner shot his little girl a huge smile, winked at me, and left without another word.
He’d spent my time in the shower getting his own shower done, doing not only a load of laundry, but folding and putting away that laundry, and he’d managed to get his daughter fed at the same time.
This man was a freakin’ expert at this parenting gig.
Luckily, the girl was fed, because I had places that I needed to be this morning, too.
“Okay, Lottie girl. What are we wearing today?”
“Shoes!”
I smiled. “Shoes, yes. But what else? We can’t go out in our pajamas.”
“Why?”
I paused, because I had no answer for that.
Why couldn’t she?
“Because it’s cold?” I offered up my lame excuse.
She wrinkled her nose.
It wasn’t too cold today, even though it’d been cold the night before.
The weather app on the big screen that Gunner had up in his kitchen—one that displayed his schedule on one side, Lottie’s schedule on the other, and the tasks that he needed to get done for the day—said that we had a high of sixty.
Chilly, but doable.
“Those clothes you have on are pretty thin,” I said. “And your daddy didn’t have time to do your hair, and baby girl, it’s a total mess. How do you feel about braids?”
I could French braid with the best of the best.
I’d had to teach myself to do it because I wasn’t one of those girls that got the girls on my high school teams to do it. Not because they hadn’t offered or anything—they had. But because I didn’t trust them not to cut it off while they were messing with my hair.
Let’s just say that I learned how to protect myself from bullies, and that was not putting myself into a situation where it had the potential to bite me in the ass.
Needless to say, I’d learned how to do it on myself, and I’d practiced on my mom countless times to know that I could braid other people’s hair.
“Yes!” Lottie clapped. “Bwaids.”
I scooped her up in my arms, and she brought her pancake with her.
We got to the bathroom, and I sat her on the counter with her feet in the sink. “Okay, so you’ll have to hold really still, okay?”
She nodded solemnly.
I went to work, and had her hair braided in two Dutch braids down each side of her head in about five minutes.
She was the perfect customer, too, because she stayed so still that you’d think she was sleeping.
Her eyes were wide and excited as she watched me work.
When I was finally finished, she touched it with a reverence that made my heart melt. “Wow.”
I kissed her cheek. “Now, what are we wearing?”
She tugged at my hand and said, “You bwaids, too!”
