Page 12 of Hopeless Romantic
“You already have enough to cope with,” he said, grabbing some paper plates from the cupboard. “How was your date with The Boy?”
“He’s a man, and we had to reschedule.”
Jeffery looked concerned. “That’s too bad. You were looking forward to tonight. You need to get out more.”
Reminding him that he’d called her home wouldn’t help, so she said, “Working on it.” Beckett placed a few bowls on the table, dumped the takeout in them, careful to leave Thomas’s in its carton, and called it dinner. “But about your pills—if you just let me know in advance, I can make sure they get picked up on time.”
“Nah, you do enough around here. We’ve got it handled. Don’t we, kiddo?” he said as Thomas entered the kitchen.
“My name is Thomas, not kiddo.”
“Dad, you know he prefers Thomas,” Beckett gently reminded him.
“What kid doesn’t want to have a nickname from his old man?” Jeffery reached for Thomas’s shoulders, but Thomas shrank away.
“I don’t,” Thomas said, sitting down and taking the remaining carton, which he handled as if preparing to make a surgical incision. He pulled his chopsticks out of the paper wrapper and went about the process of cleaning them of splinters. When done, he picked up each and every piece of chicken and vegetable individually, arranging them on his plate so there was an equal balance of colors, all separated, none of them touching the rice.
Beckett gave her dad a pointed look when he started to argue. Jeffery held up a surrendering hand, then started shoveling food into his mouth, barely taking breaks to breathe. When he spoke, it was with a full mouth. “This is great.”
Not as great as flirting with Levi, but the food did smell delicious. Taking a seat, Beckett allowed her body to slump in exhaustion, relaxing for the first time since she’d left the house earlier that day.
“How’s the song coming?” she asked Jeffery, the bowl blocking the lower part of his face.
“It’s a score,” Jeffery corrected, licking his chopsticks. “And I’ve still got the entire strings section to record.”
Her dad wasn’t just a musician, he was a musical savant, playing a total of twenty-eight instruments—one more than Prince, he liked to say—and fiddling around with another nine. When he was a child, music was the way he communicated with, and participated in, the world around him. Over the years, he’d turned his passion for music into a flourishing career. And after his wife left him, music became his excuse to avoid anything that made him at all uncomfortable.
Beckett had once overheard him say that every minute he was kept from his music was like a minute blindfolded and gagged for someone else. Beckett had been five at the time, waiting for him to tuck her in with a bedtime story. The following day, she taught herself how to read.
Jeffery poured a helping of pad thai onto her plate, a signal for her to start eating. “Before it gets cold.”
It was still steaming, but she picked up her chopsticks anyway. She dug in just as Jeffery reached across the table to fill up Thomas’s plate. Because while Jeffery ate as if the world were ending, Thomas moved at a sloth’s pace, cutting, measuring, and weighing each and every bite.
“Dad, he’s got it.” But Jeffery wasn’t listening; he was too busy thinking of what project or piece he’d left unfinished in his studio down the hall.
Beckett leapt into action, her hands shooting out in alarm. But all the flirting had left her distracted, weakened her Olympic-worthy reflexes, so she was forced to watch in horror as Jeffery scooped a huge portion of pad thai out of the bowl and onto Thomas’s perfectly arranged plate.
The plop of the noodles on ceramic echoed through the kitchen and, as if sensing her distress, Diesel whimpered from beneath the table. Sauce splattered all over the separated curried vegetables and chicken with no peas, while a noodle flopped from the seven to the two o’clock position, a chunk of sliced green onion dangling from its end.
“Oh no.” Thomas stood, his gaze shooting from his plate to the upper corner of the ceiling, where it locked. His hands pressed into the front of this pants, smoothing from thigh toward knee, over and over. “It’s ruined. You ruined it. The sauces mixed, and there is green on my plate. Green and red don’t go together unless it’s Christmas. Only then do green and red go together.”
Thomas was pacing, and Jeffery—sweet, impatient, always-got-it-wrong Jeffery—looked around the table with an earnest helplessness in his eyes that went a long way toward soothing Beckett’s frustration.
“I was just trying to help speed things along,” Jeffery admitted.
“I know, Dad,” she said softly. “Why don’t you grab a clean plate, and we’ll see if we can fix him up a new plate.”
“No.” Thomas stopped, his head shaking like the Hermione Granger bobblehead figure on the handlebar of her Vespa. “It cannotbe fixed. The sauce is touching the curry. It’s ruined.”
“It’s not ruined.” Beckett moved the pad thai with the offending green onion slice to her plate, then used her napkin to soak up the remaining dots of sauce. “It’s just a few splatters.”
“No!” Thomas was back to pacing, eyes glued on the space where the wall met the ceiling. “A few means three. There are more than three, and some mixed with the curry, so we will be unable to separate those.” He stopped and faced Beckett. “We need to call Mrs. Darian and reorder.”
“We’re not reordering,” Beckett said softly. “We can make you a new plate. Free of splatters. Deal?”
Thomas’s lips thinned as he considered. With a smile, he took his seat, perched on the end, hands on his knees. “That is a deal. A new plate made from items that did not touch the irreparably damaged plate will be fine.”
Beckett should have finished her beer before heading home.
