Page 51 of Story of My Life
I dropped my boots in line with the rest of the family’s discarded footwear and followed the dogs into Laura’s cramped kitchen.
Mom was at the stove, flipping pancakes like it was a military action. Dad was next to the sink, blotting the grease off bacons strips with paper towels. My brothers were setting the table, and my sister was shooting everyone annoyed looks from the folding table that now served as her food prep area.
She scraped a mound of blueberries and cut strawberries into a glass bowl and pushed her wheelchair back from the table.
“I’ll take that,” Gage volunteered, sweeping in to relieve her of the bowl.
“I’m perfectly capable of taking fruit to the table, Gigi,” she reminded him with the patented Bishop growl.
Cammy, Gigi, and Livvy were my sister’s nicknames for us. She claimed she’d always wanted sisters instead of the wild pack of testosterone she’d been saddled with. But deep down, somewhere far beneath that prickly exterior, she loved us with a fierceness that would have embarrassed us all had any of us actually acknowledged it.
“I’ve got an extra hand, Larry,” Gage insisted.
“And I’ve got two extra fingers,” she said, shooting him both middle fingers.
“Children,” my mother warned without looking up from the pancakes.
I inched past Mom, dropping a kiss on her cheek on the way. “Don’t worry, your favorite is here,” I assured her.
All three of my siblings snorted in my direction.
The previous day’s fight long forgotten, I clapped Dad on the back and skirted around the island. The kitchen had been cramped when my sister and her husband, Miller, had moved in fifteen years ago. Now with three teenagers, a ninety-pound counter-surfing dog, and a wheelchair to contend with, the space was fucking useless.
The ramp outside was permanent. So was the chair. But the plastic folding table pushed up against the island and the first-floor den turned into a makeshift bedroom still pointed to temporary. The accident a year ago had pulled our family into a strange limbo that none of us seemed to know how to climb out of. Maybe because that meant admitting that things would never be the way they had been.
Unwilling to entertain any emotionally taxing revelations this early in the morning, I grabbed the handles of her chair and dipped her backward until she scowled up at me. I dropped a noisy kiss on top of her platinum-blond fauxhawk.
“Donotmess up my cool-ass hair, jerk,” she complained, giving me a relatively friendly punch to the arm.
“Stop with the pouting, Laura. You’ll give yourself deeper frown lines,” Mom warned my sister.
“I’ll stop pouting when you start letting me cook in my own kitchen. I told you I was going to plug in the electric griddle and do the pancakes myself.”
Laura and Mom were cut from the same take-no-shit cloth.
Mom expertly scooped the last of the pancakes onto the platter and covered it with a dish towel. “I’m not making the pancakes because you have a spinal injury, so calm the hell down.”
The men in the room froze. None of us took a breath for several seconds as we looked back and forth between the women.
“Oh, really? Then why am I stuck on berry duty?”
Mom’s grin was sharp and merciless. “Because your pancakes suck.”
The collective intake of breath had Melvin slinking out of the room backward. It was true. My gym-rat sister still insisted on putting some crap protein powder into her low-carb pancakes, which—let’s face it—didn’t hold a candle to Mom’s homemade sourdough insulin-spiking recipe. But none of us had the guts to tell Laura that.
“Wesley! Harrison! Isla!” Laura shouted.
Heavy footsteps echoed overhead and then thundered down the stairs. My niece and nephews obediently joined the crowd. The boys were sixteen with newly minted driver’s licenses. Wesley wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes. His curly hair was an unruly mess, and he had pillow creases on his face. Harrison was dressed in workout clothes and sweating. Isla was in pajamas and had her shoulder-length hair rolled up in one of those weird sock things on top of her head. At fifteen, even with the weird sock thing, she was turning into the kind of teenage beauty that made me remember all the stupid shit high school boys pulled to get close to pretty girls.
“What’s up, Mom?” Isla chirped, as if it was perfectly reasonable to be summoned to the breakfast table at 7 a.m. on one of the precious last days of summer vacation.
Before the accident, the kids had been typical surly teenagers who challenged their parents’ authority at every turn.Since then, they’d turned into well-behaved baby adults, meal prepping, doing yard work, even running their mother through her at-home physical therapy exercises. As grateful as I was to them for stepping up in the worst of times, there was a part of me that hated this for them.
“Your grandmother says my pancakes suck,” Laura reported.
Wesley and Isla exchanged a guarded look. Harry became fascinated by something on the ceiling. My sister’s eyes narrowed dangerously.
“Yours are definitely better,” Isla insisted just a beat too late.
