“I came back to Indiana for my thirtieth.”
“I thought you lived in NYC.”
We were still talking over each other. Annabelle blurted out, “You’re pretty.”
I didn’t get that a lot. With my extra curly hair, I never thought of myself as that pretty.
“Out of the mouths of babes,” said Logan. “Anyway, welcome back to Indiana.”
“It’s good to be home,” I replied. “And this must be Annabelle.”
She held her arms out to me, the confident action of a child who was never told no by an adult. I pulled her into my arms. She felt solid and warm. I felt jealous then of Logan for having a child to whom he could tell bedtime stories and splash around in the bathtub with. Going to the grocery store was a mundane activity which everyone did, and I knew that it was harder when you had a baby along. But there was a part of me that wished that I had a kid, too. I had friends in NYC, but they were starting to have their own children, left and right. Now that Bianca was married and pregnant, yet another friend fell off the list of last-minute happy hour drinks. Soon, I’d be the last one standing in our group of friends without even a husband.
Annabelle pulled on my hair, not hard enough to actually hurt. “You have curly hair,” she announced.
“Don’t pull her hair,” Logan admonished Annabelle.
“It’s okay. She’s just curious.” My hair took a lot of care to make it presentable, but she wasn’t hurting me.
“Where are you from?” Annabelle asked me, hand still yanking on my hair.
“I live in New York City, but I grew up here.”
“Oh.” She shook her head. “I’ve never been to New York. Daddy might take me sometime.”
“I can take you when you’re older. Pushing a stroller on the crowded sidewalks of New York never really appealed,” Logan interjected, smiling at the both of us.
“Anyway, I should let you get back to shopping,” I said quickly.
“I want to have dinner with the lady from New York,” announced Annabelle.
“You have to invite her, Annabelle,” prompted Logan.
“I invite you to dinner with me and Daddy,” replied Annabelle to her father.
I laughed a little. “I’d be happy to.”
Annabelle looked at my cart. “How come you don’t have any real food?”
“I just came for snacks.”
“We can have real food at my house. Daddy said chicken nuggets tonight.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” I responded.
“I’ll cook chicken breasts for the grown-ups,” Logan quickly offered. “You don’t have to eat frozen chicken nuggets.”
“Do you still like chicken parmesan? If you’re hosting, I might as well help. And let me buy the ingredients.” I took out my phone to look up my chicken parmesan recipe, which lived in Evernote. “What would you need?”
“If I’m hosting, I’m buying the ingredients. And all I’d need is cheese. Annabelle likes chicken parmesan, too.”
“It’s like a big chicken nugget,” explained Annabelle. “With cheese.”
“How could I turn that down?”
Logan laughed a little. “I guess you can’t turn down big chicken nuggets. With cheese.” He and I shared a grin. The three of us walked to the cheese aisle.
“Do you have anything that’s refrigerated?” Logan asked me.
“Nope.”
“Then let me drive you to my house. I’ll drive you back here after dinner.”
“Sounds fine.” I’d known Logan for long enough to know that he liked to be the person who called the shots. If he was the one driving me back to my car, he’d be in control of the situation.
The three of us went through the cash registers quickly, and I headed to my car after seeing where Logan had parked. I quickly shoveled my snacks into my trunk, then I went to his car. The passenger seat was immaculate, but I could see the remains of some decimated goldfish next to Annabelle. The car smelled of cherry juice, which I imagined was also Annabelle’s responsibility. She had been buckled in by Logan. We pulled out and then headed to Logan’s home, where I’d never been before.
“How long are you here?” he asked me.
“A week. I’ve been too busy to come home for a while,” I replied.
“Annabelle thinks that you smell like Dove soap,” Logan reported.
“I probably do,” I laughed.
At a red light, he leaned over and gave me an exaggerated sniff. “You still do. You did in high school, too.”
I blushed a little. Back in high school, he had a habit of giving me quick pecks on the mouth at red lights. My face was warm remembering how easy it had been to be with him. It had only ended when he went to University of Michigan - Ann Arbor while I’d stayed closer to home to go to Kelley School of Business in Bloomington.
“How’s work? What do you do?” I hadn’t looked him up beyond the odd Facebook post about Annabelle.
“I run my own company. We do human resources, outsourced from a lot of small companies,” he shared.
“Sounds cool.”
“What do you do?”
“I have a publishing business for genre fiction. We’re putting out a lot of books nowadays.”
“Sounds like you’re busy,” Logan commented as he smoothly navigated a left turn. We were in an average Carmel suburban neighborhood, where everyone had a manicured lawn. It was humid and muggy during an Indiana summer, but Lord forbid anybody forgot to cut their lawn. Logan took a few turns before we pulled into a driveway with a two-car garage.
“We’re home!” Annabelle called out.
Chapter 4
She was already unfastening her seatbelt. Logan got out of the driver’s seat and went to the back immediately.
“Easy does it, Munchkin.”
There was a lump in my throat looking at the two of them together. Logan had been kind of wild in high school. It wasn’t surprising that he was running his own business now, and it didn’t surprise him at all that I had my own publishing business in NYC. But he’d made the time to have a kid, and I hadn’t. I wondered what it would be like to come home to an apartment where I had to clean up crumbled goldfish the first thing after I came through the door. The light in Logan’s face when he picked Annabelle up to take her out of the car was worth working some 9-to-5 under fluorescent lights in a gray cubicle somewhere. I’d sacrificed a lot to get my publishing business off of the ground. Seeing them together made my heart twist a little bit. Bianca was pregnant. There were a lot of friends who didn’t mind pushing a stroller down the streets of New York, unlike Logan. Some of my friends had moved a little further out, like Long Island, in order to have more space for their own Munchkins. I was seeing less and less of them while their sticky little kids ate up more of their time.
“Are you okay?” asked Logan, one arm around Annabelle and another hand pushing the door of his minivan closed. I couldn’t believe that Logan had a minivan. Logan Simpson, the former basketball player, had a minivan for a single child.
“I’m fine,” I said, and I shook off the feeling. I was here to make some chicken parmesan before I went home to my parents. I remembered to text them that I wasn’t coming home for dinner because I’d run into a friend. They didn’t mind it, because my dad was already on an intermittent fasting schedule that interrupted family dinners the way we’d had them when I was growing up. He was on a sixteen-hour fasting schedule so his eating window was just eight hours per day.