Chapter 17: Chapter 17
It was 8:30. She had said she’d call at 8:30, but if she actually called at 8:30, wouldn’t it seem like she was just sitting around waiting to call him? Like she had nothing better to do than stare at her phone until it was time to call? Maybe she should wait. Maybe 8:35 would be better. Or maybe a totally randomly seeming time—like 8:37—would be even better. Should she even call tonight at all? If she waited until tomorrow, wouldn’t he think this was absolutely no big deal to her?
Melody tossed herself backward onto the lavender bedspread she’d had on her full-sized bed since she was in high school. She’d convinced her mom to let her redecorate a little bit and taken down the trophies and medals her mom still had on display when she’d moved back in, but the wallpaper was still the white flowers with a purple background she’d helped her dad hang when she was twelve, and the furniture was more suitable for a little girl wishing she was a princess than an adult woman wishing she had a speck of the confidence it must take to be royalty.
In actuality, she had been staring at her phone for most of the forty-five minutes she’d been home. She went ahead and slipped into some cozy light blue pajamas with little snowflakes on the pants so that she’d be comfortable on the outside even though she was definitely a nervous wreck on the inside. She propped a pillow up behind her and glanced at the screen again. 8:32. Was that a good time to call a person? Was she completely neurotic now? Why would Reid want to spend any time with a rambling, overly-anxious interloper who didn’t even know a screwdriver from an Allen wrench?
With a sigh, she dropped her phone onto her lap and whispered, “I’ll call at 8:37. That’s a good time to call. And I will let him do most of the talking.” Besides, she reasoned, what were the chances that Michael was even in bed yet? Didn’t it take little kids, like, an hour to actually go to bed and stay there?
Just as she started to rethink her 8:37 strategy, her phone began to ring. Melody caught her breath and looked down. It was him—his name blinking at her from the display screen, daring her to answer. She was so nervous, her swiping finger was shaking and it took her two tries to get the phone to cooperate. Finally, with a deep breath and what she hoped was a nonchalant voice she said, “Hello?”
“Hey, Melody. It’s Reid. How are you?”
***
The sound of his voice sent little tingles down her spine, and she pictured him sitting in his living room on a manly-looking, plaid sofa, a fire blazing behind him, maybe a painting with hunting dogs or something else masculine in the background. “Good,” she said, still trying to sound as casual as possible. “I was just about to call you.” Why did she say that? Stick to the minimum!
“Well, Michael went straight to sleep tonight, so I figured I’d give you a call before whatever magic spell he’s under breaks and he spends half the night requesting water and screaming that he needs to go to the bathroom.”
He sounded a bit exhausted, as if the bedtime routine was not his favorite part of parenting, and Melody couldn’t help but chuckle. “That sounds fun,” she said sarcastically.
“It’s a nightly battle of tug-of-war where he always finds a way to win. Anyway, I hope now is a good time.”
“Oh, yeah,” Melody assured him, trying not to let the glee that he’d called resonate in her voice. “I was just going over a few things on the website—nothing pressing.” That was a lie. She hadn’t touched her computer since she got home. Could he tell that was a lie?
“Cool. So do you still want us to meet you on Saturday? I mean, I’m sure you have better things to do with your day, and if you were just offering to be nice, I can find a way to break it to Michael.”
Melody hesitated, wondering if maybe he really didn’t want to go. “No, I think picking out a Christmas tree with Michael sounds like fun. Unless, you were hoping to keep it just a family event.”
Reid chuckled. “If someone else actually wants to help me chase Michael around a Christmas tree farm, I’m all for it. I just don’t want you to feel like you have to. Since you already got roped into watching his rehearsal tonight, I think you’ve done more than enough to check your good deed for the week off the list.”
She found it a little odd that he seemed to think hanging out with Michael was some sort of charity to her. “I really like Michael. He’s so sweet and funny. He brings out a side of me I never knew I had. I don’t mind spending time with him at all.”
There was a pause, and then Reid said, “Good. Because he sure does like being with you.”
She wondered if he was thinking of tacking on “for some reason” at the end of that sentence, but then she continued her own thought, which likely should’ve stayed in her head. “I hope that doesn’t seem weird to you. That this woman who doesn’t even have her own kids likes hanging around your little boy. I’m not going to kidnap him, I promise.”
Reid laughed, and Melody realized what she’d said probably sounded incredibly stupid—or creepy. “If you did, you’d probably bring him right back,” Reid muttered before he added, “no it doesn’t seem weird at all. He picked you after all, and Michael has a habit of getting what he wants probably more often than he should. I just can’t imagine you don’t have better things to do—friends to hang out with, a boyfriend to see—than spending your Saturday with us.
Melody didn’t really know what to say to that. “Delaney is really the only good friend I have left since I moved back, and she’ll be there. Although, if things go her way, I might not see much of her. I’ve been trying to stay busy these days with work. Being back here is… hard. I miss my dad a lot.” Before she even realized what she was saying, she’d gone down a path she hadn’t meant to. Why was he so easy to talk to?
The phone was quiet for a moment, as if he was absorbing all that she had said before he replied, “I can understand that. Mrs. Gregory mentioned that your dad passed fairly recently. I’m very sorry to hear that, Melody.”
She’d been offered a thousand condolences over the last two years, but none sounded as sincere or thoughtful as this one, and she felt a tear in the corner of her eye. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
As if he could sense her mood shifting, with a chipper air in his voice he said, “So where is this place? Shepherdstown? I’ve never been there before. It’s not far, though, right?”
“No,” Melody replied, happy to be able to talk about something else. “It’s about a half an hour, depending upon how fast you’re driving and whether the roads are slick. The name of the place is Taylor Tree Farm. I could give you an address, but it might be better if you looked at their website because they have specific directions for how to get there from different locations and a map.”
“Okay, that seems easy enough.”
“Delaney said we would try to get there around 11:00, if that works for you.”
“Sure,” Reid responded. “Michael gets up around 8:00 on Saturdays, so that means I’ll only have to spend a couple of hours answering, ‘Can we go now?’ questions.”
Melody giggled, picturing her little friend bombarding his dad with pleas to leave already. “I think you’re right about the snow, though. It’s supposed to start Friday night. They said it should be pretty light without a lot of accumulation.”
“Yes, we will have to make sure that we bundle up.”
“Right.” Melody realized the conversation was about to start wrapping up if she didn’t think of something to say to prolong it, and even though she’d spent days telling herself not to say more than she needed to so as to avoid saying something dumb, she wasn’t ready to let him go just yet. “What ended up happening with the school?” she asked, hoping he didn’t think she was prying. She was directly involved in the scandal, after all.
The sigh Reid let out was sharp, and Melody could hear his frustration. “He was suspended from the bus for the rest of the semester.”
“The rest of the semester?” she repeated, unable to believe she’d heard correctly.
“Yes, but it’s not quite as harsh as it sounds. Next Friday is their last day before Winter Break. He’ll be able to ride the bus again in January.”
“Still,” Melody said, “that seems a little steep for a first offense.”
“I thought so, too,” he admitted, “but he did lie to the bus driver and forge a note. It could’ve been pretty dangerous. What if you hadn’t been home?”
“I have thought about that a million times,” she agreed. “I make a lot of my runs to the shop in the afternoon. It was just good fortune that I was home at all.” She didn’t add that she’d since altered her schedule so that she was home in the afternoons just in case Michael decided to pull a similar prank.
“Exactly. So, I’ve been picking him up in the afternoons. It’s not a problem in the morning because I always dropped him off then anyway. It’s just kind of difficult to leave a job to go get him and then drop him off at Ms. Karen’s and get back to work long enough to finish a job before 5:00 or so, which is when most people want you to go away and leave them to their evening family routine.”
“Oh, yeah, that would be a problem,” Melody agreed.
“I’m making it work,” he said, but she could hear the tension in his voice.
Before she even thought about what she was saying, Melody offered, “I could pick him up and take him to Ms. Karen’s if you’d like. My schedule’s completely flexible, and I live pretty near the school. Isn’t Ms. Karen’s place just around the corner from my house?”