The Daddy Box Set

I shrugged, I didn’t think I was picky, but I did have some standards. This place was at the very bottom of the standard pile.

As my mom promised, she ordered a chocolate milkshake to go with her burger and fries. I couldn’t let her commit such a grievous sin alone and ordered the same. We dug in once our meals were served.

“Don’t tell anyone I said so, but this is absolutely divine,” my mom said sucking ice cream off a salty fry.

I nodded my head in agreement. My mouth was too full to talk. It was really good, better than I could have imagined. If only I hadn’t been such a stick in the mud when Talia had tried to get me to try it so many years ago. I wondered if Ian would like it. What the hell? Why was I thinking about Ian and what he did or didn’t like?

“You going to eat those last few fries?” my mother asked.

I raised an eyebrow at her. I couldn’t believe she put away her whole meal. The woman barely broke five-foot-tall and didn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds.

“No. Go ahead. Unlike you, my metabolism isn’t quite so forgiving,” I lamented.

“Oh, pooh.” My mother waved her hand, holding one of her snatched fries. “You’re as skinny as ever, and I know you don’t do any kind of working out. You were blessed with my genes. Consider yourself lucky. Your father is probably four hundred pounds by now if his eating and drinking habits stayed the same as they were.”

My mom rarely talked about my dad. None of us did. He walked out and made it very clear he wanted nothing to do with us. We didn’t waste time trying to worry about why and all that crap. My mom was enough parent to be both our mom and dad. Talia and I had wanted for nothing.

“I love you, Mom,” I said, suddenly feeling the need to say it out loud.

She looked at me funny. “I love you too, dear.”

She finished the last few fries, and we headed to her car.

“Do you want to take a walk around the town square? I don’t think you’ve been down there since—” She stopped.

I hadn’t been there since Talia died. It was somewhere we used to hang out a lot together.

“Sure. That’d be nice. It’ll help walk off some of that lunch,” I said.

I sat back and watched the scenery as my mom drove down roads that were once so familiar. I missed the trees in Georgia, covered in Spanish moss. It was so beautiful; I often questioned if my decision to move to Florida was the right one.

Mom parked the car, put change in the meter, and we began our walk. We stayed silent as we walked down the cobblestone sidewalks.

“I don’t think anything has changed,” I mused.

“Well, I think all of these little shops have changed owners, some several times, but they always maintain the name and the goods to make it feel like it’s the same,” my mom said with a knowing voice.

I took her word for it. She dragged me into a few antique shops. I provided the prerequisite oohs and aahs when appropriate, but my mind was elsewhere. It was on Ian. I couldn’t stop thinking about the man, which was making me a little crazy. The kiss had been so great. It was odd that I liked it so much. Not just ‘liked’ — ‘obsessed’ was the right word. Maybe it was the twelve-year age gap compared to other men I had kissed. He had more practice—a lot more practice.

“Something on your mind?” my mom asked with a look that said she knew I was preoccupied.

“No, I was checking out those antique rings. They are very unique,” I quickly said.

She didn’t believe me but didn’t press the issue. Thank God.

My mom would definitely not approve of me getting into a relationship with a professor. I knew that she wouldn’t care about the age gap, but the fact that he was a professor and I was a student, that would piss her off. She would lay into Ian as well as myself.

“I think we’ve done enough walking,” Mom said. “Let’s just head back to

the house.”

I nodded in agreement. I wanted some time alone to think about what I should do about Ian. I had to figure it out before things went too far and one of us did something we truly regretted. His job was on the line, as was my degree. We both had too much to lose.

We pulled into the driveway, and I stared up at the familiar doorway and the same potted flowers that my mom always kept up. It all looked as it should, but I knew when I walked through that door, nothing was as it should be. Talia should be in there. But she wasn’t and never would be again.

“Don’t,” my mom started. “I know it’s hard.”

I nodded, blinking back the tears that had formed. I walked inside and went straight to my room. Flopping down on my bed once I was alone, I let the tears fall. I needed this release. As the tears streamed down my face, my mind drifted back to Ian. How many times had he laid in his bed like this, crying over his dead wife and child?