She got herself a plate and Ken deposited two pancakes on it. She sat down next to her daughter, reaching out and rubbing her shoulder. “Morning, sweetheart. You okay?”
Eva nodded. Her mouth was full—she’d snagged a pancake after all, and eaten it like it was a cookie, no syrup or anything. Lynn had always known she was an unnatural child.
“I was just telling Ken and Aunt Lynn about Doctor Who,” she said after she swallowed.
Stella smiled fondly. “Of course you were. I don’t understand a thing that happens on that show,” she confided to Lynn.
“Mom,” Eva said. “You’ve seen, like, twenty episodes.”
She turned back to Ken, and Stella whispered, “I never pay much attention. But she likes it when I sit with her while she watches.”
“I like it when she tells me about it,” Lynn said back in a low voice. “But I never remember any of it.”
They smiled at each other, and Lynn was struck by the moment—when was the last time they’d been in perfect accord like this? And it all would’ve been ruined if Lynn had started the morning by criticizing her sister about choices she’d already made and couldn’t take back.
“So what do you want to do now?” she asked, as neutral as she could manage.
Stella looked startled again. Then she scowled. “You mean, how am I going to fix this latest screwup?”
Lynn’s instinct was to scowl back, but she stomped down on it and smiled instead. “No, I mean, what do you want to do now?”
The scowl slowly faded as Stella studied Lynn’s face, maybe searching for signs of derision or sarcasm.
“Well,” she said finally, “I have to get our stuff back from Todd’s place. I guess I’ll wait until he’d be at work, and go pick it up. So that’ll have to wait until tomorrow, he’s off today. And then…” She hesitated. “We’ll need to stay here until I can get a job.”
In the past, Lynn thought, she might’ve made some comment about Stella having been fired from half the jobs in town already, so what plans did she have for somehow getting a new one? Now that she thought about it, she realized how unhelpful that would’ve been.
It was true—or, well, not half the jobs in town, but a few of them, for sure. And Lynn had always thought that that made it all right to say. After all, if Stella couldn’t face the truth, how could she ever change?
But being reminded of past failures wouldn’t put her in a mindset of success, either. That was for sure.
“I hired one of the Oliver’s waitresses away a little while ago,” Lynn said instead. “They had another girl working for a bit, but she quit in a hurry. I think they’re still looking. They’d probably be happy to have you.”
Stella had worked for Oliver’s on and off over the years. As far as Lynn knew, she’d never been fired, only left when she was moving in with this or that boyfriend or leaving town for this or that wild idea.
Stella blinked. “Thanks. I didn’t think—”
“Didn’t think what?” Lynn asked after a second.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter what I thought. Thanks, Lynn, I’ll definitely do that.” She smiled, and the warmth in it was genuine.
It was funny, Lynn thought—she’d always figured Stella for capricious and unreliable. She’d decide to do one thing one moment, and then the next moment, she’d want something else. She’d leave a boyfriend, go back to him, and then leave him again.
But another way of thinking about it was that Stella was too warm-hearted to hold a grudge. She never wanted to believe that someone could truly be cruel, and she never wanted to let go of an opportunity for something good to happen.
She was perpetually optimistic, and it got her in trouble. But seeing her little sister smile happily at her, just because of a few words of encouragement—when she’d been half-expecting Stella to be suspicious of her, because Lynn had criticized her so much in the past—Lynn couldn’t judge her for it.
Maybe there was a virtue in Stella that Lynn had just never recognized. Maybe Lynn could stand to be a little more optimistic, a little less suspicious. A little happier with whatever might happen.
After all, she’d been hit with something totally unexpected, in the form of one Ken Turner, and that was the sort of thing Lynn usually hated. And she’d been suspicious of him. But it had turned out to be the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her.
In the same situation, Stella would’ve been delighted from the start.
It was something to think about.
After breakfast—a more pleasant breakfast than any Lynn could remember, the morning after one of Stella’s stunts—Ken’s phone rang.
“Aha,” he said, and answered it. “Hello, sir.”