Page 13 of His Curvy Distraction

I pursed my lips and shook my head. “Yeah, well, it would be really nice if it was easy.”

“This town will help. You know they will. I’ll talk to my son, and we can find people willing to pitch in. The clean up will make a huge difference. Just getting the trees around the driveway trimmed back, the tree off the basketball court, and this grass cut, it’ll be a different place.”

“What are we going to do about this camper?”

Amelia looked at it. She rested her hands on her hips and shrugged. “Burn it?”

I snorted a laugh. “As much as I love the idea, I’m not sure we can afford that. Think any of those volunteers would be willing to help clean it out?”

“Maybe there’s someone with zero sense of smell.”

“Lucky person,” I said.

“Yeah, because that’s horrible.”

I nodded. “It’s so horrible.”

Amelia chuckled. “Let’s look at more of the property. Then we can start making a plan.”

“Sounds good.”

By the time we got back in the car, I wanted the camp so badly I was ready to start the work myself. It was going to be a lot, but I could see it. I could imagine where everything would go. It was going to be perfect.

If there was such a thing as perfect. It would be damn close, though.

We got back to the community center, and Amelia went to her office. I retreated to mine and started dreaming about what we could do.

On my whiteboard, I drew a map of the campground. I added the current structures, including the hookups and the camper, then I made a list of all the things that needed to be done.

Remove hookups

Clear and pave road

Clean up volleyball court

Remove tree and repair basketball court

Clean pool

Fence in pool

Exterminate camper

Those were the bare minimum tasks to open the camp and know it was safe. If we couldn’t open the pool, we would have to put barricades around it. The volleyball and basketball courts were not bare minimum, but they would make the camp more fun and hopefully wouldn’t take much work or money.

The only part I really wanted to add in was shade. But there was no way that was in the budget.

Maybe someone had an old circus tent they didn’t want. And by some miracle wouldn’t be opposed to donating it to the summer camp.

I shook my head and pinned my list next to the drawing on my whiteboard. Even if Amelia managed to get people to help, there was no way we would be able to do all of it in time. But I refused to give up. Even getting halfway there meant we were closer for the following summer.

I just had to put aside my impatience and accept that some people weren’t as concerned with the welfare of children.

And then change his mind.

4

Omar

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