Page 25 of Daddy's Little Chaos Gremlin

“No, but I think I’d better eat soon, everything just got tipsy,” I explained.

“Yup, time to get you fed. No more stops, no matter what you spot along the way.”

“It’s close, right?”

“Four doors down. We can always go back and look at something after you eat if it really holds your attention.”

Sighing, I rubbed my face against his shirt, “Okay.”

I’d already seen so much today that nothing in the brightly colored souvenir stands could distract me from the rumbling in my tummy, though I did hope that we’d still have time to visit the bookstore Tristan had told me about. He said they sold puppets to go with some of the books and that Daddy loved to put on puppet shows. I loved puppet shows, but it had been a long time since I’d seen one. I couldn’t even remember the town we’d been visiting that day, just that I’d annoyed the hell out of my aunt by slipping away to see it before she was able to dump a whole bunch of chores on me.

Even the arcade held little appeal until after I’d devoured all the fish on my plate and a piece from Daddy’s, which I’d traded him my chips for. They were super good, but I wasn’t the biggest fan of fries, which wasn’t what I’d thought they’d be. Fries always made me feel too full. Potato chips, the way I’d imagined them to be, would have been too filling, too, but I’d have probably been able to eat more of them than the thick cut fries. The fish was amazing, though. I couldn’t get enough of it. Tartar sauce covered my fingers by the time I’d finished dunking my last bite, and I chewed it slowly, savoring it before washing it down with root beer. Even the root beer was different, the flavor deeper, like I could really taste the depth and bite of the sassafras, crisp and so refreshing I finished two glasses.

Squirming out of the booth took way too much effort and I felt like I was waddling as I followed Tristan to the coin machine, where Daddy filled buckets with twenty-cent pieces for us to play games with.

There were games with bundles of tickets inside of them, along with trinkets and pieces of candy and even tiny stuffed toys that would fall when the coins they were sitting on slipped over theledge in the machine. I’d only ever seen the game played with quarters and I’d never seen anyone get pieces to fall the way Tristan did when he started playing. Then Daddy started doing the same and I realized that the games were meant to let people win and have fun on, unlike the way the carnival games had been set up. We had fun just playing our way through the room, collecting as many tokens as we spent, until Tristan tugged on Daddy’s sleeve, pointing to where a little girl with bouncy curls was just getting started with a little bucket of tokens.

Daddy grinned and gave him his bucket, then Tristan bounded over to me.

“It’s time to go to the bookstore, but we still have all of this,” Tristan said. “So I asked if we could give it to the little girl.”

“Ohh, okay,” I replied, passing over my bucket and going to stand by Daddy while Tristan took it to her. He came back beaming moments later, because she’d been so happy and announced that it was her birthday and she’d just turned three. That made it extra special. I hoped she had fun the way we had playing all those games.

It had gotten colder, and I was grateful for my new hoodie as we headed up the block to the bookstore. Even my hands stayed warm when I tucked them in the pouch and with Daddy’s arms around us, we got to share some of his body heat, too.

“They close in thirty minutes,” Daddy announced as we stepped inside. “So make sure you don’t take too long picking out your books. You may choose four each, or three books and a puppet.”

Four books, or maybe three and a puppet, and rock candy and a new hoodie and the stuffie in Daddy’s bag that Tristan had helped me pick out. My octopus and rock candy were carefullyzipped up inside of my own bag, where my pin from the arcade was proudly stuck to one of my backpack’s paws. It might not have been my birthday, but it sure felt like it.

Four books in thirty minutes, though.

Holy crap!

Eyes darting around the room, I struggled to choose a starting point, until I spotted a really cool cover with a lizard man and a bunch of other characters on it. Lizards were apparently going to be my theme, because I wound up with a chameleon puppet and the matching book to go with him, as well as a book about a frog named Bay who takes a wrong turn into the bayou and nearly becomes dinner, several times over. I couldn’t wait for Daddy to narrate the voices of all the creatures that try to eat him, as well as Bay’s when he was hopping around trying to escape them. Daddy had books when we got to the counter, too, one was even a storybook, so I knew he had to have gotten it for us.

“Is tomorrow a work day?” I asked as we waited for the taxi back to our hotel.

“Only half, then it’s back on the plane,” Daddy reminded me. “We have to be up early, so we can get checked out before we photograph the cemeteries and architecture, but we’ll have a car to chauffeur us around so it will be a lot easier.”

“You won’t really have to do anything,” Tristan said. “I’m just gonna be taking pictures, though we might do some things back at home, in front of the green screen, that I’ll add to the images.”

“Ohhh, okay.”

That meant I could hang back with Daddy, hold his hand and let my mind wander. Daydreaming had always been a specialescape for me. Everything around me got all soft, faded around the edges, and fuzzy everywhere else. Sound was muffled and my steps tended to slow down unless someone was guiding me, which Daddy had patiently done earlier, when the lines at the park had finally grown so long that it stopped being fun waiting to get on the rides.

“There’s something we need to talk to you about when we get back to the hotel,” Daddy said.

“I’m still hired, right?” I asked, hoping that this whole magical day wasn’t anI’m sorryday out to try and soften the blow of telling me there wouldn’t be a contract after all.

“You’re more than hired, you’re ours,” Daddy said. “And when we go home, we’ll be going home to our real home, which isn’t that apartment.”

“But I go with you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Daddy, is that it?”

“Is that…” Daddy murmured as he brushed the hoodie back from my face so he could gaze down at me in the glow of the streetlight. “Sweetheart, do you understand what I just told you?”

---