Page 34 of Wild Love
I try one last time. “They’re for Cora.”
Rosie goes quiet and then, “Oh. Well, why didn’t you say so? I’ll bring them over.”
Then she hangs up on me.
“You know how to start a fire?”
Cora stands at my back as I arrange the sticks and newspaper at the bottom of the fire pit.
“I do.”
“I’d have thought you had a butler to do it for you.”
I sit back on my heels, kneeling as I look up into Cora’s snarky little face. “Man. Did you and Rosie make some sort of evil plan to mock me mercilessly today?”
A small giggle I’ve never heard from her tumbles out. “No. But I wish we had.”
“You women are going to give me a complex,” I say, dusting my hands clean. “You wanna light it?”
“Me?”
“Yeah. I feel like adding pyromania to your personality profile would be a good fit.”
Cora doesn’t laugh. She stares at me, considering my words. I wonder if I shouldn’t have said them. Probably shouldn’t be ragging on a twelve-year-old.
My twelve-year-olddaughter.
But then she says, “That was funny.”
“Yeah?”
Another small giggle. “Yeah. And I want to light it. Show me how.”
“You’ve never done this before?”
She shrugs. “My dad had ALS.”
I know as much, but I’m missing how that has anything to do with lighting a fire.
“So, like… he just became more immobile every year, for most of my life. My mom took care of him. I tagged along. We didn’t do camping or anything. Or maybe we did when I was too young to remember.”
Without hesitation, I decide this is what we’ll do—all the things she never got to. Simple things. Childhood things. Things that include her.
This is what Marilyn wanted for her.
“Well, believe it or not, my parents loved to camp. Before they bought their cabin here—when I was your age, actually—we went camping all the time. Hell, we still went camping even when they got their place.”
“Your parents have a place here?”
I nod while reaching for the long-arm lighter I brought down from the house.
“Can I meet them sometime?”
Her question catches me off guard. People usually just want to meet my dad because he’s, well, him. Famous. “You want to meet my parents?”
Another shrug. I swear her traps must be extra strong with all the unaffected shrugging she does. “Yeah. I never got to do the whole grandparent thing. Might be kind of all right.”
I blink a few times, trying to process that she wants to meet my parents for the grandparent experience. She should be careful what she wishes for because after seeing them with my sister’s kids, I know how over-the-top they are.
