Page 3 of Friends to WHAT?!

And here we have the stinkyboy.

Wolfe

“You should just kidnap her,” my eight-year-old budding delinquent says from her seat at our dining room table. She slides a pastel pink pony bead onto a fuzzy brown pipe cleaner so casually I wonder if I’ve imagined her words, until she continues, “Then she can live with us and there won’t be any problems.”

I blink furiously. Then, I reply, “No more sleepovers at Auntie Almond’s house.”

Amia giggles, knowing I’m full of it. “Kidnapping is romantic,” she says. “That cool beasty guy did it, and he ended up with a whole princess and happily ever after.”

“You’re talking about that fiction movie? That is fiction? Fiction being made up? Not real? Fake?”

“Yes,” she replies, nodding earnestly. “Plus when I was watching it with Auntie Al, she said she read a book about how a blindfolded guy kidnaps a pretty bird lady and puts her in a cage and then they fall in love because of it. She said it was ‘peak romance.’”

“I’m nearly positive that’s not correct.” Because surely that is not the actual plot to an actual book, and surely if itwerean actual plot to an actual book, my sister would not be telling my child about it. Because again. She. Is.Eight.

“It is,” Amia assures me. “She said it was just like in the movie, except that her book guy did it better because he wassaving his girl from a bad life. Do you think Miss Leora has a bad life?”

“No, I do not think Miss Leora has a bad life.” Leora has about as idyllic of a life as she possibly can as far as I can tell. She lives in a pretty little cottage just on the edge of our small town of October, Tennessee, where she owns her own business selling crystals and geodes and other rocks and rock accoutrement. After work, she goes home to her cottage and reads, or plays cozy video games, or sews a new dress, or cooks a five-course gourmet meal—whatever suits her fancy whenever it suits her fancy. She spends her days doing what she loves and her evenings doing what brings her joy. The opposite of a bad life by any measure.

In other words, she is not ripe for the kidnappingby any measure.

“That’s too bad,” Amia mutters, bending her pipe cleaner to twist the ends together. “I bet you could kidnap her even without a bad life, though, ’cause a life with us would probably be even better than hers. So in comparison, her good life could be bad, right?”

Seriously. She’s. Eight.

Eight years old.

“What are they teaching you at that school you go to?” I ask. “Or is thisallAlmond’s doing?”

She grins a gapped-tooth grin at me. “I think some of it was your doing, too.”

“I don’t remember teaching you the benefits of comparing lives or kidnapping,” I comment, tapping my chin. My eyes slide to the ceiling as I pretend to think about it.

Amia giggles. “Well, you’re the one who sent me to school and to Auntie Almond’s house.”

She’s… kind of right, I guess. I drop my gaze. “You’re switching to homeschool,” I declare. “And Almond is dead to us.”

More giggling ensues, and my stern facade cracks. We both know I’d never follow through on these threats. I haven’t the first clue how to school a child, and as a single father, I lean on my sister more than a little for help raising her niece. I lean on my whole family, really, and Amia’s all the better for it. If I were doing this alone? Really alone? We’d both be toast—the burnt, inedible kind.

I think for the one millionth time as I watch my sweet, beloved girl giggle her sweet, beloved giggles, that her mother is a complete and total idiot. Wherever she is, I hope she feels acutely what she’s missing out on, and I hope that she knows just how much better her life could have been if she weren’t such a stupid, cowardly, moronic,idiot.

But that’s a thought for another time. Thoughts for this time include—

“Can’t you just kidnap her anyway?”

That.

“No, I can’t just kidnap her anyway.” There are laws in the way. And morals, too, probably. Even if it would be nice to have her here, with us, going nowhere anytime soon. Stuck like glue with the love that we have for her—and her for us, hopefully. Stockholmed love, but Stockholm love makes people stay just as surely as the organic kind does. Maybe even more so, if you think about it.

Which I’m not. Because kidnapping is wrong and not a solution to any problem, even if it is…enticing.

“How are we ever going to meet her if you don’tmakeit happen?” Amia asks as she fiddles with her newly formed bracelet. She slides it on her wrist, and it slides right back off, about three wrists-worth too big. “Don’t you want her with us?”

Oof. Not the sad girl guilt tactics. She knows I can’t handle those. “We’ve talked about this, sweet girl. No guilting.”

She sniffles, the guiltiest of guilts. “I’m not trying to. I just really love her, and I thought you did, too, and she loves us, and so I don’t understand why we can’t just… go get her? Do you think she won’t be happy here? Do you think she’d leave us?”

Leave us,too, she means. Like her mother did.