Page 65 of Hot Dad Summer

“Keep going.”

“Damn, woman. You really think my little smart car can take on those honkers?”

“Rat, please.”

“Okay, but if this ends in a police report, you’re my emergency contact now.”

The chase, if you could call it that, proceeded through Sweetwater at approximately nineteen miles an hour, past the amusement park and the ice cream shop, both trucks maintaining a respectful distance behind us like the world’s most polite kidnapping in reverse. We might have gone on like that all day if we hadn’t come around the bend by the village green and met a family of ducks crossing the road with the unhurried confidence of creatures who had never once been late for anything.

Rat stood on the brakes. The smart car stopped. Flynn’s truck stopped behind us, mostly. There was a tap, gentle as a handshake, and Rat’s rear bumper, which had been living on borrowed time since Charlie’s four-wheeler hit it in June, simply gave up and fell off into the road.

For a second nobody moved. The ducks finished crossing.

Then everyone got out at once, and Rat walked back, surveyed the bumper lying in the road like a fallen soldier, took off his sunglasses, and held his hand out to Wes without saying one word.

Wes was already reaching for his wallet. “Every time my family gets within a hundred feet of this car, it costs me money.”

“Bumper. Emotional distress. Two egg rolls,” Rat itemized. “And Mrs. Kowalski’s food is getting cold, so let’s keep this moving.”

But I’d stopped listening, because Flynn was standing in front of me with his chest heaving, looking like a man who’d aged a decade in twenty minutes, and he gave it to me fast and plain. “She saw you coming up the hill. She grabbed me and staged the whole thing for your benefit. I threw her in the lake. That’s the entire story, Daisy.”

“You threw her sister in the lake?” Rat looked up from counting Wes’s money, delighted. “Respect.”

All three of them were watching me carefully now, braced for me to run again. I looked at Flynn’s wrecked face, and Wes’s wallet still open in his hand, and Max positioned quietly between me and the road like a guardrail, and I felt my body finally catch up to my head.

“I know,” I said. “I knew before I got in the car. I just needed a minute.”

“A feelings lap,” Rat clarified.

“I’m coming home.” My voice stayed steady, which surprised me more than anybody. “If that’s even what it is.”

The three of them traded a look over my head, one of those wordless brother conversations I’d been watching all summer, and Wes was the one who spoke.

“It is. And when we get back, the four of us need to have a talk.” He paused. “About our future.”

My stomach dropped straight through the road. Our future. Fragments from the office door started circling like gulls, September, my name, all the sentences I hadn’t been able to hear. A talk about our future could mean everything I wanted or everything I was afraid of, and standing in the middle of the road, I couldn’t tell which one was coming.

Rat loaded his bumper into the passenger seat like a friend he was driving to the airport, told the brothers with total solemnity to take care of me or he knew people, which nobody believed, and gave me a hug. He drove off with the bumper riding shotgun and Mrs. Kowalski’s cold dinner in the back.

I climbed into Flynn’s truck, and he got in beside me and didn’t start the engine right away. Behind us, Wes and Max pulled around to lead the way home, and the two trucks rolled through Sweetwater in a slow convoy.

Flynn reached over and took my hand, and I let him, and neither of us said a single word the whole way back. We were saving them all up.

50

***Daisy***

Tyler’s car was already in the driveway when our little convoy pulled in. Yesterday, the sight of it would’ve dropped my stomach through the floorboards. Today I just felt tired, and underneath the tired, strangely calm. The worst thing Brooke could stage had already happened this morning, and it hadn’t ruined anything. I was hoping that it had brought me and my men closer together.

They were waiting by the car. Tyler was leaning against the hood with his arms crossed like he was posing for an album cover. He always had a flair for the dramatic. Brooke stood beside him, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek, because my little sister was still soaked. Lake water had melted what was left of her makeup into gray streaks, her hair was stringing down her neck, and she was clutching a towel around her shoulders that she’d clearly bullied out of some poor soul at the marina. She looked like a drowned rat doing a very bad job of pretending it had planned to go swimming.

The men got out of the trucks and flanked me without a word, Wes on my right, Max on my left, and Flynn who was behind me put his large warm hand against my back.

Brooke spoke first. Her voice came out small, and for once sounded sincere. “I’m sorry, Daisy. I really fucked up.”

I looked at her for a long moment. My baby sister, twenty-six years old, shivering in a stolen towel, having burned through a man’s trust fund in a few weeks. Somewhere under all my anger, I realized the truth was sadder than anything she’d ever done to me.

“I know you are,” I said. “You’re always sorry after. That’s the pattern, Brooke. Something in you has been broken for a long time, but it’s not my responsibility to take care of anymore.” My voice stayed gentle, which seemed to scare her more than yelling ever had. “You need real help. A professional kind that doesn’t share a bank account with you. And until you get it, you stay far the fuck away from me.”