CHAPTER TWENTY
JUDE
“Why do we have to go?” Olivia whines. “Mom promised she was gonna make pancakes,” she tells me, rubbing at her sleepy eyes.
I peer at her in the rearview mirror. “You’re just going to stay with Grandpa for a few hours, so Daddy can run some errands— and then we’ll have pancakes…for lunch.”
“Are you and Mom fighting again?” Brady asks.
“Your mom and I—we don’t fight.”
“Right,” he says, and I swear, he’s four going on thirty.
I focus on the road, at the task at hand, and I don’t know how I’ll raise them without you, I really don’t. Brady with his ‘special needs’ and Olivia being well… a girl.
Girls need their mothers. Even I know that. But then, so do boys, and mine was pretty messed up, so there is that.
* * *
My father meets me at his door, like always, but h
