The next morning at six-fifteen I was awakened by a text. I rolled over, thinking (hoping) it might be Jared and instead found it was my father. “I didn’t want to disrupt your date, but I have good news. Meet you at the store at eight?”
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and sat up. “Okay,” I said although that was a full four hours before I was due to be there. Today was my day to close, and I had been looking forward to a leisurely morning. Dad, though, wasn’t one to text, period, much less to say he had good news. Besides, maybe I could wander around town and see some folks after I talked to Dad. I hadn’t been over to the maritime museum in a while, and Lucas had said they had a new exhibit about African American boatmen up.
After I extricated my cat, Aslan, from her hovel between my leg
