She dashed across the lawn, this time giving the horseshoe stake a wide berth. She couldn’t imagine Ted ever doing to her what Panda had done. Although she could imagine him doing it to Meg. Not that she wanted to. She grimaced and shook off the image.
She and Panda … Two mismatched people … One vasectomy … This was exactly what she wanted from her lost summer. A chance to be really bad.
As she stepped up on the deck, she thought about how people made bucket lists—everything they wanted to accomplish before they died. It occurred to her that she was working her way through a kind of reverse bucket list, doing things she would already have gotten out of her system if she’d been part of another family. Crazy hair, unsuitable clothes, tattoos. She’d dumped the perfect boyfriend, dropped out, and now she’d taken an unacceptable lover. She’d thought she didn’t believe in meaningless hookups, but had she only convinced herself of that because meaningless hookups were unrealistic for the president’s daughter? No wild monkey sex for Lucy Jorik.
Until now.
Could this be the key? What if doing all the things she’d missed was precisely what she needed before she could move on with the next part of her life?
She locked the sliding doors behind her, changed into dry clothes, and climbed into bed, but she was too worked up to sleep. A reverse bucket list …
She got out of bed and grabbed her yellow pad. This time she had no trouble finding the right words, and before she was done, she had a perfect list. This was exactly what she needed.
She flipped off the light and smiled to herself. Then she thought of the licorice whip and shivered. She turned into the pillow, got out of bed again, and unlocked the sliders.
No doubt about it. She’d gone bad. And it felt so good.
“READING TIME,” BREE SAID, OPENING the door to the cottage’s small front porch just as she’d been doing for the past two weeks, ever since she’d made up her mind about this.
“It’s summer,” Toby protested. “I’m not supposed to read books in the summer.” But even as he complained, he got off the living room carpet and followed her outside.
The porch was only big enough for a pair of ancient brown wicker chairs and a small wooden table. She’d set up a lamp from her bedroom so she could read after Toby went to bed, but she was so tired by the end of the day that she generally dozed off first. She had better luck keeping up with her new adult reading list between breaks from molding candles, painting note cards, or experimenting with a new beeswax furniture polish.
As she opened the book they’d been reading, she asked herself once again why she was putting herself through all this. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have enough to worry about. It was mid-July. She wouldn’t be able to begin harvesting this year’s honey until early August, if she was lucky, and as always, she was frantic about money. She’d been trying to create new products, but that took a financial investment for materials, and how many of her products would actually sell? At least she’d begun to see tiny cracks in Toby’s dislike of her, the same cracks that had formed in her own resentment toward him.
The wicker armchair creaked as he pulled his grubby bare feet up on the edge of the cushion. “I can read good. You don’t have to read to me like I’m a kid.”
“I like reading aloud,” she said. “That way, I can learn at the same time as you.”
“I already know all this stuff.”
That was total crap. He knew even less than she did, although she was learning more every day.
With the help of the island librarian, she’d located a few books on transracial child rearing only to discover they focused primarily on whether or not it was right for white families to adopt black children. Hardly helpful. Most of the rest of what she’d been able to discover didn’t go much further than an explanation of hair care, something Toby was handling just fine for himself. Not one of them answered her most fundamental question—how was a pale white woman like herself supposed to instill a sense of racial pride and identity in this golden-brown child?
She was working on instinct.
He slung one leg over the chair arm, waiting for her to begin. So far, he’d finished short, kid-friendly biographies of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King, along with the story of the Negro Baseball League. He’d rebelled when she’d found a book about the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, so she’d begun reading it aloud to herself. Within a few pages, he’d forgotten his prejudice against “books about girls,” and when she’d reached the end of the first chapter, he’d pestered her to keep going.
Even though she was tired from a day that had begun too early, she read for nearly an hour. When she finally closed the book, Toby started picking at his big toe. “Did you get another movie for us to watch this weekend?”
“
