really phoned it in this week.

Sorry, y'all, I, too, am cleaning. Probably why this is a jumbled mess.

I had the record player turned up so loud, I didn’t hear my stepdaughter come home. Mid-angry girl scream into the mop handle like a microphone, I caught her dirty blonde hair reflecting the sun from the window, and froze in place. 

“Uh, hello, hi. How much of that did you see?” I asked, shoving my cleaning instrument behind my back with a nervous smile.

Kess threw her backpack into the corner by the door and shook her head with the same goofy grin on her face that I loved about her father. “No, don’t stop on my account. If your gallery weren’t doing so well, I’d say you have a promising career in music.”

“Don’t be a bitch,” I muttered, drifting toward the kitchen to make her after-school snack.

“Ouch. Candice. You wound me,” she whined, holding a hand over her chest like she’d been shot. “Anyway, where’s Dad? Isn’t Thursday youse guys’ clingy day?”

“Your father took your brother to a doctor’s appointment, and they’re supposed to stop by next door for a play date with the littlest princess. Just you and me, kid. Unless you’d rather go over there, too? I’m going to be cleaning all day. Figured I had the time.”

Kess picked a cookie off the tray I set in front of her and shrugged. “How can you clean something that isn’t ever dirty?”

The noise I made couldn’t even be described with words. Almost like a disbelieving gurgle. “This place is a wreck, are you blind?”

“You know I adore you, Candy, but,” this teenage girl swept her non-cookie holding hand broadly across our home, “this is a magazine cover. Between you and Ducky, I don’t know who is more anal about coasters.”

I readjusted my hair clip and sighed. “You know you’re not supposed to call him that.”

“You gonna tell him?”

“Well, no, but…”

“What Ducky doesn’t know won’t hurt him. So, why didn’t you go with him? You and Auntie Manda fightin’ or something?”

“Nah, he needed Royce time. Amanda’s at the shop, anyway. What about you? No Jonas? Is that still a secret?”

“Mother!” Kess gasped, clutching fake pearls and pretending to be dizzy. 

“Well?”

“No, I’m meeting up with him later, when he’s done fixing Dad’s shit in the office. Thursdays are so much work for that poor kid.”

I took a moment to pour glasses of milk for both of us, setting them on the island before I leaned over it and whispered, “He’s gonna figure it out, Kess. He’s stupid, but no one is that stupid.”

“Oh no, his seventeen year old daughter held hands with a boy? What ever will he do?!” She took a quick sip of her beverage and drummed her fingers on the polished granite. “Wait until he finds out I’m not a—”

“Nope!” I held my hands over my ears and shook my head. “Willful ignorance. Plausible deniability! No thank you!”

She rolled her eyes and tilted her head toward the clock on the wall. “Honor student, Candy. Not an honor student. Anymore. Flunked math. Oh well.”

“God, that’s somehow worse!”