Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69063 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69063 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
“Nice,” I said. “Anything you might want me to start looking into?”
Shasha’s eyes gleamed. “Oh, yeah.”
“No way!” Nastya cried, throwing her hands up.
“Yes, way!” my sister-in-law cried. “He totally mooned an entire congregation!”
“Seriously?” Nastya looked from Kendall to Benedict.
“Don’t look at me, that was him!” Benedict pointed at our brother-in-law, Kingston.
I grinned as I remembered that particular event.
We’d been at Kingston’s bachelor party, which wasn’t much of a bachelor party as a day of target shooting, drinking beer, and building a chicken coop for our sister, Caroline’s, wedding present.
Later that day, after five or six beers, Kingston had gone out to dump the plethora of beer cans we’d gone through that day, and a bus had stopped and scolded him for throwing them on the ground.
What they hadn’t known was that he was putting the glass bottles there for recycling to get, and he’d have dumped them in the box that they were supposed to go in, but the recycling company had taken his bin because it’d been broken.
They’d told him to put all the recyclables out by the road, and sure, they probably meant for him to put it into another container, but none of us had been thinking all that clearly that day.
We’d been hot, halfway drunk, and tired.
Needless to say, Kingston hadn’t taken their lecturing well, turned his back on them, and mooned them.
The police had been called, but I’d luckily been able to calm them down.
That didn’t mean that we didn’t still give Kingston all kinds of shit.
“I want a chicken coop for my wedding present,” Nastya said dreamily.
She was two glasses of wine deep, and it was very obvious that she didn’t handle her liquor well.
At least, not anymore.
I loved it.
She was much more talkative, and Mom, Caroline, and Kendall loved having drinking friends.
I didn’t think I ever saw Mom at a gathering without an alcoholic beverage in her hand.
Not that she was a drunk or anything, but she loved to drink socially.
And she loved spending time with her family.
I loved seeing my mom so happy.
I also loved seeing Nastya fitting right into the group.
It made something that I hadn’t realized was tight loosen in my chest.
This was the “final test” so to speak.
My kid loved her.
I loved her.
My parents and siblings loved her.
There was no denying that she was going to be perfect for us.
“I like her,” Ben said. “She’s great with Kendall.”
Kendall was a little odd duckling.
She was great, I loved her like crazy, but she took a while to warm up to new people.
Obviously that wasn’t a problem here.
“So you gonna marry her?” Kingston asked.
I grinned as he came up beside me.
We were standing near the drink fountain.
All three of us were now waiting for the sweet tea to get filled back up.
“I’m gonna marry the hell out of her,” I promised.
Kingston smiled. “Good.”
Yes, it was good.
Very, very good.
I hadn’t felt this good in a very long time, and it was a foreign, but great, feeling.
But something in the back of my mind told me that it wouldn’t last.
My husband just said ‘calm down’ like he wants his own Dateline special.
—Brecken to Nastya
NASTYA
Dima called, and I instantly answered the phone. “How’d it go?”
He was taking over my personal shopping gig because someone might or might not have forced me to stay in bed while he ran Desi to school. And since I’d stayed in bed, I couldn’t get to the auto parts store that I’d been scheduled to go to by the scheduled time. Luckily, Dima came in on the clutch.
“I bought a new car battery today at Auto Zone,” Dima said to me.
I laughed. “You weren’t supposed to buy a car battery. You were supposed to buy something cheap.”
“I know, but the front desk clerk was the cutest fucking girl I’ve ever seen, and we got to talkin’, and after I did that whole ‘is she knowledgeable about all the parts she has’ thing, I asked her if she could help me find something. She said yes, and so I thought, ‘Dima, what do you need right now?’ and the only thing I could come up with was a new car battery for the ‘Yota.”
Dima and his damn Toyota.
It was the first car he’d ever bought by himself, and one of those things that had more sentimental value at this point than financial value.
He had plenty of money given his trust fund and his job, yet he still insisted he drive it.
Even though every year I fully expected the damn thing not to pass the emissions test, yet it did.
I was fairly sure he was paying off the facility that he took it to for inspections.
“Okay…” I said.
“Yeah.” He nodded and took a large bite of the mac and cheese. Dima and his FaceTime calls. I wondered if he’d ever call me like a normal person. Probably not. “And she tells me it’s going to be like two hundred and twenty-nine dollars, and I was all, ‘holy shit that’s a lot.’”