Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 137077 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 685(@200wpm)___ 548(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 137077 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 685(@200wpm)___ 548(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
Cameron laughs at my theatrics and grabs my hand. “No way, we’re all making it out of here alive.”
Hand-in-hand, he leads me through the rest of the maze, going as slow as I need, even though he could sprint through this thing. When we finally find the exit, Grace is standing there waiting for us with a victorious smile on her face.
“There you are! I won!”
Her eyes drop to our clasped hands, and though I’d swear her smile grows a bit wider, I instinctively release Cameron. I feel the loss, my hand instantly feeling colder without being wrapped in his warmth, but I don’t want Grace to be confused about my role here. I’m her nanny, that’s it.
A tiny, regretful prick stabs my heart again. I wish I could be more… for her, for Cameron, for this sweet little family of two.
But that’s not what I’m meant to be.
I’m here to remind them that life can be fun, and amazing, and full of joy, even after a bad thing happens, and that it’s okay to live after loss. Especially after a loss, when it might be more important than ever.
Playing that up, I rush for her, grabbing her in my arms and spinning her around, her legs dangling ungracefully. “I thought I’d never see you again!” I declare. “It’s a good thing your dad was there to save me.” I play-bat my lashes at him. “My hero!”
Grace laughs and so do I. But Cameron? His hand, the one I released, is tightened into a fist and he looks irritated again.
Probably at me.
“Did you see the way that goat tried to bite me?” Grace gushes on the way home, sounding much more offended than she should be.
“In his defense, you had the food pellets,” I remind her. “If someone were holding your favorite Frappuccino hostage, I bet you’d do a whole lot more than nibble them.” I mime taking a big chunk out of someone, growling as I clack my teeth together T-Rex style.
“Yeah, but he’d already had two handfuls and the cutie patootie mini cow hadn’t had any,” Grace counters. “He was probably starving. The goat should’ve shared.”
I hide my snicker, because none of the animals at the petting zoo were missing any meals. In fact, today was probably like their trick-or-treating gorge, only on animal-safe pellets rather than Hershey’s bars.
“I’m not sure goats have manners the way people do.”
“Well, they should.” She crosses her arms, looking out the window, but she’s smiling happily.
For something she decreed ‘for little kids’, we all had fun. The maze was a laugh riot. The hayride was jarring and bouncy but the farmer driving the tractor told both funny and spooky stories, and somehow, we ended up with Cameron sitting in the middle of Grace and me, which meant that every other rut sent us careening into each other. We spent nearly thirty minutes wandering the rows of pumpkins, each of us determined to find the ‘perfect one’ but all with different definitions of what that entailed. Cameron’s is the stereotypical round, orange globe. Grace chose a chalky white, flat one because ‘aesthetics’, she said. And of course, I picked the bumpy, multicolored one because different is always good in my book and the pile of ‘ugly’ and ‘unwanted’ pumpkins had made me sad. I’d very nearly bought them all just so the inanimate gourds wouldn’t feel bad, but Cameron reminded me that I probably didn’t have room in my trunk for that many and I’d reluctantly agreed. Despite Grace’s thoughts on the one greedy goat, the petting zoo was hilarious, mostly because of Cameron’s horrified reaction to the way the dusty, dirty animals felt when he finally took the plunge to pet them, like he was petting diseased steel wool. I’d laughed even harder when he used three heavy squirts of the provided sanitizer to decontaminate his hands after. He acted disgusted, sticking his tongue out and making a gagging noise, but I saw his little smirk. He did it to make us laugh.
He went along with it all. For Grace.
And for you.
All day, the little voice in my head has been trying to make today have more importance than it should. But it’d felt so nice to simply play and have fun together. I’d felt included, and that’d been nice. It sure hadn’t felt like work.
It’d felt like family.
That sense of family continues when we crowd into the kitchen to carve Cameron’s huge orange pumpkin, scooping seeds and guts out and threatening to smear the ooey gooeyness onto each other, which quickly turns into a three-way chase around the island. When Cameron’s long arms reach across the counter’s expanse and he gets a bit of pumpkin on Grace’s nose, I save her by teaming up with her against Cameron. I play dirty, though, and with a whisper, remind her that she doesn’t have to go around the island… she can go over it, and with our shortcut plan in place, I help her jump up and get a handful of orange goo on Cameron’s cheek before he can react to Grace suddenly going from two feet away to looming over him. None of us come out of the battle unscathed by pumpkin guts, but it all washes off in the sink, and the completed jack-o-lantern looks adorable with its crooked gap-toothed grin.