Counting to Perfect by Suzanne LaFleur

Author:Suzanne LaFleur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

I came up beside Julia and put my free arm around her. She kept looking out.

I held Addie tight, away from the edge.

“Hey, Julia?”

“Yeah?”

“Can today be the new best day you’ve had in a long time?”

“I would like that. I would like that an awful lot.”

“Go ahead then. Keep taking us up. I won’t call home on you.”

The mountain turned out to be so beautiful and also a lot cooler than everywhere else had been lately. I was glad I’d brought a sweatshirt. We pulled over at another rest area to put Addie in pajamas because that was really the only long stuff we had for her. I sat in back with her again after that, clapping her hands together and then letting her stick her fingers in my mouth to check out my teeth.

“Does she ever bite you when she eats?” I asked Julia.

“Yeah, sometimes. It hurts!”

“What do you do about it?”

“I ping her.”

“You ping her? Are you allowed to do that?”

Julia caught my eye in the rearview mirror again.

Right. Are you allowed to feed her beans? To take her on a vacation so her dad doesn’t know where she is? What was the point of all these questions?

“Just on her foot. It gets her attention. She has to eat, and she can’t eat if she does that.”

I nodded.

There were a lot more travelers heading up the mountain.

“What if there’s no place to stay?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if there’s no place to stay? I mean, no empty rooms?”

“Who are you, the Virgin Mary?”

“Yep. We’ll have to swaddle Addie and lay her in a manger.”

“Away in a manger, no room at the inn,” Julia sang from the front seat. Addie turned to try to figure out where the singing was coming from.

“She likes when you sing,” I said.

“I sound terrible when I sing.”

“You don’t.”

Julia used to put me to bed, when I was four and she was ten. I asked for her specifically, every night. She’d sing me the ABCs and then “Twinkle, Twinkle,” which were the same tune, so that was perfect. One night she sang me “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and then I sleepily asked, Why are you making me think of spiders at bedtime? and she laughed and I laughed and she said not to worry, it was just a song. And then she would read me a book and I would never hear the end of the book because I would be asleep.

“I’ve always loved the way you sing.”

“I know there’s a room, by the way, because I called ahead, when you were trying to clean your teeth this morning. They usually wouldn’t have had one so late, but there was a cancellation. So it’s ours, just for one night.”

“Amazing….Is it a hundred dollars again?”

“Don’t you worry about that. You know what, though? It’s a nice-enough place, I bet they’ll give you a free toothbrush at the front desk.”

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