Joint Custody by Lauren Baratz-Logsted & Jackie Logsted

Author:Lauren Baratz-Logsted & Jackie Logsted [Baratz-Logsted, Lauren & Logsted, Jackie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

Three weeks later . . .

The Woman brought me back much earlier than usual, but The Man was ready for us since she’d called ahead.

After the usual exchange of formal pleasantries, she was about to take her leave when he stopped her with a:

“STAY!”

He barked it so loud, no one could have blamed her if she assumed he was administering a command to me. Except he never yelled at me like that, no matter how bad I’d been. And his tone now wasn’t admonitory so much as it was just plain loud.

“Stay?” she said.

“Or,” he said, “go?”

“Do you want me to stay or go?” she said, understandably confused.

I was confused too. This was the moment I’d been hoping for, for so long; the moment when he’d do something to stop her from going out that door again. And yet now that he was doing it, I sensed he might be flubbing the whole thing.

“No,” he said. “I mean, yes. Go. Go OUT!”

She sighed but not without a benevolent level of patient tolerance. “I think you’re going to have to give me a little more to go on here.”

“GATZ’S OFFICIAL BIRTHDAY!” was the little more that he came out with.

Her expression completely softened then as she said with a gentle wistfulness, “Gatz’s Official Birthday.”

And here’s where I need to explain the one thing, outside of a regal bearing, that I share with Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. QEII, as I like to think of her familiarly, was born on April 21, so that’s her Real Birthday. But in England, her Official Birthday, the date the country celebrates it, is the second Saturday in June. I’m not really sure why, but if you asked me, I’d have to guess it has to do with the British weather. An April celebration would likely involve a high probability of precipitation. But have it in June, and at least you stand a chance at a good day.

In my case, no one really knows when my Real Birthday is. The obvious deduction is that it’s sometime early in winter, but no one knows the exact date. So, after The Man adopted me and later The Man and The Woman became a couple, they put their heads together and decided that, like QEII, I would be given an Official Birthday. But unlike her, I wasn’t given a specific Saturday in June. Rather, my Official Birthday was decreed as being “the first really amazingly gorgeous day that we’re all home together.”

And that Sunday, it was amazingly gorgeous out.

Now that The Man had shouted like a loon several times, he calmed down enough to explain, “I’d just been figuring that, when you said you were bringing him back early, it’s so amazingly gorgeous a day today, this should be Gatz’s Official Birthday this year. But then I thought that maybe you’d like to join us. You know, to make it extra special for him? But you probably have other plans, so—”

“I do,” The Woman cut him off. “But I agree, it would be nice for us all to mark the occasion together.

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