Slow Play by Christie Ridgway

Author:Christie Ridgway [Ridgway, Christie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781939286529
Publisher: Christie Ridgway
Published: 2020-08-25T07:00:00+00:00

Instead of going straight home, Harper swung by a convenience store for a cup of bitter coffee and a sweet roll in plastic wrap. The flavor of both improved when she found a spot at a parking lot alongside one of her favorite local beaches. A scattering of other vehicles showed others were appreciating the splendor, but directly in front of her was an empty expanse of sand and endless knee-high waves rolling in.

Not good for the surfers.

Perfect for a hometown girl experiencing a bit of a crisis.

In love with Mad?

She took a vicious bite of the honey bun and considered the chance she was so stupid.

Cranking down the window, she let in a salt-laden breeze. Her eyes closed and she pulled in a deep breath, letting the familiar scent into each cell. The ocean was as much home as the avocado grove and the herbs in the kitchen garden.

Home.

Maybe that was how she’d become hung up on Mad again. He was as much a part of home as the sea and the citrus and her family. It wasn’t such a disaster to admit she’d missed them all. A day or so more and she’d go back to her other life. To the dark bar and the golf bachelors and the new divorcées.

Another bite of honey bun didn’t make that idea go down any sweeter.

A last sip from the cup of rot gut left a taste in her mouth that suited her frame of mind. So she drove toward Sunnybird Farm, her sole focus on her full tube of toothpaste.

In the front yard, she found her mother sitting on a bench in the shade of a crepe myrtle. “Hey,” she said to Rebecca, then halted as she noticed her mom was writing in a journal. Her stomach jolted. “I don’t mean to interrupt.”

“You’re not,” her mom said. “Come join me.”

Harper gestured vaguely in the direction of the open pages. “This is a private moment.” For personal, private thoughts.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You know I’ve been journaling for years.”

“Well.” Harper didn’t know where to put her hands and kept her gaze off her mother’s neat cursive. “I didn’t know you continued your writing after I left home.”

“It’s a habit since I was fourteen years old,” she said, shutting the book. “Perhaps one day I’ll start with the first and read what I was thinking and feeling during all the different stages of my life.”

“You never look back at what you wrote?”

“Nope. I just stack them in the back corner of my closet.”

Where Harper had found them when she was twenty-one years old on a mission to unearth her mother’s rain boots. With a rare afternoon alone, she’d cozied up in the closet and breached her mother’s privacy. At first it had seemed an amusing pastime, enjoying her mother’s chronicling of kitten litters and her dislike of algebra. But then Harper had skipped ahead to the summer that she’d been conceived.

Her mom had fallen in love, hard. Cheeks burning, Harper had skimmed the pages, and though embarrassed, she’d found herself hungry for any detail about her dad.

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