Family for the Holidays by Victoria Pade

Author:Victoria Pade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Silhouette
Published: 2007-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

“I yike Dax,” Kayla informed Shandie as Shandie tucked her into bed on Saturday evening.

“I know you like Dax,” Shandie said.

“He’s funny.”

“He made you laugh all night, didn’t he?”

It was true—the entire time Shandie had spray-painted and glittered the clouds for Kayla’s preschool program Dax had entertained the three-year-old.

“He putted my French fries up his nose,” Kayla said, laughing at the memory.

Shandie made a face. “Yuk.”

“We din’t eated those ones,” Kayla said as if her mother were dim. “And he letted me sit on the big red motorcycle, and he gived me a horsey-back ride, and—”

“I know everything you did, I was there,” Shandie reminded her, to cut this short so she could do some freshening up before Dax arrived with the pizza he and Shandie were to share for their dinner. Kayla hadn’t been able to wait until this late to eat and had had fast food at the motorcycle shop.

“Can Dax be my boyfriend?” Kayla asked as she situated her security blanket just so.

That alarmed Shandie. The last thing she wanted—or would let happen—was for her daughter to become too fond of someone who could remove himself from their lives at any time.

“No, Dax is too old to be your boyfriend. And you’re too young to have a boyfriend.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“No, he’s not my boyfriend, either,” Shandie said emphatically. “He’s just a plain friend.” If the kissing they’d done the past few nights didn’t count…“He’s just a plain friend we have for now,” Shandie qualified.

“Not a forever friend?” Kayla asked, picking up on that qualification.

“Maybe he will be a forever friend, or maybe not,” Shandie hedged. “Sometimes people are friends forever and sometimes they’re friends for a little while and then they get busy with other things or something changes, and you don’t see them so much anymore. You don’t count on them.”

“Like one-two-free counting?” Kayla asked, confused.

“No, like…”

How to explain this…

Shandie tried. “Like, we had fun with Dax tonight, but if we didn’t see him again nothing would be any different for us—we’d still have fun and go places and do things just the same.”

“Why wouldn’t we see him again?”

The three-year-old mind.

“That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you know that it’s okay to have fun with Dax as long as we don’t count on him always being around.”

Kayla shrugged the tiny shoulders in her flannel pajamas. “Okay. But for now we can play with Dax and he can be our friend even if he isn’t a forever friend,” the little girl summarized.

“Right, for now we can see Dax,” Shandie confirmed.

“Good, ’cuz I yike him.”

Which brought them full circle, and Kayla put her thumb in her mouth and closed her eyes.

Shandie kissed her daughter good-night and whispered, “Just don’t like him too much…”

“’Cuz he’s jus’a friend for now,” Kayla repeated through a yawn, her eyes never opening.

But her daughter’s easy acceptance of what they’d just talked about reassured Shandie that Dax hadn’t gained any great importance to Kayla. And that was something Shandie was glad of.

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