Room For More(41)
Her eyes softened as she looked at me and gently squeezed my forearm. “Thank you for going to get these. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Hell yeah, I did. Piper needs glitter dollars.” I looked down at the stuff all over the floor. “What the hell do you got going on here?”
“Oh, I found a couple of my old boxes, so I was going through them.” She sat back down in the middle of the clutter and I followed suit. “Some pictures, some drawings, old toys, stuff like that.”
I reached into a box and pulled out an old crayon drawing of what looked like dogs and cats. “Uh, did you do this?”
“Yeah.” Her cheeks turned an adorable shade of pink.
“Wow. This is amazing. I mean, except for the fact that every one of these animals appears to have a penis.”
“Shut up.” She giggled. “Stop teasing me.”
“No, really. You were drawing anatomically correct animals at a very young age. I’m impressed.” I turned the paper toward her and pointed to a particularly well-endowed dog in the upper right hand corner. “This guy up here, he’s very, uh, gifted in the penis department. His name must be Brody, huh?”
“Gimme that!” She snatched the paper out of my hands and laughed as she put it in another box.
“What’s in this one?”
She tried to peek over the top of the box off to the side of me. “Not sure. Haven’t gotten that far.”
“Let’s take a look, shall we?” I pulled another stack of drawings out and set them off to the side. “Well, we have Barbies. Lots of Barbies. Apparently you don’t like blondes, though, because you cut all their hair off and left the brunettes alone.” I pushed them off to the side and pulled out a very familiar toy. “I remember this!”
“My View-Master!” she squealed and grabbed it out of my hands. She held it up to her eyes and found the light, frantically pulling the lever on the right down to switch the slide. “Smurfs!” Setting it down, she crawled over to the box I was rummaging through. “Are there any other slides in here?”
“Tons.” I grabbed the stack of slides and handed them to her. She shoved them in the View-Master, one after another, clicking through to see what they were.
“Wizard of Oz! Lady and the Tramp! Rugrats!”
She set the giant red binocular-looking things in her lap and looked at me, taking a deep, satisfied breath. “I’m over-the-moon that you found this. I had no idea Mom still had it. I can’t wait to show Lucy and Piper.”
“You really liked your View-Master, huh? On a scale from one to finding a run-down barn, how excited does this make you?”
She stuck her tongue out at me. “I loved this thing, took it everywhere with me. If any one toy represented my childhood, it was this. I loved that I could just pick it up and immediately be transported somewhere else.”
“I had one, but I never played with it. Actually, I think I broke it when I hit it with a hockey stick.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “Help me clean this stuff up real quick and let’s head in. I have a dollar to spray.”
“A dollar?” I asked, surprised. “Just one?”
“Yes, just one. And no, you may not put more under there.”
“You know me so well.” I leaned over and kissed the tip of her cute, crinkled nose.
The next morning, I went downstairs and Kacie and the girls were already in the kitchen.
“Brody! Look!” Piper squealed when she saw me, waving a glitter dollar around in the air.
“What’s that?” I played along.
“My dollar. From the tooth fairy!” She looked down at it like it was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen. “She really came. Can you believe it?”
I took the dollar from her and looked closely at it. “Wow, did you see her?”
Piper shook her head, looking a little disappointed. “No.”
“I did!” Lucy bragged.
Kacie turned from the fridge to face her. “You did?”
Lucy nodded furiously. “She had yellow hair and white, sparkly wings and a green dress. She was so pretty.”
“That’s Tinkerbell, Lucy!” Piper argued.
“No! It was the tooth fairy, Piper!” Lucy’s little head shook back and forth in anger as she yelled.
Kacie stepped in between them. “Okay, you two, relax. It’s too early in the morning for this and I haven’t had nearly enough coffee yet.”
“Hey.” I walked over to the fridge and pulled out a mason jar of Sophia’s homemade cinnamon applesauce. “Anyone want some of this with me?”
“I do,” Piper said.