I had this crazy urge to open the minivan door and leap. We weren’t going that fast, and I’d seen it done a million times in the movies. Like in Crazy, Stupid, Love when Steve Carell’s character tells Julianne Moore’s character If you keep talking I’m going to get out of the car. You just jump and roll.

Carol must have read my mind, because she clicked the locks on all the doors. Everybody but me burst out laughing.

We sat at a tall pub table in the bar at High Tide. The server had gone to high school with some of us, so she got our drinks right away.

We held up our glasses. “To Johnny,” we said.

“Sláinte,” we roared.

Christine put her wine glass down. “If it doesn’t work out, we can turn Kim into a drinking game. You know, every time someone says her name, we have to drink.”

“Kim,” Michael said.

“Not yet,” Carol said. “She has to earn it.”

The thing about a big family is that when you’re quiet they’re usually too busy talking to notice. I didn’t even try to follow the conversation, just let it swirl around me.

I should have been relieved that my sisters and brothers didn’t know that Polly and our dad were on a date. Together. I hated that Carol had been right. I couldn’t believe Polly would do that to me. I couldn’t believe I’d invited her to stay in our house. I couldn’t believe I’d hired her in the first place.

At least the pink ice cream truck wasn’t in the driveway when Carol dropped me off. When I let myself in through the kitchen door, the smell of seriously crispy casserole greeted me.

“Perfect,” I said. I turned off the oven, grabbed a potholder and plopped the casserole on top of the stove, peeled back the foil. I spent a moment considering whether or not it might still function for breakfast in a pinch.

While I waited for the casserole to cool enough to put in the refrigerator, just in case, I tiptoed up to check on the renovations, desperate for some good news.

Pink, the plastic flamingo I’d last seen stuck into the pot outside the entrance to the mudroom and my father’s new man cave beyond, was leaning back against the wall beside Polly’s bedroom door, the bedroom that had once belonged to my parents. If I still had any doubt at all that those were my father’s footsteps I’d heard coming down the stairs in the middle of the night, they were gone. Gross, I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs, like I was still back in high school.