“Trust me, my mom’s okay with it,” I lie smoothly. “The waxing is less than the massage anyway, right?”

Malia relaxes a bit. “Right. I’ll charge it to your room.”

Chapter 37

37

“I want you to know,” Mom told us the day we met Pop, “that you girls will always come first.”

She was saying this because she was already serious with Pop. She already suspected that he was “the one” for her, that she’d marry him eventually. But she’d never brought a man home to meet us before. She hadn’t included that part of her life with ours—dating, romance, sex. She actually had never been big on dating after she got divorced from Dad. She didn’t have time. She joked about getting Ruthie to create a dating site profile for her, but she never went through with it. She met Pop as a fluke. They’d both been waiting for takeout at a Chinese restaurant when they’d noticed that they’d ordered the exact same thing. I could always picture it perfectly when Pop told the story, love born out of some shrimp egg rolls they both had passionate feelings about.

And then at some point she’d decided it was real, what she felt about Pop. So she introduced him. She brought him over for dinner.

He was funny that night. I remember it well. He even had Afton giggling. He seemed to know everything about everything—how many bones were in the human body, how old the pyramids were, what Italian salad dressing was made out of, what the rules were to backgammon. He’d brought a set of four laser tag guns, and we ran all over the house sniping each other.

At the end of the night, he gave me a stately bow and Afton a high five.

“What did you think?” Mom said.

“He’s all right,” Afton said.

“He’s the one,” I said.

We both approved.

“Good,” Mom said. “I like him, too. But you girls are the most important thing to me. More important than anybody else could ever be. I want you to be happy and safe. So if he comes over more, and you don’t like him, for any reason, you can tell me. I’ll listen. Because you girls come first. That’s my promise to you.”

This worried me a little, because I liked him, but I could see how the power she’d just given us could be misused. Afton could say she didn’t like him, just to test Mom’s loyalty. It seemed like a thing she might do.

“Don’t mess this up,” I whispered to her that night, after we’d been put to bed. “I like this guy.”

“Me too.”

“So we agree, then,” I said solemnly. “This is our chance to have a normal family again. He’s the one.”

Chapter 38

38