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“Then let’s go eat,” I said.
“I want funnel cake.”
“Only after we have some real food first,” I said.
“It’s Coney Island,” Stan said gently. “I’m not sure they have any real food here.”
“Then what do you propose?”
He pointed across the street to a food truck.
“I propose tortas and quesadillas and tacos.”
“Tacos?” Lindsey said, her mouth agape.
“Now you’ve gone and done it,” I said with a laugh and a sigh.
“Tacos, tacos, I want tacos! Tacos dance!”
Linsey did her ‘taco dance’, which looked an awful lot like what might happen if you electrocuted a monkey high on crack cocaine. Stan recorded her and I covered my face with embarrassment.
“Why in god’s name are you recording this of all things for posterity?”
“You’re not looking at the big picture, my love,” Stan said with a smile. “This will all be great blackmail material later. Say, if she doesn’t get good grades, we’ll show these videos to her dates.”
“Ew, I’d never go on a date,” Lindsay said as we joined the line for the food truck. “Boys are gross.”
“Yes, that’s perfect,” Stan said. “I want you to keep thinking that all the way through high school. Preferably college. In fact, don’t go on a date until I’m dead.”
“Oh, Stan,” I said, pinching his cheek. He laughed like a schoolboy. I adored him so much. “You might as well get an old gun to clean anytime a boy shows up on the porch.”
“That’s not a bad idea. I was thinking of taking up karate so I could, you know, split a stack of bricks with my forehead or something when they came up the sidewalk.”
“Thank goodness we’ve got a decade before she starts dating.”
“At least a decade,” he corrected me.
When we got to the front of the line of the taco truck, Stan suddenly turned to me.
“I’ll be right back with drinks.” He pointed at a row of picnic tables. “Can you and Lindsey wait for me there?”
“Sure, but what’s wrong with the drinks that they sell here?”
“Nothing.” He kissed me and headed off into the crowd. I got to the window and lifted Lindsey up so she could see.
“What do you want?”
“Tacos,” she said.
“We know that, but what kind?”
“Al pastor,” she said. “Ten of them.”
The guy at the counter laughed.
“She means give her two of those.”
I ordered for Stan and myself and then settled in at the picnic tables. The air was just that perfect fall crisp, plenty warm for shorts but not sticky and hot. I wondered at how my life had changed so much since I’d started the fake relationship with my now very real husband.