Page 138 of The Homemaker

“Hmm, what do your parents think?” I mount my blank to the lathe.

“They said to ask you.”

I laugh. “Forward it to me. I’ll read through it later.”

“Thanks.” He slides his phone into his pocket. “What are you making?”

“Well, I think I’m going to make a chess set for Alice’s dad.”

“That’s cool. Think sometime you could show me how to do that?”

I glance up at him. “You want to learn to turn wood?”

“Yeah.” He nods. “I mean, if you think I can learn it.”

My chest swells. “Of course you can. There are a lot of safety measures to learn, so I’ll run it by your parents, but I’d love to teach you.” I fear I sound too excited, like he might piece together my enthusiasm with my involvement in his soccer, then look in the mirror and suddenly think, “Holy crap! I think I’m Murphy Paddon’s son.”

It’s funny how much Alice and I fear he’ll find out beforeRose and Jonathan tell him. And maybe they’ll never tell him he was adopted. That’s fine too.

“Can you keep a secret?” Cameron asks.

“I think so.”

“I want to ask this girl out, but I keep chickening out. My friends think she’ll say no. And when I mentioned it to my dad, he said she’d be crazy to say no. But that feels like a fatherly response. What do you think?”

I grab my face shield and fiddle with the strap. “Well, I agree with your dad. She’d be crazy to say no. But shecouldsay no. And that will suck. So you just have to decide if her saying no will suck more than never knowing if she would have said yes. When I met Alice, she warned me not to fall in love with her. But I did. So I poured my heart out to her. Nearly brought me to tears.”

“She stayed?” Cameron asks.

I smile. “No. I didn’t see her for eight years. But not once in those eight years did I regret a single word I said to her.”

“I don’t think I love this girl, yet. So …” He scrapes his teeth along his bottom lip and shrugs.

“Well, there you have it.”

“But,” he wrinkles his nose, “Ireallylike her.”

“Then shoulders back, chin up. Brush and floss your teeth. Be confident until the last second, then give her the tiniest flash of vulnerability. Say something like, ‘I’m thinking about asking you out, but I can’t be the sole object of anyone’s affection at the moment, so I’ll let you know what I decide. And by the way, you look beautiful today.’”

A slow grin climbs up his face. “I don’t think I can say that. And I was just going to text her.”

I purse my lips and nod slowly. “Okay. That’s cool. But I’d stick with the same line and after you type ‘so I’ll let youknow what I decide,’ end it with three dots and the sunglasses emoji.”

“Did that kind of line work for you?”

“Absolutely.”

Definitely not.

“I’ll think about it,” he says, and I know he’s just being nice.

“Did you ask your mom or Alice?”

“No.” He picks at the tree stump on the workbench. “My mom will just give me condoms, and Alice probably will too.”

I clear my throat. “Well, condoms are a good idea if you uh, you know, think you’ll need them.”

Cameron lifts his gaze to me. “You know you can buy condoms before you’re eighteen, right?”