Page 110 of The Merger

I smile proudly. “Brewer Group.”

Dad stares at me. “Isn’t one of your friends a Brewer?”

Of all the things he manages to know about me, it’s Tate. Ugh.

“Yes,” I say. “But he isn’t involved in my job there. It has nothing to do with him.”

“Right,” Dad says as if this somehow pisses him off.

A server stops by, taking my drink order and dropping off a new drink for Dad and Gabe. I shouldn’t order alcohol when I’m already fired up, but the thought of managing an hour at this table without some liquid courage seems like unnecessary torture.

“What do you do?” I ask Rochelle.

“I’m an elementary school teacher. I teach the fourth grade right now, which is a lot of fun.”

“I could never be a teacher,” I say.

“It might be the last thing on my list.” Aurora laughs. “I don’t know how you do it all day. I’d lose my mind. Sometimes clients will ask if they can bring their kids into the salon for me to do their hair and I want to run and hide.”

“Do you not like kids?” I ask.

She smiles. “I love kids. Just not other people’s little kids.”

Rochelle laughs. “I understand that. It’s not for everyone.”

“You gonna give her a baby, Kent?” Gabe asks, snickering. “Or are you too old for that?”

Dad looks at Aurora fondly. “I’d give this woman anything she wants.”

Aurora places her hand on his arm, smiling at him.

“We talk about starting a family all the time,” Dad says. “It’s just the two of us now that our parents are gone. Aurora lost hers last year in a car accident.”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper to her, my heart sinking.

“So we figured once we got into our house and did some traveling, we’d have a kid or two,” Dad says. “It’d be nice having some young blood around and doing the whole baseball dad thing or whatever.”

“Hell, you might as well,” Gabe says.

Yeah, you might as well.

I fight back an urge to remind him that he had the chance to do the wholesoftball dad thing or whatever. I was a cheerleader, played volleyball, and played band. I even did theater one summer and was the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz.

He was nowhere to be seen.

“Were you not a sports kid?” Rochelle innocently asks me. “I was a book kid, myself. No judgment.”

I laugh anxiously. “I was a sports kid, actually. And band. And theater. I did a little of everything.”

“I hear that from so many parents,” Rochelle says, looking around the table. “They complain about the sports and schedules and commitments while their kids are little and then miss it so much once they’re grown. I guess it goes back to that old saying about not knowing what you got until you no longer have it.”

Dad reaches over and presses a kiss to Aurora’s temple. “I know what I got, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Wow. Okay.

I shift in my seat, trying to find a way to change the topic.

“What’s everyone going to have to eat?” Gabe asks, pulling out his menu. “That ribeye looks good.”