Page 27 of The Romance Line
Everly reins in a smile. “All of that sounds great. Max?”
“Sushi’s good,” I say, then Everly tells me she’ll text me later with details. Finally, she continues down the corridor, and I side-eye my sister as we leave and head through the lot. “Coffee? A café? Sushi?”
She smirks, “Well, I was right. You picked dinner.”
Shit. She’s an evil genius. She tricked me, but I try to shrug it off. “It’s a work dinner,” I insist as we weave past a Mercedes.
“Keep telling yourself that,” she says with the smugness only a younger sister can pull off.
“It is,” I say.
“Of course it is, Max.”
“What else would it be?” I ask, since evidently I’m in the mood to double down.
“Gee. I can’t even imagine.” She stops walking, forcing me to look back at her as she gives the smuggest of smug smiles. “You sent her cake.”
“She helped me out of a jam in Seattle! I was thanking her.”
“Ohhhh. So it was a work cake,” Sophie says as we reach my car.
“Yes, exactly.”
“Do you send cake to everyone you work with who helps you? Like, did you send Hugo a slice for blocking that shot on goal the other night?” She parks her hands on her hips.
I don’t back down though. “Thanks for the reminder. I’ll get right on that.”
She stares at me without blinking. “I can’t wait to find out what he thinks of it next time I come to a game.”
“Me too.”
While she opens the back seat door, I grab the booster from the trunk, then buckle in Kade. He’s already yawning as I shut the door.
When I get behind the wheel, I add, “And you are not going to try to set me up with my publicist.”
“Of course I would not,” she says as she settles into the front seat. “But now that you mention it…have you thought about dating again?”
I stare sternly at her before I pull out. “Do I look like I enjoy torture?”
“You do play hockey for a living. So maybe.”
“Touché,” I say, and shift topics to her work, then to Mom and Dad and how the school year is going for them as I drive her across the Bay Bridge.
“Mom says this is her best dance class ever,” Sophie says of our mom, who teaches dance at a performing arts school.
“And let me guess. Dad says it’s the best class of actors ever?”
Sophie laughs. “Of course that’s what a drama teacher would say.”
“Gotta love their optimism,” I say, and we chat more about them as we head over to Oakland, where she lives a few blocks away from them. After I carry a sleeping Kade inside, then make sure the alarm is on and no one’s out front, I hop back in my car. Before I head back into the city, I stop at a local Whole Foods and order a breakfast platter for my parents, sending it to the school where they teach for delivery in the morning. Bagels and fruit are the key to their hearts.
I return to my car. Alone at last, I turn on the Bluetooth and toggle over to the app for the class onnavigational tools used in the eighteenth century. It’s not my favorite topic, but I’m not taking this online course for fun. As the lights of San Francisco guide me home, I recite the facts I’m learning so I’ll be ready to take a quiz in a few days. I need to ace it. For me. I don’t want to end up like my grandfather when I’m older. Forgetting everyone. My heart clutches as images flash by of his final year—the long, painful months where he was gone before he was gone.
I’ve got to keep my mind in as good a shape as I keep my body. I hope I can have a different fate. A different future. And that’s what I need to focus on—the future. For my family and for me.
“Taste test time!” Kade issues the announcement as he runs into The Hand Dipper the next afternoon, rushing to the counter.
I follow him into the shop in Hayes Valley with my mom and dad. Sophie has a twelve-hour shift today.