Chapter - 1
“You’re what? Run that by me again?”
“I know it’s sudden and sounds a little weird, but-”
“A little? You just told me that you’re getting married again. To a woman you met three weeks ago on vacation.”
“Yes. Her name is Adelaide and she’s wonderful.”
“Adelaide?” I muttered. “Isn’t that a street name or something you yell when you’re falling off a building?”
“Be nice, Sean, she makes me happy,” dad chided. “She’s really nice and you’ll like her.”
I sighed heavily as I sat at the dining room table. I knew my dad, he wasn’t exactly spontaneous, so for him to do this, there must have been something to it. Or he failed his save roll and got ensorcelled. Either way, I knew better than to try and change his mind. “Guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“Oh, you’ll get to meet her before we tie the knot,” he said easily, joining me in sitting down and drinking coffee. “I’ve invited her to come and visit, test out the waters before she makes a decision. She wanted to meet you.”
“Well, that’s good to hear. Will she be staying with us or in a hotel in town?”
“I offered both options and she chose to stay here, see if day-to-day living in a non-vacation environment was to her liking. She’s a single mom and we really hit it off.”
“She’s been married before?”
“Situation not unlike ours, really,” dad mused. “Hubby left her soon after her daughter was born, never heard from again.”
I paused a moment. “She has a daughter? So, if you get married, I’m saddled with a step-sister?”
“Yup,” dad answered cheerfully. “Her name’s Jerica.”
“Like, Jem and the Holograms Jerica? That lame-ass Eighties cartoon?”
“If you say so,” dad replied amenably. “I wouldn’t know about that. But Addy showed me pictures of her and she seems nice. She’ll probably come and stay too.”
“What’re we gonna do for two weeks?” I asked, trying not to sound frustrated.
“Well, Addy said she’ll find a job in her field here, which shouldn’t be difficult for her. If she can, and if we all jive, she and Jerica will move in with us. We have the extra bedroom for Jerica, and Addy would stay with me, of course.”
“So we double the size of our family, just like that.” I stated flatly, not impressed.
“Sean, please don’t be a hard-ass about this,” dad said with a firm kindness in his tone. “You know dating has always been hard for me and Addy makes me happy. How can that possibly be a bad thing in your world?”
Well, he had me there. I promised I would reserve judgement until I at least met this woman and her daughter. “So when do we receive our guests?”
Dad looked down at his watch. “What time is it now?”
Okay, dad had been screwing with me, making me panic into thinking they were due that afternoon or something. Things were a little more flexible than that, fortunately, and it was decided that Adelaide and her daughter Jerica would arrive in two weeks. While dad and I ran a tidy household, two weeks would give us a chance to rearrange it so that it didn’t feel quite like such a man-cave.
He showed me pictures of her on his phone and from email- she was a pleasant-enough woman, actually rather pretty, although middle-age had given her additional weight that was no doubt a permanent feature on the chassis. Hard to tell from pictures, but I think she was around five and a half feet tall. She had lots of light brown hair, tawny eyes and a good-natured smile.
Jerica, on the other hand, was a marked contrast- she was thin, or at least slender, and obviously hardcore into the goth scene. Her skin was pale, she wore black or dark purple lipstick and eyeshadow, and her black bobbed hair was shorter on one side and had purple highlights (or undertones, whatever). She wore contacts that made her eyes were a vivid violet colour and she had numerous piercings in each ear and a snake-bite lip ring. More than a few tattoos were visible on her nearly alabaster skin.
And unlike her mother, she didn’t seem to smile. Not in a single picture.
“Wow, she looks like the life of the party.” I muttered.
“Hey, you never know, maybe she just needs time to warm up,” dad reasoned. “She’s a few months older than you, I believe, not quite twenty-one. And yeah, the whole goth thing throws me too, but how bad can she actually be with Adelaide as her mother?”
How bad indeed. I guess we’d find out.
