Page 184 of The Path to Loving Him
I shake my head. “Hayes has to head to San Francisco early in the morning, and Hattie’s going with him. They’re going to drop Mac off around eight.”
Gabby takes a look at the time on her phone. “Oh, we’ll be done with time to spare. That’s if we don’t get distracted.”
“And how would we get distracted?” I ask with a grin.
“You know exactly how and it’s not going to happen. We’re putting this living room together so when your niece comeshome, she’s greeted with a great surprise, which you’ll have to record for me because I’m going to want to see her reaction.”
“That I can do.”
Gabby starts working on hanging some pictures, laying them on the ground before she puts them on the wall. I grab the iron and ironing board and start releasing the wrinkles from the curtains.
“What do you do in your spare time?” I ask, wanting to know more about Gabby.
She applies Command Strips to the back of the frames and answers, “Watch baseball, read about baseball, talk to Bennett about baseball.”
“A girl after my own heart. I don’t meet many people with such a passion for the sport. I usually see that kind of enthusiasm for football.”
“Same,” she says as she hangs her first picture, one of Cassidy and Mac together. It’s my favorite picture of them out on the farm before Cassidy got sick. “It kind of annoys me because baseball was America’s pastime and it almost seems like it’s a dying sport now, which makes me sad.”
“I agree. Do you think the new rule changes will help bring more people into the sport?”
She shrugs and hangs another picture, which is of Mac and me in the Redwoods. We took it a month or so ago. She’s on my shoulders, and we’re both looking up at the tree. “I mean, it adds a bit of drama with the pitch clock. But I don’t know if it will bring more viewers to the game. I just think society has changed. We’re more about instant gratification. It’s hard for us to just sit still, phones down, and enjoy a game that moves at a slower pace, but still offers the same kind of thrill and excitement that something like football offers.”
“I like the pitch clock rule. I remember watching baseball with my dad—when he was sober—and listening to him bitchand complain about the batters and how they’d step out of the box, readjust the straps of their batting gloves every single time, tug on their helmet, and take all the goddamn time in the world before they stepped back into the batter’s box. Drove him nuts, and I remember thinking it was one of the very few things my dad and I agreed on.”
“Ugh, I hated that too. I understand the importance of establishing a routine to trigger your muscle memory before going up to the plate, but adjusting your batting gloves every time is not the way to do it. There was this one season, I think when Bennett was a freshman, and he was still trying to establish himself, and he started the whole batting glove thing. I told him to stop it immediately. The way your gloves feel will not get you a hit. It’s the mechanics. So that’s what he focused on.”
“You’re very smart, you know that?”
“It’s why David hired me,” she says with a wink.
I chuckle and then set my second-to-last curtain panel over the couch. “You know, the more I think about that situation, the more I wonder if I would have hired you.”
“I think you would have,” she says with confidence as she takes a step back to observe her work. The third and final picture is all of us at Aubree and Wyatt’s wedding, in front of the barn and staggered on hay bales. “You’re a smart man. You would have grilled me on my knowledge, found out what an asset I’d be to you, and you would have hired me.”
I rest the iron on the wrinkled fabric, moving it up and down. “I think you’re right. I’d have hired you and then hated every second of it because I wouldn’t have been able to keep my eyes off you, nor would I have ever found out what you tasted like.”
She pauses and turns toward me. With a finger pointed in my direction, she says, “None of that. We’re not getting distracted. We have a task at hand, and your sweet-talking can’t throw it off.”
“It’s the truth though,” I say.
Her expression softens. “I guess we have David to thank, then.”
“No, we’re not going that far.”
She laughs again, and my entire body relaxes as the sound fills my living room. My decorated living room. A room that will reflect joy and happiness, and family. A place I know Mac will love, and a place where she can feel at home, where she can feel her mother surround her, and where she can spend her childhood years growing up.
Rain pelts the windows as I break down the last cardboard box for recycling. Gabby just finished vacuuming, and we’re about ten minutes out from Mac arriving. Hayes and Hattie had to carefully buckle her up while she was passed out, the Chewys having to be dragged out of her shirt so her car seat fit properly.
Gabby places the vacuum in the hall closet and then walks up to me, wrapping her arms around my waist. “It looks so good.”
“Amazing,” I say, taking in the living space. Because Gabby works fast, not only were we able to fix up the living room, but she also adjusted some things in the kitchen, added a potted plant to the dining room table, and hung more pictures in the stairwell leading to Mac’s bedroom. She marveled at how much Mac looked like Cassidy while I marveled at the woman who spent her evening helping me make my house into a home.
We didn’t have time for my bedroom, but I told her it was fine, and we could plan to do it another time. At least I have a bed off the floor and working nightstands. The rest can be put together when there is time. She did slip back to her house fora moment to grab her perfume and spray my bedroom. I’ll be enjoying that later tonight.
“Thank you so much for everything you did tonight.”
“Of course. It was so much fun. I really hope Mac loves it.”
