Page 63 of Single Dad Problems
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
We pushed off our tailgates, called the kids, and walked into the building like men headed for a firing squad.
Callie's director chair was empty. Mr. Donaldson the substitute was at the front of the auditorium holding a script upside down. Karla Chism was next to him in a cardigan the color of a parking violation, snapping at parents about where they were and were not allowed to sit. The kids on stage were running in roughly the pattern of a kicked anthill. The whole room smelled like pandemonium and Goldfish crackers.
I scanned for Callie but she was nowhere in sight.
I looked at Cole. Cole looked at Luke. Luke looked like a man who had just figured out he'd missed his own funeral.
And then, just when it could not have gotten any worse, a five-foot-two hurricane in a Hawaiian print dress with wrath written across her face came beelining straight for us.
A small hand closed around my elbow.
"Outside."
Tessa's hair was up. Her amber eyes were doing a thing I had personally never witnessed on a human being and was actively praying I would never witness again. Her hand on my elbow was clenched like a vice grip.
"Tess, we were just-"
"Outside. All three of you. Now. Right now."
She turned and pulled me, fully expecting that the three biggest men in the room would in fact follow a hundred-and-thirty-pound woman in a tropical dress out the side door without argument, which we did, because something in our bones knew we were in deep shit.
We exited via the side door into the alley between the auditorium and the dumpsters. Tessa pulled the door shut behind us. We were alone with a woman who looked like she was about to castrate us in the back alley of an elementary school.
"Sit." She pointed at the curb.
"Tessa-"
"Ben. Sit."
I sat. Cole sat. Luke sat. Three grown men on a curb behind an elementary school in a row, looking up at a woman who had clearly planned to destroy us.
"I am going to say this once," Tessa said, "and I am going to say it without raising my voice, because there are children inside, and because my husband would prefer I not give myself a stroke. Are we clear."
"Yes ma'am," the three of us said in unison.
"Wonderful. Then let us begin." She inhaled. "You absolute walking concussions. You stuffed-bear-carrying, bouquet-ruining, Sale-Pending-causing, trauma-haunted, single-father horndog disasters. You showed up to my best friend's house on the worst goddamn day of her entire goddamn life and called her a whore in her own driveway. Do you know that?"
Luke made a sound.
"DO YOU. Hand up if you knew. No? No hands? Wonderful. Allow me. That morning. The morning of the worst day of her life. Callie was called into Darren Beauford's office, who proceeded to invite her on a dinner date, and when she politely declined the offer of suckling on a cologne-soaked toad, he fired her on the spot. Effective immediately. Thirty minutes to clean her room. She did. She did it without letting her son see her cry. Then she came home. Then she let my husband, Vaughn, the man she has known for twenty years, the man who carried in her boxes because nobody else was there, hold her up in her own driveway while she finally let years of repressed sadness go. That, gentlemen, is what your erections rolled up on with a stuffed bear. My fucking husband was helping her and you proceeded to call my best friend a whore and insinuate she was fucking my husband you absolute shit for brains cocksuckers."
"Oh shit, that man wasyourhusband? Tess-" Cole tried.
"Do not."
Cole did not.
"You." She pointed at Luke. "I have watched my best friend fall in love with you, in this stupid sweet careful way she does, because she has always had a thing for men who fold their laundry. And you, who have done two years of therapy looked at her face and decided what your ex-wife would have done was what she had done. I want you to think about that. I want you to think about that for the rest of your life, and then I want you to go to one more year of therapy, just on principle."
Luke was openly crying now into his knees.
"You." She pivoted to Cole. "Cole Ramirez. You sat down to dinner with her son. You let that boy hold your dog tags. Callie told me you'd never let a woman near your kid the way you let her near Noah. And then you stood in her driveway and looked at her like a suspect.”
"I know," Cole said. He had the very still look of a man stuck at the bottom of a well.
