Page 57 of Good Time Boyfriend
I frowned, trying to figure out how to fix it, and then realized I had no idea how to fix it. Literally, there was nothing I could do, other than listen to them and try to be the best big sister I could.
“Are you having fun with the game at least?”
Russ shook his head. “I was, but now it’s getting boring because they just want you to pay for everything.”
“I don’t know. We did spend the initial money up front. Now it’s lost.”
I squeezed Kennedy’s hand. “Okay. So you spent the money up front using your allowance.” Each of them nodded. “And you had a lot of fun for what, a few weeks?”
“Almost three whole months,” Heather clarified.
“Okay, well I think that’s good. I wish it was longer, but maybe you can come back to it after they work the kinks out, and maybe they’ll realize they can’t charge you for every single little thing.”
“And what if they realize they can always charge you?” Justice, my youngest sibling asked.
“Then you find a game that you can play together that doesn’t charge you individually.”
“Good luck with that in this day and age,” my stepdad said as he came in and kissed the top of my head. “What happened to the days where we just played a board game?”
“We still play those,” my mom said as she squeezed her husband’s hand. “The problem is that there’s not a board game big enough for all of us.
“And we’re not allowed to play Monopoly anymore,” Maureen said dryly.
I rolled my eyes. “Not after ‘the incident.’”
Maureen narrowed her gaze at me. “I thought we were never going to bring up ‘the incident.’”
“We only ended up in the emergency room once while playing Monopoly. And I don’t know why that’s ‘the incident,’ and Candy Land isn’t,” Lee said.
“What’s ‘the incident?’” Lee’s wife asked, and he shook his head. “We must not speak of it.”
“Maureen didn’t mean to stab her sister.”
Elizabeth rubbed her arm where she still had a small scar. “I didn’t even know you could be stabbed by a thimble until that day.”
“My poor baby,” Elizabeth’s wife said as she kissed her cheek.
I held back a laugh and tried not to look at my mother, until we all burst out laughing.
“We need to stop thinking of ‘the incident.’”
“Wait, does that mean more people were stabbed in Candy Land than in Monopoly?” one of the spouses asked, and my stepfather held out his hands.
“We will not speak of it again. Not if we want peace in our time.”
“This is why we have different board games in each part of the room during game days. Or we have a game that we make up that can handle fifty of us.”
“I don’t think anything could handle us,” Mom said as she snuggled into William.
I smiled at the two of them. I was so happy she had William. He loved my mom with everything he had.
And my mom loved him just as much. I knew she would always love my father. But she had the capacity to love so many people, to bring them into her heart, that it put mine to shame.
She opened her heart for the children of William’s first marriage, and I tried to do the same. I thought it worked. They were my siblings and I loved them. The only reason that I even called them the steps was so I could group those five versus the other five. There were just so many that they needed nicknames.
But they were my family. My siblings. My brothers and sisters that I loved with all my heart.
I needed to just get this out there.
