Free Mackinnon 03 - The Bonus Mom by Jennifer Greene Page B

us tomorrow. I guess we could go to Traveler’s Rest, but the girls seem to think we need to shop where there are more choices. Please. Please, Rosemary. I’m groveling. I’m desperate. I’m scared out of my skull. I can do teenage bras if and when I have to. But I can’t color coordinate. I don’t even get what that means. Please don’t make me do this alone.”
    She wasn’t sure whether he severed the call or her answering machine quit recording. Either way, he was off the line—and she let out a burst of a laugh.
    Maybe if she could quit thinking of him as a lover, she could just enjoy what he had to offer. A friend. A caring dad with two daughters alone on a special holiday. Someone to have fun with. Someone to help him with the girls.
    It wasn’t as if she didn’t have the free time...or didn’t enjoy them all.
    She just had to be careful about Whit. And she could do that.
    Somehow she’d find a way to do that.
    * * *
    When Whit’s SUV showed up the next morning, Rosemary dashed out. She opened the door, took one look at the expression on the two girls’ faces and quickly glanced at Whit.
    “Save me,” he mouthed.
    She popped into the front seat, and opened a travel tote that was filled to bursting. “I brought catalogs,” she told Lilly and Pepper. “So each of you could look through them, give me some idea about what you like and don’t like.”
    As she latched her seat belt, she added to Whit, “Could you give me a general price range?”
    He looked at her with the same trapped expression. “Whatever they want?”
    She rolled her eyes, turned to the girls. “Where did your mom usually shop for clothes? Things around the house? Shoes?”
    Neither had a problem answering the question, but Pepper came through with the most detail. “Mom liked to go on a shopping trip a couple times of year. She’d go to Atlanta or Dallas or like that. She liked Neiman Marcus. And Saks. Places like that.”
    She shot a startled look at Whit. She’d never envisioned his wife as being fancy and status-driven that way. “And those kinds of prices are okay with you?” she asked carefully.
    “Is there something wrong?”
    “No, not at all.” Except that he was an earthy guy who worked with his hands and loved diving into projects headfirst. And the girls were describing a mom who was a dry-clean-only type of formal lady. She turned back to the girls. “We don’t think we have any of those stores in Greenville, but there are still a ton of places to shop. In the meantime, I painted several rooms in the lodge when I moved there last June. Being me, I couldn’t make up my mind, so I collected somewhere around five million paint swatches. So...”
    Paint swatches came from the bottomless travel tote and were distributed to the backseat.
    “You don’t have to pick just one color. Pick, like, four or five. If you like blues, they don’t have to be all blue. But I want you to choose colors that...well, that make you happy. Colors that you’d like to wake up to every morning. And then...”
    She turned halfway, to include Whit in the conversation. “Then, I had another idea. If no one likes it, no problem. But possibly you might want to put up composite board or peg board or cork or something like that for one wall. That way, they’d have a place where they could hang their favorite rock stars or pictures or phone numbers or whatever they wanted. But they could also take down stuff and put up new without damaging the walls.”
    “Yeah! That’s an awesome idea,” Pepper said.
    “I like it, too,” Lilly agreed. The girls looked at each other as if astonished they’d agreed on anything—at least that day.
    When Lilly handed back her choice of paint sample cards, they were all in blues and greens. Rosemary pushed her into a little more brainstorming. “Okay, is there something that you’d like to do with these colors? Such as...well, blues and greens make me think of water. The sea. Or I can imagine