Free Totlandia: Winter by Josie Brown Page B

much-too-quiet demeanor, but she didn’t say that. She’d already said too much. “Hey, where’s your microwave? If we don’t put it in there now for the next ninety minutes, it’ll never be ready.”
    “Over there.” Jade pointed to the far kitchen wall. She ran over and opened the door. “That’s a big bird. Will it fit?”
    “One way or another it will, even if we have to shove it in.”
    She was right. They had to slam the door tight, but it could still rotate on the carousel.
    Jade’s relief came out in a hug. “I don’t know what I would have done without you. Well, I guess worst case scenario, we could have just eaten these beautiful pies.”
     
    5:53 p.m.
    “So, what do you think about our wives and this cockamamie club?” Matt had flopped down on the easy chair opposite where Brady was sprawled out on the couch.
    “I think…I don’t know what to think. It’s certainly a lot more work than I—I mean, than Jade thought it would be.” He stared at the TV set, but he could care less about how badly the Cowboys were beating the Redskins.
    He was having too much fun enjoying Ally and her friends.
    More to the point, watching Ally enjoy herself.
    When Jade first broke the news to him that she’d invited all the Probationary Onesies for Thanksgiving—well all of them but Kelly, who hadn’t really been hanging out with them anyway—he almost told her to call everyone and cancel. He couldn’t stand the thought of being so close to Ally and unable to do anything about it. But now that the holidays were upon them, he knew it was inevitable that he’d find himself in the same room as Jade and Ally. While he hadn’t expected it to be so soon, or in his own house, Jade’s determination to pull off a Thanksgiving on her own changed his mind.
    That, and the thought of being near Ally for practically the whole day.
    It was Brady who had answered Ally’s knock on the door. It took all his strength not to take her in his arms and give her a real kiss as opposed to a friendly peck on the cheek. Was that a look of concern on her face? No, it was sadness. Was she sad for the same reason as he, because of the circumstances that kept them together but also pulled them apart?
    He wanted to believe that was the case.
    And he wanted to believe that someday the situation would allow them to be together, happily and forever.
    Happily ever after.
    What a pussy I am , he thought. Around her, anyway .
    Lorna and her family had come up right behind Ally. Brady had liked Matt from the moment they’d met. What was not to like? No ego, lots of jokes, many at his own expense. He held his son gently but firmly and casually, all at the same time.
    “He’s quite a bruiser,” Brady said as he tweaked Dante’s nose.
    “Yeah.” Matt nodded. “No tight end here. Linebacker, for sure. Hope the 49’ers feel the same way about him in another twenty years. They’ll need him. Hell, they need him now.”
    After football, their GuySpeak ran the gamut: Warriors, Giants, politics, the latest greatest gadgets. That’s how Brady found out about Matt’s hair-brained scheme to raise money for a company that made plasma antennas. He insisted, “They will revolutionize high-speed wireless communications. Hey, and not only that, but also radar apparatus, directed energy weapons—a whole slew of things, really. I’ve been following the blog of this British company, which developed it. I liked what they said, invested in it, and I’m raising money for them.”
    “How do you know this stuff is the real thing?” Brady asked. “Do you have a degree in physics or computer engineering?”
    “Ha! I wish. Nope, I was just a plain old math major. No masters…well, really I dropped out of Berkeley.”
    “Oh yeah? Stanford. Also a drop-out.”
    “Didn’t hurt you any.”
    “Nope.”
    The clink of the beer bottles was the start of a new friendship. That, and when Brady added, “When you get the prospectus together, send me the