“I know it’s going to be a hard profession,” Adia admitted quietly. “But they’re doing something so selfless for their child, and that’s got to leave a mark for a long time, if not forever.”
Raising her glass to Adia, Santana smiled softly at her. “Thank you for making the world a better place.”
Snorting, we all clinked glasses.
“Now we eat,” Nonna shouted. “I hope you eat like pasta and water of chickens.”
Fuck, she was back to non-English speaking Nonna.
Sharing an eye roll with Adia, I stirred the soup with my spoon to get the noodles floating around. Only… it wasn’t the regular noodles that greeted me.
“Nonna…”
“Yes?”
A glance around the table showed my friends and sister were all staring at their bowls as well.
“Why’s the pasta in the shape of penises?”
“Here, Bronte. Let Mummy cool a piece down for you to try.”
Hearing Sadie talking to the baby, I looked up and almost died when I saw her cooling down the pecker pasta and then passing it to the little girl.
Smiling at the scene like it was the cutest thing in the world, Nonna put her spoon in her mouth and smiled happily as she chewed. “I have not a small pasta, so I use little pecker.”
On the next piece of knob noodles into Bronte’s mouth, my sister took a photo and showed Sadie. “That needs to go in her baby book. Baby’s first shlong spaghetti.”
“Knob noodles,” I corrected quietly. “It’s not long enough to be spaghetti.”
In the end, it was a great day. By the time Marcus and the others joined us, all of them accepting a bowl of soup and then staring down into it with identical expressions of confusion on their faces, while Nonna regaled them with the fictitious tomato juggling Valtolina family, I’d forgotten all about the shit storm going on at the ranch.
However, I didn’t know all of what’d happened, and if I had, I might have been able to brace for what happened a few days later.
Chapter Nineteen
Addy
Okay, here’s a little bit of advice for car owners—clean your damn car. Buy a pack of diaper sacks and put them in the glove compartment to put garbage in. Remove any fast food wrappers when you’re done. Vacuum the carpets now and then.
Think of the amount the vehicle cost you and continues to cost you to run, and then think about putting that amount of money at the bottom of your trash until you need it. That’s what dirty cars were the equivalent of.
Gross.
But above all else—if something spills, clean it up.
Maybe, given my current circumstances, I should have been more focused on what’d happened, but given that my arm was sticking to the carpet of the trunk I’d woken up in, and the smell was like my brother’s breath first thing in the morning, it was pertinent to bestow my wisdom to the world. Well, to myself, because that’s who my current audience was, just me.
And, just to add to my current problem, the person driving the car was a fucking idiot. The figure given for the speed limit was just that—a limit. It wasn’t a suggestion, it wasn’t the minimum, it was a fucking limit. Why so many people struggled with this, even though they had to sit a test to confirm they knew the rules of the road, I didn’t know, but alas, there were a lot of speedy twats on the road.
My current chauffeur was just that, as they screeched around corners, sending me into the side of the car, my head thunking off the interior of the trunk and my arm burning from the carpet.
For the next however long as I was shuffled around the back of the hot and dirty car, I had to keep forcing my thoughts to inane things like motor hygiene, and the state of the country when assholes like this one driving had a license.
I wondered how many accidents they’d ever had, and if I’d ever get to visit the U.K. and see the things I wanted to see…
And I had a good reason for it. The situation I was in reminded me of the last time I’d been this powerless—when Eileen had spiked my drink. I hardly remembered any of it aside from flashes here and there, and I’d gone through the after-effects of it on my own, fighting to get to the person I was today. Right now, f I didn’t force my brain to think about other things, I was scared I’d have a panic attack I couldn’t come back from.
How much could a person’s brain take? It was a serious question.
If I had a panic attack now, would it join with the ones I had after the Eileen incident and make it impossible for me to recover?
I probably should have gotten help after it, but it’d seemed small beans in comparison to a lot of problems people needed therapists for, and I hadn’t wanted to waste resources that someone needed to survive.