We were now on our way home and I had a warm feeling in my stomach about how the day had gone.
“We should take Elodie next year,” Jarrod mused as he overtook someone. “We could dress her up as baby Groot.”
The warm feeling I’d been nursing turned into a blazing inferno. “Really?”
Taking his eyes off the road for a second, he looked over at me and grinned when he saw how happy that idea made me. “Yeah. We’ll make it a weekend with her and get the Friday to Sunday tickets.”
This made the inferno hotter than the sun. First off, he liked my niece enough to take her to something like that, and for the whole weekend. Second, he was thinking of ways to include her into things. Third, he thought we’d still be whatever we were in a year. Or wait, was he thinking that we could split up and survive it as friends? That was a sucky prospect.
“She loves Groot. I got her this baby one that dances to that Jackson 5 song, I Want You Back. I swear whenever it turns on, she does her best to moonwalk.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” he chuckled, reaching over for my hand. “Hey, I have a question.”
“Shoot.”
“Now that I know where your names came from, how did Elodie get her name?”
Now this was a Debbie downer topic. “When she was born, Effie left it until the last second almost to get to hospital. When Uncle Leo got the call, the staff said she’d practically crawled in, pushed her out, and left. They’d only just gotten her situated in a bed and had taken Elodie to have some tests done seeing as how Effie was high as a kite.”
His hand tightened on my fingers, and then it felt like he forced himself to relax. “Was she born addicted?”
“No,” I blew out a breath. “Being the caring mother that she was, Effie had stuck to pot once she knew she was pregnant. That said, we’re not talking about a joint here and there, we’re talking constant. Elodie was only just under five pounds when she was born, slightly premature, and it took them six weeks to let Leo take her home because she had some ups and downs because of it.”
“Jesus,” he muttered. “Poor precious girl.”
“Anyway, Leo couldn’t decide what to name her, but he knew he wanted to do something similar to Mom and Dad because he was torn between his dead wife’s name, Ellen, and her mother’s name, Melodie – with an I and E. He’d been thinking Mellen until I visited her and told him he couldn’t call the poor baby something that sounded like melon. I mean, what’s up with that?”
“People call their kids apple,” he pointed out. “What about Mellencamp? He’s a legend, so you could have given him the credit.”
With my head still pressed against the headrest, I turned to look at him. “Does she look like a Mellen to you?”
He took all of five seconds to think it over and answer. “Point taken.”
Damn right, doggy. “I suggested Elodie, and he loved it, so that’s what we named her.”
“What happened to Effie during all of this? Were CPS involved?”
“Yeah,” I sighed, turning now to look out of the window at the dark around us. “It was a mess, but Leo’s a great guy and CPS prefer to keep kids with their families, so after some red tape and cavity searches, they said ok. Then he had to track Effie down to get her to sign over custody to him which sucked.”
“Why did it suck?”
Doing my best not to cry, I whispered, “Because by the time he found her, she was so high, she’d forgotten she’d even had a baby.”
There was a tense silence, and then he growled, “What the fuck?”
Exactly. She was my flesh and blood, but I couldn’t get my head around it a year later.
“Leo struggled with that the most I think.”
Shaking his head, he asked, “So, what’s with the purple teddy bear?”
This question hit on another sore point for me. “Three months ago when she did one of her fly by visits, she made a huge deal out of the teddy bear. At first Leo wasn’t sure about giving it to her because of the quality and was worried that one of the eyes would fall off and she’d choke on it, but by the time Effie left, Elodie wouldn’t sleep without it. He took it to a friend of his who was one of those rare doll fixer guys to check the eyes and he did something that made them uber safe.”
“Uber safe?” he snickered, giving my hand a quick squeeze. “What kind of safe is that?”
What kind of question was that? “Uh, only one step down from as safe as Fort Knox.”