Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 88290 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 441(@200wpm)___ 353(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88290 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 441(@200wpm)___ 353(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
“Feds, but not the marshals.”
“We work with the Feds,” he corrected me. “Don’t get confused.”
I was going to get a headache if I thought about it anymore. But I was betting that Stafford was missing the good old days. Too bad he hadn’t thought first. But really, how many of us could say that we had the foresight to make all the right choices all the time?
Like Jake.
If only he had thought—before he went walking across the bottom of six rows of a giant kids’ slide, disregarding many, many signs, using the dangerous path as a shortcut from where the cute general store was where we bought cider donuts, to where the hay cart ride was that took people out to the pumpkin patch—is this a good idea?
If he had not done that, if he’d thought, was it possible that there were adults on the slide too, then he might not have gotten a nineteen-year-old coed slamming into his backside and knocking him down hard. If he hadn’t been face down on fiberglass, the three kids who came after her wouldn’t have landed on his back, basically punching his face repeatedly into a hard, reinforced surface.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault but his. And even though the lovely woman, and the parents of the three ten-year-olds all felt bad, as well as the attendant dressed in safari gear because it was his Halloween costume, full liability rested with—technically, at the moment—my kid. He was in my care since he was staying with us.
Hannah pointed the signs out to Jake as she helped him to his feet.
He said something that was not recognizable, and she told him not to speak.
“I hink I bwoke my haw,” he informed her.
“No kidding,” she replied, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
The summer between seventh and eighth grade, on his bike, Jake had gone first, showing Kola and Harper the speed needed to make the jump from the roof of his garage to his house. Harper didn’t think it was aerodynamically possible, and he was right. Kola had reported that Jake had flown directly into the side of the house. The splat had been just like a cartoon; except he didn’t stick the landing and his face looked like he’d wiped out on the road.
Since all of us were not needed to go with Jake, Sam, Kola, and Harper stayed to pick pumpkins. Jake, Hannah, and I took my car to the Good Shepherd Hospital in Barrington, which was where we were. The city of Barrington was where we went every year, forty-five minutes from our house. Normally, we got an assortment of pumpkins and gourds, picked apples, and grabbed cider donuts from the shop. When the boys were gone, I didn’t do the apples or the donuts, but this year there would be the apple picking and knickknack buying. Sam promised he would get things he knew I’d like, would make sure two perfectly shaped pumpkins for carving would happen, plus various other sizes and colors, and would procure the multicolored corn and the mums I required as well. He was also all over the donuts. It was why we had two cars. Couldn’t fit all the people and flowers and vegetables into one car.
Jake was horrified to be the cause of me and Hannah missing time with Sam and Kola, but we both told him to shut his pie hole.
“We love you too,” I reminded him, and he looked better.
About the time Sam had exhausted everything he felt was needed for Halloween and beyond by way of gourd décor, Jake was having his jaw—that was only dislocated, not fractured—reset. It was called manual reduction, and after he got a local, Dr. Emma Simms, who was lovely and more than a bit concerned that this was not the first time Jake had injured his face, gently manipulated his jawbone back into place. Because we got there quickly, and they saw him quickly, they were able to get him fixed up. The swelling that normally occurred had not set in yet. It looked weird with her thumbs on each side of his mouth and a nurse with his fingers under Jake’s chin, but together, they got it done, and Dr. Simms declared his jaw back where it belonged. Of course then she wrapped his head in what was called a Barton bandage, which looked like something out of those old brain-swapping movies with a mad scientist.
“You also look like you could have been an extra in The English Patient,” Hannah told him. “Which would be sort of romantic.”
He texted her that he had no idea what that was.
“Oh good,” she said, smiling at him, “we can watch it together.”
“That’s mean,” I scolded her.
“It’s a great movie.”
“I’d rather have my head wrapped up in a Barton bandage than watch that movie again.”