My Life Of Evasion

Epilogue: Are You Ready For Another Adventure?

Epilogue

Are You Ready For Another Adventure?

 

 

“Addy, what do you think you’re doing?” I asked, looking at my four-year-old sister, who was sitting on the countertop in Dad and Brielle’s kitchen. 

“Nufin’,” she said, though she certainly looked like she was doing something.  Now that she was older, she looked like an exact copy of Brielle, though she definitely had Dad’s demeanor.  You could tell she was my sister, too, because she copied everything I did.  She took after all of us with her smarts, too.  She had been reading since she was two and a half and was reading books now that were meant for kids who were in the second grade. 

It was Christmas Eve and, true to tradition, Brielle, Addy, and I were doing all of our Christmas baking.  Addy, though, decided that she didn’t want to wait for the chocolate chip cookies that were currently baking in the over.  She was just going to lick the leftover batter off the spoon. 

“You know Mommy said that you couldn’t lick the spoon,” I said, giving her a – kind of – stern look. 

But when she looked at me with that innocent little smile, I had to bite my lip to keep from smiling back.  “Then don’t tell her.  It’ll be our secret,” she said.

 “What’s a secret?” Brielle asked as she walked into the kitchen.

The clank of a spoon flying into the sink beside where Addy was sitting made me look toward her.  That look of innocence on her face was just a little too much, so Brielle knew what was going on.

Yep, definitely my sister. 

“I thought I told you no licking the batter off the spoon?” she asked, stopping in front of her with her hands on her hips. 

“Sissy said I could,” Addy said, pointing to me with a devilish grin on her face.

Brielle, who was trying to hold in her laughter, looked over at me and then back to Addy.  “I hardly doubt that,” she said, finally laughing.

“How could you accuse me?” I asked Addy, tickling her side to make her giggle and squirm.  “Me, your big sister?”

“I-I sorry!” she squealed as I tickled her more.  “It was me!  It was me!”

I laughed and stopped tickling her so I could pick her up, setting her on my hip. 

“When’s Max comin’?” Addy asked, her face still beet red.  “And Ben and Drew and Sophie?”

“Later,” I said, kissing her cheek.  “I’m going back to my house in a few minutes and when I come back for dinner, I’ll have them all with me.”

When I pulled up to the house, I could see that Drew’s rental car was back in our driveway since he and Ben had left before I did this morning to go last minute shopping.  That’s how they were every year that they’d come to visit.  They would fly in on the twenty-third in the morning and then go shopping Christmas Eve. 

The two of them, plus Sophie and her husband Eric, came to spend Christmas Eve with us every year and then we would go to England on Christmas Day.  Max and I would spend that evening with his parents and then a few days after that.  It wasn’t the only time of the year we would go and see them.  We flew over at least a dozen times for about two weeks at a time.  And it would give us an opportunity to see them all again.