Lost in the Sun Read Online Free

curtains.
    Aaron squinched up close to me in the booth and whispered, “Three, two, one . . .”
    â€œSo, how’s school?” Kari asked.
    I fist-bumped Aaron under the table. He had Kari
down.
    â€œIt’s still summer,” Doug answered, engrossed in soaking the table with water. “School doesn’t start till Monday.”
    â€œOh,” Kari said. “Right. I knew that.” She laughed a trilly little laugh. “Pregnancy brain.”
    â€œWait, you’re
pregnant
?” I asked, in my best incredulous voice. Under the table, Aaron kicked me.
    â€œTrent, please,” Dad said, setting his phone on the table. “Must we?”
    Doug finished with his wrapper worm, and Kari handed him a wad of napkins to mop up his mess.
    We got our second-favorite waitress, Claudia, who clearly had a thing for Aaron even though she was probably in her twenties. “You all ready?” she asked us. She gave Aaron a little smile, no one else.
    We were all ready.
    No matter how good a restaurant is, if you go there for dinner threenights a week for a full year, you’re going to get a little sick of it. And the St. Albans Diner wasn’t very good to begin with. When Mom and Dad first got divorced, back when I was five, Dad used to drive out to Cedar Haven every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday night to have dinner with us there. Sometimes he’d eat dinner at the house with us and Mom, which was weird but sort of nice, too, but usually we’d go to one of the restaurants in town. He’d take us to the arcade after, or out to a movie even, if there was something we could all agree on. But after Aaron got his license, Dad decided he was sick of the hour drive each way, so we met in the middle. And the only thing in between Cedar Haven and Timber Trace, where Dad lived, was the St. Albans Diner. So that’s where we went.
    â€œHow’s the, um . . . ?” Aaron started after Claudia left to put in our order. I could tell he was searching for something to talk about. I wasn’t sure why he bothered. “The construction going?”
    â€œOh, we finished that weeks ago,” Kari said. She sipped at her tea—decaf, for the baby—and smiled at us. “The room looks just darling. Pink walls and carpet, too. We’ll show you next time you’re out.”
    â€œCan’t wait,” I said.
    â€œTrent,”
Dad warned.
    What I should have said was that it was news to me that the remodel had been done for weeks. The whole reason we’d been skipping our every-other-weekend overnight visits lately was that Kari thought the construction would disturb us. I guess now that it was over, she still thought we were disturbed.
    â€œYour father’s company picnic is coming up soon,” Kari told us, the smile stretched too wide across her face. She rubbed her belly.“We’ll see if this one holds out a little longer so we can all make it. I hope so. It was so much fun last year, wasn’t it, egg-race champs?” She aimed her smile first at me, then Dad.
    â€œYeah,” Dad said. “It was.” And for a second I thought he was about to smile or something, but I must’ve been making it up, because Dad never smiled at me. Anyway, he went right back to looking at his phone. So I’d definitely been making it up.
    Last fall, at Dad’s company picnic that we were forced to attend every year because Dad wanted to convince all his coworkers that he had his own big loving family to brag about or whatever, Kari got the bright idea that it would be “super fun” if Dad and I entered one of the races together. Which is how the two of us ended up with our legs tied together by a purple handkerchief, our hands gripped tight around the handle of a plastic spoon balancing an egg, for the three-legged egg race, which was somebody somewhere’s idea of a good time. Anyway, turns out we won, because