Episode 1201: Relax

“There are a bunch of decent looking movies playing, you could take your pick.” Paul reached for his phone to find the options. “You know, we could do an ice cream parlor crawl afterwards. I had no idea there were so many ice cream places until I started looking. We could actually make a project of it. A crawl today would only cover a fraction of the locations. We could make it our mission to sample from each one, rank the flavors, that kind of thing, maybe we could even turn it into a blog or vlog or something. Oh, here’s the movies that have matinees, filtering out the age inappropriate ones.”

Paul held out his phone to her across the kitchen nook.

Hope waved it off.

Paul got a sinking feeling, thoughts racing to Curran, thinking he’d convinced her to back out of these visits. “Are you the one brushing me off here, Hope? Or is this your father’s influence?”

A scowl formed on her round face. “Are you guys ever going to quit being enemies and suspecting each other of bad stuff? Sheesh. He’s not pulling my strings or whatever right now. He had nothing to do with this. And I’m not brushing you off.”

“You’re not?” Paul felt his shoulders relax, relieved on two counts, Curran wasn’t meddling and Hope wasn’t bailing.

“If I was brushing you off I wouldn’t have even ridden my bike over here today,” Hope said. “It’s just that the last couple weeks of camp, Jenny and I crammed in so much stuff and then you and I have been cramming in so much stuff… When I said do nothing, I meant, like not even something as simple as a movie and ice cream. I kind of just want to sit in the sun and do nothing. Would that be okay? I just feel like I haven’t had a minute lately to just relax.”

“Um, yeah, sure. I guess I have gotten a bit carried away planning activities for us, your grandmother warned me not to do that. Sorry, kiddo, I should have listened to her. I screwed up.” It was just really hard to pass on making memories with his daughter when he feared any minute now Curran would find a way to put a stop to it.

“It’s nothing to look so down over,” Hope said. “I’ve had a lot of fun and I totally want to do an ice cream project, too. I just feel like I need to recharge today, unless it sounds too boring to just sit here soaking in the sun and chatting. I could just go home though if you wanted to go out someplace on your own.”

“No. No. Stay. Absolutely stay. Nothing sounds like the perfect thing to do.”

Episode 1202: Something To Talk About