Going Down Easy (Boys of the Big Easy #1)(35)

Addison took a deep breath. “She’s into art and books,” she told him. “But she always has been. She draws and paints and colors and loves clay.” Addison smiled. “She wants to take a pottery class.”

Gabe felt his mouth ease into a smile. “That sounds cool.”

“She’s young for it,” Addison said. Then frowned slightly. “I think. I don’t really know. I need to call around and see, I guess.”

“So not just a hunk of clay at home, then, huh?”

“She’s a doer,” Addison said. “She knows they use pottery wheels and kilns. She would start with clay and stuff at home, but she’d eventually want to really do it. Literally get her hands dirty with it. I indulge things like that—classes and such—because . . . ,” Addison trailed off, and Gabe had to resist the urge to take a step closer.

“Because why?”

“Because I was never like that,” she said. “I was pretty content to read and imagine and pretend about things.” She seemed to be thinking over what she’d just said and what she was about to. “My dad was a big proponent of learning from your mistakes and dealing with the consequences, and after seeing my sister go without her bike for an entire summer because she crashed it doing some obstacle-course thing and then had to save up her allowance to fix it, and seeing her miss a family trip to the zoo because she’d eaten an entire bag of candy that morning and gotten really sick, and seeing him give her cat away to a guy he worked with because my sister went camping with some friends and didn’t arrange for anyone to take care of the cat, I guess I got . . . careful.” She frowned. “Really careful.”

Gabe felt his gut tighten with a mix of emotions. Addison was sharing something really personal about her past with him. She’d never done that before. And it was something kind of heartbreaking. Especially when he saw that look of realization, sadness, and worry on her face.

“He sounds like a hard-ass,” Gabe said. He didn’t want to insult her father, and probably wouldn’t get any brownie points with her for doing so, but damn.

She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Though, in fairness to him, he made all of this really clear to us. The expectations were carefully outlined. I think he would have helped her with her bike if she hadn’t been screwing around. And the zoo thing—he would have postponed the trip if she’d been actually sick, but since it was self-inflicted, he wanted to show her that choices have consequences.”

“I’m sure being sick all day was a pretty bad consequence that taught her something,” Gabe said with a frown. Yes, his mother and brother sometimes thought he was too permissive with Cooper, but damn, they were talking about kids here. Even adults screwed up sometimes. Kids certainly did. They needed some slack, didn’t they?

Addison nodded. “I know it sounds harsh. But, like, the cat thing . . . all she had to do was ask one of us to take care of it. In fact, I did take care of it while she was gone. But that wasn’t the point. She hadn’t asked me to. She didn’t take that responsibility. And my dad had made it clear that if she was going to have a pet, she was going to have to take care of it.”

Gabe took a breath. “Yeah, I get it. The cat needed her to be responsible. It just seems . . . overly hard on a kid.”

Addison’s frown deepened. “Sometimes I worry that I’m too hard on Stella.”

Okay, that surprised him. Addison seemed totally confident in everything she did with her daughter.

“Really?”

Addison nodded. “I push her to be independent, to think through her choices, to learn from her mistakes. But then . . .”

She trailed off, and Gabe held his breath, hoping she’d go on but not wanting to push.

“I definitely indulge her interests,” Addison said.

Gabe blew out his breath.

“When she wants to try something new, I probably even go overboard a little. Because I’m almost envious of her sometimes,” Addison went on. “She’s completely fearless. She wants to try everything and do everything and, while pottery isn’t exactly dangerous, I want her to know that it’s okay to get in there and try things even if they don’t work out.” She looked up at Gabe. “But I think it’s good to teach consequences, too.”

He nodded. “Of course. But she’s five. And . . . I think a lot of times consequences kind of teach themselves. You touch something hot and it burns you. You stay up too late, you’re tired the next day. You eat too much candy, you feel sick.”

Addison just looked at him for a long moment, a bunch of emotions in her eyes all at once. “Alligators very rarely attack people, but it does happen.”

Gabe blinked at her. “Okay.”

“I’m just saying that Cooper’s not wrong to be a little fearful of that.”

“True.” Gabe just watched her. He didn’t know what was going on exactly, but he could be patient. Probably.

“Did you know that alligators will sometimes balance sticks and twigs on their heads in an attempt to lure birds that are building nests?”

Gabe wanted to smile. Or hug her. He didn’t know where this was going, but yeah, he was going to wait it out. “I didn’t.”

“That’s kind of amazing, right?” she asked.

He’d never given alligators this much thought in his life. “I guess it is.”