My Buddy Archie [1]

24..

“Hello? Earth to Niall.” Connie snapped her fingers to get my attention from across the kitchen counter. I looked up at her from the pot of heating water. “You zoned out…”

“Oh,” I cleared my throat. “Sorry. What were you saying?”

Her eyes softened, “What’s been bothering you?” I didn’t say anything, just nodded towards the birthday card sitting on the other end of the counter. It’d been sitting there since the day after it got here. I kept trying to forget about it, but since Archie hasn’t, I haven’t either. Every time I walked in here, there it was taunting me, saying ‘well, what did you expect?’—killing me.

I turned my attention back to the pot of boiling water on the sink and dumped the box of pasta in. As Connie read the letter, I absentmindedly stirred the pasta, way more than necessary. There really wasn’t much else for me to do.

“Did you call her?” She said quietly.

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

I shrugged, “Archie said he wanted to meet her.”

“What?” Archie said from the kitchen table. He was busy drawing on his whiteboard until he heard his name being mentioned.

“Nothing, Archie.” He only shrugged before going back to his drawing. Connie walked around the counter, standing next to me so Archie couldn’t hear us anymore. “I don’t want to though,” I admitted.

“Are you afraid she’ll—”

“Yeah.”

She sighed, resting her head on my shoulder and gliding her hand over my back. “Maybe it won’t be so bad.” I knew she was scrambling to say something comforting. There wasn’t much of a bright side for this. But at least she was trying.

“Maybe.” She stood on her toes to kiss my cheek before moving over to check on the sauce, also heating on the stove. Then I remembered something a lot more uplifting I had to tell her. “We have reservations.”

“Reservations?”

I nodded and looked at her, “Dinner reservations.”

A cloud of pink tinted her cheeks, “Why?”

“For Valentine’s day…even though it’s the following weekend since I have to work on Valentine’s Day and everything was full already. But…yeah.”

“Oh.”

“Wear something nice,” I winked. “How’s the sauce coming along?”

“What? Oh.” She held her hair back as she looked down in the pot. “I think it’s finished.”

“Okay.”

I went to strain the pasta in the sink before setting up a plate for each of us. Archie liked his pasta drowning in red sauce, while Connie liked only a little bit, with a lot of parmesan cheese on top. I guess I was the only normal one who liked a regular amount of everything.

I carried Archie’s plate over to the table for him, pushing away his whiteboard and replacing it with his food. As Connie and I sat down across from each other, I felt her socked foot graze mine as she crossed her legs. I shot her a fake glare, but she only smirked before digging into her pasta.

“So, Archie,” she started. “How was daycare today?”

“Good.”

“Good? What’d you do?”

“Miss Trisha read us books. One was on bees.”

Connie wrinkled her nose, “I don’t like bees.”