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Cassie’s not leaving this house; they’re gonna have to airlift her out of here.
That declaration will only really hold up until she gets Harrison back on Monday, but she’ll say it to Dana anyway when she gets home, June in tow for the weekend after her school spelling bee. It’s hilarious and bone-chilling all at once, how she has a woman to wait up for now and vice versa, all because she decided to follow an impulse for once and ask Dana out once her leave was finalized.
There was more to it, for sure, but whenever Cassie tries looping anybody else in over coffee, it sounds like she lost all self-respect and went, Hey Dana, I’ve had this stupid crush on you for years and everyone finally got the memo about you not being Mrs. Evans anymore, officially, so if you run out of things to do on your sabbatical, consider doing me?
They got off to a wonderfully unceremonious start, but the timing turned out to be shit. That January brought an angry tidal wave along with it: Gia, coming back home after doing her darnedest to make it work with June’s dad in Asheville. It was a total head trip for Dana, helping her girl pick up the pieces and settle into a new apartment while getting to know her— and her daughter— all over again after the four years they spent apart.
Still, Dana’s answer was a resounding “fuck that” when Cassie floated the idea of giving her some space, and that’s how she ended up with someone to come home to every other week, plus an enthusiastic informant on third-grade politics, nicely supplementing her existing knowledge on middle schoolers and their dealings.
She hears the car first, then the screen door, and then—
“Junie!”
There’s the voice she’d assume was already livid if she didn’t know it so well. She briefly thinks about Dana’s default settings, her hardwiring, the rough edges that persist long after they’ve served their purpose.
“Junie, baby, hurry. I got somethin’ for ya inside, come look.”
Dana blows her a kiss as she sets down her bags— half-hello, half-apology for the yelling.
June dashes in and goes straight for the couch, only stopping to shrug off her backpack. “Cassie! You’re here!”
“Hey, kiddo. Did you have fun?” It’s hard not to ask a million questions, but Cassie settles for just one, reveling in the giddy way June throws her arms around her when it’s only been a week.
“Ehh, I guess.”
“Nothin’ too crazy today, Cass, only first place,” Dana says, coming over to show Cassie a picture of June up on stage with her certificate. “I don’t know where she gets it.”
June eases out of the hug, looking to rectify. “Actually, I didn’t. It was freaking boring. And it was all old people watching.”
Dana gives her granddaughter’s stomach a warning poke. “Julianna.”
“But I won an iPad, I think. So that’s cool. And, oh my gosh, somebody hit on Nana.”
“Ooooh. One of the other old people?” Cassie probes, avoiding her possible executioner’s gaze.
“Watch it, both’a you.”
“No,” June says, pushing her hair out of her face and getting keyed up. “My friend Tamia’s dad. He looks like the guy from Bridgerton. But he’s, like, boring. And you’re like if Spider-Man was a girl. And Nana was nice to him, but not too nice. Mom always says to do that too. So yeah.”
“Wow, thanks, Junie, I was starting to sweat a little.”
June jumps to her feet. “Oh my gosh, I need to pee. Are you sleeping here too?”
Cassie does the best curtsy she can without having to lift her ass from the spot she’s gotten so attached to. “If you’ll have me, Your Highness.”
It feels like June’s stretched-out yaaaay fills up the whole house as she zooms up the stairs.
“Hey, bug, while you’re up there, get changed. Then we eat, ‘kay?” Dana calls out behind her.
The distant, muffled groaning makes them both giggle. “Nana, I was already gonna!”
Cassie pats her lap and motions for Dana to put her legs up. “So. Mr. Bridgerton, huh?”
“Cass. It was ridiculous. Like, thanks, I guess, but seriously?”
“No, it rocks. I guess you’re in your GILF era.”
It takes Dana a few seconds. “That better not mean what I think it means.”
“Sorry,” Cassie chirps, narrowly dodging the throw pillow launched her way. “It’s true, though! If you’re gonna keep bringing June to stuff, get ready to swat a lot of people away.”
There’s another unexpected upside to being off-off work: Dana doesn’t have to school her face as much, lets it take the journeys it wants to take. Cassie’s found that it never gets old. Tonight, it’s repulsion, then consideration, then a grin pulling at the corners of her mouth.
“Hey, who says I wanna swat ‘em away to begin with?”
Cassie crosses her arms and presses her body hard against the arm of the couch. “Oh, got it. Fuck me, I guess. Cassie-Chopped Liver-McKay.”
As irritating as it is, she can see how Dana’s magnetizing property’s come up a notch. She isn’t wound as tightly, she’s out in the sun a lot more, and her ears are triple-pierced now. You look great, Mom, Nancy Meyers would kill to have you, Gia had said. She was right— combine the intriguing retired-ish aura with the absence of a ring on her finger, and, well. No fuckin’ wonder.
Dana scooches over and starts prying her open, literally, starting from the hands. “Well, school’s out, almost. I’ll be chauffeurin’ the kid around while her mom’s working. Soccer and some other shit. If you’re so worried, come keep an eye on me.”
“You better not take that back, D,” Cassie says, smiling again before she knows it.
Didn’t take much, never does.
“I won’t. Just come, Junie’ll love it. And those vultures won’t know what hit ‘em.”
They spend dinner filling Cassie in about the bee and the days leading up to it. June’s path to victory was as follows: meddle, harass, aghast, agenda, then wreckage, which almost tripped her up before she remembered wreck (duh) and her seatmate Wren. From there, they start discussing how everyone thinks Wren was cheated out of being class president in August after Zahra conspired with her parents and Ms. Chase. While Dana’s more prone to interrupting and arguing and poking at June’s reasoning, Cassie finds that they’re both hanging onto the eight-year-old’s every word.
It’s risky, getting this involved in June’s life, and she knows it. There’s a voice in her head going on and on about how a kid needs stability and this whole thing with Dana might get messy once she comes back to work, but as the days and weeks go by, it’s becoming exceedingly clear that all of it could be worth the heartache at the end.
She’d always wondered what it would be like to have a girl, and while it became apparent early on that it would have to be a one-and-done event with Harry, the thought never left her mind. It’s just that the great and honorable Neil and Pam McKay got so much of it right, and here she is, finally getting a chance to dust off her notes on this whole Raising Girls shebang. In a limited capacity, that is, and only as a part of Gia’s “village” by extension— Gianina, who still scares the shit out of her for some reason. Who’s statuesque in her loveliness even when her potty mouth is going off, who’s still keeping Cassie at arm’s length after all these months. Cassie understands, of course, but that distance will only make their inevitable conversation about boundaries all the more awkward.
Dana’s already seen the inside of this particular box of worries, and while she does have the time these days to process an idea more than once, she’ll always throw out a reassurance first, along the lines of They just came out with somethin’ crazy, Cass, it’s called crossing the bridge when you get there. That’s how they’ve always operated, even as colleagues and friends, before all this, her running around with something unwieldy in her mouth and Dana forcing her to spit it out. Some days, they switch places. Those days are Cassie’s favorites.
It’s funny, Cassie thinks, she’s never dated anybody and had it go this swimmingly from the get-go. She’s really gotta do something about those dads, though.
The utter disrespect unfolding before Dana’s eyes is making her mood tank in record time, sure, but she— what was it again? Takes her W from the fact that it’s the exact opposite of what Cassie said was going to happen. She didn’t come this far without being able to read a “vibe”, or simply know what it looks like when somebody’s making a pass at somebody else. So far, her Dr. McKay’s attracted two dads and one mom. Rattling, but commendable.
Cassie made sure to keep the first day of the soccer clinic free so she could support Her Royal Highness June and, in her words, do some recon on the parents Dana would be stuck with for the summer. Before that, though, she’d gathered all her courage to shoot Gia a text and ask if it was okay for her to be there.
“You’re doin’ too much, Nini already likes you,” Dana had huffed, furrowing her brow at how Cassie tossed her phone across the bed like it was radioactive. “You’re never that nervous texting me.”
“And how the hell would you know that? Am too.”
“Oh, really?”
“You shoulda seen me that first night, after I dropped you off. I was up and down the stairs just composing, man.”
Dana picked a spot to settle in once they made sure that June was okay, holding her own against the other, much taller kids. Cassie, not quite done with her snooping or her fretting, asked if she could go around a few more times, with the promise that she’d pluck a Diet Coke from the giant cooler and come back with it. That solo run is what attracted the goddamn interlopers, in their thirties and forties with no object permanence, hitting Miss Bangs M.D. with the fucky-eyes the second she lost her blonde companion— who had her finger hooked on one of Cassie’s belt loops the entire time, let the stupid record show.
As Cassie hurries back with her head down, Dana tells herself to commit to the hardass act for once. She’s found that she always cracks too quickly when it comes to this one, never meeting her own shit-giving goal.
She whips off her sunglasses, doing her best to sell the steel in her gaze. “Good goin’, Cass. There’s a line around the block, d’you see?”
“Stop. It was three people,” Cassie groans, reaching up to hand her the silver can.
Dana pops it open one-handed. “Three too many in my book.”
Cassie stops short, sinking down onto the bleacher below, the picture of unease. “I, um, I gotta tell you something.”
“You look like you’re gonna shit yourself, you wanna go do that first?”
“I screwed up. I’m sorry. It was the last guy, I was getting anxious, the vibe was getting gross, and I wanted it to be over— he asked which kid was mine, and I— the G-word, it just came out.”
Dana frowns, racking her brain for what could have gotten Cassie twisted up like this.
“You called me a GILF in front of that man?!”
“No! I said I was here with my girlfriend and her granddaughter.”
“Oh. So? Non-issue, sweetheart.” Damn. So much for the hardass thing.
For what feels like the millionth time, Dana gladly takes in those eyes, electric blue with a fleck of amber in the dexter, current diameter of, like, five feet each.
Cassie drums her fingers on the aluminum. “Didn’t we say we were gonna hold off? With, you know. Opening this up to the world.”
“We said we were gonna play it by ear,” Dana corrects, miming pulling up a sheet of paper and stamping it. “And if you did call me that— then I’m Dana Evans, and I approve this message.”
“Okay, got it. Great-great-great.”
“It’s good that you said it. One more fuckin’ buzzy bee and I woulda planted one on you to shut ‘em all up.”
It’s Cassie’s turn to gawk at her, horrified. “A punch?”
“Baby, a kiss. We aren’t aligned at all today, Jesus.”
“Sorry,” Cassie says, letting a nervous laugh balloon out. “You get me all scrambled.”
Dana scoffs and pats the space beside her. “Enough. Come up here already.”
They sit and watch the kids run their drills, chatting inanely about Harrison’s plans for the summer and the gossip digest Cassie had carefully assembled for her over the past few days— no one knows who got assigned to do the bulletin board for Pride, it just appeared all decorated one morning, Santos and Garcia’s deadlock has been going on for so long that some of them think they might be calling it quits, and Perlah came across Dr. Shamsi, of all people, on one of the apps and wanted to throw her phone in an incinerator.
There’s a shared, sharp intake of breath when they see a ball sailing right across to June and hitting her square in the rear with a solid thwock.
“Hey, bug, you good?”
“Are you okay, June?”
Their artillery-gun voices cut across the field in unison, attracting a few looks, and when June turns around to deliver a thumbs-up, her nose is scrunched up in embarrassment.
“I’m okaaaay. Oh, Nana, can you leave me a tiny bit of your Coke?”
“You got it,” Dana yells back, surprised at how she feels her throat close up once the words have flown out.
It hits her all at once, being in awe of June, absolutely bewildered at her, still concerned. She spent four whole years worrying about that little girl and her mother, the distance creating the longest queasy spell of her life, and now she just doesn’t have to worry anymore. She can watch it all happen, collect many more mornings like this with June and Gia, and drop them into a slot along the hard plastic of her chest as they go along.
Cassie nudges her shoulder, and there’s a glimmer of understanding when their eyes meet. “Tough cookie, huh?”
“Yeah,” Dana exhales, blinking back the hot, natural consequence of her thought process. Time and place, she thinks. She has an additional image to keep up starting today, she wants to be the cool ER doc’s even cooler girlfriend, and she won’t have these people see her crumple into a weeping mess.
If she let it all tumble out right now, mom to mom, she knows Cassie would scoop it up like a champ, all too familiar with the feelings. Still, it’s a conversation that deserves to be saved for a better day.
It isn’t surprising that June and Cassie get along like a house on fire, two minds running a million miles per hour even through their sleep cycles, it seems, but she never would have guessed that they’d bust through her literal and figurative doors at almost the same time. Dana had ventured into her year off without much of a plan, only meaning to hibernate, hang out with Vic and Mari until they were sick of her, and give a bunch of memories their well-deserved send-offs. She’s already crossed off all three, and in light of the shake-ups, plural, she thinks it’s shaping up to be pretty damn remarkable. Yet another fuckin’ thing that’ll make her cry if she dwells on it for too long.
She slots her fingers between Cassie’s, wondering how to beg for a distraction without actually having to beg.
As if she heard Dana loud and clear, she takes the sharp turn. “So, you saw Marlee, the lovely lady I was talking to? She invited me to a pickup game with the other moms.”
Dana grits her teeth and channels all her brainpower into scanning the sidelines for that Marlee again. “That’s nice, Cass.”
“So I might head back here Thursday night after work. I dunno, I really feel like I could meet someone— ow!” Cassie yelps, feeling the solid pinch to her obliques.
They’re all good now, Dana’s jagged little pill of insecurity mostly digested, but she grabs the chance to swoop in and plant one on her anyway.