Regardless of the late arrival, the pizza was excellent and warm, but perhaps a large pizza was too much for Natalie and me. Into a Tupperware, the rest of the pizza went. Natalie calls out from the bathroom. She is already in her pink cupcake pajamas and almost ready for bed. She stopped giving candy halfway through her meal. She got tired of going to the door with a bite of pizza in her mouth. Also, the two huge slices of pizza she ate made her tired and sleepy, and she noticed that our stash of candy was getting low, and soon, we would run out. She called it a night.
"How many times do I have to brush, momma?" she asks from inside the bathroom.
"Every night you ask me this, and every night it's the same answer: three times," I tell her, cleaning up the remnants of our supper in the kitchen.
She groans to herself, which makes me smile. I can only guess what repressed words she hides behind those grunts of hers.
Timmy brought the pizza a few minutes past 07h00 p.m. Like the one from this morning at the clinic, the exchange was weird. He did not make eye contact or spoke much and almost left without getting paid. I wrote it all off to him being nervous about his new job and did not give it another thought.
Natalie comes out of the bathroom and walks up to me in the kitchen for her routine teeth inspection. I examine her teeth with a big, serious frown on my face, making humming sounds, which always make her laugh.
"Well done, young lady. You may go and choose a story, I'll finish up in here, and I'll be with you in a minute," I inform her and kiss her on the forehead.
And the doorbell rings.