A Father's Love

Chapter 62

It was a pretty relaxed weekend for Shelby. As relaxed a weekend being sick could be, anyway.

Her body still ached a little on Saturday, but by this point, was extremely bored and did not want to sleep or watch TV anymore. So, instead, she laid on her back, holding her GameCube controller on her stomach while she played Luigi's Mansion. She had her own file she had started, plus a second file Shelby played whenever the twins were over and would let them take turns playing. Turns out, Luigi's Mansion was a ghost-capturing game where the player had to capture a bunch of ghosts and turn some of them back into portraits. Luke of course had a lot of issues with that, especially when Luigi's weapon of choice was a vacuum, and made no sense to him.

Shelby still threw up a couple times, but not as much as the day before, and was able to hold food down better, as long as it was something easy on the stomach. She really enjoyed eating all the soup she wanted. The boys were bummed they couldn't come over and play video games with Shelby. It was a pleasant break with not having anyone else over. Luke wasn't sure how parents with more than one kid could do it on a regular basis. One was definitely enough, and the one he had was easy to manage, thankfully.

By Sunday, though, Shelby was feeling a lot better, and Monday morning, she was able to go back to school. Mr. Harris worked with her on the tests she missed on Friday, and Shelby could take the spelling test with Ms. Kelly, who also used the words to help practice her speech. Miss Kelly highly praised the progress the kid was making. Luke, though, gave all the credit to Jess. He tried to work with Shelby, too, usually in casual conversation, but it was mostly Jess who was the real hero of helping Shelby with her sounds. The real challenge was that blasted T ending sound that she still seemed to struggle with. Shelby was coming along on the ST, SL, SK, etc sounds, at least.

That week, since Luke thought Jess seemed to be doing well with helping in the diner, suggested Jess do the ordering. Thinking back, Luke probably would have had more success if he told Shelby to do it when it had completely slipped Jess' mind and Luke ended up serving Kirk a lettuce sandwich. So he had to run to Doose's to grab a few things to tide them over until the next day when Luke could do the ordering.

The following Saturday, despite Ethan and Alan wanting desperately to come over and play, Shelby had offered to help the Gilmore girls clean out their garage first when Lorelai had told Lane, her band could use it to rehearse their music.

While Shelby was over at the girls' house, Luke was having to deal with the beginning construction Taylor was having done on his new shop he was renting from Luke, and in the process, driving Luke crazy until finally he stormed over to say something and ended up wanting to punch Taylor in the nose.

Fed up, Luke tried to walk away, greatly exasperated. That is, until Taylor caught him before he headed back to the diner.

"By the way, Luke," he said. "I noticed you haven't returned any of my lawyer's calls about the lease agreement."

Luke turned back around to stare at the guy, still wanting to punch him in the nose.

"Now, we have to set up an appointment to see that those papers get signed."

"Forget it," Luke told him, shaking his head. "I'm not going through any lawyer. You want those papers signed, you pick them up and you walk them over to me." He held a finger up as he said, "then I'll sign them."

Taylor did the same with his own finger. "Luke, this is business. It needs to be done properly and legally."

Throwing a hand out to the side, Luke came back with, "It's a standard release form, Taylor. I bought it at Office Depot."